Withdrawl

I hate it when there is no class...

A drenaline rush, can’t get enough

D id 100 kicks

D id 100 leg lifts

I ’ve been kicked in the head and punched in the face

C an’t get enough

T ested twelve times, busted so many boards

E ntered in competitions

D id too many push ups

T ougher than I was but still terrified

O lympian at heart

T esting my limits

A lways pushing harder

E very day is an opportunity

K icking higher, stronger

W ishing I were taller

O ne with the moment

N ew form to master

D oing my best

O ne more class please.  

Sparring, Mostly Myself

I realized that Kim's post went onto my old blog.  So I am re-posting it today here.

My name is Kim. Laura asked me to post about sparring...

It's been about five minutes. The plastic protecting my teeth feels like a mouth full of sand, but there's no sneaking over to my water bottle. There are vinyl-clad pads protecting the rest of my body, except for a sliver of wrist that's a favorite of my opponents' kicks (again with the wrist? are you kidding me?). I am gasping and sweating through pores I never new existed. My opponent has barely started gently perspiring and is soundly beating me. I should be thinking of combinations--3, 4, 2, pull, step, front to back. Find an opening. Instead, I can think one thing.

I suck at this.

My classmates are very kind, suggesting moves and telling me they're going to go easy on me (awesome, says my ego). I keep thinking that at green belt level, I should be able to hold my own. But this is fast, this sparring thing, and my opponents seem to have more arms and legs, and definitely more coordination, than I. They can do that back to front thing without toppling over, and still nail me right in my chest guard--the one my disobedient arms are supposed to be protecting instead of flailing around like that.

Two years ago, wrapping myself in plastic and voluntarily letting other people kick the snot out of me wasn't even remotely on my radar. I signed up for Taekwondo for my son, who wanted to try it but resisted joining the class alone. So I joined too, figuring a session or two would give him enough confidence to go it alone and I could drop out and hang out with the gaggle of moms on the steps, checking email and reading books while their kids learned a bit.

Here we are. He is moving like lightning, having drastically improved in his motor skills and confidence. My daughter joined class a few weeks ago, after finally making the tough decision between TKD and dance, and is learning her fist kicks and fundamental moves. I, on the other hand, am strangely addicted to the class, but lumber around like the 40-something minivan driving desk jockey I am, praying to whatever powers exist that somebody will call the damn time already so I can breathe for a minute. Take a shower. Pour a glass of wine and burrow on the couch where I belong already.

I'm trying to learn. The tips my classmates and my teachers give me make a lot of sense. Given a few minutes of practice, I can do most of the moves reasonably well (except for that toppling-over turny thing...and that reverse back kick that taunts me) during class. But the pads go on and the kicks and punches come at warp speed, and try as I might--and I really do try--I suck at this.

Thank you if you've tried to help me with tips and the going-easy thing. Apologies to those who want a real fight on Thursday nights and wind up facing me on the mats. I'm trying--I promise. I'll get it eventually. Maybe...

Now

I am sitting and stretching waiting for the class before me to finish so I can start mine.  I am watching the class, watching Jonathan and Danielle help Master Holloway show the beginner class how to do a low block.  I am half here, watching but also thinking, not about what I am watching but about a hundred other things that are occupying my mind.  Worrying about my business, about schedules, my friend who is depressed again this week, my patient who is going in for surgery.  I am physically here in the gym waiting for taekwondo to start but miles away in my mind with all the worries and planning and stuff that is making me think it is all so important.

Now class begins, line up, feet together, my body knows what to do.  I am here.  I feel my feet touch, my hands press to my thighs, my body bend at the waist to bow.  Finally class begins and I can be here, now.  The floor vibrates into my feet as I sense the movement of the students next to me through the bouncy floor.  Jumping jacks, stretching, punches, kicks and I start to feel the sweat around my face and my familiar aches work themselves out.  Combinations, fundamental moves, my form and I feel myself focus.  I am only here and now and nothing else matters.  Focus and freedom.

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about being in the moment.  We were talking about things that keep us in the moment and things that we do when we are so far out of the moment it is scary.  I am noticing all the times when my thinking takes over.  The thinking is mostly worry about the future, or remembering some past moment.  When I do this I am not paying attention to the only moment that really matters, which is the one I am in.  I have been practicing this lately, this being in the moment.  It makes everything interesting.  I feel more alive to what is happening around me, people, nature, everything.  It also wipes away any worry about the past or future when I can get myself into the now.  I have found it a waste of time to worry about something that hasn’t happened yet and another waste of time to worry about something that has already happened.  Freedom.  Slowing down, paying attention, with relaxed focus on the thing that is in front of you.  And all of this seems like a miracle seen as I have been conditioned from an early age to worry.  I somehow learned to worry about everything, like my worrying, if fierce enough, would produce some result.  Well, I will tell you the result, anxiety.  

Present moment awareness is a practice, a discipline.  The practice is catching yourself in your daily moments when over-thinking is taking over and coming back into your center, into the now, with a clear, quiet focus.  Negative thoughts have this way of sucking you in, and being self perpetuating.  Breaking out of that trance and into the now is the practice.  And it is worth the effort.  

When I am in class I am in the moment and it is beautiful, almost effortless.  There are moments of distraction like when I catch one of my kids misbehaving, but in general I can stay focused because I have to pay attention to what my body is doing.  If I don’t, there is a consequence that has a way of slapping me in the face, and in taekwondo that is sometimes literal.  I used to call my running practice my meditation time.  When I learned about the idea of the mind chatter I realized that most of my meditative runs had been lost in thoughts, some good and some bad.  Since then when I have tried to focus on the moments of the run itself I have struggled to stay there, always seeming to drift back into thinking about something other than what I am doing.  It was easy to be distracted because running is rhythmical and repetitive and I seem to be able to run without really paying attention to the act of it.  With taekwondo it is more difficult to be distracted and still practice.  It requires the mind and the body focus at once, and that is what I enjoy most about it.  

There is power in the present moment when you are aware inside of it.  That power has to do with a peace, freedom, creativity, a stillness out of which anything can happen.  If we can break out of the prison of our minds and live aware inside that stillness we can achieve anything.

This post was taken from my blue stripe essay.  Thanks for reading.

Benched For a Week

I have been benched from exercise for a week after having a minor surgery to remove a lipoma (benign fatty tumor) from my arm.  The procedure was the second in a year, after the lump grew back and began putting pressure on my tricep.  Made doing push ups really fun.  Kidding.    So like I did prior to the procedure about the event itself, I am now looking for the opportunity in being benched for a few days.  However for most who know me they know that being benched is torture.  I thrive in movement and in doing.  Slowing down, resting, stopping all the doing, well, almost impossible.  I decided that I was going to listen to my doctor this time though, and she said one week.  I want the best possible outcome for this arm and I don't want to screw it up.  So here I sit, and rest, and sleep, and eat, and think a lot about how great exercise will feel when I can do it.  I am faced with my thoughts and my feelings about them, and it is not really a lot of fun.  Though I still look for opportunity for healing here in the boring slowness of it all.

My sister posted something on her blog that I am going to repeat here that reminds me of living, healing and taekwondo...

Fall seven times,
stand up eight.

Japanese Proverb

Dynamic vs. Static Stretching For Warm Ups

I was reading an article in ESPN High School magazine called "The Truth About Stretching" by Cristina Goyanes where she talked about the fact that static (longer one position holds) stretching can be bad for your sports performance, even increasing injury risk.  This happens says Goyanes, when you keep a muscle in a relaxed state making it hard for the muscle to fire up and contract when needed.  The article goes on to talk about dynamic (active, repetitive movements of the body) stretching being a better way to improve blood flow and increase range of motion before starting an activity.

I have experienced this myself before a taekwondo class when I have spent a lot (too much) of time stretching out to try to loosen up before class starts.  I have actually felt like my legs tire out faster and I lose some of my speed toward the end of class.  I have had much greater success using a couple of dynamic muscle balancing techniques just five minutes or so before class.

So regarding my last post about holding stretches longer, I want to comment that for an over all improvement in flexibility and range of motion, you do need to work on lengthening and relaxing the tissue, and that is best done with longer, slower, more body-aware types of releases and stretches.  If you are stretching ten minutes before a run, aerobics class or sporting event, that is not the time to work on improving your flexibility, it is the time to warm up with active stretches.  Active stretching pumps blood into the muscle which helps to warm and loosen it up in preparation for action.  A muscle that is too stretched out immediately prior to an event will not be able to contract  with as much power and speed.  Goyanes notes that some studies have shown that static stretching before an event can make you slower and weaker by as much as 30%.

So for peak sports performance we need it all.  We need to slow down and carve out time for slow, long hold stretches that help release the restrictions in our tissues and improve flexibility. We need to work on conditioning and strength for our sport.  And we need a good warm up before any type of activity that is full of dynamic stretches.

There are two particularly excellent ways to incorporate dynamic stretching into your warm up routine.  Total Motion Release is a series of dynamic and corrective exercises that helps you balance out the right to left asymmetries in your system to prepare your body for exercise and any activity of daily living.  And Active Isolated Stretching:  The Mattes Method is a series of dynamic stretching techniques developed by Aaron Mattes that use repetitive active movements with a one or two second hold to warm the body up.

I teach both of these stretching methods in my practice so for any further information, don't hesitate to call or email!  Or catch me before class starts and I will teach you one or two of the exercises!

Do What You Can

Do what you can from where you are with what you have...
with an eye for moving forward.

Taken from Mike Dooley, www.tut.com

Ideas Worth Sharing

So someone sent me one of the recent Ted talks and I thought it was worth re-posting.
This is a good one...

www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html


Enjoy!