The Dinosaur and the Runt

Muhammad Ali had this old trainer named Reverend Williams who used to preach on Sundays at a church out in St. Louis. He’d always praise lightweight to the heavyweights he used to train. Used to refer to heavies as “those dinosaurs”. At the ring of the bell he’d yell “Get in the ring and kick the goddamn dinosaur’s ass.” Whenever he thought his fighters were getting “too big” he’d tell them this joke: 

A great big dinosaur strolls through the jungle. Left and right animals would scurry at every step. Until the dinosaur ran into a four-legged runt no bigger than a dog, plotted, defiantly immovable. ‘Why aren’t you running you little shit’ the dino grunted. The runt lifted his chin and yelled up “‘Because I ain’t scared of your ass.’...lighting up a big cigar” he continued “In a few million years your ass is gonna be extinct…As for me, I’m gonna grow up to be a horse.” And the Reverend would wheeze and burst in hearty laughter (220).

The dinosaur was too big for its own good, too slow and pompous to outrun the Meteorite. The wise young buck stood on growth in the long haul and steadfast resolve. Sure dinos might swing heavy right now, but after a few millennia, runts become horses and apes form cities; if they remain adaptable, humble, and defiant against incoming challenges.

Durham, R. (1975). The greatest Muhammad Ali / my own story. Random House.

Black and Brown Fighters

“Why does Judo or Karate suddenly get so ominous because black men study it?”

1964, The New York Times published a bogus story about a gang of Blood Brothers walking around smacking white people. Depending on the author’s speculative mood, its membership ranged 25 to 400 people. They had, in the author’s premonition of danger, “intensified their training in Karate and Judo fighting methods.”

Of course, the Blood Brothers never existed, and the original story was penned by Junius Griffin in reaction to an enraging police response to a couple of school kids who “swiped a few pieces of fruit” from a stand in Harlem. The day came to be known as the Fruit Stand Riot. 

In colored hands, martial arts were vilified as a outrageous cults of violence entrusted to certain ‘people’ with ill-tempered natures. Inspite of the martial path’s lessons on self-discipline, humility and the strength of kindness, Black and Brown martial artists were viewed through the memory of anti-imperialist violent revolution. Whether “Kenya’s bloody Mau Mau Uprising, the Angolan and Mozambican Wars of Independence”, the Algerian Revolution or Palestinian Uprisings, the Black and Brown man was archetyped by their seemingly ‘irrational’ anger, hatred and violence aimed at the ravage of colonial conquest on the naturally free human spirit. 

100 years after the American Civil War was fought over slavery, the government was still crowding “Black people into ghettoes through redlining…kept them in place with segregation and, when that didn’t work, lynching.” As you can imagine “for alot of Black Americans, kung fu, karate, jiu-jutsu, what-have-you, looked like paths to empowerment” (Hendrix and Poggali, 24).

I hear this story a lot when I sparr with the people I care about, the loss of power and the quest for empowerment. Whether we lost power to a bully, a sexual assaulter an abusive parent, a slave-master, colonizer, boss, or even just to life! Martial arts was a good and structured way to reclaim our power, channel and manage our feelings of anger or grief in a controlled and healthy way, working through things while reconnecting with our body’s natural rhythm in the world.

Hendrix, G., Poggiali, C., & RZA. (2021). These fists break bricks: How kung fu movies swept america and changed the world. Mondo Books.

Notes on Dissociation - Van Der Kolk

• What is dissociation?

  • “Feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world”

  • “... seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down.”

  • A defense mechanism developed in early childhood to block our maternal “hostility or neglect.” Pretending we’re not affected by a caregiver’s neglect, resentment, “rejection and withdrawal” or abandonment. 

• Sources of dissociation

  • Lyons Ruth found when a mother doesn't see or know you, especially during the first two yours of life, the rates of dissociation are much higher. 

  • Maternal “disengagement and misattunment” is responded to by the child with repression of “frustrations and distress”, their “emerging self” as well. For the sake of ‘peace’ or avoidance of parental backlash the child mutes their authentic self. We’d rather shut off than feel rejected, neglected or abandoned, or resented.

  • Example correction: Don’t let the child cry it off, listen to their needs. Bowlby says “What cannot be communicated to the mother cannot be communicated to the self.”

• Long-Term Impacts of Dissociation 

1. Not feeling real inside 

2. Nothing matter anymore

3. Difficulty protecting yourself from danger

4. Self-harm or dangerous situation to “feel something” other than numbness. 

5. Impaired sense of inner reality 

6. “Excessive Clinging”

7. Difficulty forming an identity that is naturally emergent 

8. Asynchronicity with our bodily senses, our sense of self, with our relationships (123)

• Solutions: 

  • Knowledge of the original wounds is not enough, how our fear of intimacy has to do with our mothers or fathers for example. We have to learn new ways to connect in relationships. 

  • Training “rhythmicity and reciprocity”. This means being in synch with oneself, integrating our presence in our bodily senses. Embedding ourselves in sensory and affective awareness of the world around us, embracing our activities. 

  • Singing, dancing, playing music, or sports to “foster a sense of attunement and communal pleasure” (124). 

• Other takeaways

  • “Early attachment patterns create the inner maps that chart our relationships throughout life”

A., V. der K. B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. Penguin Books.