Whoa! Are we really going there, taking on an esoteric subject that begs reason and demands blind faith — namely, the state of balance between your mind, body and spirit?
Yes we are.
You’re at a point in your life where you’ve drifted away from karate to live other parts of your life. Family. Career. Health. The demands for your time and attention have been many, and probably still are.
But there’s a voice whispering inside, calling you to reclaim something about yourself that was expressed through the martial arts.
What is that something to which it’s calling? Where is that inner urge coming from anyway?
Looking at yourself
Understand that karate brought forth an aspect of your personality we’ll call the warrior. The discipline and physical activity it required were manifest through the training. It allowed you to challenge yourself through training for combat — and performing the art of kata, right living, and embodiment of the spirit of bushido.
Why karate? It touched a nerve inside that allowed you to be that warrior and all the benefits that came with it, without having to face actual danger or risk losing your life or taking another.
While karate was for some just a way to defend themselves, for you it grew into far more than that. It nourished an aspect of your spirit that few other activities have since.
That part of you went into hibernation when you left the dojo. But it’s beginning to awaken in response to the life you’ve created since then.
For something is missing. Some part of you is unfulfilled, longing for what your martial training once brought you.
So you’ve come here to try to reclaim it, to recapture the joy you once knew in a daily routine that’s more of a rut than you’d like to admit.
For me, that urge to keep alive that part of my life was always with me. But my willingness and ability to feed it waxed and waned. Yet it was always there, ever ready to remind me that I wasn’t serving that primal need to connect with and honor that aspect of myself that my life had denied.
Only you know what your life is about (you do, don’t you?) and where you’re trying to go. Only you can feel the sense of longing to keep karate as an active part of your life. Only you can choose to restore the balance despite all of your life’s other demands and the difficulty marshalling the energy and effort to get off the couch.
What about mind, body and spirit?
Martial training supposedly started in the shaolin monasteries to bring balance through this kind of physical activity. Mind. Body. Spirit. All working together to create a life that serves you and your reason for being.
I cannot tell you what that is. I can only offer you the opportunity to honor and respect the wholeness that you are at your core, and empower you to bring more of into your life.
Maybe you can’t get to the dojo anymore. Maybe you don’t want to.
But the warrior within is still there. Watching. Waiting. Wondering if you’ll take it’s hint to restore balance in you. Your body wants you to. So does your spirit. Now you’ve got to do the hard part and get your mind to do it’s part and motivate yourself to work out anyway even without the regularity of a karate class to attend.
It starts and ends with you. Either you act upon it and feed the urge to do and be more within the training, or you don’t and watch that part of you again fade away into the background of your reality. And if so, to risk bring eaten up inside by that emptiness you feel from is absence.
Restore balance to the force in you. Get off the couch and get to work. Or don’t, and live in denial of this important part of yourself.
The choice is yours. Choose wisely.