Several months ago, just before I started this blog, I went through somewhat of an enlightening experience. I was at quite a low point in my life, I wasn’t at all happy with the direction it was going in and I could see that I had to make real changes if I wasn’t to get trapped forever in a highly frustrating and highly unfulfilling existence.
So I started to examine all the different aspects of my life in order to get a clearer idea of what I had to do to improve them and I made the decision at the time to really turn things around and go for the life that I wanted to have for myself. It was a powerful moment, when I made that decision. After years of bouncing around from pillar to post I was finally waking up to the fact that I had to take full control of my life for the very first time and steer it in the direction that I wanted it to go. Probably for the first time ever, I was prepared to take full responsibility for everything that happened to me.
Shortly after I made that decision I started up this blog and in doing so, changed my life for the better. Blogging is something that I found I was very passionate about and this has obviously fed into my other passion for martial arts. Both passions feed into one another and make the other stronger. At the moment, that’s what my life is mostly about, blogging and martial arts, that and trying very hard to develop myself on a personal level, which I realised I very much needed to do if I was to achieve success in any of these two things.
A large part of my drive for personal growth and development entails embracing the concept of shedding. Shedding basically involves stripping away and casting off the things that we no longer need in our lives in a drive to become authentic individuals, rather like a snake casts of its old skin in favour of a fresh new layer.
Like most people I carried around a lot of baggage in the sense that I harboured a lot of beliefs about life and myself that just weren’t positive or useful to me in any way. I exhibited a lot of bad habits that only served to drag me down and keep me from moving forward. I also had some addictions that needed addressing as well (still working on at least one of those). I had friends that fed on me emotionally and a job that I hated. In short, I had a lot of things to sort out and a lot of shedding to do so I could rid myself of the stuff that wasn’t really me and make room for the things that are me, the things that will eventually make me a totally authentic person. I liken the process to discovering one day that you are not who you think you are at all and suddenly you have to go out there and find out who you really are and what it is you want to do with your life. It’s a process of cleansing, both inside and out and a very cathartic one in the sense that you are letting go of a lot of negativity and bad emotion.
I am currently going through the same process as a martial artist. I spent years just training basically for the sake of training with no real goals or even any clear idea of where I wanted to end up. I knew I wanted to be good, but that was
Now that I have started to live my life far more consciously than I once did I am able to see a lot of things in myself as a martial artist and also, in the training itself, that need shedding. Years of following someone else’s agenda had previously blinded me to the fact that I held a lot of preconceived notions about the martial arts that were inaccurate or just not true at all. Most of what I thought I knew about self defense was wrong, for example. I held the traditional view on self defense that many martial artist’s still stand by but which isn’t anywhere near grounded in reality.
Besides all that I also discovered that I had picked up a fair few bad training habits that I just wasn’t awake enough to see at the time, not major bad habits but bad enough to make some of my techniques look wrong. I’m now in the process of retraining myself so as to vanquish those habits.
Shedding ourselves of the things that hold us back is essential if we want to really progress, both in life and in training and to do that we have to be able to live and train in a much more conscious manner than we normally do. It’s all too easy to become complacent and stay within the comfort zone, but this doesn’t lead to growth. The only way to grow is to cultivate constant conscious awareness so that we can monitor all the time what direction we are going in. If we don’t have that conscious awareness then we end up slipping back into autopilot and back into the pile of baggage that we worked so hard to shed. It’s still a struggle to maintain, but it gets easier as you go along. There will always be challenges but you get better at facing those challenges.
Do you feel good about yourself as a martial artist? Do you have that feeling of excitement that comes from constantly pushing yourself and testing your limits, knowing that with every move you are growing? Do you feel alive when you’re training? If you don’t, then maybe it’s time you woke yourself up and did a bit of shedding. You’ll feel a lot freer when you do.
A magazine subscription makes a great gift.
Further Resources
Shape Shifter: Transform Your Life in 1 Day
Hunting the Shadow: How to Turn Fear into Massive Success
