My Ideal Martial Arts (Pt 2)

 On further reflection (following on from the last post), I think this is what I'm looking for (even if it isn't 100% fitting my "ideal" martial arts):

I want something that's essentially the martial arts (or rather, "defensive arts") equivalent of yoga.

Yoga is an effective physical practice that can also be an effective spiritual practice. You can do it in a class under the instruction of a more experienced teacher, and then you can take that knowledge home with you and have a personal practice that's just you and your breath and the moving meditation.

In all of the yoga classes I've been to, the assumption is not that the students are empty vessels who need to learn from the much superior master, but rather that we are yogis in our own right who are working towards our own goals in our own time. You can have a wide range of abilities in the one classroom, and they all have the invitation made to them to "do what serves you" - take the movements and forms to the edge of your ability so that it pushes you exactly as much as you need to be pushed today and no further. 

When it works well, it calms and centres you, but leaves you feeling like you've had a proper work out.

I'm looking for something like that, that will also let me walk through a dark carpark safe in the knowledge that I can take on anything/anyone that might come at me.

The other stuff would be the icing on the cake, really.

My Ideal Martial Arts (Pt 1)

 I'm keen to take up some kind of martial arts but, from what I've seen, most of the popular martial arts that are available (especially in my regional town) are a bit... well...

Some of them seem to be an avenue for disenfranchised men to feel like they're good at something. Which is good, I suppose - disenfranchised men do need to feel like they're good at something. It's just that they take the short side of forever to stop being "boys with something to prove in need of an outlet" and turn into "mature grown-ups who want to develop skills" - and they make everything painful in the process. I'd rather find something that disenfranchised men find boring and not "manly" enough, so they go off and franchise themselves somewhere else and come back to this after they've moved on in life (if you you what I mean?).

Others are less stressy in that regard, but they've become too much of a Western sport, and aren't really a "this will help you on your journey... and protect you from the mugger in the carpark" kind of martial art. I like the meditative, spiritual side of things, and don't want to just come to the dojo and bout while I train for a competition. And I want something that has practical self-defense applications

What I'd like is something like this:

1. I want something that is largely non-aggressive - almost a non-combative martial art. It's first and foremost a defensive system, designed to side-step an attack and encourage your attacker to send himself head-first into the floor. It won't attract the kind of people who want to be Bruce Lee, because it's a fairly rubbish fighting system (being designed to get you out and away from the fight as soon as possible), but on the other hand, if you're good at it, no one will be able to land a punch on you. And if you're not that good at it, you'll be able to take a punch with such equanimity and circumspection that no one will be able to land a second punch.

2. I want something that has a meditative element to it. Like Tai Chi, it has a series of solo flow drills that you could do for 20 minutes in the morning all by yourself to get the day going. But in terms of the actual workout you get from this flow, I want something closer to yoga than Tai Chi - a bit like vinyasa yoga and Tai Chi had a baby. On your own, you move through a graceful sequence of movement that improves your strength and flexibility but is like poetry in motion. Then, you go to the dojo and practise with others to work on how any one of those beautiful moves, applied quickly and decisively, could actually disarm an attacker and throw them into a wall (while you run like the dickens to get the hell away from there).

3. I want something that's not a boys' club that one or two girls have invaded. I know this is terribly sexist, but whenever I look at the website of a club and I see that all of the instructors are men and 80% of the students are male, I immediately think it's going to be a drag. I want something where there's a good gender balance in the instructors and participants (or even a tendency to have more women than men). In my experience, any sporting group where female participation is at a bare minimum is one where... well... disenfranchised men feel the need to prove something. Women and girls usually get really involved with groups and organisations if they feel encouraged to engage (and by that I mean not discouraged). If they aren't there in good numbers, it's often because they are being sidelined or treated like idiots.

4. I want something that doesn't take itself too seriously. Some people might want to be masters, and that's nice. Some people might just want something to do to keep themselves mentally and physically active. If someone isn't getting more advanced, maybe it's because they don't particularly want to - and that's okay. Like yoga, everyone is on their own path and there's no pressure to move up a level. I not here to win, I'm here to train, and I need to know the trainers are going to respect that. (This is, oddly, connected to the point above. Clubs that are 80% male, and in which all of the instructors are male, tend to get really antsy when someone just wants to poodle along at their own pace - especially when that someone happens to be female). 

5. I want something that actually is effective against the average mugger in the carpark. Don't give me one of those martial arts where everyone is wearing a kimono and half the moves involve grabbing their lapel and sleeve and almost all of the moves require both participants to be students of the same martial art. Give me something that will work when I'm suddenly accosted by a guy in a T-shirt who only knows how to brawl.

I expect bits of what I've just said can be found in a variety of different martial arts (Tai Chi, Aikido, etc), and I don't want to be too Benedick about this ("Til all graces be in one martial art, one martial art shall never be in my grace"), but if anyone knows of an existing martial art that ticks most of these boxes, can you let me know?

Edit: In a later post, I distilled this idea even further.

Some Hard Truths You Might Need to Hear

 This is going to be a bit of tough love, where I tell you things that sound a bit sucky but are actually quite true and liberating, once you wrap your head around them. These are things I’ve had to look at in myself (and have to revisit occasionally), but I’m writing this because I think they are things you might need to hear. If you think I’ve written this post with you in mind, then it’s entirely possible you *do* need to hear them.

Please keep in mind that I’m not a counsellor or therapist or any kind of authority on the matter. I’m also going to be covering a few points, and maybe they won’t all resonate with you (or maybe some of them will sneak up on you later). Take what you will.

1. Nobody owes you anything.

This is one of the “slogans” I work with all the time - I find it helps me when I’m beginning to feel resentful about the way other people aren’t acting the way I thought they would. I firmly believe this is one of the first steps towards leading a happy life.

Nobody owes you anything. Nobody owes you love, or affection, or acceptance, or friendship, or respect... It doesn’t matter who they are or what their relationship to you might be, they don’t owe you anything. Nothing you can say or do or be can lead to a quid-pro-quo arrangement where they have to like, accept or respect you in return. This is a cold, hard truth, but we don’t like to believe it. We like to believe that someone owes us something. That person should like me because of X. The universe owes me a good turn now because of Y, so that person should be the person I expected them to be...

No. It’s not a given. Nobody owes you anything.

Expecting anything you aren’t owed is a sure-fire path to feeling miserable (and remember, you aren't owed anything). You feel like something is being withheld from you, or denied to you. You feel resentful about not getting something you feel you should be getting. Resentment is an insidious, bubbling sort of anger that simmers beneath the surface and colours everything interaction you have with that person and anyone who reminds you of that person. It’s a poison - pure and simple. It can grow inside you in a way that spills out into all sorts of areas of your life and makes you a resentful person. A resentful person is an angry person, which creates something of a vicious cycle (after all, if nobody owed you affection or respect in the first place, how can you expect them to give it willingly to a resentful, angry person?).

BUT! If you know that nobody owes you anything - if you don’t expect anything from anyone - then you are indifferent when you don’t get it (which leads to equanimity), or pleasantly surprised and grateful when you do (which leads to joy).

This is great on its own merits. It’s a wonderful thing to live in a world where you strike a balance between equanimity and joy and the actions and attitudes of others either don’t matter or are a lovely bonus. However, there’s another reason why you need to remember nobody owes you anything: so you don’t go around assuming they are doing wrong by you because they aren’t doing what you hoped.

If you’ve ever found yourself habitually thinking negative thoughts about other people (either specific people or just other people in general), it’s probably resentment speaking - a deep feeling that you have been wronged, and the person/people who wronged you are bastards. That general, nagging sense that nobody appreciates you for who you are or nobody is treating you right comes from a place of feeling owed something you aren’t getting.

Nobody owes you anything.

2. Nobody is going to validate you.

If you don’t like yourself very much (and I’m pretty sure you don’t, based on what you’ve said about yourself and how you talk about others), then you won’t find someone who likes you for “who you really are”. “Who you really are” is someone you’re trying to avoid - how the heck is anyone else going to even meet that person without seeing all of the negative baggage you’ve saddled them with? You’ll constantly introduce other people to versions of yourself that are designed to hide “who you really are”, so it can’t be a surprise when they see “who you really are” as someone who hides things from them and tries to present themselves as someone other than “who they really are”. That’s a really hard thing to like you for.

We all do this, though. We all instinctively try to find someone who can be a mirror that shows us a version of ourselves we can feel good about. “Well, she likes me for who I am, so I must be worth liking.” Oh, that is such a nasty trap to lead yourself into - basing your self worth on what value you think others give you. No wonder you feel resentful when they don’t give you the acceptance, affection and respect you wish you were owed. And no wonder you try to protect yourself by assuming it’s because they’re all playing you, and not because you aren’t playing your cards squarely.

You can’t expect other people to like you for who you are if you don’t really know who that is and you haven’t made peace with that person.

You need to spend time getting to know yourself - not in terms of “good and bad” or “desirable (to other people) or undesirable”, but in terms of “healthy or unhealthy” and “things you’re proud of and things you’re not proud of”.

If you can sit with yourself and notice when you are doing something that is unhealthy or that you’re not proud of and simply try to change that behaviour so that (slowly but surely) you start to replace the unhealthy thoughts and actions with healthier ones and the things you aren’t proud of with things you are proud of (or at least could be) - not for anyone else but for yourself - then you will build a genuine version of yourself you might actually like.

And then - and this is the bit that borders on alchemy - when you are okay with yourself, you’ll stop caring if other people like you enough to prove you are worth liking, and you won’t give others that power to hurt you. A power, by the way, that they didn’t ask for and a hurt that they aren’t responsible for - it’s all your choices that put you in this position and lead you to the hurt.

Nobody is going to validate you, and nobody wants to validate you. No one wants the pressure of being the person who gives someone else their sense of self-worth.

You need to build a version of “who you really are” that you’re okay with, so you no longer need the validation.

Which leads to:

3. People who don’t want you aren’t there to be pursued.  

(And people who want to leave you are better off let go, but that’s another story).

We need to get rid of this godawful narrative that saturates our music and movies and books that says someone who doesn’t want what you’re offering is a prize you need to win through persistence. The outcome you want with another person isn’t something you are owed just because you want it.

If someone doesn’t want what you’re offering, don’t keep following them around pushing it at them until they change their mind. Sure, if it works it will make a great story to tell your grandkids, but if it doesn’t work (and it probably won’t), you’re just a) giving them the power to hurt you over and over again, and b) getting kind of creepy.

This is a real problem a lot of men in particular have, to be honest. They think they are being romantic and “holding the line” in some grand gesture, but in reality they’re just not listening. It’s more dangerous for men, but women do it too. It’s a dumbass move regardless.

You need to pay attention to what is happening in the relationship you’re actually in, not push on trying to create the relationship you hope you can replace it with. If someone tells you they don’t want what you’re offering, listen to them. If you genuinely don’t want to offer them something else, then cut your losses and move on. The “right one for you” is the person who is “for you” in the same way and to the same extent that you are for them. When you both want the same relationship (whether a friendship or something more), then you’ve got a relationship. When you’re pushing something at them that they’ve made it clear they don’t want, then you’ve got a problem. If you keep trying to manipulate the situation to come around to the outcome you want, then you’re engaging in behaviour that isn’t healthy.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to build healthy relationships with the people in your life is to let go of what you hoped for and just face what is - and if it isn’t something you want, then shake hands, say “no harm, no foul” (and believe it) and remember that you’re way better off having dodged a bullet.

"Who do you think Jesus is?"

I was recently sitting on the grass in the shade of a tree trying to think my way through a task I've been stuck on, when two young men approached me and very politely asked me if I could tell them who I thought Jesus is.

I've noticed the campus has broken out in a rash of young Christian men lately. They're everywhere, sitting in pairs with a Bible casually propped between them as they have their mini-Bible-discussion-cum-mentor-sessions. There's also been a large group of "Christian Students" meeting after classes in one of the lecture rooms, which doesn't appear to be the old Christian Union that has been floating around for God knows how long (pun intended). Although it might be the same group with a spot of rebranding. Christian groups do love to rebrand in the 21st century.

Over the years I've occasionally found myself the target of young Christians on an evangelistic spurt. I remember once, when I was 18 and stressed out of my brain, I was literally sobbing in the street after realising I had forgotten to do something at uni and I had to go back and fix it, and most people completely ignored me except for a young Christian woman near my own age. She didn't ask me if I was okay - she invited me to her Church. I was a deeply committed Christian in a modern Pentecostal denomination myself, at the time, so I didn't think this behaviour was particularly weird or inappropriate. Looking back on it now, I wonder if maybe it was an early contributor to my eventual realisation that Christians aren't as "Christlike" as they like to believe. Jesus wouldn't have invited me to his church. He would have asked me if I needed a cup of tea and offered a hanky.

The "fun" thing about being a Christian who is occasionally targeted by other Christians on the prowl is you know exactly what they are doing and why - and it all seems so terribly forced and mercenary. I have always been polite to them "sorry, but you're preaching to the converted - I won't take up any more of your time", but part of me was always slightly creeped out by it. Especially when they would still try a few follow-up techniques on me. I couldn't figure out if I didn't look Christian enough and they still wanted to try to convert me, or if the point was to win more people over to their specific church, rather than The Church.

It's probably why I was never that evangelical myself - I knew how creepy it felt on the other end.

When these two young men approached me, it was the first time I've been hit-up by Christians for a spot of "winning souls for Christ" for a while. It's also the first time someone has approached me about it since I became a Buddhist.

"We were just wondering," said the lead boy, "Could you tell us who you think Jesus is."

I knew what they were really asking, and why, and that they didn't actually want to hear my answer. I knew they didn't want to hear it because they were just looking for an opening to tell me who they think Jesus is. I looked at them as a woman twice their age who has been "Churched" since she was a child and made her way through more than one Christian denomination before coming to see that it was easier to follow Jesus' ethos by being a Buddhist. I looked at them as someone who has been fed the answers, and who has sought the answers, and who has discovered there are problems and holes in all the answers.

I simply told them, with a polite smile, that I had been a Christian, I was now a Buddhist and they were better off trying to have this conversation with someone else. It threw them for a moment - they weren't prepared for that answer, and clearly had no follow up for it, so they muttered something polite and left.

What I wanted to say, as I watched them walk away probably trying to think of how they could respond if they had a similar reply next time, was:

"Oh, boys, I could give you at least 15 different answers to that question and they'd all be as wrong as your answer - but you are too young and in love to have this conversation right now. Go and be young and in love with your faith. In time, when you're ready to be more critically engaged with your beliefs, you might be in a place to hear the answer to the question you're asking."

Why busy people turn down offers of help

Do you know someone who has too much to do, isn’t quite keeping their head above water, but never takes up anyone on their offers for help?

I know several people who are like that. They are very annoying, aren’t they? You know their load will be lessened greatly if they would just stop being so stubborn and share it with the people who are genuinely offering to carry some of it for them, but they just won’t.

And yet… I do exactly the same thing myself. I am one of those annoying people. And this is why I don’t accept help when it is offered:

1. You add to my cognitive load

Yes, it was nice of you to offer to take care of something, or suggest I give you some of my jobs to do, but that means I have to factor you into my day in a way I didn’t have to before – you become something I have to deal with and think about in a timely manner, rather than something I can come to when I have the time and space for you in my brain. You’re offering to do something for me, but if I take you up on that offer you become one of the balls I’m juggling.

This is the same whether you are a colleague offering to help me at work or a friend offering to make me dinner after work. Something I didn’t have to think about becomes something I have to think about. And from your side of things it may seem like a no brainer, but when your brain is too full, it’s a bit of a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back kind of scenario. Sometimes your offer of something nice is just one thing too many.

2. The jobs get bigger and heavier when you have to hand them over

When someone offers to help with something, I actually have to give even more thought to what you’ve offered to help with than I did before. It’s amazing how much of what I’m doing is only half-formed in my brain, but still works for me. It’s like a scrawled note on a napkin – it means something to me, but I can’t give it to someone else like that. I have to make it more solid and actionable before I can hand it over, which feels like way more work than just keeping the note on the napkin and running with that.

3. I feel like I shouldn’t need the help

There is every possibility I could do all the things if I just managed my time better. When I’m feeling stressed out, I often switch off (mentally speaking) for chunks of time. I take little attention breaks – look at something that isn’t one of my jobs for a little while to let my brain just fizz for a bit instead of broiling.

But when someone offers to help, I feel extremely guilty about all of these little attention breaks. I should be getting through more work than I am – and I would be if I just got my act together. I feel like giving you some of my work to do is a sign that I’m failing you, somehow, because if I was doing my work better I wouldn’t be giving you some of it.

Oddly, this is also why I hate having the work I’m doing acknowledged. I know I could be doing better, so when you tell me I’m doing well, all I want to do is say “You have no idea how badly I’m doing right now, and how much I’m trying to keep that from you.”

4. I lose control of the outcome when I give it to someone else

And here’s one of the big ones. If I give someone some of my tasks to do, I should (if I’m being sensible) trust them to do them well and in a timely manner. 

Sometimes I do trust them, but it turns out that something that was at one rank on my list of things to do is on a lower rank of their list of things to do, and I actually would have done the job better and sooner if I just did it myself. Then I have to snatch the job back again and run like heck to get it done.

Sometimes it would actually work out – I can give it to that person safe in the knowledge that they will do it their way, but do it well. But even if it’s not on my plate any more, it’s still on my list of things to worry about, only now I no longer have control over how it’s done and when. That’s just highly stressful.

And so even though accepting help is a smart thing to do, and seems a simple enough decision from the perspective of the person offering to help, it’s just easier for me to keep having too much to do.

And now that I’ve realised this is what I’m doing all the time, I can clearly see that it’s also exactly what my friends and colleagues are doing when I suggest they should accept help when it’s offered to them.

I wonder what the solution is? Maybe there isn’t one.

The Zen of Grumpiness

“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”

This is a quote from a Grumpy Cat calendar that I’ve had on the wall of my cubical for the past year. I’m getting rid of it now, as part of a tidy-up, but I just wanted to take a moment to honour it and reflect on it.

Grumpy Cat (for the three people who might be Internet savvy enough to read a blog, but not enough to have come across Grumpy Cat) is a cat that looks permanently grumpy, and has been part of a long-running series of memes in which she is apparently saying or thinking grumpy things (the actual cat had a genetic condition that caused the grumpy appearance and is, sadly, no longer with us – but her owners took many pictures of her during her life so we can continue to bask in the glory that is Grumpy Cat for years to come).

Its her job to “say” grumpy things, and we are expected to think “Oh, how adorably pessimistic and grumpy!” in response.

But I’ve been reading some Koans and Zen writings for my bed-time reading lately, and I’ve been amused by how often her “grumpiness” sounds a heck of a lot like something one of those old Zen masters would tell their students. 

The point of a Koan (or Kong-an), if you aren’t familiar with them, is to encounter something that doesn’t match what you expect – something that takes received wisdom and says “but what if that’s not how it is after all?” and leaves you to think through your presumptions and assumptions. After mulling over a Koan for a while, you might end up changing your mind about something entirely (you realise the mountain isn’t so big after all), or you might come to a different understanding of it (you understand that the mountain is big for reasons you never previously considered), or you might realise you’ve been looking at the wrong thing the whole time (the mountain is irrelevant). And different people get different things out of the same Koan – it all depends on what assumptions you have that need shaking up.

Grumpy Cat frequently says something good is awful or something awful is good, and if you look at it in the right light, that’s a very similar thing to a Koan.

There’s an old Zen proverb “Every day is a good day”, and I have to admit that Grumpy Cat’s rejoinder (perhaps not intended as part of a Zen discussion) tickled my fancy.

“Every day might not be good, and that’s good.”

“Every day is a good day” is supposed to remind you not to compare. Taking each moment on its own merits, with nothing to compare it to, and no vision of what it “could” be if things were otherwise, there is no reason to believe today is anything other than a good day. Or, as everyone’s favourite doomed Shakespearean character* famously said: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.

Yet, as Grumpy Cat points out, it might not be good.

You can try to say “oh, but if you can’t compare it with anything else…”, but let’s face it: sometimes to be truly “in the moment”, you have to acknowledge that this moment is not “good”. If you’ve just been in a car accident and you have to wait for someone to cut you out and you can’t feel your legs, that is not a good day. If you’re watching someone you love die slowly and painfully from a repertory illness, that is not a good moment. 

Even without comparing it to anything else, you can say that this moment, just as it is, is objectively terrible. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be good. We don’t have to pretend it’s good, or convince ourselves that it could be worse. We can meet this awful moment on its own terms and say “well, this is terrible”. It is what it is.

“Every day is a good day”. But it might not be good. And that’s fine.

*Polonius from Hamlet. He's my favourite, at any rate.

So, I met a bird

 I dropped my mother off for an appointment near a park today, and my grand plan was to sit in the park and read through some documents while I was waiting to pick her up again.

This park is the oldest park in the city, and for many decades it has had an avery in it. Not always the same avery, and for a while now the avery I remember from my childhood has been semi-abandoned. The plants are still there, but the birds have been gone for a while. There have been signs saying they were "planning what to do with the avery" for a while.

Well, there is now a new avery. They ripped out the rose garden and put it there. The last time I visited this park there were signs saying they were "planning what to do with the rose garden", so maybe they're going to tear down the old avery complex and put a new rose garden there. Who knows.

I suppose the garden curators do.

Anyway, two things struck me about this new avery. One was the sign on the side saying it had been constructed in 2019. Now, my memory of this year is hazy at best (to be honest, my memory of any year is hazy at best) but I would have sworn I visited this park earlier in 2020, and there wasn't an avery here then. But maybe it really has been over a year since I last came during daylight hours (I went to a play in that park one night a few months ago that was staged on the opposite side of the gardens to the avery, so I wouldn't have noticed it then).

The second thing that struck me was the mystery bird in the lorikeet enclosure. This fancy new avery had three enclosures with native Australian parrot species in each enclosure. One held cockatiels and galahs (they each had signs on the side of the enclosure), another held a sulpher crested cockatoo and a long-billed corrella* (also listed on the side of the enclosure), and the biggest one held blue mountain lorikeets, according to the signage, and nothing else.

Except there was something else in the enclosure. Something that definitely wasn't a blue mountain lorikeet. Something like this:

Image by JJ Harrison, from Wikipedia

If you haven't seen a blue mountain lorikeet before, I assure you they do not look like that.

While I was trying to find out what this bird was, I noticed a giant spider in the same corner of the enclosure the bird was sitting in, and I walked closer to admire the spider. It was one of those massive orb-weavers that eat large insects and small birds, and I spoke to the spider:

"You are magnificent, aren't you?"

I don't know if the bird thought I was talking to it, or it noticed I was talking about the spider and wanted to engage in a conversation with someone who wasn't one of those idiot screetchy lorikeets, but it started chattering away to me.

We had a good natter for a few minutes, and I found myself saying I would happily take it home to have the run of my house, if I could. It seemed quite interested in this offer, and the tone of the conversation actually shifted slightly. (This is pretty much how I got my cat, actually - she engaged me in a conversation and I thought "Well, this cat seems pretty cool"). But then I mentioned that my house is not as light and airy as the avery and I probably wouldn't be allowed to take any of the birds home anyway, and the bird lost interest in me and went to attack the sprinkler system.

Still, it was fun to actually meet a bird at an avery and have a bit of a conversation. Most of the time you just get accosted by bored cockatoos who are driven half mad by humans who can't provide much entertainment beyond bad cockatoo impersonations.

I found out later on that this beautiful creature is a crimson rosella. You would think I would recognise it from the side of the tomato sauce bottle I've been using for years,**,*** but I didn't. It really has the most lovely plumage - especially on its wings. If you ever get the chance to chat to one, you should.

*These birds look vaguely like a zombi galah. They're kind of cadaverish.

** Rosella is a brand of condiments in Australia. They have a rosella in their logo, which is on the side of all sorts of bottles and jars in my cupboard.

*** Update! The Rosella condiments have an eastern rosella as their logo, not a crimson rosella, so I feel less dopey about not recognising it now.