(Photo taken from meditationcommunity.wordpress.com )
Mind, Body, and Spirit
心 Shin, Mind, 体 Tai, Body and 精神 Seishin, Spirit these are the three things that I have felt grow as I have continued my Karate Do training from a young boy of 10 through adolescence and into adulthood. In this post I would like to continue to explain what I mean by Mind, Body, and Spirit. As you read these posts, please try to apply the techniques that we have learned to deepen our understanding of the Kanji presented and contemplate your own interpretation relating to your unique situation and experiences.
心 Shin, Mind, 体 Tai, Body and 精神 Seishin, Spirit these are the three things that I have felt grow as I have continued my Karate Do training from a young boy of 10 through adolescence and into adulthood. In this post I would like to continue to explain what I mean by Mind, Body, and Spirit. As you read these posts, please try to apply the techniques that we have learned to deepen our understanding of the Kanji presented and contemplate your own interpretation relating to your unique situation and experiences.
As I stated at the end of my last post:
I would like to talk more about the mind and body connection as well as address a statement I made when I started this series that Karate Do can offer us a "map" or an outline to healthy living in three main areas: Physical, Mental, and Spiritual. I realize that this is a very heavy statement to make and I am aware that I need to back it up with fact. I am working on how to verbalize the experiences I have had and the feelings they have caused within me. Both the experiences and the feelings shaped my growth, as I am sure they have shaped yours.
The above paragraph is how I ended my last post, as you may remember. Since then I have been really thinking specifically about how to provide you with an adequate definition of the term 'Spiritual' as this seems to be the most personal and the hardest to define. Attwood & Attwood (2014) discuss spiritualism in their book Your Hidden Riches and they also provide a definition for the term spiritual that, I feel, can be applied to how I intended to use it in the Karate Do context. They state that, "Every accomplishment requires steps that are physical, mental, and, yes, spiritual (defining spiritual as whatever you are most devoted to and truly revere)" (p. 82). Indeed our Karate Do journey is defined by our accomplishments; As practitioners of Karate Do, the inner journey that we are on is one that reveals more to us with each step we take and it is a very personal journey indeed. It requires great physical and mental effort to pursue our training goals, but we still thirst for more, so much so that we "devote" ourselves to our training in ways that make others sometimes shake their heads. But, we keep going to the Dojo and submit ourselves to the sweat and the pain and the fatigue because we all believe, deep down in our souls, that we are becoming better people on multiple planes through our training. We actually, as my Sensei, Michael Delaney pointed out on a number of occasions, "humble ourselves to our training" and when we reach this point, I believe, spiritual growth occurs. I further believe that we all have the potential to accomplish our life goals through our studies and training in Karate Do the physical and mental tools that we possess become evident to us and as we continue our training these tools become polished and sharpened.
