I seem to be on a body consciousness kick right now. Yesterday I talked about not letting one’s aches and pains get in the way of happiness. Today I want to talk about the sh*t women say about their bodies. Cut it out, ladies, and stop apologizing for the way you look and what you do!
Continue reading “Stop Hating on Yourself with Unnecessary Apologies…Seriously, You Guys, Quit!!”
“Failure is the new awesome,” my yoga teacher said in his deep booming voice as we eased back into child’s pose after a hearty, vigorous vinyasa series. This is interesting, I thought as I breathed into the space between my nose and my mat. I wonder where he’s going with this?
“We’re afraid to fail. Some people say the opposite of success is failure. I beg to differ. Winston Churchill said, ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ When you fail it means you’re awesome. It means you took a risk, you stuck you’re neck out.”
Continue reading “Happy Fails to You”
Wednesday night in red and black belt class we practiced falling. “Don’t drop like you’re dead,” my instructor said to me and the other bo dans after we morosely plopped forward, landing forearms-first on a heavy mat. “Hit your arms against the ground and don’t sink your body into it,” he said, emphasizing his statement by popping his arms. Falling face-forward is scary, but if you know how to protect yourself, you can fall with confidence.
Continue reading “Break Fall”
“Any New Year’s resolutions?” my instructor asked, raising his eyebrows expectantly at the end of class.
“To not write 2014 on my papers,” remarked one of the teenage black belts with a smirk. Even though his smart-assotry gets old pretty quickly I giggled at that one. My instructor rolled his eyes and bounced his question back to the rest of the class.
“To get my black belt,” said a classmate proudly. Damnit, he took my idea! My mind had wandered off to my usual internal hippie daydreams like meditating more, being more mindful and present (ironically I wasn’t), start swimming in the early mornings again like I used to, juicing when I what I really want to do is get curly fries at Arby’s. I had forgotten what was so obvious and looming for a few of us:
Black belt. This is it. This is the year.
Holy crap.
A few weeks ago a friend posted on Facebook how grateful she was for a mentor that believed in her and gave her encouraging words. I’d like to remember someone who didn’t believe in me, because he set the trajectory for other major events in my life over the past 10+ years.
Continue reading “Oh YEAH? Here’s to the jerks who told us “You can’t””
I’m one of those people who not only needs a kick in the pants to make a drastic change, but I also need a swirly, a wedgie, and to be shoved in a locker and left over night until the janitor finds me the next day. I changed my major several times as an undergrad and each one was punctuated with hysterical sobbing phone calls to my dad during which I declared I wanted to give up on everything. I started my second master’s degree eight months after a devastating breakup. I started taekwondo two months after a string of dating humiliations and failures. Pursuing the MBA and returning to taekwondo were among my top 5 Best Decisions of My Life Thus Far and were decisions made with a mix of both impulsiveness and calculated determination. Decisions, choices, moves, whatever you want to call them, each event dramatically changed the trajectory of my life.
The Poomsae series is intended to glean lessons from the meaning of each form. My school studies the palgwe forms so that’s what I will use for each post. Descriptions are taken from the book “Complete Taekwondo Poomsae” by Dr. Kyu Hyung Lee and Dr. Sang H. Kim.
My favorite yoga teacher often says “Be the change you want to see in the world.” He will sometimes offer a variation on it: “If you don’t like something change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
Continue reading “Can We Pause for a Change? – The Poomsae Series Part 6”
I used to glare at thin women. I took it as a personal affront that another woman had a flat stomach and therefore in my twisted logic not a care in the world. I couldn’t believe that someone who was unintelligent or had a butterface (look it up) or bad fashion sense had what I believed I deserved. I hated them for what I perceived to be effortless perfection. I was obsessed with a girl in my college chemistry class and hated her the most. Bottle blond, artificially tanned, and beautiful in a girl-who-gets-killed-first-in-a-slasher-film kind of way, this poor girl got the death stare worst of all. That bitch had a flat stomach and was flaunting it in my face. She wore purple spandex to the gym. She wore tight jeans to class. We never spoke a word to each other. I still remember her name yet I feel like I am a galaxy away from the troubled 19-year-old who despised her so much.
Continue reading “I’ve Become the Person I Hated and I Couldn’t Be Happier”
Despite despising my grad school marketing class I did get the message that you have to be clear about the market you want to target. That being said I haven’t quite found my “niche” with Little Black Belt. While the motif is taekwondo the deeper purpose is personal growth through self-awareness and reflection. It just happens to be written from a female perspective. That’s all good and well if I want to keep an online public journal (the paradox of that is staggering) and shout into the abyss from my soapbox, but it doesn’t make much of a contribution to other people other than having something funny and possibly thoughtful to read for 20 seconds.
In a previous post I zeroed in on one adult who is braving the taekwondo waters. This time I’d like to share some of the most useful things I’ve learned along my martial arts journey and can hopefully provide some guidance to other adults tkd students.