Community Concepts (Feb 2022)

02/06/2022

Dojo Philosophy for Everyday Life

By early February most people have abandoned their New Year’s resolution. Based on polling, the average American’s New Year’s resolution lasts for 32 days. It’s little wonder why this happens. We stress ourselves out over the holidays, allow ourselves indulgence, and then assert that we will find a new reservoir of discipline as the calendar flips! We push ourselves into a new routine and feel great about it for a few weeks until we realize that we’re off balance. The life we led before had a balance to it that we need to acknowledge before we can make a real adjustment.

This basic Cuong Nhu philosophy is a broad outline, but when making life changes, you need some room in the plan. Awareness is required to understand the balances in your life. If you don’t like your eating habits, just deciding to change them won’t get you very far. There are reasons that you have the habits you have. They are like a puzzle piece and you can’t just put a new one in without doing some rearranging. If you made a New Year’s resolution and you’ve abandoned it, this is a great opportunity to deconstruct why! You’ll need to keep digging down to root causes and don’t bail out at “I’m just not good at following through.” What support didn’t get put into place to help you stay committed?

This is really important because at the root of change, you need to believe that you are a person who can grow and change. If you’ve never had a chance to learn this, then come by the  dojo and let me show you! This is the critical piece of knowledge that I impart decade after decade. Once a person learns to believe it, they see fewer real limits, only things that take different amounts of work and change to accomplish. When you believe that you can change, then commitment just means setting the board up for success. Changing your diet means bringing your family and friends in on your efforts since they eat with you. It means finding time to cook which may take away from another activity. What did that replaced activity accomplish, and can you fold it into the process of cooking or another part of your day. When you complete the puzzle, you’ll find a sustainable new rearrangement that encourages your growth instead of resisting it.

Dedication means to permanently endow a time, space, or effort to a cause. You may be thinking, “didn’t we already commit to this change?” Commitment is the jumping off point. Dedication means that when there are new challenges and upheaval in the future, that this critical new change gets preserved even when other things get pushed aside. If you’re thinking “this seems a little intense just to look good at the pool this summer,” then I know one of your biggest challenges. Temporary goals earn temporary resolve. If you want to make a change, make it to permanently become the truest form of yourself! Find the practices that create the health, harmony, and happiness that you want to embody, and then let them shine forth. Enlightenment means simultaneously to feel unburdened and to give off light. What we seek here is the sum of all our dedications: the self that we build not to cope but to shine.