gabuwingchun:What Did You Learn In Martial Arts Class Today? “Character” - Throughout the cycles we
gabuwingchun:What Did You Learn In Martial Arts Class Today? “Character” - Throughout the cycles we go through in our lives and our training, we can polish and refine our character: “who we are”, along with our skills. As we train and develop our physical and mental selves, over time this constant refining and balancing can help us to grow as a person and refine our character, regardless of how we grew up. What we’ve been through in life maybe defines, “how we are” but not “who we are”. It can be difficult, painful and a process of making mistake after mistake, but we can change and learn, if we eventually let go enough to “listen”.When we have the seed planted in our “idea”, our “heart”, we train, we work on it, we can now understand it, we work on it more, refining body and mind together until it becomes habit, this habit becomes our characteristic, which can be seen in our expression of ourselves. We then come back to that “idea” and we realize that we only scratched the surface and it can go much deeper, as we can now see more than before. We repeat this process over and over through training, thus refining our physical skills, our mental skills, which combined help us to find a balance of refining our Character, helping us to grow and learn. We don’t need to try to get rid of that that little bit of craziness and the quirky parts that makes us the unique individual’s we are. We can never be perfect, too good, or too bad, as we experience life, we experience many things, but to look at both sides and choose to walk the middle road is most difficult, to be neutral. We are trying to find our natural balance, as we can always work to be better than we were yesterday. Through training we can not only develop our skills, our minds, and our behavior, but we can refine our Character - when the realization goes beyond the surface, beyond the superficial driven by outside desires and ego. When the realization touches the soul, touches our hearts in a way, that we want to grow and change, to better ourselves, this helps us to grow so that each cycle when we look at the “idea” again, we keep seeing deeper and deeper into our development. The refinement of body, mind and Character or “Spirit” is The Tao of Martial Arts, The Way…Train Well and Train Safe -- source link