Grappling, Compassion, and the Five Excellences.

     Today is a good day. I woke up. Took care of some auto repair issues and then I practiced my Tai Chi. This summer is all about focusing on my Tai Chi form and skills. Getting better at stand up grappling and closing the distance. Each summer I try to focus on one specific art or aspect of martial arts to play with and improve upon. It's fun because I set a goal and pursue it. Sometimes I even make it. My goal for this summer is to keep my purple belt Brazilian Jiu Jitsu friend from taking me down in five three minute rounds. It's nothing competitive, just good fun and a challenge to myself.

    It is really interesting. I will do things like this and dig in my heels quite hard about learning even basic HTML. I am not interested in the marketable skills. I just want to do the stuff I think is cool. I am quite unreasonable on this point too. I model my life on the idea of the Five Excellences: Meditation, Martial Arts, Healing, Composition, and Presentation. The idea behind these pursuits is that if one pursues these five things then one always has some skill to trade for food or money. 

    I enjoy meditation and I like teaching meditation quite a bit. It is fun to explore the weirdness and wonder of our consciousness and see what cool things are to be seen. What can be controlled and what cannot. I remember seeing this in high school when I first played with a biofeedback meter and learned how to use the sound to slow down my heart rate. That was so cool to me. I then started learning more and more about meditation and to this day I am hooked on the mind-body-spirit connection. 

    I got into martial arts because I was scared. Scared of violence, scared of illness, scared of being bullied. It started with Shorin Ryu Karate then moved into the Chinese Internal Martial Arts of Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Bagua. Later, I would spend several years working as a security guard with a fellow who was very skilled at Southern Shaolin Kung Fu, specifically White Crane and Fut Gar. I absorbed martial arts wherever I could. Jiu Jitsu, wrestling, military combatives, boxing, traditional and mixed martial arts all of it fascinates me. This is why even as a middle aged woman you find me training at least an hour every single day. Not because it is good for me but because it is fun for me. For the record, martial arts did help me to be less afraid. To learn to study whatever scares me in detail until I can understand it thoroughly. It's not the easiest way to deal with fear, but it does work.

    Healing is an interesting one. Mostly because I am pretty skeptical of most healing modalities. However two of them have been quite useful for me. One is qigong, a branch of Traditional Chinese Medicine that is quite old and involves meditation, relaxation, and various exercises. It has worked to keep me relatively sane and keep me pain free and more fit after a really bad gallbladder/sepsis episode at the end of 2020. I am forever grateful for that. The second one is the Japanese art of Reiki. Now this one is tricky because often you see it as a sort of New Age woo woo thing and I did not take it very seriously for many years. Then I was fortunate enough to meet a really skilled Reiki Teacher who showed me that it was originally a Buddhist meditation exercise aimed at helping one become enlightened. The hands on healing aspect was really more of a side effect than the aim of the system. One of the most powerful tenets of the Reiki system is the idea of extending compassion to oneself and to others. This has helped me tremendously in learning to be kinder to myself and to acknowledge my own boundaries, limitations, and traumas. 

    Composition is what I am doing right now. I am writing. Composing things to create art. This can mean making art, music, games, sales plans, whatever helps you to express yourself and transform your thoughts and feelings into something that can be shared and communicated. I am working on this one quite a bit these days because for years I didn't think I deserved to be heard and that my experiences and opinions were boring and unimportant. Really that was my lack of compassion towards myself talking though. (See how these all kind of fit together?)

    Presentation is the excellence that I need the most work in. I can make things. I know things. I have skills. However, I do not have the skill here to market these things effectively. So that is another aspect I am working on. Blogging, using social media, learning how to teach better and more effectively. These are aspects that transform the other skills into gifts that can be shared with others. 

    The thing about the Five Excellences model is that they are not some massive set of goals that one has to grind toward. They are areas we can look at and work on and developing all five of them makes us balanced as human beings while we have fun pursuing the things we desire. The idea of marketable skills bores me to tears. The idea of useful skills that can help us achieve our aims, that is exciting. I aim to not just be at peace in the world but to effectively carry out my will. Isn't that really what most everyone wants? To be able to accomplish their aims and live happily in the way that fulfills us? 

    Thanks for joining me today. I appreciate you very much. And remember: just for today, be compassionate to yourself and others.