Mark Your Calendars for
PAWMA Camp 2020
Thur, Sep 10 - Sun, Sep 13
CYO Camp, Occidental CA
Approx. 75 miles north of San Francisco / Oakland - plan to fly into SFO or OAK
https://www.catholiccharitiessf.org/cyocamp/cyocamp.html
A letter from PAWMA President, Aminta Steinbach
The Latest from PAWMA News
By Mamie Chow
“One of the hardest lessons …. has been learning to accept my power”
I spent 16 years living in hell, another eight years recreating that hell, and the past six years trying to break the trauma cycle. Today I consider myself blessed because I can finally say, “I don’t owe you a damn thing.”
I started training in martial arts because I was angry and wanted a positive outlet for my rage. I had no idea the process would be so significant. Until I started martial arts training, my childhood was the only process by which I defined myself —- defining myself by all that I hated and raged against. There was no core to who I was, nothing original for me to connect to. There was no me — just a wall of pain, shame, and self-loathing that stood in as me.
It is only now that I understand that martial arts training provides me with another process by which I can define myself. That I am not my childhood, but I am something that is positive and pure at its core. It led me back to myself through a dense fog of blocked memories, survival responses, and worthless treasures of self-hate. It led me back to myself before my childhood ended when I was six and my stepfather sexualized me, before I was eight and Gordon the local drunk stuck his tongue in my mouth, before my mother began chanting my worthlessness, and before the five years of childhood that I can’t remember.
One of the hardest lessons in my training has been learning to accept my power, to accept that I exist here on this ground. In many classes I felt my weightlessness, my apprehension at existing in this life. I threw empty kicks and punches because I was afraid to announce my presence or risk being seen for fear of the consequences. What if they know I’m here and they hate me, they blame me, they envy me? I’m not sure how I got through those first years of training when it felt like that. I guess my original spirit was stronger than my learned survivor self. Thank goodness for that.
