Spirited Play Sections

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Liberation Martial Arts is the opposite of conventional Western pedagogy. Most systems work from the top down: knowledge trickles down and learning is broken into isolated parts—like memorizing letters before you’ve ever spoken a word. In LMA, we reverse this. We front-load our practice with what takes the longest to grow: comfort and spirit. Here, learning sprouts upward and outward, following the nonlinear, natural progression of human development—where conversation and relationship come before the alphabet.

We do this because safety is immediate, spirit takes time, and comfort is not the end goal but the soil from which all growth emerges. By front-loading, we give the most vulnerable, most enduring capacities the longest time to root and flourish.

Every harvest begins with the work of planting. Training follows the same rhythm: we begin with spirit and comfort, so they can carry us through every stage that follows.

Ground up

We begin literally from the ground. The Ground-Up Series asks us to rise, fall, and rise under duress, to relate to land, and to discover safety in the ground itself. Conventional pedagogy avoids vulnerability until “later”—but later is too late. By working with difficulty first, safety is maximized right away.

Working backward

We start from one of the most vulnerable positions—our back, unable to see who we are engaging with. Instead of treating this as a deficit, we flip it into confidence, play, and joy. Inverting hierarchy, what was marginal becomes central.

Inside out

We begin close where experience is immediate. Training starts with contact, entanglement, and the press of another body, then expands outward. Immediacy invites presence; distance breeds disengagement and distraction. This runs counter to the normative progression of far to close, isolated to contextual, dead to live, simulated to real, choreographed to dynamic. Inside-out reflects our world: transformation radiates from lived proximity, not distant abstraction. Our earliest imprint as humans is closeness—first pressed against another body, then gradually expanding outward. That is our historical progression, both personally and as a species.

Pedagogical embodiment of radical principles

This approach is more than curriculum design. It is the physical and pedagogical embodiment of radical politics:

• Ground up: Bottom-up struggle, working with and from the land.

• Back first: Centering the most vulnerable, turning marginalization into strength.

• Inside out: Starting from immediacy—close, lived engagement, in relationship—and moving outward, instead of beginning from a distant vantage point.

This inversion of order is not symbolic. It is practical. It is safer, more efficient, and more honest to how people learn to move with one another. Spirited play is where these commitments come alive—not as doctrine, but as adaptive, immersive practice that grows spirit, safety, and skill all at once. We begin with what matters most because, as adult learners, our seasons are shorter. If we take too long, we won’t reach harvest.

– Sam