Angst

"To die will be a great adventure." J.M. Barrie


I have a recurring nightmare in which I am trying to drive a speeding car along a crowded, twisty highway. I am in the backseat. I am leaning over the back of the frontseat, barely able to touch the steering wheel, with no access to the pedals at all. It seems an apt metaphor for how helpless I feel in the grip of my negative moods.



Emotions are not wrong/bad. They are what they are. Emotions come. The heart wants what it wants. We feel what we feel. We have no control over the emotions we feel. Flagellating oneself for the emotions one feels is futile. Denying the emotions one feels is futile.

Sometimes emotions that we are feeling are not only painful, they appear to take on an actively destructive role to the point that they become the enemy.

The mind, heart, and body are not only capable of eating themselves, they are capable of attacking one another…. in a seemingly endless cycle of pain.

Where is safety if one can't be safe inside one's own mind and heart and body; inside one's own self? Where are the resources to survive when the self is striving to destroy itself?

If one's strength is rooted in the sense of self, where to find strength when the self is divided and one side is fighting the other?

A warrior whose survival depends upon trusting instincts, has trusted instincts that led to disaster. How does one ever trust instinct again? If the lesson isn't "Don't trust instincts"- and it can't be- then what is it?

A warrior faces down a fear with great courage- and got mowed so completely that hir entire being embodies the concept of defeat. Again, what is the lesson? From whence comes resolve to face any fear again?



Form Of the Day: Sil Lum Tao. I have not been able to bring myself to do the FOD for weeks. Today I did this one and the Southern Mantis fragment. It felt really good. It felt really terrible. All Shaolin is still drenched in the essence of my betrayer. I still cannot transfer ownership. I want this to be mine and not his.



What can I do with my BJJ to make sure that as it evolves, it is MINE, and will remain mine even if I should lose my teachers sometime in the future?

What needs to change in the student/teacher relationship so that one can be respectful, loyal, even personally fond of one's teacher- yet the essense of the art is not so much as one with that person that if you lose hir, you lose the art as well? That if s/he betrays you, your art betrays you as well? That if s/he causes you pain, your art causes you pain as well? That if you lose respect for your teacher, you lose respect for your art as well? That you are defined only as a function of that teacher, or can be defined only in respect to that teacher?

This would be a lot simpler and easier if MA was simply sport to me. The spiritual aspect is its best strength and its worst weakness.