If you feel called to something, it will create tension in your life.
Your calling will pull you away from who you are and even who you thought you wanted to become.
It will put you at odds with your previous goals and even some of your current relationships.
Not everyone will understand your new direction.
You may not even fully understand it yourself.
Your task is not to understand, but to listen.
Heed the call and lean into the tension.
You cannot prepare your way into perfection.
You will never feel completely ready to do something brave.
Once you get to good enough, commit.
Experience is the best teacher.
You will work out the imperfections as you go.
Embrace the tension between success and failure.
That is the line you must walk in order to do anything worthwhile.
Seriousness does not solve problems.
We often think that the solution to a frightening or frustrating problem is to take it more seriously or to become more serious ourselves.
By doing so, however, our tendency is to tense up and tension creates resistance.
Instead of helping us, resistance actually hinders our ability to discover solutions to our problems.
Resistance begets resistance, putting us at odds with that with witch we are trying to overcome.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, when we are faced with an overwhelming situation for which we are seeking a solution, our best course of action is to relax.
By relaxing, we allow ourselves room for curiosity and curiosity breeds creativity.
A creative state, not a tense, resistant state, is the place from which the best solutions arise, and creativity tends to respond better to playfulness than it does to seriousness.
‘Creative Solutions’ by Robert Van Valkenburgh
HOLISTIC BUDO: As in Life, so too in Budo. As in Budo, so too in Life.
Tension sinks us.
It weighs us down.
That is why, when we are learning how to swim, we must be told, or even taught, to relax.
When faced with a new challenge, our natural instinct is to tense up as a means of trying to protect ourselves from that which frightens us.
But, this only makes our situation worse.
It slows us down, holds us back, and may even drown us in our very attempt to self-protect.
If we want to survive and someday even thrive, we must learn how to relax.
We have to rise above the forces that feel like they are trying to pull us down.
If we can make friends with that which frightens us, we may even come to enjoy the challenge.
With everything going on, with the drastic schedule change, and the abrupt halt put on my day-to-day ‘hustle’ (hipster entrepreneur speak for not being able to prioritize and focus on what is essential), I have had to reduce my coffee intake.
A few days at home made me realize that I was ‘running hot’ everyday with the amount of coffee I was drinking, but I was doing too many things to notice.
I am now drinking about 1/3 as much coffee and, when I need a midday pick-me-up, I drink some green tea to get me over the hump.
Slowing down has revealed a lot of unnecessary stresses I have put upon myself. Now, some of these have been replaced by new stresses and worries, but I am more aware of them and more able to consciously address them as they arise.
Have any of you also noticed this in your lives as you adjust and adapt to a new normal? What have you done to shift gears and wind down in a healthy way?
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 (artist unknown, unless otherwise noted).
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