Martial Arts & Yoga…is more than just ‘exercise’ and learning ‘how to fight’!!
While exercise has many benefits, it is important to understand the difference between fitness and health.
While they are often used interchangeably, there actually is a difference between being fit and being healthy.
Fitness is seen as an external condition of the skeletal voluntary muscles.
Fitness is measured by how fast someone can run, the ability to jump high, or lift large amounts of weight.
Being healthy has more to do with organ fitness,
the condition of your internal functions, and your endocrine or immune system.
A professional athlete may be very fit but internally weakened do to exhaustion. Conversely an individual may be considered healthy based on their resistance to disease, quality of digestion, energy level, outlook on life, or quality of sleep even though they are not trained to run ten miles or lift two hundred pounds.
Of course the ideal would be to be both externally fit and internally healthy.
When it comes to choosing an exercise regimen, different exercises are appropriate for different people.
After the age of forty, for example, the wear and tear of slow, long-distance running may outweigh the benefits.
Martial Arts & Yoga = Body Practice
There are body-centred practices which go, or can go beyond exercise.
The distinction between body-centred practices like martial arts and standard exercise is based on the ability of these practices to both require and increase awareness and ‘presence’ as well as creating fitness.
For example, walking on a treadmill while blasting an iPod, or spinning while watching the news does not increase awareness.
Movement arts like martial arts and yoga among others have goals which not only include muscle tone and flexibility, but also focus on mindfulness and intention is placed squarely on what one is doing in the moment (body awareness) – correct use of the breath, of tension and the correct use of relaxation in both body and mind.
Useful skills indeed to learn to carry over into the rest of our endeavours, be they in action or in stillness.
Correct Use of the Self
Today, there are many people offering a whole range of solutions for reducing the stresses in our lives. Some might say that the answer lies in physical exercise – hatha yoga (the physical branch of yoga), or in martial arts, working out in the gym, or jogging, swimming or even just taking long walks.
Others might say that relaxation methods like meditation or relaxation scripts, more frequent breaks or holidays in the sun or simply taking some time to ‘put your feet up’ and relax a bit more – may help.
Another group might even advise you to get counselling or psychotherapy of one kind or another, where you might have to talk about your problems or even hit cushions and scream into pillows to release the pent up anger that might be the root cause of your muscular tension.
To cut to the chase and discard all the non-sense...
Ultimately, the thing that one would hope to achieve and what needs to be achieved with any of these systems is absolute awareness and correct use
of the self.
Sounds simple doesn’t it?
Is any one ‘way’ actually the correct way?
Because this is what most of these systems seem to claim, in one way or another!
So let us discard this kind of thinking and just get on with it, shall we?
Tension in the body always indicates some form of ‘holding back’, resistance, inability to ‘let go’. This much should be fairly obvious? What is not so obvious is that each area of the body has a specific relationship with certain mental and emotional states.
Physical tension is directly related to mental/emotional tension. The physical location of this tension is directly related to its function in relation to you.
As you ‘think’...You Are!
Most people know what it feels like to be tense. How certain muscles tighten until you feel like you are being gripped by a giant’s hand...how your breathing becomes shallow and unsatisfying...how your head pounds and your heart races....
And most people kind of know what it feels like to be relaxed.
How your muscles seem to fall into place.
How your breathing deepens and picks you up and refreshes you.
How, even your blood flowing through your body can create a pleasant sensation of flowing warmth..
What is it then that creates these opposing conditions?
Or aggravates one, or induces the other?
It is your thinking!
This is generally understood to be true, but what is not so well understood is actually how specific and spatially located our tension/thinking/feeling – really is!
That stiff neck – is it because maybe that you are unwilling to look at things in a different way? From another person’s point of view, as it were?
Or that left hip that won’t move properly – is it maybe because you are unwilling to step away from what is familiar to you?
‘Holding back’
Yoga stretching techniques – done with due care and attention and awareness, can increase One’s normal range of motion or movement.
By trying to extend these ‘normal’ limits you begin to experience the way that your muscles have been neurologically ‘set’.
The protective reflexes that you yourself created in the first place – by trial and error – that are reinforced by action and sensation, these limits.
Transcending these limits successfully takes a united effort...between the wise part of you, the talking part of you and the physical part of you.
Traditionally, this is why yoga and the martial arts were developed in the first place, to unify and bind these seemingly separate elements.
Again, done with care and attention, these techniques are a union of the seemingly separate methods described at the top of the page!
The wise part of you is the part that knows something is possible, even though it may seem impossible right now.
The talking part is the part that acts as an intermediary between the wise part and the physical body (which does have its own rudimentary wisdom). And the physical part is like a partially domesticated animal, tamed – but wild at times.
The correct approach is absolutely essential.
In the past, the animal part of you, which contains all of the hair-trigger protective reflexes, has been haphazardly programmed by a combination of accidents, some painful, some pleasurable.
These accidentally created reflexes can be re-educated.
So, in reality, what we are discussing here is not a method of remedy;
It is one of constructive education.
The habitual use of improper reflex mechanisms in everyday actions such as sitting, standing and walking introduces conflict into the nervous system, and it is this conflict which goes on to cause fatigue and strain to entire nervous system.
By relieving this conflict between the body and the reflex mechanisms which are individually cultivated by accident or bad design, we can conserve the energies of the nervous system and by doing so not only correct postural difficulties, but also many other medical conditions that are not ordinarily recognized as postural.
These corrective principles can be learnt by the individuals themselves and is the work of the self as a whole.
The idea is to recondition and re-educate the reflex mechanisms and bring their habits into normal relation with the functions of the organism as a whole.
BOOK YOUR PLACE TODAY!! LET’S DO THIS!!!
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