Get Real Self Defense Podcast
A dose of personal protection discussion to help you become more confident and prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones. Train Today. Protect Tomorrow.
We just launched our YouTube and Instagram! Give us a follow @smartsafedefense.
Get Real Self Defense Podcast
Ep #21: Enhancing Self-Defense Abilities through Movement: Insights from Rafe Kelly
When you think of self-defense, your mind probably jumps to martial arts or some form of physical combat. But what if I told you that the key to effective self-defense and personal development lies in something much simpler, something as natural as movement? Welcome to another thought-provoking episode where we have the pleasure of hosting Rafe Kelly from Evolve Move Play. Rafe, a beacon of resilience, shares his personal triumph over ADHD and dyslexia through the transformative power of movement and play.
Throughout our conversation, Rafe offers illuminating insights into his work at Evolve Move Play, a unique blend of dance, tribal movement, parkour, and martial arts designed to promote growth and wellbeing. We also take a deep dive into the profound impact of movement on our health, how it shapes our gene expression, and how we can harness its power to bring more meaning into our lives. This can be especially crucial in our society today, which has increasingly shifted away from the significance of embodiment.
Finally, we touch upon the essential task of teaching children self-defense and the importance of developing situational awareness. From martial arts to parkour, we explore how physical activities can build confidence and strength in children. However, it's not just about preparing for potential threats. It's about empowering children with the knowledge and skills to navigate life in a safer, healthier, and more intentional manner. So, join us for a riveting discussion on the essence of self-defense, the role of movement in personal development, and the wonder that is the human body in motion. You won't want to miss it!
Follow Rafe Here!
YT: https://www.youtube.com/@RafeKelley
Website: https://www.evolvemoveplay.com/
Please be sure to give us a 5 Star review for this Podcast!
We are now also a video podcast! You can find us @smartsafedefense to follow and subscribe on YouTube and Instagram!
You can also join the Waiting List for the upcoming 5 Day Situational Awareness Challenge Course - Coming Soon.
In order to defend yourself properly and take action when someone is attacking you, you have to move. Movement is an essential aspect and requirement when it comes to defending yourself well in that self-defense situation, and movement is one of the things that I think most of us as human beings do not do well anymore. Maybe our ancestors were very good at it, but we aren't required to move nearly as much as those before us were required to do. We have so many conveniences and so many ways to just order things online and have things come to our doorstep and sit on our butts on the couch or in an office chair that we don't really get a lot of opportunity to practice movement unless we force ourselves to do some sort of sport etc. So to cover the concept of movement and self-defense and what it means to personally develop yourself and your self-defense capabilities through movement, I brought on my friend, rafe Kelly from Evolve Move Play to speak on the subject as a whole.
Speaker 1:Rafe is someone who I've known from back in the day when we did parkour and free running together in the same social circles, and Rafe has actually taken the concept of movement and what he has learned in his journey to new heights by actually opening up parkour visions, which was a parkour gym in Seattle, and then later on he started the company Evolve Move Play, which does a series of retreats and classes that help people to personally develop themselves better, both internally and externally through movement, with a blend of dance, primal tribal movement practices and parkour and martial arts. And because of the fact that he has taken his movement knowledge to a scientific and philosophical level, he actually was recently brought on by Jordan Peterson onto Jordan Peterson's podcast to talk about rough and tumble play and how it actually is a requirement for developing good, solid, socially smart children. Let's get into the episode where we talk with Rafe and where Rafe and I actually go over movement, how it is beneficial for you and how sometimes it doesn't require a kick or a punch to still be in the mentality of teaching yourself and your kids how to be safe on the street. My friend Rafe Kelly from Evolve Move Play.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Get Real Self Defense podcast. Here you get your daily dose of personal protection discussion to help you be more confident and prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones. And now let's get real with self defense.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to the Get Real Self Defense podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm Adam Jolly, helping you find tips and tricks to help you become a more confident, competent and capable protector for yourself and your family, and today I'm really excited.
Speaker 1:It's a long time coming. In some ways, I'm bringing on Rafe Kelly from Evolve Move Play and he is someone that I've known, actually from years back when we were both doing parkour back in the Northwest, and even then he was someone who always came with conversations from a point of intelligence and reflection and he's developed, going from just doing movement and parkour to actually creating a movement around movement, and so we'll get more into that in a second, but with that, essentially, I'll give you a quick rundown for you guys. Rafe is someone who at a young age, struggled with ADHD and dyslexia and moved on to have eventually a mentor in his life, and he can expand on that in a second where, basically, through a lot of rough and tumble, play, a lot of movement, he was able to overcome a lot of these issues and move on to getting a college degree and, like I said, he's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met and listened to. And so with that, rafe, how are you doing, brother?
Speaker 3:I'm good. Yeah, it's great to see you, adam. I think it's been over a decade, but I remember when you were training with us regularly, that was great, yeah, yeah, I actually didn't finish my degree.
Speaker 1:Oh, I thought you did.
Speaker 3:No, no. I stopped with about three classes left because I at that point was really focused on teaching gymnastics and that was my action at the time. But, yeah, I was able to go from basically being held back. They wanted to hold me back after third grade so that I should know no sign of having really been educated at all, despite four years of school at that point. And then, when I came back into the school system, what am I? Sophomore year of high school, skipped my sophomore year and ended up being a junior. That year I went to community college and right away I was able to get a 4.0 and score very highly on the SAT. So ADHD continues to be something that is a feature of my life. But yeah, rough and tumble play was really healing for me in that way. And then later, parkour actually really helped me stop losing my phone, stop losing my keys all the time. I still lose them, probably more than the average person does, but it's not a daily occurrence anymore.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that you did a lot of movement as I was looking you up and you have been trying to keep up to date on where you've been at in life prior to this podcast.
Speaker 1:One of the things is, like you covered all sorts of things in martial arts and self defense, like capoeira, you did Sistema, you did BJJ, you did Kung Fu I mean Akito, just to name a few of them and even before that you were playing in the woods. As a child you had a mentor who was very, very okay with the idea of not restricting you and confining you to learning in the typical environment, which is sit down in a classroom or at a table and do math and do science and just focus up, and so with movement, movement obviously is very important to you, was very important to you as a kid. So with all the movement that you've done, from gymnastics to parkour to martial arts what have you discovered in that entire lifetime of movement? That is kind of like a universal importance for people to have that maybe they don't have in society.
Speaker 3:Just movement itself, right? So fundamentally, every cell in your body actually relies on movement to maintain its health and to just continue to actually thrive. So your, my friends from functional range conditioning, they have this saying which is a force is the language of cells. So when you exert a force on a cell, that's what informs the cell how it should shape itself and it kicks off metabolic processes in the cell when it's moved. In the same way that food, right. So chemical nutrition comes from food and feeds your body, the building blocks of proteins. But it's actually movement that moves a lot of things in and out of cells. It's a lot of it's movement that tells the cell how to build itself, that informs gene expression.
Speaker 3:Your, your body, you know, you, you have a heart which is moving and the heart of course pumps blood. But even vignette's return is not perfect without some kind of movement. Then you have the lymphatic system, which is completely dependent on movement. You have to walk, basically to push lymph up through your system. Lymph is the primary kind of sewage system of the body. It's how we get rid of metabolic waste problems out of our cell. So most people in our culture simply don't move enough and that is a primary cause of the multitude of lifestyle diseases that we face in our culture.
Speaker 3:The movement isn't just, how you know, isn't just fundamental to health, it's actually fundamental to our experience of meaning in the world and what we actually are as human beings. We come from a very unique sort of cultural background in the West where we we have kind of divorced ourselves from our own embodiment through the influence of beginning of the scientific revolution, particularly the work of Descartes, who is really a philosopher in many ways. He has said I think, therefore I am, and this project of radical doubt. The only thing that he could not doubt was his own mind, and so then the body he conceived of as mechanical, in the same way that he conceived of the rest of the world. The mind was separate from that. But that's not how we experience life, it's not what evolution tells us, it's not what many religions tell us. Right, we are actually contingent on our embodiment, and when we, when we divorce ourselves from our embodiment, we actually lose touch with some of the things that are most fundamental to experiencing life is meaningful, literally. You know, ecological psychology tells us that the meaning of an object is not, it's not objective, right?
Speaker 3:So, if I pick this up and I tell you this is a cup, right, this cup is ceramic. Right, but I could have a metal cup, I could have a plastic cup. This cup is white and has things on it. I could have any number of colors. This cup is, you know, like a cylinder that's even at the top and the bottom, but it could be different shapes, could be rounded, it could be kind of cut in at the top.
Speaker 3:It's actually very hard to design a computer program that can perfectly differentiate cups from non-cups. What makes a cup a category isn't objective, right? There's an infinite set of facts that are different between two cups and an infinite set of facts that are the same between a cup and a can, for instance, right? So you know, finally, fundamentally, they're all made up of protons and neutrons and electrons, and you know. But they're different in some way.
Speaker 3:And the the the fundamental thing about a cup is actually that it has a relationship, a real relationship to me as a. So, as I was saying, the cup has this real relationship to you, which is that we can grasp it. It's, it's the correct size and shape, that it's easy for a hand to hold and it's, it's relevant to us because we have a desire to, we have a necessity for consuming liquids, and we can contain liquids in these and easily then access them. Now, it's not subjective, and this is a mistake that, like romanticism, makes, because you can't actually project the function of a cup onto anything. If you try to make this cup out of cheesecloth, it wouldn't work very well, right, you're getting water all over your hands. So it's, it's real, but it's not objective that.
Speaker 3:So when we perceive a cup, we perceive the meaning of the cup because of its relevance to our own motivational scheme and our action capabilities.
Speaker 3:So when you move and take on any movement practice, you're actually layering new potential meanings into the world.
Speaker 3:So when I can do a jump between two tree branches, that's now a meaning of those two tree branches that I've unlocked. When I know that I can harvest certain fruits or honey or eggs from a tree, that's, or, or timber or fiber from the tree, that that's, that's meanings that they have available to me. When we live lives where we spend most of our time in front of a screen, we are actually becoming in some sense blinded to the most fundamental meanings that have been important to us throughout our evolution. Everything about us is, in some sense, actually contingent on our capacity to move. Our intelligence arises because we are actually the most complicated, the most complex movers in the animal kingdom. We have a wider variety of motor capabilities and more flexibility in developing new motor capabilities than any other animal, and it's because of that that we have these huge brains. So when we talk about movement, what we're talking about is actually reclaiming our own understanding of the most fundamental aspects of our nature and the very things that can give deep meaning to life.
Speaker 1:I think that's actually a beautiful concept as a whole, because I'll tell you what, for me personally, I've found that my you know, my family, my friends I found that when people were moving they Like whether that be playing sports or jogging, going for a walk. Everyone has these different things that they do that makes them happier. Like people say like hey, it helps to lift weights when you're feeling depressed. That was something that universally seemed to help a lot of guys when I was in the military. You know, just getting that physical stressor, you know putting yourself under a little bit of amount of stress and lifting weights.
Speaker 1:But with movement, when it comes to creating meaning, the first time that I discovered a sliver of that was actually when I started parkour. And when I started doing parkour I didn't look at a bench as a bench anymore or a wall as a wall anymore. It became something different. And I would assume it's the same thing for, like skateboarders or BMX bikers, where they're moving something and they see an obstacle or they see something that most people would go around, or you know, take the stairs or something like that and they're looking at that as an opportunity to see what they can do with that environment. And when it comes to you know, it kind of goes in the same realm for situational awareness and self-defense, where you are looking at somebody and you know other people and things in your environment and you're not looking at it as just hey, there's people in the environment and I'm going to the store.
Speaker 1:You're looking at it as hey, you know what are people doing, what is their behavior, what are their hands doing, and it creates a different level of meaning in that realm and it all, you know, circulates around the concept of what you're talking about, which is, you know, jumping between two tree branches. You know, looks like two tree branches at first until you do that and all of a sudden it's more than that now and you created a relationship with yourself through that. I think that's quite fascinating. So when it comes to to movement, I mean you've done a lot of martial arts and you know you have children and I was actually watching the other day your video that you had on YouTube with your kids doing the introduction. It was like 10 things to do during COVID or whatever I think was the title, with your kids. And I watched your youngest, who she was she two, two and a half three, she seemed really young.
Speaker 3:She would have been maybe under two at that stage. I think because she's under. She's five and a half now, and that would have been three years ago. So, yeah, two and a half.
Speaker 1:Goodness gracious. So when I, when I when I watched that and I saw her climb the bunk bed, I honestly was blown away and this is coming from someone who did, you know, parkour and stuff and those there's possibilities. And so when it comes to yourself and your children, what are you what, what things are you doing with your family to create, you know, to embody, like, the concept of movement, to create that resiliency and that confidence, because a lot of people on the street aren't confident and bad guys can smell that out very, very quickly. And so, you know, through movement, it seems like your kids are actually very, very, you know, confident with themselves as people and it seems like movement does a lot with that. Can you expand on that a little bit, like your relationship with your kids and movement?
Speaker 3:Mm, hmm, I think I want to start with, like, what we don't do right, sure, via negative. So we none of my kids have phones, right, they don't have access to tablet devices. We only allow we only allow, you know, about four hours of television a week, and so we don't know video games. So we don't have anything, that's, we don't have as many things that are actually competing for their attention that pulled them away from engaging with movement. Second thing we don't do is we don't punish our kids for moving generally or tell them to be scared of movement. Right, as much as possible we try to support them when they want to take on a movement task. So there are certain things that I do like.
Speaker 3:I regularly warn my kids when they're swinging on tree branches to make sure that they swing relatively close to the trunk, right, they're not always aware of how much of you know they're they're getting too far out on that lever on. But they get to swing on tree branches and they get to climb trees. They get to climb. You know, when we lived in Seattle, I allowed them to climb on a roof which was flat. They're not allowed to climb on the roof here because it's, you know, it's steep, but you know, as much as possible, I'm just giving them a chance to do it. When they want to wrestle, then they're allowed to wrestle.
Speaker 3:So I've been working with a lot, of, a lot of schools have reached out to me recently and they've been like how can we get started? And I said, well, like, go back and look at all the things that you've banned that the kids are doing and say, hey, you know what of this can we let go of banning? Right, stop banning tags, stop banning. You know games that involve tackling and chasing and you know, like, how much of this can we let go and how much of this is actually required by insurance and so. So that's a big part of it. Now I think about sort of I guess you maybe we could categorize like the things that impact your kids' movement environment. Three things pop into my head. One is the kind of removing, removing barriers to their movement. The second is creating pull factors. What makes the kids want to move inherently. So we just bought an air track and put it out in our backyard for the kids to jump over.
Speaker 3:And I'll go outside and put the air and, like, put a hurdle for them to jump over at the end of the air track and a big pit pillow for them to jump into, and I'll kind of change the different arrangements around the air track so it's a little bit different every day and attracts the kids attention and then they'll go out and play. We happen to have a Japanese maple tree in our front yard. That is really great for the kids to play on and like, just it's amazing, just having that completely changes how much time they spend climbing. So that's a pull factor. So how many pull factors can you create for your kids? And then there's a push factor which is this is actually something I'm telling them is a necessary component of their education.
Speaker 3:So my oldest daughter we kind of pushed her too hard with some of the movement practices at a certain point and she burned out. She had too many things going on. She wanted to drop some of them. We weren't ready to let her drop some of them. She then, when she did drop, she just wanted to be out of it for a long time. So eventually it was like time to kind of get her back to it and I told her like, just like you have to learn math, you have to learn Brazilian jiu jitsu. It's a fundamental aspect of self-defense. You have to learn this, so, or grappling. So I was like you can choose BJJ, you can choose American wrestling, you can choose judo, but you have to choose some kind of fundamental grappling skill and that structure that push. This is something you have to do. It worked and now she's really engaged with jiu jitsu, she loves it, she excels at it.
Speaker 3:As much as possible I want to rely on, like, removing barriers and creating pull to movement more than push, because push becomes a potential place of conflict and tyranny between the child and the adult. That's not to say that you shouldn't do it right, like children do need structure, but when something pulls people in through love, it's better than when they're just pushed into it. So that's, I guess. Then the last thing would be I want to have aspirational targets with it for my kids as much as possible. So obviously I try to practice around them so they can see me practicing, see what I do, know that that's available, but not only that. I want them to be in community with other adults who engage with movement and other children who engage with movement so that they can see something that's more approachable than me. Oh, that dad's just a weird superhero guy. He does that stuff. That's not for me. But if it's like, oh my, this, this 16 year old girl who I admire she's also doing it, and my 11 year old is 10 year old is seeing that saying, okay, I want to be like her, that's more powerful. I'm trying to help find community for them that creates an aspirational target around movement.
Speaker 3:And you know it's certainly not perfect, right, like we, we've had our struggles but we've had, you know, really exceptional results. All of my kids well, so my older two kids have both done over 10 pull ups. My oldest, my daughter, my oldest daughter, she's the kind of the least athletically driven of us, but she has like a 14 inch standing vertical jump which you know is way outside of the scope for a 10 year old girl or nine year old when we tested her. My son is, you know, kind of now approaching super freak levels. He just recently tested, I think, a 20 second one arm lock off which I've never seen any other kid do a one arm lock off ever, so he can hang from one hand in a full flex, chin up position for 20 seconds. So he's actually, you know, we'll probably be able to do a one arm pull up relatively soon, which he's getting this he's going to be nine years old in a week, so that's extremely unusual.
Speaker 3:He just he's been running track. He's, you know, wins pretty much every race. He ran a seven, nine, 50, and we don't do any, you know, we don't do any dedicated track training. You know he's one or podiumed at multiple Ninja Warrior competitions. He's, you know, exceptional at wrestling. And then my youngest daughter she's five, she's already done five pull ups, she can do a tuck plans and else it. Wow, she all, she, actually just she. She had a clean sweep at our local all commerce track meet yesterday for the first time. She's she hasn't won every event in a day before, but she won the 50, 50 meter hurdles, 100, 200 and long jump for her age class. So yeah, I mean we do have some genetic gifts as a family. My dad was a collegiate football player. My aunt on my mom's side was invited to train for the Olympics as a swimmer.
Speaker 3:But I think a lot of it is just this kind of cumulative effect of a very different environment of exposure to movement from a very early age and one of the reasons why I see that is because, like with my son, you know, he was like maybe the second fastest kid in preschool and then he's one of the fastest kids when he's five and six and now he's much faster than other kids his age and so he's just his, his sort of growth trajectory within movement is is increasingly diverging from the norm for other kids, and I think it's because other kids are actually just not getting the normal level of movement nutrition, nutrition that he's getting. So, yeah, that's kind of how I think about providing movement and you know. So, basically, within our system we break it down to, there are there are kind of four fundamental movement tasks that exist for us, which are how do we move within our own body? Right, how well coordinated are we? Kind of internal awareness, so something like yoga, gymnastics, strength work, somatics, pilates. This is all in this internal relationships of the body aspect.
Speaker 3:Then there's how well do we move the body through space? So locomotion, parkour, I think, is the most, the most fundamental expression of this, but gymnastics is also expression of this. Trekking fields and expression of this you know also, of course, racing, ninja, warrior, any number of things. And then, and then there's how well do you manipulate objects? And then there's oh there, okay, my screen turned off, yeah. So then how well do you manipulate objects? And then, last is, how well do you move with other people? So both in coordination and competition. So team sport is great because that's locomotive aspects. You know, can you change direction and move through, jump over something? Can you manipulate an object? You know dribble a basketball through a, through a pass and football, and and then you know how do you coordinate with teammates and how do you defeat an opponent. And then also you have things like juggling, things like you know playing with sticks and balls, swords you know anything like that is kind of within that look, manipulate the basket.
Speaker 3:So I want my kids to be exposed to something along all those lines. Kids will naturally engage in lots of locomotor play, lots of rough and humble play. So we try to make sure that there's lots of opportunities for them. Right, the air trick in the backyard, the tree in the front yard. But then we also do things like go to a local park or park. Or, during the winter, we go to the local Ninja Warrior Gym once a week. We choose the open gym rather than classes, so the kids have as much autonomy as possible in choosing the type of movement they're doing Martial arts they have to do martial arts, right, that's. That's a fundamental aspect of education to me. And then I encourage them to do a team sport at least once a year, and then we just have lots of balls and ropes and swords and weight lifting equipment around that they can pick up and mess with as much as they want.
Speaker 1:And that's interesting because you know there's a lot that I'd like to unpack here with some of the things you said. For one you talked about you know, hey, there's weights that they can mess around with most, most parents I think would kind of be worried or concerned about. Hey, you know I'm not supervising them lifting, you know, any sort of weight. You know, especially at a younger age, but also to a lot of parents also worry about climbing. And you talked about how in school there's a lot of restricted, you know, practices or activities that kids can't do anymore, such as tag, because it's a lot of tag, I think you said, actually in one of the conversations you had on another podcast where you said I think it was Mercer Island School District in your area had had restricted tag and and among other things.
Speaker 1:And so one of the things that I'd like to kind of breach on with you is with movement. You said martial arts is a requirement and because there's so much lack of movement that kids can do where they can't get that strength, they can't get that coordination, they can't develop themselves. I mean your kids, I mean you're talking about your three children all excelling in movement because you've allowed them and helped cultivate an environment where they can move as part of their you know literal education. What are you doing? Because they're becoming more confident, they're becoming stronger, they're independent or becoming more independently minded every single day. What you know? What are you doing as far as like training and developing their movement to keep them safe? Aside from martial arts, is there anything that you're doing yourself to? You know, make sure that they have that? You know, using that movement to their advantage to cultivate a mindset of safety and awareness. And you know it comes to other people that are in their environment that could get in their way of their day to day life.
Speaker 3:We haven't really talked a lot specifically about self defense ideas and situational awareness. They're very confident in their bodies. You know they're very capable. We live in a very safe place, but, you know, actually the biggest thing that I worry about is water. I worry about them drowning, and so the primary self defense thing is just getting them really confident at swimming. So I spent a lot of the time and attention into like okay, giving them to have high confidence in swimming. And then you know, yeah, I have a little bit different perspective on self defense, right, I think that a lot of times people get really focused on the idea of you know, a bad guy might catch you in a dark alley and try to take something from you. I think that for me, self defense is like don't text and drive. You know I was talking to Rory Miller, who's a great self defense author. You may be aware he's got a book called Meditations on Lounge Fantastic.
Speaker 3:We're talking about this idea that you go to a like a, you know, really intense self defense seminar and you'll see all these guys dressed in camo fatigues and talking about violence and all this stuff and they've got pot bellies and they walk outside and smoke cigarettes and so the likelihood that they're going to die of cancer from the cigarettes or heart disease from the food that they eat is immensely higher than the likelihood that they're actually going to, you know, get in a violent confrontation unless they choose to behave in ways that expose them to violent confrontations because they want to test their training. So, you know, I'm trying to teach my kids about what healthy eating is and how to have good relationships with people and how to manage conflict and be articulate and have good self advocates. To me, that's all fundamental to their awareness of self defense. Yeah, stuff, like you know, with my girls in particular.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, really both sex is actually like having really strong sexual ethics and understanding the risks inherent in beginning to start a sex life. It's this huge aspect of self defense. I mean, so much violence is actually around drunk young people trying to negotiate and figure out who's going to have sex with who and if they're actually willing, right. So you know, the vast majority of murder is men murdering other men between the ages of 15 and 25. The largest reason that they kill each other is overromantic rivalries. Absolutely Most of the violence that women encounter is from men who are trying to either get access to them sexually or control access to them sexually, and I think it's like 80% of murders happen when people are under the influence of alcohol.
Speaker 3:So, like a huge part of teaching your kids. Self defense to me is teach your kids not to binge drink and not to start sexual relationships when they're drunk at parties.
Speaker 1:No, absolutely. I think that I think there's a lot there and we actually started going into an area that in self defense discussion here that I thought we'd get to later, but we might as well tackle it now and that's. There's more to it than just a bad guy, like you said, you know, like one of the things that I find interesting is you know self defense. To me, though, I talk mainly about you know protection, kicking, punching, you know the physical transactions that happen when you have someone on the in the opposition who's trying to do something to you, take something from you. Like you said, you know the don't text and drive, I mean, is a great example of self defense. You're being preventative.
Speaker 1:Another one for me is like the idea of how are you internally to yourself? How do you? You know, because if you are not, if you are not able to control yourself, control your personal choices whether that be your addictions, your finances, whatever it is if you aren't striving to mitigate those, then those things control you and therefore you get into situations that are out of your control, that can make you do things that you normally wouldn't do or be in situations that you normally wouldn't be in. So like definitely, even though it's more abstract. It's more than just a physical transaction. It's one of the other things that you can do to keep yourself safe, and I mean, for instance, in law enforcement, which I'm a law enforcement deputy in the area that I live. One of the things that I was taught early, early on, was there's three things that can get a cop in trouble more than anything else, and that is going to be money, booze and girls. I mean, you know, in this case was what I was told like spouses, relationships, whatever, those are the three things that will get you in trouble in the job faster than anything else. And it seems like that seems to be the universal case for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:Most videos that I review and watch and study for visualization purposes when it comes to self-defense is people at nightclubs, bars, after hours, you know, once they get done, partying and, like you said, alcohol is a big factor. So I think that it's very wise that you know it's more than just hey, kicking and punching, it's hey. How do I prepare my kids with these social transactions? Because really self-defense from the lens of what most gurus do, it can only happen through a social transaction. So I mean, if you're by yourself and nobody else is around, you're not having to practice self-defense the way that most of society perceives self-defense, and so I think that's an excellent point.
Speaker 1:So, with that, where do you, you know, what are the main things that you really focus on teaching people, like you know? So for the listener right now, they're saying okay, we've talked about all sorts of things relationship with movement, we've talked about some of the ways that your kids have gone from, you know, starting off at one stage, to being, you know, like you said, in the super freak levels in some regards. What can I do for myself? What are some activities I can do for myself or for my kids to develop movement, to increase my confidence, coordination, competence, so on and so forth.
Speaker 3:So the place that I actually start with everybody is you need to start walking Again, like from a broad self-defense perspective, the number one, the number one killer in America is heart disease. Walking is one of the best defenses you have against heart disease. It's like it's the biggest missing movement nutrient. It also takes you into relationship with the world. As you walk around a city, you begin to be aware of what is afforded to you in the environment, what are potentially areas that you don't want to go. You develop an intuitive sense of the place that you are. If you walk through nature, you develop an awareness of the natural world. I think a good way to fall in love with the world better is just to walk through it. Walk through nature.
Speaker 3:Once we kind of move past that, a really fundamental thing is how competent are you at rising and falling to the ground? If you're looking at older adults, one of the biggest risk factors is going to be a hip fracture from a fall. Yes, how well can you fall? Do you practice? Do you practice actually being on the ground ever? How many ways can you access the ground? How many ways can you get up off the ground? Something like Sistema, which I don't love, as an actual combative system has a lot of beautiful things in its ground acrobatics program which are really really valuable for getting people comfortable with moving on the ground. Getting up off the ground, hitting the ground that's really fundamental. Obviously, something like Judo, any sort of grappling which is going to get you falling is good. And then parkour. We start our teaching with fundamentals of parkour in the natural world, with break-falling practices, with ground sitting practices, with walking and with meditative practices. I think that's a really great prescription for most people to get started in a moving practice.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Talking about parkour. I know that you and I know more about this than maybe the average Joe, but for someone that's listening a lot of what you see online for quote-unquote, parkour is the gainers off of two-story, three-story buildings and jumping from building to building and all the where people have pushed their physical bodies to extreme limits and trying to go beyond those limits. Most people might think, oh gosh, I can't do that. Is parkour flipping, tricking type stuff, or is it? Is there something different to the philosophy of parkour that maybe most of society doesn't glean from?
Speaker 3:Yeah, but unfortunately and we face this ourselves it's much easier to capture people's attention by doing something really spectacular and in a sense, actually maybe even unnatural for a human body. Right, it's not really something that we would have been doing regularly in our evolutionary past to say, front flip between two buildings, but it is an expression of human capacity. It's very virtuosic and it's really fun to do if you're capable of it. But fundamentally, what parkour is is just locomotion. It's just exploratory locomotion or exploratory locomotive play. That's the terminology that comes out of play literature, as you have exploratory locomotive play, object-oriented play, rough and tumble play.
Speaker 3:Parkour is just a kind of formalization of an exploratory locomotive play practice. Now that just means exploring, running, jumping, climbing, moving on all fours. Most parkour athletes don't do it, but swimming would also be part of that, can also be part of that Balancing, and all of that can be done at very low risk, very low heights and scaled to any level. There's a beautiful video from the Parkour Dance Company, I believe that I think it's called Forever Young, but it's about people in their 70s doing parkour and it shows that, like you can take someone who has very you know regressed locomotor capacities and you know mostly is only walking and have them sit down on a bench, spin and come up on the other side, and that's parkour, and that is something that your grandmother can do, it's something that your four-year-old can do. You know, any kind of jump, the smallest little hop, is developmental and necessary. One of the things that we lose fastest as we age is our explosiveness, our power, and it's very, very valuable to us If you need to get out of the way of a car quickly. How fast can you produce power on the ground is an incredibly important aspect of it. If you are in a self-defense situation, hitting someone hard, pushing someone off has a lot to do with how much power you can create off the ground.
Speaker 3:Like I found as a parkour athlete that, with minimal sort of practice of martial arts, I sustained a very high level of skill and a very high level of ability to to interact with good martial artists in a way where I'm still holding my own, or even doing better than holding my own, because of the athletic advantages that come through my parkour practice the ability to produce power quickly, the ability to move in and out of space, the ability to imagine my body in different spaces and move and have kinetic awareness of where I am. All translates incredibly well to the martial arts context and often it creates some problems for people who are only martial artists because they're just not used to somebody who has the affordances that I have. My ability to move into and out of range for an attack is so much advanced over someone who has my technical level right. So it's like if you look at my full work it probably doesn't scream. This guy can cover that distance that fast.
Speaker 3:But because I just have so much more baseline power and locomotive ability than you know who's prototypical and a martial arts athlete, I continuously surprise the people that I spar with. So yeah, so if you're in a fight, if you just need to plow through a crowd of people who are freaking out, you know, because there's an earthquake and you just need to get somewhere, like to me, these are all aspects of self-defense and being more competent at locomotion, having more power in your body, having the ability to jump, is really, really, it's really a power.
Speaker 1:No, that's great. So some of the things that, because I've been trying to try different aspects as well when it comes to my own personal movement development because, to be quite honest, when I went into the military, we did movement, we rocked, we ran, we did stuff like that, but I wasn't doing parkour, I wasn't doing martial arts, I wasn't doing those things at all, and mainly because I excused myself from them, saying I don't have time for that right now. I have all these other things to do and I have a family, and so, with that, some of the things I've been trying to do is get back into movement myself and trying things out like animal flow exercises, trying to do more calisthenics doing lifting, which, for those of you that don't know that are listening animal flow is actually super subtle in how much it'll actually smoke you. If you do it right and you do it carefully, it'll mess you up. So if you are interested in checking out that kind of stuff with animal flow, look it up on YouTube. But I'm sure Rafe can get into those things as well because of what he does, which we will get into at the end.
Speaker 1:But so with that, I've been trying out these different things myself, and obviously you have to kind of fit it to your schedule, fit it to your what your strengths are versus what your weaknesses are. Everybody's gonna be different. What are some universal, I guess, activities that, aside from walking, that people have done, or that you've had people do in your classes, in your retreats, that seem to give them the most? I guess a-ha moment, bang for their buck development, where they just go, they get the light bulb and they go. Oh my gosh. But after doing this activity I realize I can do more with myself. I can actually do more with my body than I expected.
Speaker 3:I mean, the answer is just basically doing parkour in nature and rough and tumble play. Right Now. The rough and tumble play thing is the parkour thing is relatively easier for us to support Right now. We don't have a rough and tumble play or a program online and it's actually a lot of times people will see our videos and say, okay, just take a Jujutsu class and it's like, maybe, but a lot of times it doesn't actually fulfill all of the functionality of what we're doing and I can talk more about why that is. But that's very, very empowering to people when they experience it and it's hard for them to access outside of our retreats. But the parkour is something that we have online programs that can support. There's actually also many schools of parkour that we are friends with that we can point people to that you might be able to find in your area, and just expanding your capacity to generally engage in locomotor practices is incredibly empowering, like you're just more capable in the world. You see the world differently. You can fall in love with the world for how you can access it in these different ways, and something like being able to take a fall is so empowering. Right, I'm not as afraid to fall down and when you do parkour and you engage with break-falling practices it's incredibly powerful. So those are kind of the big things that I think you know are important.
Speaker 3:I wanted to mention about Animal Flow. I know Mike Fitch. He's a great guy. I've had him on my podcast. I've done some Animal Flow facility and stuff. It's really. It's very well put together, feels really good in the body. We do have a ground flow component in our stuff as well. So if someone's looking for a more holistic approach to it, you'll get ground flow in what we're doing. If you wanna dig into and really if you really enjoy that ground flow practice, animal Flow is definitely exceptionally well developed program with a huge I mean there's trainers all over the world and a huge online ecosystem for it and Mike comes highly recommended.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. That's a. I guess there's one more thing before. I wanted to get into exactly what you do and what you offer for retreats, for classes and stuff like that, and that is you know, we brought up rough and tumble play quite a bit, and then we've talked about a little bit of the stigma about how society and school have been pretty anti-rough and tumble play, not just for kids but for adults as well. It is considered uncouth or inappropriate for people to get physical with each other, mess around with each other, and so with that, I mean, what do you challenge? With that? I mean, what is exactly rough and tumble play? Is it rough housing? I mean so-.
Speaker 3:Yeah, same word In context. So rough housing is a sort of colloquial term for what's termed rough and tumble play. In play research, you know, people might call it play fighting, people might call it horse play, but essentially many, many animals are motivated to engage in some sort of mock combat style of play, which can include also games of chase and tag often, and they seem to be pretty reflective of different animals' sort of lifestyle needs, right? So cats love to stalk and pounce things and bite them and claw them and kick them with their back legs, because that's how cats catch the prey. And dogs do a lot of similar things, but they do a lot more chasing and a lot more sort of jaw sparring, because that's more related to how they catch and kill things. And horses, on the other hand, do a lot of like kicking their back legs up as part of that and a lot of wrestling with their necks. One of the interesting things is that basically, one of the fundamental social problems that animals face, even before they have much of a like complex social life, is that two animals of the same species will want to solve a problem of who gets to have access to a resource, right Like here's a patch of ground that you know has more food available, okay, the next patch of ground isn't as good. So who gets that patch of ground and who gets the other patch of ground?
Speaker 3:Generally, animals have evolved a way of solving these kind of dominance conflicts that doesn't involve their lethal combative systems. So if you're a venomous snake and you are trying to solve a dispute with another venomous snake that's of the same species, you don't bite each other with your venomous fangs, you actually wrestle. They pin each other's heads to the ground. If you're a two-bull moose, right, and you're trying to decide who's the king of the herd there right, they don't try to ram each other in the side with their horns, they lock horns and then wrestle. If a moose sees a wolf, it's gonna try to pick that wolf up with his horns and toss it and kill it and go as badly as possible. But they actually did engage in this non-lethal combat system and in most species it's some kind of wrestling, some kind of showing that you can pin the other animal down. So we look at human beings even. You see that some kind of throw and pin-based wrestling is universal across all cultures, right, systems of striking-based combatives that are sort of ritualized and for interpersonal disputes are actually much less common. Generally, if you look at sort of like Hunter Forger tribes, it's like you wrestle with your friends and you hit your enemies with clubs and spears and bow and arrows and throw rocks right. So you have these different systems, so rough and dumbled play.
Speaker 3:You can imagine that once you have this agonistic combat system then you could realize that if you play it outside of an actual dominance conflict then you're gonna be better prepared once the dominance conflict comes up. And then you might realize that if two players are playing and one is stronger than the other, if they win all the time, then they're growing and the other player isn't growing. So then the other player can default out of the game and just stop wanting to play. So then there's a motivation to actually handicap yourself. If you're the stronger player and we see this throughout the animal kingdom that stronger players will handicap it. You know, a classic one that you'll see in in animals is like a. If you've ever seen like a great Dane or a big Malamute or something Playing with like a Chihuahua or a Jack Russell Terrier, it will flop on its back and Joss bar on its back with this much smaller animal but it could literally just chomp in one bite. But it wants to engage in play.
Speaker 3:So Yuck Panksepp is a neurobiologist. He's found that there's a specific reward circuitry in the brain around rough and tumble play that's highly motivating for juvenile animals. His model was juvenile male rats and and it seems to be deeply evolutionarily conserved. And then you see that it's the same pattern like goanna lizards wrestle, venomous snakes wrestle rats pin each other on their shoulders like that's, that's what we do. So rough and tumble play you can think of is as play that reflects this dominance, hierarchy, conflict, but then it's become exacted for all these other purposes. It actually teaches us empathy, right, because you have to recognize when somebody else is overstressed so that you can Handicap yourself such that they'll want to continue playing with you.
Speaker 3:So Jordan Peterson as a paper called play on the regulation of aggression, which shows that the best way to help anti-social children, who are mostly boys, become more social is to give them access to rough and tumble play, because they'll be highly motivated to get access to this kind of Play and then they'll learn to regulate their behavior such that they can access it. So If you go to do jiu-jitsu or Kickboxing or karate or any kind of free play sparring environment that access aspects of this rough and tumble play. What can happen is that you Won't have the same kind of freedom to manipulate the game and to engage in self-handicapping a lot of times in this formalized sports that children engage in naturally. So you can imagine that we used to have a play culture that kids would create through their drive to play and then the specific social context. So children are always trying to solve how to grow up to be a competent adult in the culture and environment in which they're in.
Speaker 3:So if you are a, an embutee kid like you're a hunter, forager from Tropical Africa and you get a, you find a cool stick, you pretend that it's a bow and arrow because you see all the adult men in your area shooting animals with bow and arrows. Right, if you grew up watching Rambo movies, you pretend that same stick as a machine gun. Sorry, all right. So we do play out some aspects of it, but there's something fundamental which is that everywhere Kids pick up sticks and pretend their weapons. Right, maybe it's a sword, maybe it's a club, maybe it's a bow and arrow, maybe it's a machine gun. And then you know we play these. You know there's different systems of wrestling that are that are common in different places. So maybe you're doing submissions, maybe you're just doing pins right, are you allowed to strike? How much are you allowed to strike? But basically people are doing this everywhere and and then kids will invent lots of games that are related to this Right.
Speaker 3:So, like some of the games that I play with my kids are things like this is my couch, right, I'm on the couch. I try to kick them off the couch. They try to pull me off the couch, they try to get on the couch. A game we play with our students is just this is my spot, so we'll just like have someone sit down in the spot. The other person tries to push them off their routine.
Speaker 3:So what is distinct about what we do versus a jiu-jitsu school is that we're focused on how the play cultivates the human individual rather than the technical skill, and we're looking at how can we scale games Rather than just cultivate specific techniques is, rather than going and saying here's our fundamentals you need to know how to escape routine guard, escape guard, past yard, mount Side, mount, north south Arm, bar triangle, choke, omoplata we're saying how can we cultivate somebody who has good sensitivity to play, who moves well, who can Do what you know, who can recognize when I you know, when a play environment is good for everyone who's involved, who can play with multiple people or one person. You can play with someone who's much stronger than them or much weaker than them. And how do we scale games that educate people? Do that.
Speaker 3:Now, as part of that, because I come from this extensive martial arts background and I have an interest in self-defense, I'm also curious how can I get more technical skill out of those games? How can I get more self-defense awareness out of those games? So I, you know, I pay attention to people like Rory Miller and Matt Thornton and For us a hobby and John Donahue and all those guys, so that I can say, hey, I'm choosing to play this game because it's achieving this play result and also it's teaching something fundamental about the martial arts. So I'll give you an example. One of our teachers had a game where they would you play tag, where you're telling a tag someone's shoulder and I.
Speaker 3:Don't love that game from a martial arts perspective, because the we don't want to be moving our shoulders out of the way in a way that's going to be exposing our face, neck and center, so I want the target to be the centerline of the body and I want the shoulders to be a defensive thing, so I can move my, my shoulder into the way to intercept your attempt to tag, to get me at the center of my line, because my shoulder is actually Much more defensive than my center line, right, like if I'm trying to hurt somebody, I'm not punching them in the shoulder, I'm punching them in the face and the throat, the solar plexus, and a lot of times one of my best lines of defense is to shoulder Roll and intercept that with my shoulder, so the game kind of achieves the same thing either way from a pure play perspective.
Speaker 3:But from a martial arts technical perspective, I'm preparing that athlete to to have better awareness of the type of games that they might want to play if they're going into a Muay Thai context or MMA context later down the line. But Fundamentally, we believe, though, that a lot of the awareness that is taught technically in martial arts is actually better developed through Play. So what should your stance look like? So, if you are a Muay Thai guy, you're going to be taught a Muay Thai stance, which is adaptive for Muay Thai rules but it's not adaptive for MMA rules. You're a karate guy? You're going to be taught a karate stance, which may have completely changed since Gishin Funakashi, because it's mostly adaptive for impressing judges in a kata routine. Right? If you're a wrestler?
Speaker 3:you're going to adopt a wrestling style or you're going to adopt a wrestling stance, but if you Play a striking game and you play a wrestling game and you play a swordsmanship game and you play a you know different styles of striking games All of a sudden you realize the stance is adaptive to the circumstance and the type of tasks that you're trying to do. If you, if you have people just try to tap we play a game called torso tech, so we have people take a like a. Basically, imagine you're holding an egg in your fist, so your hand is soft, but now you're just trying to tag the other person gently with your hand on their torso, people will automatically blade their stance Because they recognize right away that they can get to someone faster If they have one shoulder in front of them and that they can move their chest away faster. They're not going to stand there in horse stance to play this game, no Right. So they blade their stance. So already they're recognizing fundamental things about what an effective stance is in martial arts.
Speaker 3:Play a game where you try to tag someone's knee You're going to blade your stance. You're going to lower your shoulders, you're going to move back so you can move those legs out of the way quicker you can get to someone's legs quicker. So all that awareness just fundamentally builds up. So then you start pointing it out and you say, okay, within this context, what's going to be adaptive? Like you can, you can figure it out yourself. What kind of athlete are you? Are you predominantly going to go for the takedown, or you're predominantly in a strike, etc. That all dictates what's the optimal stance for you. So rather than giving someone a Perscriptive stance and having them stand in it all the time, we just play games that teach them why stances work in specific contexts. So, anyways, that's.
Speaker 1:I could rant, that's, that's that's quite fascinating, I mean, it makes a lot of sense. It really does. The idea Depending on the activity, your stance is going to change, your position is going to change. You know how how a fencer stands stands versus how a wrestler stands is, you know, completely different how someone does. You know, like you said, traditional karate versus you know some sort of uh, mma or point sparring or something. I mean it's going to all be different and and that, and that actually makes a lot of sense to use, use, play, um, I mean, all what you're suggesting actually is almost like a mr Miyagi type scenario. It's like a paint the fence, you know, wax off. You're doing certain activities those weren't play for him. Ralph Machio thought it was miserable. But the idea that you're doing certain activities to replicate movement rather than teaching the movement itself, uh, and getting repetition too from it, I think that's that's quite interesting, using the play aspect, I think that's really cool.
Speaker 3:So we were very influenced for my work is kind of, I suppose, convergent with the perspective of what's called ecological dynamics and motor learning and the constraints. That approach and then we've been deeply influenced by that. So the constraint led approach basically tells us that the more that we can use the structure of the task and the environment to impact the way that the athlete is learning the motor Expression, the more stable that's going to be under pressure and the more adapted the athletes going to be. So if we tell somebody this is the, you know, if you like, imagine, imagine having somebody like Stand in one place and mock out a basketball shot with no basketball and no hoop.
Speaker 3:Hmm right, versus having them say, hey, try to get the basket in the hoop, right, okay, you're, you're, you're a tuning. There's no information in the environment without the ball or the hoop or Another player. But the more that we get those, then the information within the the training To reflect the context in which we're going to apply, the more that that's the training will actually show up in that context. So so if you tell someone to arc their shot on a when they're shooting a basketball More, that's harder for their brain to process. That's not really how your brain learns movement information as well. It's a constraint. You're using a verbal constraint but use a physical constraint. If you put a barrier in front of them they have to shoot over. It attunes their information better, tunes them to the correct information better. It gives them an opportunity to solve the problem in a variety of general ways, which creates more, more effective so Problem-solving in the long term. So the way that we think about it is that a lot of our training has been mistaken because it's been about the idea that you have to have specific patterns, right, so you need to know how to shrimp in jujitsu. That's fundamental. I'm not actually interested in people having patterns that look a specific way. Particularly, I'm interested in how well athletes solve Problems, and then I want to introduce problems that make them as adaptive as possible and then that are representative as much as possible of things that they might actually experience. So one tool that we really like is just a ball on a string, so we can use this in a lot of ways. But one thing you can use it for is to build the capacity to move evasively, so we can swing that at someone's head, at their shoulders, at their torso, and have them move their head, and now they're learning slipping and rolling and all sorts of mechanical stuff that applies to striking. Now the problem with the ball in the string is that the perceptual information of the ball in the string is not the same as the Perceptual information that you're gonna be picking up from someone trying to strike you with their hands, right. So when, if you're a good striker, you know that most of the information that's gonna tell you where my body's gonna go next is actually in my torso, all right, so you're gonna be attending to my torso to tell you, okay, that that shoulder is moving forward, that's the hand that's gonna come. He's moving this way, okay, so I have to slip this way. So if I'm just swinging a ball at you, you're do you don't have that information anymore? All right, sure? Or the information is unrelated the way that I move my torso isn't that related the way that I'm gonna move it when I'm gonna strike you.
Speaker 3:So we'll still play with the ball. It's great, it's really fun, it's very easy, it's non-threatening and it gets a lot of these movements going. It helps you generate a lot of sort of general movement ability. But then we'll right away pair it with some offense defense, right. And then we can scale that from very playful right up like we can be throwing a, you know, very exaggerated dance, like movements into someone's space, where we're, you know, throwing like big, open, sweeping movements by their head and they're still getting this fundamental idea of what it's like to see a human body moving through that Space and move out of the way. And then we can tighten it, tighten it, tighten it. So, until we're teaching that person who's delivering the strike to have a very tight Hook punch, and that person's responding to a hook punch with a roll under it, right, we're responding to a jab with a slip off the side. But we want to start by creating as much breadth of movement capacity as possible and then refine it down.
Speaker 1:No, that makes a lot of sense. That's, that's a, it's a good, it's a good system to put together, because you're you're suggesting that, you know, you take the play and then you progressively make it more and more, in some ways, I guess, serious or specific to an activity. Yeah, and it'd be the same, I guess, for for kids too. I mean, I remember my dad, as when I was a pup, you know, having us do rough and tumble play, he wrestled us, he, he has sparred with us. He did all sorts of things like that.
Speaker 1:To be quite honest, we rarely did Catch, we really did fishing. I mean, it was really. He got home from work and then we went right into just wrestling and other stuff. And then, as I got older, it became more sophisticated, it became more specific. Okay, you know, son, try to do this now or try to do that, whatever the the task was when it came to wrestling or sparring, hey, roll me over, or hey, put me on my back, whatever it was. And so I definitely resonate with that. I think that that's that's huge, so rave. At this point, before, before we wrap up, let's let's talk about what you do, what exactly you offer, what you're. You know why you started it, you know and what people can expect when they look you up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Websites evolve, move, play calm. Folks can find us there. We have very active YouTube channel and Instagram channel, also on Facebook and Twitter, though I'm less active there. We essentially it's evolved from Parkour. I Was a parkour teacher, I love teaching parkour and I liked Also being in nature, so I wanted to take people to do parkour with me in nature and I also had this deep and abiding love for martial arts which has obviously come out through this conversation. I wanted to be able to integrate them, so I started integrating them.
Speaker 3:I encountered the idea of movement culture. I met Ida Porta all around that time, started playing with some of the object Manipulation games, incorporating those, some of the structural, taking care of the body aspects. I was very interested because I had suffered a bunch of injuries through my parkour practice and I had to figure out how to take care of my body, so I started looping all these things together. Then we started taking people out to do retreats and we found that the impact was much more than just the movement. People were talking about how much they were craving and needing this deep sense of connection to a tribe and to transformative experiences and to Getting to know themselves, and so over time, we started thinking that a movement practice for most people is not about being a world champion. It's actually not about being able to defend themselves in a dark alley. It's actually about the sense of meaning that they experience in their life and that without Good movement practices were actually denied some of the most fundamental ways that we can access meaning in life. So that's when I became very deeply influenced by Jordan Peterson's work and then John Brabaki's work, and so essentially, what we've created is what John Brabaki would call an ecology of practices that are oriented towards giving people the greatest ability to fall more in love with their experience of being, and that includes practices that are about this, about the internal relationships of the self right.
Speaker 3:So that's structural, but also somatic. Was it like to experience anger inside you? The world, which is being able to do parkour, but it's also wilderness skills, the objects we can manipulate, which is ropes and balls and strings, and again wilderness skills and other people, which is the rough and tumble play, but then it's also dialoguing and storytelling and music, and Then there's even, you know, within that we also take respect for the transcendent. It's non. It's non the denominational right. It's not, like you know, we expect people to to come in with a specific religious belief, but we do fundamentally recognize that we exist With a necessity for relationship to the transcendent and that there are Collective intelligences that are above us, and we can describe this in a purely Scientific manner. You know, you don't have to make any supernatural, metaphysical commitments to recognize that something like Google is actually a power and that it has intelligence that's beyond us, right, and that we Necessarily live in relationship to it. So how can we relate to it properly? So we talked about those five fundamental relationships and we think that getting your Having practices that help you increase the depth and sophistication of those is ultimately the pathway for the most meaningful life, and that's what we try to offer people through our retreats, and They've been incredibly successful. People Tell us that they're Deeply life-changing. So we have.
Speaker 3:We have three retreats a year right now. We're hoping to expand the six next year. Right now they're all in Washington state, but hopefully going the next year will be opening something in Massachusetts and also in Europe. We also have a variety of two-day workshops available. We just opened one in Los Angeles in October so people can check that out.
Speaker 3:And then we have our online courses which Take you through the whole theoretical, philosophical background of what we're trying to achieve and then start you off on fundamental practices like walking, like sitting on the ground, like being able to move through fundamental ground flow patterns, being able to, you know, take care of your body and your joints, and fundamental meditation, and then move towards being able to do parkour in nature Running, jumping, climbing, vaulting, etc. Right now, that's what we have on offer and we are going to be building Some of the the object oriented practices and the rough and tumble practices into online courses as well, going forward. So that's how, what's going on with us. I also have a podcast of my own. The people can check out and see my interview with my pitch, for instance.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So I mean that's that's that's fantastic to hear that you're you're expanding, that I mean UK and Massachusetts in places like that. That's that's quite awesome that you're now going from three retreats to six retreats. I mean I've Done, you know, I've done some research on, on, you know, some of the reviews people have said, some of the opinions people had, and it was all very, very positive and I actually, personally, will Do my best to try to maybe get out to one of those retreats myself, just to experience it. You know, maybe in the next, next year. So with that, so evolve, move, play, calm, you know, I mean that's where people can find you and do you have any personal socials, or is that where, yeah, it's all?
Speaker 3:everything else is just under Rafe Kelly. So the YouTube page is Rafe Kelly, the Instagram page is Rafe Kelly, twitter, etc.
Speaker 1:Yep, all right. Well, rafe, is there any other passing thought, that or final thought you want to give before we wrap this up?
Speaker 3:No, that's good, Thank you.
Speaker 1:All right, excellent. Well, rafe, thank you so much for being on and sharing your insights and, and you know, your thoughts and wisdom on on movement. For those that are, you know, excited and interested and maybe have any questions for Rafe, you can reach out to him on those socials and on his website evolve move play calm, rafe. Thanks for being on, brother, absolutely All right, guys. That is it for this episode of the get real stuff of his podcast. If you enjoyed this video, if you are watching, please be sure to hit that like button and subscribe and share with your friends and family. And also, if you are listening I appreciate you Please be sure to hit that five star review and share with your companions and friends as well. And with that being said, guys, rafe, I mean, I've always enjoyed talking with the guy. He's very intelligent, he knows his stuff and I really do appreciate that.
Speaker 1:Some of the insights and counterpoints he gave when it came to self-defense. I like it when people try to push some of the boundaries and some of the I guess, echo chambers when it comes to Self-defense, and I agree with him, self-defense is more than just kicking and punching. It's also about being preventative in other ways and the fact that he covers that, I think, is very solid, talking about everything from just preparing your children for you know when they're gonna go, interact with other teenagers and parties, and and the romantic interactions that may come with that, as well as the fact that you can just be as simple as making sure your kids don't text and drive, or that you don't text and drive, and that being preventative in a self-defense manner as well. I think it is very articulate and it actually makes a lot of sense and I think more people, myself included, should take that into consideration when it comes to defending yourself.
Speaker 1:So, with that being said, guys, thank you so much for watching this episode of the get real social defense podcast. If you enjoyed this, if you were watching, please be sure to hit that like button, subscribe and share with your friends and family, and if you are listening, as usual, please be sure to get that five star review. Give a review on Spotify, apple, itunes, whatever it is that you were using as that platform, and share with your friends and family again, I really appreciate you guys. Tree today, protect tomorrow. I will catch you guys next time.
