Personal Space

This is, again, about self-defense. Space has a significant meaning to all of us. We have our personal space, which is the main topic of this post, we have spaces that extend our personal spaces such as our home, our office, our automobile and then we have spaces that encompass our neighborhood, our town and our country. Space is so important that it is often the reasoning behind conflict, i.e. personal conflict when someone invades our space in an aggressive manner, our home space if someone trespasses and our societal spaces if someone decides they can benefit from owning it and want to take it away from us, i.e. an invasion of our country, etc. 

We even have issues when our space is change such as when your work environment dictates you have to move. It can be felt when the move is to a smaller and less prestigious space or it can be felt, in a more positive light, when you get that corner office with a view (that, by the way also means more responsibility and power).

Thinking of street groups (think gangs) who decide they must control their space, i.e. several blocks in their neighborhood, and that means when you move through it or trespass you had better have a good reason and you better follow their rules or suffer the consequences. 

This post is mainly about our personal space. We must control that space but it can be complicated. Our space control is influenced by a multitude of factors such as where you are, who you are around and what you goal is as you travel through various other spaces outside your home, office and automobile spaces - and so on. Marc MacYoung provides some inspirational insight as to how this works with both environmental and situational awareness in his book, “In the Name of Self-Defense.” 

When you move outside your normal home, etc., spaces you should also utilize “situational awareness” because you are actually leaving your comfort zone and encountering other personal spaces as you travel along with all the rules and requirements those other spaces dictate. You have to remember that because you can do, say and believe certain things, beliefs, that those things do not apply in other spaces. Your self-awareness as to your perceptions and beliefs should be held in abeyance when encounter other spaces because those spaces are owned by others and those folks have their own rules, perceptions and beliefs as to how things go - space governance is an individual and/or group thing. 

As you travel around either walking, taking public transportation or driving your own vehicle you have to extend your personal space detection tools so as to perceive, i.e. Observe, Orient, Decide and Act, according to their rules. For instance, driving requires you follow societies rules - the motor vehicle operation laws, etc. - and that means you don’t speed, drive someone off the road or hit a pedestrian because you fell entitled because they pissed you off. There are consequences for breaking societies rules. 

You need to extend your hearing, your visual acuity awareness and your personal aura to encompass everything within sight, hearing and tactile contact. Take a look at the following graphic. There you are in the center of your universe, your space. You have control over you tactile space, i.e. when one body makes actual contact with your body - you are walking and looking at a Tesla when you bump into someone who just happens to be looking at the same Tesla, “ops, sorry, please excuse me,” say both of you who smile and continue on your journey. Then there is that space that places you within grappling range of another person but the space where danger begins is your exclusion zone, i.e. where another person can either kick you or put their hands on you with extended arms/legs. You really want to keep perceived dangerous folks outside that zone. Screw being polite, if you sense danger then you keep them at that minimum distance (think JAM when you are making such decisions, etc.).

Then the next distance where you use your hearing and visual acuity is your environmental space. This space, as well as all those personal spaces, is in constant fluid movement. Unless you remain still in your home that space changes and moves according to your ability to see, hear and feel. How you do this is situational awareness (won’t even try to give a full definition of what this is, read Marc MacYoung and Rory Miller’s books starting with INOSD by Mr. MacYoung). 

Just think that good situational awareness is about avoidance. How you use it can mean avoiding the types of conflict that mean violence, etc. It isn’t all that hard and it does not mean you have to stay “frosty” all the time. Just doing it in normal every day movement along with training in the type of SA that will detect dangerous stuff you will be safe and secure, pretty much. 

Click for a Larger View :-)