This weekend at Yale University, the Yale Women’s Center as well as the Rape and Sexual Violence Prevention (RSVP) invited Master Instructor Leonardo Stoute to campus to lead a 2-Day Women’s Self Defense Clinic open to the entire University Community. The Clinic was co-sponsored by the Graduate and Professional Student Senate. Given the increasing demand and growing number of requests for such a Clinic, the Yale Women’s Center and RSVP hosted two separate Clinics on campus in February alone. The first Clinic featured self-defense techniques based on a style of the arts similar to Karate. The second featured Master Stoute and his unique teaching style using the movements and arts of Silat.
Women from all across the University registered for Master Stoute’s 2-Day Clinic, and came to gain confidence, an increased sense of awareness of themselves and their surroundings, and practical tips for all regardless of size, strength or muscle mass.
During the Clinic, Master Stoute emphasized that awareness and balance are the key elements in any confrontation. Regardless of the physical size of an attacker or victim, whoever maintains the better balance will always have the upper hand. Pre-packaged techniques may not always succeed in diffusing an attack, so people must be willing and able to maintain constant movement, ready to change direction at any time. Master Stoute demonstrated how power and speed are of no benefit to an attacker if the potential victim is gone from his or her initial location by the time the blow would have struck. But in order to move fluidly and quickly to get out of the way of such a blow, people need to learn to maintain their balance within their movements, and to practice moving with balance until it becomes their first, not second, nature.
Furthermore, such evasive maneuvering involves moving unpredictably and at angles rather than head-on. Since we are so generally accustomed to standing up straight, walking in straight lines, and expecting others to move in straight lines, one focus of the Clinic was to help participants become comfortable with moving at angles, and incorporating such angles into their position as well as into their direction of motion
.In a Power vs. Power situation, Might makes Right. Balance in Motion can overcome and uproot any power that is upright and unbalanced. Therefore: Don’t meet Power with Power. Maintain Balance and Angles to achieve Fluidity and Unpredictability.
Always use your body to your advantage. This was one primary theme of the weekend. In a power struggle, the larger, more massive person will win. Therefore, if you are the smaller person, you cannot expect or attempt to use power in a confrontation, you should rather take the power out of your movements, maintain your balance, and use your greater maneuverability and lower center of balance to your own advantage. In this way you can outmaneuver or uproot a potential attack, offsetting the attacker and putting him or her at an immediate disadvantage.
While Master Stoute emphasized that getting out of the way of a potential attack is the most important thing, he also demonstrated and taught several movements that would aid participants in the event that contact with an attacker was made. He demonstrated several maneuvers, strikes, and blocks that serve to distract and take an attacker off guard, opening the door for the victim to get away safely. Participants had the opportunity to pair off and try some of the movements and maneuvers in order to gain a better feeling for how to move in a given situation. No one was hurt, and yet all were able to gain a greater understanding through the exercises.
The concepts taught during the Clinic are not easily learned in a short span of a few hours spread out over two consecutive days. But with practice and consistency, a person can learn to move with balance as their primary instinct. Master Stoute himself clearly illustrated this fact through his fluid and amazingly quick and precise movements.
At the end of the weekend, the participants were quite pleased with what they had learned. They remarked on the uniqueness of Master Stoute’s approach to Self-Defense, and marveled at its effectiveness. Several inquired about further opportunities to train with Master Stoute on an ongoing basis, and were also intrigued by the spiritual element they encountered in the movements.
While not only providing an important service to the members of the Yale and New Haven communities, Master Stoute also donated his time for the class, waiving fees for the Clinic and asking instead that it be made into a Charity Benefit for New Haven’s needy population. Participants donated money, household items, and non-perishable food in order to attend the Clinic. These items were gathered and delivered to the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen [MORE INFO], located in downtown New Haven, which provides the poor with free dinners on a daily basis and free groceries on a weekly basis.
For more information regarding Master Instructor Stoute and the art of Silat Tuo, or for training opportunities at Yale University, visit www.yale.edu/silat or EMAIL
Randy Milliot with some of the proceeds gathered at the Women’s Self Defense Clinic.
ISF-YALE drops off donations from the Women's Self Defense Workshop
Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen
Today in New Haven, representatives of the International Silat Federation of Yale Students and Affiliates visited the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen to deliver the donations gathered from the previous weekend’s Women’s Self Defense Clinic. We were fortunate enough to meet Kevin Johnson, the Head Chef at the Soup Kitchen who also distributes goods from the Food Pantry. Kevin himself used to be homeless, and near the beginning of 2005 began volunteering his time at the Soup Kitchen. He was soon offered a job there, and is now able to support himself by serving and helping some of the very same people he used to sleep next to at the Homeless Shelter. He gave us a tour of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, and shared some of its historical background.
The headquarters for the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen is located at 311 Temple Street, in the basement of the Center Church on the Green. In existence since 1987, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen serves the needy population of New Haven, whoever that may be. The Soup Kitchen operates throughout the year, serving meals 5 or 6 nights a week. The locations for the dinners changes throughout the week, rotating through several of the local churches, including Center Church, as well as Yale University’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life. More than 90% of the food for each meal is cooked at DESK itself, coming through purchases from the CT Food Bank. The rest comes through donations from local groups and from neighboring Yale University.
