Applying LMA to the World
In Liberation Martial Arts (LMA), we often say, "How you do one thing is how you do all things." This reflects the patterns and consistencies—intentional or not—that permeate our lives. With this in mind, let's apply the LMA framework to the world.
Just as movement in LMA arises from a dynamic interplay of body, breath, and environment, political action is inextricable from its material and perceptual conditions. When we try to change society without attending to the ground beneath our feet—the norms, narratives, and unseen forces that steer our perception—we are like bewildered swimmers drilling techniques isolated from the water: we fail to transfer our learning into the whirlwind of real life. Appropriate actions require the proper environment. To improve our environment, we need to better perceive it.
Perception itself is an active, conditioned skill, not a passive mirror of reality. In LMA, we call the improvement of this process Wayfinding: navigating our surroundings not through fixed maps but through attuned engagement with shifting conditions. Political life demands the same attentiveness. We cannot find our best routes unless we best perceive our landscape.
Just as no two practitioners inhabit the same body or land in the same way, no two people experience the same situation identically. We are not perfect perceivers, and there is no consensus lived experience. Our thoughts aren't wholly autonomous, and neither is our perception. Our histories, religions, languages, cultures, and relationships, and more critically, capitalism, white supremacy culture, colonialism, and Western hegemony, have cultivated patterns of perception—patterns that feel so natural we mistake them for reality itself.
If we believe the world is made of thoughts and thoughts are completely controlled by our will, we will fail to recognize the conditions that shape our actions, perceptions, and beliefs. Operating from the wrong perceptual framework leads us to misidentify problems and distorts solutions—looking at the wrong map and plotting the wrong paths. For lived experience to mean what we want it to mean, we must improve our ability to experience. For solutions to surface, we must see the same problems.
It's easy to come up with the perfect solution for the wrong problem if we lack attunement to the actual situation—or if we aren't constantly improving our ability to perceive it. Solutions are abundant—finding the right solution for the right problem is scarce.
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