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Original Source:www.bacdefrancais.net |
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos
amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Under
the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again
First stanza from Le Pont Mirabeau- Guillaume Apollinaire
L
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uckily for me, I
thought it was very cool. I didn’t run and hide from the practise, mentally
speaking. Or sit through the minute or two, suffering in silence, eager to get
on with the real stuff – sparring, and still more sparring.
If my Jiu Jitsu and
Karate teachers thought sitting in mokuso
important enough, so be it. Anyway, I was engaged in a Zen thing, and Zen in
the 60s had serious North American/European credibility.
The Kung Fu teacher
didn’t ignore pre-practise meditation either. He added some really secret in
house stuff to it like clicking the teeth a set number of times and swallowing
spit. Notice I said pre-practise
meditation.
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Source: uuhy.com |
If a teen back then
was able to clear both girls and school out of his mind for a few blessed
minutes, then at least that kid could brag about having some sort of self-discipline.
But then you test.
You go for the Yellow Belt, or you show your traditional no-belt Kung Fu
teacher what you’ve learned…and the test turns into a series of mistakes.
Mistakes are
absolutely important components of martial arts practise. I fumbled, stumbled,
got frustrated, froze and panicked -.not necessarily in that order. I quickly
found out that a mistake is a valuable partner you learn work with.
For instance, in
Jiu Jitsu, if you try a wrist throw and the technique doesn’t work…you don’t
freeze or give up. You go into another move. Or another, or another. Every
martial art has loads of contingency plans. Savate punch A misses, you try Kick
B, and so on. If a Tai Chi push meets with
emptiness you search for another way…without duress.
That’s where mokuso, or any form of meditation came
into the picture. Once the martial mind accessed through mokuso guided my movements, I was able just to be out there on
the mats or on the floor. So if a technique didn’t go anywhere, I simply went
on to the next. It didn’t matter.
In a sense, what
just happened, good or bad…was already water under the bridge.
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Source: www.bodyarmornews.com |
In military martial
arts, such a mindset is absolutely essential during an operation. A mistake has
been made, the soldier rolls with it and then moves on. She doesn’t sacrifice the
entire mission because of one glitch.
At the end of the
day, what has happened has happened and is over and done with. You learn from
it and you carry on. There are more missions ahead. Every bit of extra mental baggage can
compromise the success of the next mission.
The military, the
civilian martial arts and everyday life all draw on the same resource – the mind.
In sports, a bad performance can slice a
career in half if that same experience is allowed to creep around inside the
mind. A bad call in business can blow an individual’s confidence out of the
window. A souring of a relationship can seep into every corner of a person’s
life, sometimes up to a year or more.
Martial artists
relish mistakes made on the floor. I call these mistakes opportunities. We have
something in front of us that we can apply the martial arts mind to.
I quickly learned
that meditation was actually never of the pre-practise kind. Meditation was of
the 24/7 kind. The mind set you apply to your missed o-uchi gari in Judo is the same mind set you apply when the sales
pitch you worked so hard on just didn’t produce the result you wanted.
What did your
instructor say when you slipped and fell while practising kicks?
“Get up! Keep going!”
The fall, the
embarrassment, the sudden reality that your balance needs a lot more work…that’s
all water
under the bridge. Especially when it comes to the bigger picture…a
lifetime of doing what you love to do, whatever it may be.
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Source: nextimpulseports.com |
ADDENDUM
A
martial art mindset of this type need not only be applied to negative experiences.
How many times have we seen multi-event Olympic athletes admit that they were “too
pumped” to sleep after the first medal victory.
Watch
coach Bill Belichik of the New England Patriots football team handle a
post-game press conference. His deadpan expression, his short, basic answers habitually
sends out one message: “The game is over. We’ve learned from today…and now we’re
completely focused on the next game.”
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