The Mat as a Mirror: How Jiu-Jitsu Proved Me Wrong
Mariele Klering never imagined she would get into Jiu-Jitsu. A few years ago, the thought of stepping onto the mats—let alone thriving in a sport she once dismissed as “too masculine”—would’ve seemed laughable to her. But life, as it so often does, had a way of surprising her.
After spending 12 years navigating the fast-paced and demanding world of tech—a field riddled with its own unique challenges for women—Mariele thought she’d faced it all. But then came the grief of losing her father during one of the world’s toughest lockdowns, a loss that shook her to her core. It was during this difficult chapter that she stumbled into a world she never thought she’d belong to. What started as a hesitant “okay” to attend a self-defense seminar became something far bigger: a deep connection to Jiu-Jitsu. The martial art challenged her in ways she couldn’t have foreseen, not just physically but emotionally, forcing her to confront long-held insecurities she thought she’d buried.
In this exclusive piece, Mariele offers us a glimpse into her debut book, The Mat as a Mirror: Reflecting Stories of Women’s Strength and Confidence through Jiu-Jitsu. With raw honesty, she shares personal excerpts alongside reflections on the transformative journey that changed her life. Through the aches, the bruises, and the occasional tears, she learned that the mat wasn’t just a place to master grappling techniques—it became a space that mirrored life’s biggest lessons.
Mariele’s journey is deeply personal, yet profoundly universal. Whether you’ve faced the weight of grief, battled self-doubt, or wrestled with societal pressures, her story is a testament to resilience. Strength, she discovered, isn’t something you’re handed—it’s something you build, piece by piece, roll by roll, and moment by moment of courage.
How Jiu-Jitsu Proved Me Wrong
If someone had told me a few years back that I’d find my strength on a Jiu-Jitsu mat, I would have laughed it off. My list of excuses was well-rehearsed, especially because my partner was an advocate of training: ‘Jiu-Jitsu is not for me.’ And I had a lined up reasons why: It’s too masculine, I am not up for all the bruises, and what’s the point, really?
rowing up, I had always been the type to avoid physical and verbal confrontation. I preferred the safety of staying in my lane and doing my thing. That meant behaving like a good girl, keeping my mouth shut, getting good grades and staying out of trouble. The idea of engaging in a martial art, especially one as intense as Jiu-Jitsu, was far from anything I’d ever considered doing.
Then came 2020, a year that changed everything. In the midst of one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, I found my personal world shaken by my father’s sudden illness and passing. I was never a person who learned how to fight, but during that time, I found myself unexpectedly in the ring, grappling with what turned out to be a mix of grief and isolation. And my opponents were mean as hell. At some point, I curled myself in and gave up that fight.
It was only a few months later, as the lockdown began to ease, that I agreed to attend a self-defense seminar my partner had invited me to. I’m not quite sure why I said yes. Perhaps I simply had no energy left to come up with any more excuses. That seminar marked my first real encounter with Jiu-Jitsu, opening a door I had stubbornly kept shut for far too long.
I’ve never been in a fight in my life, but that moment hit me like a strong jab in my face. My vision blurred, my hearing turned selective, and I felt like I was drunk because I just couldn’t pace my thoughts or make myself think properly.
It was one of those moments you think it’s not actually happening. The ones you detach from yourself and see things from above.
It’s funny how your entire life can change in terms of seconds.
I was skeptical. Or in shock. Until this day, I don’t know which one best describes the state I was in.
I talked to my family and found out everyone was in the same state as I was. It was hard to believe it was actually happening.
I spent the night looking for flights and alternatives so I could be there for the funeral. Nothing worked; there was not much I could do in a lockdown during a world pandemic.
It felt like a joke: “Is this really happening?” I asked myself. I didn’t want to hear the answer.
I took a sleeping pill and went to bed. Dreamless night.
I woke up, and I took a few minutes to realise I was waking up to a world where my father was not alive anymore.
The shock state ended as the tears arrived.
Slowly, like someone changed the colours on the TV by pressing a button, everything started to turn grey.
I remember a little about the next few months.
I accepted the sympathy and support from everyone around me. I needed that. Some people cried with me, and I could see in their eyes the fear of something like this happening to them, too.
I received flowers, cards, and messages. It’s a funny thing what grief does to you. I went from sadness to anger, shame, regret and, lastly, disassociation.
Lockdown had eased at some point, but life had this greyish vibe I couldn’t grasp. Everything looked the same. Work was the same. People were the same. I was not the same. And I didn’t know what to do with that. I locked everything in and kept going.
When it was close to the end of winter, I remember Lucas telling me about a Self-Defense seminar happening at the Jiu-Jitsu school. I admit I didn’t pay much attention to that, same as any other thing happening in my life at that point.
I must have said yes because the next thing I remember is going to the Self-Defense seminar with Lucas.
And that day, I remember clearly, I saw the colours again. That bad radio station I was synchronised on suddenly switched to clear and uplifting music.
For the first time in months, I felt present.
I partnered up with Patricia, Sensei’s Douglas wife, at that point she was already multiple times World and Oceania champion.
She walked me through it, and for those few hours, I forgot about all the mess happening in my head. Attention to detail demanded so much of me that I didn’t have time to think about anything else. That felt great; it gave me exactly what I needed at that point: an escape from my own mind.
At the end of the seminar, she offered to try a Jiu-Jitsu class, and to my surprise, I said yes.
On that day, I decided to give Jiu-Jitsu a try.
I came for the trial the following week, and the same thing happened again: the class gave me an hour’s break from my thoughts and from everything that happened. It was a blessing to live in a bubble where I could pretend everything was okay.
I joined Jiu-Jitsu because I needed something to help me deal with myself.
I had lost my father, who I had a complicated relationship with and couldn’t say goodbye. It was all open in the air, and I felt a lot of guilt.
I was miles away from home, and there was a small part of me wishing, when this whole pandemic and travel restrictions were over, that my dad would be at the airport waiting to pick me up and take me home.
My mind could not process what had happened, so for many months, I created this dystopian story in my head that he was still there in Brazil waiting for me.
Coming to Jiu-Jitsu class every day was a struggle and a blessing.
When the class ended, I would listen to every word Sensei Douglas would say. I could swear he was talking directly to me because it was everything I needed to hear at that point. He would say many things, but one I remember so clearly was, “Life will not get easier; you need to get stronger”.
That’s all I needed to hear that day. After class, I would go back home and cry my eyes out. I felt the anger, the sadness, the grief.
The funny thing is that the place I went to run away from my problems ended up teaching me how to face them.
Jiu-Jitsu started as an escape, and now it has become my greatest teacher. There’s something about the physical and mental demands of Jiu-Jitsu that pushed me to grow stronger. Strong enough to confront my feelings and the ghosts in my head.
After every class, I would breathe in and think to myself, “Everything will be okay; just take one day at a time”.
And that’s what I did.
I came back the next day and the next…
Some days, I couldn’t find the strength to go, but I didn’t give up. Jiu-Jitsu became my lifeline, my escape from the chaos of life.
It was the place I went to face my fears, my grief and my anxiety.”
I convinced myself to take it one day at a time, no matter how difficult it was. Gradually, I began to draw parallels between the lessons I learned on the mat and those in real life. I learned that no matter how scary my opponent was – whether a physical person on the mats or the emotional burdens of grief and guilt – I had the tools to face them. Leverage, technique and resilience taught in class became metaphors for handling life’s challenges.
By the end of 2020, I felt strong enough to travel back home and face what was waiting for me there: one less person at the table, a quieter house, and one less hug at the airport. But I was ready to face it.
After two months with my family, I returned, understanding that my healing process was just beginning.
“Life had a new meaning now, and after all that, coming back to Jiu-Jitsu was like seeing an old friend again. That old friend you go to forget about your problems, but that eventually will put them to your face and ask you the question: “Are you going to make it or break it?”
And it doesn’t matter how hard life can be; you will find the strength to face it.
One day at a time, one roll at a time.”
I had no idea the work was only starting, and soon, I would find out what the true measure of strength was. Stepping onto the Jiu-Jitsu mat brought me face to face with a big number of insecurities that had plagued me since childhood.
From being a skinny kid, with people constantly asking if I was sick, I quickly understood that since a young age, I wasn’t meeting everyone’s expectations of how a child should look. I thought I had moved past their feelings, but Jiu-Jitsu brought them back to the surface, proving that some issues were just buried, not resolved. The moment I put on the GI(the uniform we wear in a Jiu-Jitsu class), I started to hear those old comments in my head.
The True Measure of Strength
“You look so skinny; don’t you have food at home?”
“Oh, poor you, if you don’t put on some weight, you will vanish!”
“Are you sick? You look so skinny!”
I have heard these comments on my appearance my entire life.
The ones above are more phrased as questions, but they were mostly comments made by relatives, friends, colleagues, and so on.
At some point when I was little, my mom took me to a doctor to check if something was wrong with me. They told her I was perfectly fine and that I would eat when I got hungry. Not satisfied, my mom tried to give me all kinds of supplements to make me eat more, but they never worked.
I guess I was just not hungry at all.
I think what bothered everyone was that I was physically far from what a healthy kid would look like. I never complained about it, but I started noticing that everyone expected me to eat more and gain a little weight.
That was the first time I understood people were putting expectations on my appearance, and I was letting everyone down without even being able to control it.
That went on from little kid to young adulthood.
I grew up skinny and underweight, and I never got used to seeing myself in the mirror.
At 16 years old, I hated my body and started going to the gym to hopefully put on some weight. I avoided mirrors and became self-conscious when walking down the street, convinced that people were looking at me and thinking I was too skinny.
The comments about my weight stopped, but in my mind I had to keep going because my body was still not the way everyone expected from me.
A few years after that, in New Zealand, when I started Jiu-jitsu, all those insecurities came back in the blink of an eye.
Since day one, when I put the GI on, I remember clearly the sensation of vanishing inside it.
I felt like I was disappearing. It made me uncomfortable.
I looked around, and almost everyone was bigger and taller than me. The GI felt heavy and baggy to wear. My breathing started to bring me down, too.
I started to question if that was really a good idea.
Will I be strong enough? Will I be tough enough?
Will I be able to look away from my insecurities and not fall back on that pattern of having to change my body to adjust to something?
Being in that class, wearing that GI, was portraying exactly what I wanted to hide my whole life: that I was small and skinny.
All the comments from my childhood would come to my mind again and again. “Are you sick?” “You’re so skinny!” “Don’t you have food at home?”
Every time I went to a class, I did everything to blend in, and would hope no one was looking directly at me.
When it was time to find a partner to practise, I had extreme anxiety. “No one will pick me, and if they do, it will be because they pity me”, I thought.
To my surprise, on the first day, a girl picked me up. She was a higher belt of a similar size as mine, and that made me feel better.
Okay, maybe there is still hope?
For many years, I was so insecure about my body that I wouldn’t change myself in the changing room. I would change at home, before and after class, no matter what.
Little by little, I learned from the smaller girls at the school that everything is in the details: you don’t need to be the strongest person to gain an advantage in Jiu-Jitsu.
When we look at the history of Jiu-Jitsu, we see that Master Helio Gracie was actually quite skinny and not strong at all.
The whole martial art was developed to empower those who are smaller and weaker, enabling them to defend themselves and even defeat much larger opponents.
So, day by day, I saw that being small was a trait I could use to thrive.
From everyone I could train with, I learnt new tricks and moves to use, how to use my grips, keep my feet active, and how to move better.
Also, I would watch the small girls in the school smashing the bigger guys with armlocks, chokes and other submissions. That gave me hope; if they could do it, why couldn’t I?
Slowly, something started to shift in my mind.
I saw my GI as my armour. Even though I was still not comfortable with my body, as I put my GI on, I was like everybody else.
What really made a difference for me was realising that no one was actually paying attention to all the things I was so worried about. It was a funny sensation: even though people were all very different from each other, the feeling of belonging was saying “we are all the same here”.
Jiu-Jitsu is a great equaliser. Doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, if you wear nice clothes or what background you have. Once you put your GI and go into the mats, you are the same as everybody else.
There is no distinction, no judgement if you are underweight or above weight. On the mats, we are all the same.
You undress yourself from all labels. You leave it all outside, and once you get in, those things don’t matter anymore. What you think is your disadvantage starts to be your superpower.
Slowly, I accepted that being small and skinny was not such a downside but something to use to my advantage. I could move faster, learn how to use tricks for leverage and introduce power without being so tired.
Once you understand that every muscle of your body has a purpose, your opinion about yourself will change.
You look at it with the eyes of: “It’s amazing what my body can do” because it is.
Once you realise that, it’s only a matter of time to start being grateful for what you have.
I’ve seen a disabled person get into the mats and do push-ups just like everybody else. I’ve seen a blind man doing rounds of sparring with many people. I’ve seen a kid with Down Syndrome light it up with a smile while running in his GI with the other kids.
Once you witness all the above, you start putting things in perspective. You realise that what you complain about now is something others would give anything to have.
I have a functional body that takes me to all the places I want to go.
It does all these amazing things in Jiu-Jitsu that I never thought I was able to do. It took me some time because I know these negative self-talks don’t go away from one day to the other, but finally, I can be comfortable with what I have. Realising this may not be easy, but once it sinks in, life becomes much lighter.
Slowly, I started appreciating all the high intensity training and the resilience of my body, and stopped criticising it for not fitting a socially accepted standard. This acceptance wasn’t a revelation but a gradual awakening to the beauty of what is uniquely mine. The world is challenging enough without us being at war with our own bodies.
And as I made peace with my body, I realised the lessons didn’t stop there. The confidence gained on the mats soon highlighted another area of my life that needed attention: my habitual niceness. It was time to confront whether my tendency to avoid conflict and always please others was actually a strength or a subtle cage that kept me from truly standing up for myself.
Being too nice was my default setting. I wore it like a comfy sweater, always there to keep the peace and smooth things over. This was one of the fights where, in my head, I was losing because I didn’t want to engage in it. Being nice is a defence mechanism I have grabbed with both hands since I was a kid and never let go of. If I was nice to people, there would be no fight, no conflict, and that was perfect for me because I didn’t know how to defend myself, not even with words. Jiu-Jitsu brought this issue into sharp relief: “How can you learn anything here if you have to say “Sorry” every time you try to choke someone? Are you going to let people win over you because you want to be nice?”
As I grappled with training partners on the mat, I did the same with these questions in my mind. Each session put me face to face with the uncomfortable truth: being too nice was not just a personality quirk; it was a barrier to my growth.
Gentle Revolution
Now, coming back to Jiu-Jitsu, how can you be nice to people when you have to fight not to get submitted on the mats?
Well, you can’t. And looking from outside, it can be so easy to say: “Just stop being nice” and from a blink of an eye all the problems would go away.
I am afraid it goes deeper than that. By always being nice, most women(myself included) have never learned to deal with conflict or to address something that made them uncomfortable. Most importantly, they never learned how to protect themselves in a discussion.
“If I stop being nice right now, can I handle the reaction that’s bound to come from the other side?
If I bring some aggression into my Jiu-Jitsu game, am I ready to face the pushback from my opponent?”
Those are all questions I would ask myself before starting to roll with someone at Jiu-Jitsu or when I had to choose between standing up for a situation or staying quiet.
It’s not easy to stop doing something that kept you safe for years.
Will I know how to defend myself? And I’m not just talking about Jiu-Jitsu; I mean in life. Will I be able to express what I want to say while knowing it might spark a reaction I’m not sure I’m ready to handle?
I would only know the answer if I tried.
It took me months of training, constantly holding back and afraid of hurting others or myself. When thinking about it, it’s almost funny – how much credit I was giving myself to think I could hurt people so easily?
One day someone said to me: “You need to stop playing nice, people can protect themselves.”
It’s fascinating how easily we get trapped in our own ideas, so caught up that we fail to see the bigger picture.
The same people I was so afraid to hurt were there for the exact same reason as me: they were learning how to protect themselves. Isn’t that the essence of Jiu-Jitsu?
By holding myself back, I wasn’t just limiting myself; I was also being unfair to my training partners. I was robbing them of the opportunity to truly practice, to test their skills, and to grow.
Little by little, I began to let go. During those six minutes of sparring, I made a promise: to give myself and my training partner the best experience possible. That meant showing up fully, not holding back, and giving my all.
And if something happens, so be it. We’re all adults who’ve chosen to step onto the mat. We understand the risks, and we know how to deal with the occasional bumps, bruises, and even accidents.
Because those scars and bruises? They are part of the process. They are part of life.
In the end, we are all just human beings trying to make the most of our time on this earth. If we let fear of what others might think or feel hold us back, we waste the one resource we can never get back— time.
It’s up to us to show up as we are, to be honest with ourselves, and to trust others to do the same.
What I’ve learned is this: people can protect themselves.
And thanks to Jiu-Jitsu, I’ve learned to protect myself too. Whether it’s tapping out when someone has me in an armlock or saying no to something that doesn’t feel right.
Now, I’ve found my strength. On the mats and in life.
