Spirituality?

When you are in martial arts one thing becomes apparent to you very early on.  There are things that work and things that don’t work.  And there is a tremendous difference between doing it right and not right.  If you have the right leverage, and you have captured the opponents balance properly, it is effortless.  But even if you are off by a hair, if you don’t have it, you don’t have it.  

I used to liken it to a house made out of a deck of cards.  It’s either standing or it’s not.  It’s all in the balance of things.

This experience teaches us there is a proper way to do things and that if things are done in that manner things come to you in a rich and rewarding, but effortless way.  To me spirituality is recognizing and working on that effort to be in the flow with the guiding forces of life.  Often times, I think we make spirituality too difficult.  It becomes too abstract and too conceptual.  I think spiritual experiences are found not only in the grand things but more often in the small things, in the more tangible things of life, such as looking at a snow flake through a magnifying glass with your kid, or if you are a kid with your mom or dad.

Spirituality is not just nice, but it deals with all aspects of life.  It is like air.  It’s everywhere.  It is subtle and often times we don’t know it is their, but when it’s not there it becomes a stark reality.  It is subtle but it is powerful and it is a reality even though it is not obvious.

We learn how to breathe so that we can recover when we are sparring and we feel out of breath and our lungs are burning, our muscles slack from fatigue.  Then at some point, we realize that we got fatigued because we weren’t breathing to begin with.  So, we start on breathing more often.  Then we realize that most of the time we breathe but when the pressure is on we still hold our breath.  Then we learn how to exhale when the pressure is on so that we still keep on breathing and we relax more so we don’t get exhausted.  At some point, we learn how to breathe so that we store energy ahead of time in anticipation of the energy that will be used so that when we start the activity we don’t run out of breath.  Then at some point, we learn that the rate of breathing and the depth of breathing matters.  This story of breath continues, for there is much more to be told about breath and its secrets, and it is a wonderful story.

The situations of life can be tough.  Air itself is there just to give you life.  It is there to support you.  It is always there.  It never leaves you.  But you do have to learn to let it support you.  When you learn how to let the air support you, it is possible that the toughest situations in life can be taken with a breath.  Spirituality is this journey not unlike the journey of breathing to a martial artist.  It is this relationship you develop where you learn to trust it and the more you learn to trust it, it teaches you more.  But you cannot learn it until you are willing to learn from it.  It seems there is truth to the saying, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.