Meditations on God

The Perception Of Opportunity
If our joy, our contentment, and our overall psycho-emotional well-being is based solely on being successful in all areas of our lives, we are setting ourselves up for a lifetime of misery and discontentment.

Rarely will things go exactly as we had hoped or planned for.

There will almost always be obstacles, detours, and unforeseen challenges in our path.

If this is enough to give us a sense of failure, loss, or even hopelessness, we may find that we spend most of our lives feeling unhappy and defeated, the victims of our circumstances.

If, however, we can redefine success to include the obstacles, to include the detours, and to include the unforeseen challenges along the way, we will find that we actually give ourselves the opportunity to find a harmonious relationship between our internal and our external lives.

When we begin to see and to embrace that which is unexpected, unpredictable, and even undesirable a gift, not a burden, we will discover a whole new world in front of us, a world that is made up of an infinite number of micro-opportunities for growth, gratitude, and celebration.

Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.

Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.

Follow Robert Van Valkenburgh and Holistic Budo on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful or meaningful in some way, please feel free to Share, Comment, and Subscribe below.
Share this:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
August 2, 2020

achievement, celebration, challenges, change, goals, gratitude, growth, joy, life, obstacles, perception, perspective, success
Stillness Guides Progress
For those of us driven by creativity, by innovation, and progress, the idea of being still can feel threatening, sometimes even life-threatening.

Some of us need to stay in motion in order to feel alive.

We need to be doing something, to be working on something, or to be making something in order to feel useful, purposeful, and productive.

Stillness is terrifying.

It feels like time wasted, like opportunity lost, and like progress stifled.

What we find, if we give ourselves the opportunity to be still, however, if we sit through the fear it imposes and the pain it threatens, is that stillness itself was never really the problem.

Stillness is necessary, not only for our mental, physical, and emotional health, but also for our work.

Stillness is a tool.

It is a mechanism of empowerment.

Without stillness, all we have is motion, but motion alone will not take us where we want to or need to go.

Stillness helps to give us clarity, focus, and perspective so that our motion has guidance, direction, and purpose.

Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.

Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.

Follow Robert Van Valkenburgh and Holistic Budo on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful or meaningful in some way, please feel free to Share, Comment, and Subscribe below.
Share this:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
August 1, 2020

clarity, creativity, direction, focus, guidance, meditation, momentum, motion, perpsective, progress, stillness
Becoming The Listener
Hearing requires empathy.

Often, our words fall short of what we truly mean to say and want to get across.

There is a feeling, an intention behind what we are trying to say that we cannot quite capture with words, that eludes our grasp, and that misses the target we are aiming for.

In spite of our best efforts, we struggle to truly communicate.

The words that come out of our mouths feel like a shallow representation of some deeper truth we mean to speak, like the shadow of that upon which we are trying to shed light.

We fumble around the best we can, but our attempts to be heard still feel like failure.

All of this can be quite frustrating.

Sometimes, this frustration can even turn into what feels like unresolvable conflict.

If the relationship is worth the effort, we keep trying, looking for a way to communicate so that our true intentions come across.

What we often fail to realize, however, is that communication begins with listening.

If we want to be heard, we must first be willing to listen to the way that the person is listening.

This requires empathy.

We have to learn how to put ourselves in the place of the listener and to imagine what our words, gestures, and expressions sound like, look like, and feel like to them.

If we want to communicate, the onus is on us to adapt to the listener and this requires us to become the listener.

Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.

Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.

Follow Robert Van Valkenburgh and Holistic Budo on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful or meaningful in some way, please feel free to Share, Comment, and Subscribe below.
Share this:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
July 31, 2020

communicating, community, compassion, empathy, family, feelings, friendships, hearing, listening, partnership, relationships, talking, understanding
For Better And Worse (On Healing)
Being afraid of being judged is not the same as being tired of being judged.

While we must learn to come to terms with the fact that, no matter who we are or what we do, not everyone will like us, we may never truly be comfortable with it.

Criticism, condemnation, and judgement from others may be the reality of the world we live in, but we deserve better from those who claim to love us.

If our hearts are in the right place, if our intentions are good, and if we are trying our best, we deserve to be seen and accepted for the better parts of ourselves and for the worse.

After all, our flaws, our failings, and our wounds are the parts of us that need love the most.

They are the parts of us that we wish were different, that we want more than anything to not be so, and that we would be rid of immediately if only we could, that need compassion, patience, and understanding.

We do not need more people who love us for how good we are, for how much we give, and for how well we perform.

We need people who love us and stand by us for the pieces of who we are that hurt us the most, the parts of our character over which we struggle the most, and the aspects of our our person for which we are most ashamed.

We judge ourselves enough for these parts of ourselves that we do not need people who claim to love us to judge us for them as well.

We all deserve love that is for better and for worse so that our worse has room to heal, for it is only through this type of healing that we can truly become better.

Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.

Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.

Follow Robert Van Valkenburgh and Holistic Budo on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful or meaningful in some way, please feel free to Share, Comment, and Subscribe below.
Share this:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
July 30, 2020

caring, compassion, failings, family, flaws, friendship, healing, intention, life, love, relationships
Difficult Truths
We are not equipped to process difficult truths quickly.

Difficult truths take time to understand, to accept, and to digest, sometimes even a lifetime.

These truths take even longer before we can transform them into usable information that adds value to our lives, our relationships, and our communities.

We have built in resistors.

As a means of self protection, whether consciously or subconsciously, we do not want to know the whole truth about ourselves, our experiences, our relationships, and our surroundings all at one time.

It is simply too much to bear.

That is why, with regards to difficult truths, we usually come to a place of understanding slowly, especially with truths that cause us pain.

Of course, we may experience the occasional epiphany, a sudden, perspective-shifting realization, or a life-altering revelation at one point in our life or another, but these experiences are typically quite rare and unpredictable.

There are ways to encourage the occurrence of these experiences, however.

There are practices that are capable of opening up our hearts and minds to a deeper, fuller understanding of the truth, and that give us the empathy, compassion, and patience required to come to terms with what we find out about ourselves and the world we live in.

The truth, even a difficult truth, is not the problem, after all.

It is how we come to know the truth, how we process it, and what we do with it that makes the difference between our experience of it being either traumatic or healing.

Holistic Budo: As it is in budo, so too it is in life. As it is in life, so too it is in budo.

Robert Van Valkenburgh is co-founder of Taikyoku Mind & Body and Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.

Follow Robert Van Valkenburgh and Holistic Budo on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful or meaningful in some way, please feel free to Share, Comment, and Subscribe below.
Share this:
X
Facebook
Like Loading…
July 29, 2020

compassion, empathy, epiphanies, healing, knowledge, patience, realizations, revelations, trauma, truth, truths, understanding

The Perception Of Opportunity

Share this:

Stillness Guides Progress

Share this:

Becoming The Listener

Share this:

For Better And Worse (On Healing)

Share this:

Difficult Truths

Share this: