I began teaching self-defense when I started college in 1997. At school, there were many young women, like myself, who were alone and living in a major city for the first time in their lives. As a security person, I had slightly more experience than most in the area of self-defense, so my classmates came to me to learn about the topic. They liked what I had to say, so they referred their friends. The chain of referrals continued, and I found myself developing and teaching a unique self-defense curriculum based on active decision-making, personal choices, and mental preparation.
I have always provided self-defense instruction for free to anyone who asked me for it. This is a personal passion. I believe it is important that everyone has the opportunity to learn how to best defend themselves. My self-defense instruction and philosophy is based in mental and psychological techniques. The goal is to avoid a possible confrontation, and to give yourself every opportunity to escape without having to fight. It acts as a complement to more traditional martial arts based self-defense classes.
My self-defense philosophy is based around two central pillars
1. You have the right to yourself. You have the right to your body. You have the right to defend yourself from a violation of either or not however you see fit.
2. If something happened to cause you to seek self-defense instruction, you did the right thing. You are here to talk about it, so I know you did the best you could in the situation. That is the right thing. No one else was in the situation with you, so no one else can judge what you did.
My self-defense discussions are meant to make certain aspects of my self-defense instruction accessible to a wider audience. They are designed to be short, conversational, easy to digest lessons about a variety of self-defense related topics. If you come here to read them, I hope you find them useful.
So,What’s new?
I have posted my first five self-defense “conversations”
These are meant to be short, easily digested articles talking about self-defense philosophy, concepts, and preparedness exercises. They are intentionally written in a conversational tone to make them more friendly and comfortable, since they can deal with some very serious topics.
amy preder 