Thursday, January 19, 2012

Decide What Your Life is About

"If you don't decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing."
Robert Brault

So pursue your passions every day in some small way.  Take an action toward your dreams.  Love a lot.  Forgive readily.  Enjoy your journey.  Keep your body and mind busy with healthy things.  Do more taekwondo...or knitting, or cooking, or soccer, or reading, or...

If your job sucks and and you are just making a living, make the most of where you are with what you have and make connections.  Put some energy into that one person who you seem to jive with.  And spend the rest of your moments imagining the best, most exciting and fulfilling job...imagine waking up in the morning totally jazzed to go to work because it feels like play.  Feel the emotions of it like you already have it.  Fake it a little if you have to.

What is getting in the way of you deciding what your life is about?  And what will you do about it?

TGIT (yes, Thursday is just as good as any other day for a miracle)

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Learning Something New

The kids and I went to taekwondo class on Thursday night after a long holiday break.  Class was awesome as usual, we did way too many push ups though.  Jonathan and I began learning our first black belt form, Kwang-Gae.  Master Holloway showed us the first fourteen moves, if my count is correct, of the form and it was awesome.  They are all awesome, but what was even more exciting to me was that we were learning something new after a year or two of perfecting Choong Moo, our red belt form.  It had been a long time since we had learned a new move, or kick or form.  Jonathan and I went through the new moves of the form over and over again, letting our bodies get used to the new rhythm and patterns.  It was fantastic.

It is nice to practice in our comfort zones, easier really.  The moves and kicks and forms we had practiced for our black belt test for the last many years became familiar and we worked on perfecting them, getting them into our body memory, and then fine tuning the details.  The more comfortable you are with a move or pattern, the less you "think" about it and just do it.  Your body takes over.

Getting out of the comfort zone feels uneasy at first.  A little threatening.  Awkward.  And it is just what we need to grow.  Nobody learns and grows in their comfort zone.  Being outside of your comfort zone demands more focus, presence, and also openness to what you are learning.

I smiled to myself on Thursday night because I felt strangely like I did in my very first taekwondo class six years ago...like I loved it!  Did then, and do today.  Can't wait to keep learning and sharing and teaching what I have learned.

What new thing would you like to learn?  What is stopping you?