Let it go

The last class before I wrote this I had some frustrated students on the mat. This brought up some questions and answers I thought to be valuable.

One of my students can’t train that often. He at best can train 2 times a week but usually it is once with times away of a week or more on a bad month. After training an hour of Karate he expressed that he felt like he wasn’t improving?! When you take into account the amount of actual training time it is no miracle that his training has not progressed that far. BUT the truth is that he has progressed, maybe not at the same speed of those training 3 and 4 times a week but he is improving.

Whenever I get the “I am not getting any better at this” statement I have to laugh a little. It isn’t that one isn’t getting any better. It is that they are not improving quick enough for themselves and that is making what is already hard that much harder.

We had a little chat in between Karate and Ju Jitsu. I keyed him in to the above concepts. My best advice here is to relax. Don’t stress about where youa re coming from and where you want to go. Chill out and just enjoy right now. Let the progress come on its’ own. You can’t force improvement.

This particular person doesn’t even like Ju Jitsu but wants to be well rounded in their training. Karate was in their mind the real focus for training with Ju Jitsu as an aside. Tonight Ju Jitsu became the main focus and was actual fun for him because he dropped the pressure and the predisposition against grappling. I am pretty sure that besides fun it was a bit of an eye opener to the fact that he may actually be able to get the art of Ju Jitsu at some point.

Training isn’t easy. Life isn’t easy. If we stress about our stress we are making things that much worse. To give ourselves the freedom we need to act we must let go to a point where we are enjoying the moment and not stressing about its outcome. What is going to happen is going to happen. We just have to be open enough to deal with the results.

We all want what we want. But training and life have a funny way of dictating what we are going to actually get.