Breath, Tension, and the Glove: A Lesson I Carry Forward

Is breath the key to solving all of life's problems?

I used to be a Systema practitioner and instructor. One memory that stays with me is a training session I took years ago with Vladimir Vasiliev. With the rise of online seminars during COVID, it became easier to stay connected with Systema HQ. In one of those sessions, he gave us an unusual exercise: we were to try putting on a leather glove using only one hand.

“No problem,” we thought. But as we struggled—sliding, wiggling, twisting—we began to notice something. The more effort we put in, the more tension we created. Not just in our hands, but in our wrists, necks, jaws, backs, even legs. We held our breath. We grimaced. Some of us laughed at the absurdity of it. None of us, despite our training, could get the glove on smoothly.

This was the lesson: tension spreads. It multiplies. And most of the time, it goes unnoticed until it hijacks the whole system. In true Systema fashion, we were reminded to breathe—to actually notice the breath—and to direct it into our tension. We were asked to observe the emotions that surfaced: frustration, shame, helplessness, defiance. It became a study in self-awareness, not technique. A confrontation with the self, not the glove.

What I love about Systema is that it never stayed in the gym for me. Though I’ve now retired from teaching and coaching the martial art, the principles of Systema come with me everywhere. It’s not just a martial art; it’s a way of observing how we meet challenge, how we respond to stress, and how we can soften—not surrender, but soften—into awareness. Breath is central. In every freeze response, the breath is the first thing to go. And that’s where the spiral starts: less air, more panic, less clarity, more tension.

Systema breaks that cycle. You train it away. Slowly. Consciously. Repeatedly. That’s why I still recommend Systema to the autistic people I know, and to anyone seeking a practice that teaches attunement without aggression, presence without panic.

At one point, I imagined building a professional development workshop for teachers around that glove drill. I still think it’s one of the most illuminating metaphors I’ve ever encountered for what it feels like to struggle under pressure. Especially in systems that expect performance without first teaching presence. Teachers often design learning experiences without truly understanding how the body—and the nervous system—receives them. When students freeze, it’s rarely about motivation. Often, it’s the glove. The tension. The breath held too long.

You can find the glove drill in Chapter Five of Vasiliev’s STRIKES: Soul Meets Body. I carry that chapter with me—not in my hand, but in my breath.

—June 2025 Update—

Systema was a vital part of my life’s Act II. A discipline that entered my life not as sport, not as hobby, but as necessity—a form of quiet protection in a world that often reads size and strength as threat long before it sees personhood. I knew, even as I trained, that in any moment of violence, I would never be granted the presumption of innocence that others might. The courtroom would not see restraint; it would see mass. It would see force. And it would judge accordingly.

That is what drew me to Systema’s quiet brilliance. Its methods are not about domination, but escape. Not about defeating, but surviving. You do only what is needed—no more—because anything more will be judged. Not only by the courts of man, but by the deeper court that lives within you. The founders of Systema wove this restraint into the fabric of the art: every act of violence bears a weight—legal, spiritual, moral. Your task is to carry that weight lightly, by ensuring you never take more than is absolutely necessary. The breath governs. The body listens. The mind remains clear. Violence is a failure of the world, not a theatre for the ego.

I trained. I taught. And through those years, I carried many people—including myself—safely through situations that might otherwise have spiralled into tragedy. It was a way of living softly whilst holding enormous strength, a quiet service to others who needed protecting, but without taking on the identity of enforcer. Without seizing the monopoly on force that police, soldiers, and systems of state violence claim for themselves.

That chapter has closed now. I no longer teach. But Systema has not left me. It is in my breath. In my ability to notice tension long before it locks me down. In how I move through conflict, not with escalation, but with clarity. Its principles live now in a different act—my transition, my emergence as a femme, autistic, neuroqueer being who lives daily within systems that would prefer me small, hardened, or erased.

Softness has taken on new meaning. Not the softness our culture derides—fragility, submission, decoration—but the disciplined softness I first learned on those mats. The softness of breathing into the unknown. Of yielding without breaking. Of moving around the blow rather than through it. Of protecting, not conquering. It is the same softness I now carry as a trans femme person moving through spaces that read my body with suspicion, my difference with threat.

And yet, there has been loss. Some within the instructor and coaching community—men whose hands I once trusted, whose teachings once shaped my practice—now look away. Their religious convictions cannot hold my existence. Their understanding of spiritual discipline could not stretch wide enough to see me still standing here, still breathing, still walking this path. I mourn that. Not angrily. But truthfully.

Systema taught me to sit with discomfort, to breathe inside grief without letting it freeze me. That remains my practice. Even now.

I carry no resentment. Only the quiet truth that their inability to see me does not make me any less real. My softness is not for their permission. My breath does not depend on their blessing.

Systema is no longer what I teach. But it remains what I live. Its lessons continue, intimately entangled with the shape of my femmeness—my refusal to harden, my commitment to remain fluid and whole even when the world demands armour. I am no longer training others. But I am still training myself. Every breath. Every moment of presence. Every yielding that refuses collapse. Every stance that says: I remain.

Softness was never the absence of strength. It was always the discipline of it.