Jesus felt it all He felt the betrayal the burden and the lonliness He felt the suffering the pain and the longing He felt the absence of God and the presence the love and the forgiveness therefore to live a life in Christ does not protect you from feeling it guarantees that you will feel it all as He felt it all and through it all He will be with you always He will never leave you just as the Father was is and will always be in and with the Son so too are they in and with you through the Holy Spirit
JESUS FELT IT ALL By Robert Van Valkenburgh Meditations of a Gentle Warrior
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It is easier to understand others than it is to get them to understand you.
Trying to be understood can be an extremely frustrating venture.
Not only that, but it is also very difficult to accomplish.
The more you feel the need to be understood, it seems, the more elusive it becomes.
Trying to be understood can be like attempting to catch a feather in a windstorm or, more accurately, attempting to get someone else to catch a feather in a windstorm.
This does not mean that you cannot get some of your ideas, emotions, or experiences across to someone else.
You can, but you are more complex than even the sum total of these.
It is far easier, and often more fruitful, to be the one who understands.
Be the one who listens and actually hears, and who observes and actually sees.
Be the person who cares and who feels for others.
This will give you the connection you crave and it will actually help you to be more understood yourself.
By understanding where others are coming from, what motivates them, and even what frightens them, you begin to understand how to communicate with them, and to communicate, in the truest sense of the word, is to be understood.
Understanding others, therefore, is the gateway to being understood yourself.
It is difficult to be emotionally available for others if you are not even emotionally available for yourself.
Ignoring, denying, or repressing your feelings does not make them go away.
Instead, they build up inside you, creating a barrier between yourself and the outside world.
But there are people who need you.
They need you to feel and they need you to feel for them.
They need you to feel for yourself.
You are not obligated to be emotionally available for others, but our lives are often only as deep as our capacity for feeling.
If you choose to feel shallowly, do not be surprised if your experience of life, your relationships with others, and even your relationship with yourself are shallow also.
If you choose to feel deeply, on the other hand, you will at times experience deeper levels of pain, sorrow, and despair, but you will also experience deeper levels of joy, happiness, love, and deeper relationships with yourself and others.
“I’m not serving a menu. I’m serving a story. I’m serving my soul. I’m serving a conversation and I want you to talk back to me. I want you to dialogue with me.“ —Dominique Crenn
Within every artistic expression and experience, there are always many stories being told.
There is the story that the artist tells him or herself about who they are as a person, a creator, an artist, and as a member of society.
There is the story the artist tells him or herself about what their art means personally, what it means in the world, to the culture, and what it means to and for others with whom it will be shared.
There is also the story that the viewer, listener, reader, taster, experiencer, or witness tells about his or herself, about his or her culture, about the artist, and about the art itself when it is shared with them and when they share it with others.
Even the culture within or from which any piece of art is created tells its own stories about that art, but the art also tells a story about the culture it grew out of or was created in opposition to, and when foreign cultures experience this same art, a new, different story is told by and about these cultures, the artist, and the art itself.
Throughout all of this, the art is also telling many of its own stories. It is telling stories about individuality, relationships, creativity, conformity, rebellion, influence, preferences, possibilities limitations, clarity, confusion, joy, pain, beauty, ugliness, divinity, and profanity.
All of these stories are ultimately about one thing, however, and that is emotion. Art’s true story is told in the emotions it was created out of and the emotions it evokes in others. Art’s essence, its’ purpose, its’ most pure expression, manifestation, and experience is a feeling, an emotion, and, ideally, this emotion tells its own story while simultaneously transcending stories altogether.
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 & Bodyand Kogen Dojo where he teaches Taikyoku Budo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
All photos by Robert Van Valkenburgh unless otherwise noted.
Meditations on God 