In his book Living the Martial Way, Forrest Morgan mentions three options of response when you’re attacked: avoid, evade, or intercept.

Avoid

When attacked, we can choose to maintain our distance. This requires some forethought, though, because if the distance isn’t there before the attack, you’re going to have to move. Avoiding has to begin in the way you position yourself from the start.

Evade

A second option is to evade. When we evade, we take immediate action to get out of the way of our opponent’s attack. This requires our reflexes to anticipate and respond quickly.

Intercept

When we intercept, we decide to change the dynamic entirely. We respond, but we only do so because we sense that our yang, or power, is stronger than our opponent’s. If this is true, we can find a way to enter into the fight and turn it to our advantage. We can intercept the opponent’s attack and transform it into an attack on our terms. Obviously, this only works if you reliably assess your opponent! So it requires keen and quick insight.

While these are techniques meant for responding to physical warfare, they carry truth in how we can respond to any kind of attack in our direction- physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Often, we respond in a reactionary way, which actually brings our defenses down. We become more susceptible to a bad move, because we’re not seeing the situation clearly and calmly. Ninja wisdom tells us that cultivating awareness is something we do all the time, so that we’re ready for whatever comes our way. If we do this, an attack will never “come out of nowhere.” It will arise from the here we already inhabit.

Knowing how to respond is also an act of humility. You won’t have to go far to find a story of someone who lost a fight because they entered it with a false or overblown sense of their own power. It can be humiliating, but losing teaches us that humility is more powerful than empty pride.

Lastly, it’s always important to remember that the ninja highly valued avoidance and evasion–and we should, too. Bravado is not in their lexicon, which is why they were so successful. We could learn from that, and realize that sometimes, the healthiest thing we can do is walk away, keep our distance, or sidestep that invitation to conflict. Then again, today may be the day it’s finally time to take that problem head on and turn it in a new direction.

In the places you’re encountering conflict these days, what option seems wisest?

P.S. The photo by Frida Bredesen at the top of this post is a great example of needing an insightful response. It looks somewhat menacing, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s a captured moment of two tiger cubs playing together. So, be sure to consider whether what you perceive to be an attack actually is one. 🙂