To me Martial Arts is not about fighting. It is not sparring and winning. Also, it’s not fighting and winning. Nor is not building strength, power, agility, incredible speed. It is not about becoming the next Bruce Lee. Or outdoing Bruce Lee. Martial arts is a process.
Martial arts is about self and self creation. It’s about understanding self and the relationship of self towards self, towards one’s mind and towards one’s physical body. It is a tool above all.
Martial arts not the alpha and omega. It is not the holy grail. It is not ‘the’ ultimate path or way or the only path and way to understanding and creating and transforming self.
Martial Arts Is A Process for Understanding Limitations
Martial arts is about understanding current limitations that self has accepted and allowed and programmed into oneself, one’s mind and so one’s body and reality. It is about transcending these limitations through living self-correction and self-change.
It should coexist with other tools in our toolbox we use to understand and create ourselves and our lives to a better version — tools such as writing and journaling, yoga, meditation, self-forgiveness and other tools and applications that are practical and helpful when practiced and applied. Emphasis being, again, on living and application of techniques, knowledge, techniques and methods learned, tested, tried and practiced.
A Path with Tools
Deep down if you will, it is not even about martial arts, about doing martial arts or not doing martial arts. Martial Arts is nothing more but a way, a path, a process with tools (techniques, breathing, meditation, body exercises, inner-body training, and so on) that should be pointed towards a destination that is: self-discovery, self-understanding and self-creation through self-change and self-application of the knowledge and applications uncovered, discovered and created from within the walking of the very process itself.
It is a process of self first and foremost. It has nothing to do with another, nothing to do with person A or person B. Comparison from a point of competition and a playing of mind-energy games of ego of inferiority and superiority has no room in here and must be understood and transcended / changed within oneself. Otherwise martial arts just becomes an external doing — a blueprint of a cup but not the cup itself in manifested and in creation state.
You can’t fill a blueprint of a cup and thus cannot pour essence into that non-existing cup in order to nurture yourself or your body.
Martial Arts is a Finger Pointing the Way
Thus martial arts is a process of self, a process to self — to understand and create self. A — or one of many — tools that can be utilized and lived to help oneself in this process of self-understanding and self-creation and learning what it means to live and understand one’s own self, mind, body and functioning/programming (how and who and why I am the way I am; where my thoughts originate from; where my characters and personalities originate from; and so on).
This renders martial arts as but a tool in this process of self-creation and self-understanding. Nothing more, nothing less. It is not god. It is not the ultimate goal. More likely it serves but as a finger pointing the way to the process of self-understanding and self-creation.
