Deflection is Better than Defense

Fighting back or direct resistance only leads to more harm, using love, deflection is better than resistance because it decreases the damage to you while your opponent continues to fight in force until they become disinterested in the battle or have exhausted their resources.

In a battle, you can never have enough weapons to combat a formidable foe. A fight between two individuals fighting against each other always results in a great deal of pain and suffering, which may include broken bones and spilled blood. So, the smart thing to do is not to fight back in defense of yourself.

This applies to physical confrontation, as well as psychological confrontation, or response to any attack from any type or style of attacker.

In the olden days, an actor was cast in a TV show based on a Shaolin monk facing all kinds of attacks responding in Kung Fu fashion, which is primarily deflection of physical attack, using the opponent’s power of force against themselves. The actor was David Carradine, who didn’t know anything about Kung Fu at the time but playing the part in the Kung Fu TV show so inspired him that he did become an avid student and teacher of Tai Chi and Qigong.

Having been exposed to this television show did influence me and my response to fighting of any kind. Therefore, I have little respect for an all-out fistfight, am inclined to avoid a brute force battle, and prefer to be the one who walks away from any confrontation in as pristine condition as possible.

I have not been able to avoid physical confrontation, but I have survived these encounters with as little damage to myself by following these principles.

1. Do not respond
2. Do not defend
3. Apply love
4. Avoid blows
5. Deflect blows when necessary
6. Do not counterattack
7. Use the opponent’s power against them

Then, walk away unscathed.

I am not trying to convince anyone to follow these principles, I am just expressing that this is what I do, whether it is a physical altercation or any other type of potential battle.

When I was attacked by a prolific psychopath, I documented everything and applied these principles.

I remained steadfast and simply ignored everything the psychopath tried to say about me or do to me, and applied love’s perspective to the man who was attacking me. I wondered why someone might end up being like that? What kind of a life must he have lived? What must he have suffered as a young child? I tried to imagine what it must be like to walk a mile in his shoes. I sent him love, hoping he might be able to find a way to a better life.

Most would have lost interest and found some other mark to pursue, but this one made a lifetime vow with the commitment of all his resources, and those of others, to destroy me.

In this particular circumstance, the psychopath (because he could not be satisfied by my response), took the battle to the media and my circle of influence.

Still not wanting to fight back, I had no choice but to engage, because the psycho had started attacking my friends, and family. Attack me, fine, but to go after my children (who are sacred to me) requires my protection of them.

Attempting to keep my wits about me, I did respond to the psychopath with deflection and using the psycho’s own power of force against himself.

Fortunately for me, the psychopath left threatening messages on my answering machine. I posted them on YouTube. Now, he had a venue where he could spin all his efforts against me, and I empowered him to do so.

Did I care? No. I am impenetrable. Anything he says about me is not true, and I don’t care, nor do I respond to any ridiculous accusations.

Now, I did get a flood of attention from friends and family who feared for me, especially those who the psycho was able to make fearful in his attacks on them because of my not responding. I just told them not to worry, and apologized for any overflow which had affected their lives, but told them that I was attempting to protect them by placing his focus back on me.

Without directly engaging or defending, I just posted everything he threw at me online, and let it be.

In the process, I was able to help countless other potential victims see the psychopath (a lifetime criminal con man) for who he was prior to losing their life’s savings and suffering continued abuse by the psychopath by finding some of this information online.

He was forced to change his identity and possibly even fake his own death in order to continue his life of crimes in the exploitation of others.

I apply this to any confrontation by anyone, even if someone were to say in an interview (in this fictitious example), “According to,” (some source that was leaked by the psychopath), “you kill babies and bury them in your backyard. What do you have to say about that?”

My only response would be, “It is my personal policy not to respond to any false accusation. Next?”

When what I wanted to do is to counter-attack, like ask the interviewer, “What about your collection of clown noses and pickled small toes of circus performers who have mysteriously disappeared? What about those?”

It is your sacred right not to respond to a false accusation, not to even dignify it with any response. Regardless of your good intentions, and the inclination to defend yourself and your good name, any response can be used as a weapon against you, or to fuel the fire of further attack.

In this way, deflection is better than defense.

Next.

Triggered!

When you get challenged by another person, your instinctual preliminary reactive response is to select from your choices of fight or flight. When you are triggered in social interaction, punching someone in the face, or running out of the room would be far too dramatic for anyone who might like to retain some sense of dignity in modern-day society.

Instead, we replace “fight” with self-defense and “flight” with withdrawal. We either post-up to do battle with words, voice inflection, body stance, and physical gestures, or we become more increasingly silent until we have nothing to say and look for more comfortable environmental circumstances elsewhere.

Of course, this is a spectrum and includes many options between these two extremes.

If someone challenges your competency in an area where you’re feeling you are confident about your abilities, you get an adrenaline charge which triggers your response system, which is primarily operated by your ego.

There is a lot of discussion about the ego, some believe we should have none of it, and others believe we would die without it (at this time I am among the latter) and anything possible between those two extremes. I believe the ego is vitally necessary but should be moderated by a heart-centered individual.

You are the result of a lifetime of experience and learning and far from the equivalent of any other being on this planet. While you may be able to get to know someone intimately and have so much in common with this person, you can never know the totality of what goes on behind the scenes.

Just like you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how well someone knows you, they cannot know what you are thinking when you are thinking, in the same way, you can never know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Exponentially beyond this real-time unknowingness, you cannot know what anyone has experienced or learned from their life to this point in time.

When someone challenges you, it is a perfectly normal response to defend yourself, which may include a counter-attack. Obviously, “You don’t know me,” is a reasonable response which will always be true, but accusing whoever has challenged you, feels so much better, as your ego settles into a relentless position of exerting superiority over your challenger.

While you are feeling superior, you’ve now challenged the person who may not have challenged you with any malice whatsoever, as most people challenge motivated by love, compassion, or a sense of caring which is trying to help you live a better life by lending you some of his or her experience or learning. When you counter-attack, you call upon their ego to defend him or her. Now, you are responsible for having triggered an argument or debate, which is far from productive and rarely leads to a positive outcome.

When you and whomever you have engaged in this interaction with are engulfed in this vibratory mismatch, communication is not possible for you are communicating on different frequencies.

You carry with you an enormous cache of hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitivities which have been secretly stored in your subconscious, and are protected by triggers switched on as emergency responses by your ego as a method of self-preservation.

This is the natural state of your human response system. For those who are in the process of awakening, they are in a process of digging up these raw materials which are hidden from the consciousness and dealt with and resolved in a loving matter. Thereby eliminating the emotional trigger from the hidden past life event.

If you can find the wherewithal to love and accept yourself for who you are, you are less likely to become triggered by someone else’s challenge, and it will feel less like a personal attack.

You realize that in most cases this challenge is not an attack, it is only a reflection of that person’s life experience, learning, and self-confidence (at any level) expressing itself. So, it really is more about them asserting themselves, for whatever reason, than it has to do with you at all.

When this happens to you, you can love them, not judge them because you know they are only doing the best they can with what they have, thank them for their input, and compassionately bless them.

Defending Your Self

Ever find yourself feeling as if you’re fully engulfed in the inherited heavy emotion of fight-or-flight and defend yourself either verbally and/or physically, just as if you were actually being attacked by a wild animal? (Which is where this feeling originated with our ancestors.)

There is that part of us that seeks to protect our idea of “self” from attacks from other human beings. This part of us is highly sensitive, easily offended, feels entitled, superior, and jealous, among other motivations for defending your self at any opportunity, either real or imagined.

Nobody wants to experience pain, either physical or emotional, so we find ourselves on-guard to defend ourselves, especially if we’ve been hurt in the past. In this case, anything that looks frighteningly familiar to anything associated with any pain we’ve experienced in the past, we go into an emergent emotional response, which heightens our senses and readies us for battle. Or if the opponent appears to foreboding, we are looking for the closest exit and start preparing for a rapid departure.

This is a natural response to particular circumstances, such as

Dealing with conflict

In an attempt to protect yourself from the pain of any conflict, to defend, prevent or disable a conflict which could escalate into a more difficult situation, that might lead to injury or even loss of life.

If you’re unable to admit that you overreact in certain circumstances (which we are all prone to do), you can easily identify this self-defense mechanism being engaged in by others.

A common response in self-defense of potential conflicts is to play the blame card, blame the other person or someone else to remove the focus from you. Certainly, you could be falsely accused, or you could be in a heightened state of defensiveness due to unresolved issues from your past. And who knows what lies in the dark recesses of our heart and mind? There can be a wide variety of pent-up emotion, fear, guilt or shame fueling your defensiveness.

It’s interesting to sit back and watch two people defending their selves. It is not unlike hand-to-hand combat only using accusatory words instead of fisticuffs.

Protection from pain

Nobody wants to be hurt (or hurt again) so we’re on the lookout for potential painful situations. circumstances or interactions with other people. The downside to this is that surely if you are looking for demons you will find them, whether they are real or imagined.

And it’s not all in your head, as you experience psychological and physiological real pain from just the idea of there being a threat of a pending painful experience. These feelings can also create actual illnesses and diseases as well as the deterioration of the physical body, possibly ushering you to an early grave.

Even if you cannot imagine yourself as an angry person, when you are accosted by an angry person, it is a natural reaction to respond in kind, which escalates the anger into a potential battle of Armageddonistic proportions.

If you are too defensive, onlookers will be compelled to believe you are possibly guilty or hiding some demons of your own.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

It is not uncommon to use an alternative feeling as a bandage to cover the wounded feeling. For instance, if someone leaves us, we just find it easier to re-frame the whole affair be demonizing the departing partner, or convincing ourselves (and our peers) that he/she was actually undesirable and below your standards, wishing him or her, “good riddance.” This does sometimes offer an adequate degree of decreased pain.

Comfortably numb

Our defensiveness does not have a healing effect on those who surround us, in fact, it has just the opposite effect. It prevents us from cultivating potentially amazing relationships with others and if you are prone to overreaction, others are likely to keep their distance out of their own self-preservation, and often we are unable to see this in our own reflection.

If left unattended, we can fall into a nearly comatose state of emotional numbness with regard to relationships. We lose all sense of love, compassion, empathy not to mention a lack of happiness or joy around other people. You could become a lifeless zombie just going through the motions of living a life.

Leonard Nimoy’s Spock

You find these zombies liberated from their feelings lurking in the Internet or social media via any device available. This is the only place where they can find solace, or ability to strike out at other imposing threats while hiding behind their firewall.

Others retreat into simply being completely logical, denying all sense of emotion as nonsensical illusion, like a Vulcanic Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

Loss of self

Eventually, you are left lonely and alone. If you’ve prepared yourself for this, you won’t care and feel as though you are better off because everyone else is evil or stupid and you’re better off without having relationships with other people at all.

In this state, there is little chance of discovering your true self, as you can only do this by viewing your reflection in the eyes of others. Before you have little chance of finding and empowering the real you to emerge and celebrate all the good things this life has in store for you, you might like to explore the possibilities.

You are a very special person with so much life calling you to all the love and joy you could possibly imagine, but it may require taking a look at doing some inner deep work.

You have the right to live your life any way you want, to any degree of success or privacy you want without any judgment whatsoever.

After all, aren’t we all just doing the best we can with what we have?

 

 

Life is a Battlefield

Life is like a war zone. Everyone is fighting for their lives, for their survival, for their preservation of their self. It’s a constant war of me-versus-you. In some cases we create teams or troops, then it’s us-versus-them. Even so, it is not uncommon for a barrage of me-versus-you appearing within the troops of the us-versus-them. We are surrounded by the war we wage for our self.

Are we all so narcissistic to think that we are so superior to any other person, that any incongruence that we interpret or sense justifies suiting up and weaponizing anything available to us in the immediacy of that moment when our self feel threatened, disregarded or disrespected.

We strike out, strike back in a full on devil may care battle to defend our self, to annihilate the enemy taking no prisoners.

If you don’t see this taking place in your life, you certainly can see it in others. In fact, you may be keenly aware of others posting up to defend their selves and striking out at others, even labeling and pointing out their behavior to others, but unable to see your own participation in the battle. Maybe, it’s out of denial – or an all-out attempt to refuse to see these attributes within – or, you might be using a different set of weapons, hiding behind the shield of the victim.

In most cases, reviewing the base causes initiating the fear of loss and defense of self is based on something that isn’t even real. Some emotionally charged belief in something that cannot be seen, verified or vilified, because it is a feeling. A feeling that created a trigger marking the emergent defense measures being launched, because anything else would mean certain death to what you believe to be true.

Yet, we know that what we believe to be truth changes as we mature or gain access to new information. This has never been more apparent than in these current days of rapidly advancing technology when we actually have been able to witness – with our own eyes – the impossible being an ordinary aspect of everyday life.

Regardless, we see everything in the world all around us as a potential threat as we continue to be keyed-up and on high alert to any prospective assault. And the higher law rewards us by honoring our seeking by giving us the gift of bestowing upon us that which we seek. Universal laws do not change, so this is true: Seek and you will find. (This law sometimes confounds scientific research.)

If you look for demons, you will surely find them. When you discover them, you can initiate the holy war you rage to protect your self, yet again.

If you’re open, and honest, you might find yourself looking inside and asking if all this pain and war is necessary. Why? Because something inside you is yearning for an alternate emotional state, one of peace, serenity, joy and happiness.

When you are in a constant state of combat, there is little space available for experiencing the good things in life with any degree of gratitude or enjoyment. When you are in a high security mindset scanning for potential threats, you find it difficult to find the space for gratitude and allowing yourself to live a better life.
This is true: You are waging a war, when no war exists, that vanishes when you stop fighting it.

It’s your choice. You can choose to love, instead of fight.

It’s not easy, because you’ve spent your whole life being the warrior.

Your love life, your life filled with love and enjoying and cherishing all the good things this life has to offer, is tapping you on the shoulder, even now.

Isn’t now the time to consider putting down your weapons, turning your back on the war, surrounding your self with love and gratitude?

Self Destruct

Why do I have a tendency to self destruct? Am I my own worst enemy? Why am I so self destructive? What is wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?

It’s not just President Trump who has the power to destroy the world with the push of a button, we all have this power to destroy worlds within our own universe and bring the end of the world as we know it.

Sometimes, we burn bridges, pour gas on people whom we feel have wronged us, light the match and walk away. Occasionally we hit the self-destruct button or just nuke the whole shebang.

Why you would do such a thing is beyond me, and years of therapeutic process may (or may not) help to uncover the roots of one’s self destructive behavior.

Am I immune from having a tendency to self destruct? No, I don’t think anyone is immune from some form of self sabotage.

Regrettably, I’ve dropped a few bombs myself. I think we all do it when we’ve felt hurt, betrayed or disrespected. When your feelings are hurt, striking out in self defense seems like the best option at the time, so you hit the button… and in that moment, you feel better about yourself.

You feel better than feeling hurt when you’ve struck back. You might even feel really good… for a while.

You might even feel like your life will be so much better without this-or-that in your life at all, so you rationalize total decimation is not only warranted but acceptable or preferable. You are happy you pushed the button.

In the case of physical abuse, certainly methods of isolating yourself from others in a way that prevents further abuse are worth contemplating.

Do you have to destroy everything?

This is an important question to ask yourself before you push the button. When you’re considering lighting a match, pulling the trigger, pushing the button or dropping a bomb, asking yourself,

What are the far reaching effects of this destruction?

May be worth the momentary pause or distraction before you launch your attack (or counter attack), even if for consideration for the briefest of moments.

Oftentimes, the actions that we take – especially those actions conducted in the heat of the moment – do not serve us well in the long-run. At some time following the taking of such an action, we begin to realize this, start to feel bad (remorse), possibly even guilt, sorrow or depression.

We find ourselves struggling with our decision to lash out, often in ways that are irreparable as the damage was done, ever so effectively. What felt like self-defense at the time often leads to self destruction.

Is there a better way?

Yes. Self preservation is important. It is likely that you are the only person who is going to truly protect you or seek to defend who you are or what you believe. When it comes down to it, you’re all you’ve got.

So for god’s sake don’t do more harm than good.

Wisdom based on history and viewed through the eyes of love would dictate that in most (if not all) cases war is not the best option. Seeking inoffensive ways to protect one’s self are far more prudent and effective over time.

It’s hard to find balance between revenge and tolerance when our feelings are hurt or our ego is running amok.

Nonetheless, it is in these moments that we must find ways to retreat, find a place of solace or sanctuary, allowing us the repose necessary to ask the questions, “Is this destruction necessary?” and “What are the far-reaching implications?”

From a peaceful perspective and/or contemplative state, you may be willing to consider other options as you ask, “Is this truly in my best interest?”

Will this action lead to regret or self-destruction, or am I achieving my highest and best?

Is this my highest and best?

This is the life-affirming bottom line. If you are on a path to achieve your highest and best, is the action you are about to take helping you to stay on the high road, or have you somehow become derailed and are headed down a path leading to self destruct?

If there is any way possible, take the time to pause, re-evaluate and get back on track before you say or do something that you can’t take back.