blue

 I have been struggling for a few weeks, not so much with my Kung Fu, well, actually, now that I say that, I'm sure that is not true, my struggle has been touching all areas of my life lately.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I'm not struggling with a specific Kung Fu-related requirement.

My numbers are fine, I caught up to my push-ups and sit-ups, other than sparring, of course. 

I struggle with motivation, drive, energy and joy. In other words, I'm going through a rough patch and feeling generally down and deflated. This is not a very common state for me, especially for an extended period.

I tend to be quite excitable and always full of ideas. I do get annoyed, impatient or frustrated at times and I also get sad, and I cry a lot, but these are usually short-lived moments. My energy may not always be directed at the most pressing thing on the priority list but its ussually there and never makes it hard to get up in the morning. 

The thing that bugs me is that I have been feeling dull and nothing seems to excite me right now, not even the thing that is last on my priority list.

I want to be clear, it's not that I am in any kind of serious mental distress, but I'm really disliking this feeling.

There have been a chain of events lately, some very unfortunate ones, some devastating, and some incredibly confusing. I'm mostly the emotional support system for too many of the people affected by this, and I should technically be less impacted by most of the drama, but I'm starting to wonder what life is trying to teach me.

The way this affects my Kungfu right now the most is by making it hard to focus on the mental parts of my requirements, like my blog posts, my written assignments, and the reading of my books.

I could spend hours and hours journaling right now, there is so much I want to get out or try to understand. Unfortunatly non of it can make it into any public blogs without a lot of brainpower to avoid oversharing while still getting my points across. 

Anyway, this too shall pass...

There have been two interesting ideas I have recently heard that I'm pondering right now, while all this is going on. 

One was something my Dad, who spends a lot of time meditating, recently said. 

My Dad lost his wife a year ago, but is doing ok considering the circumstances. (Well, technically, he doesn't do ok because he recently broke his right hip and right wrist and had to be screwed back together in a surgery.) But My Dad is like an unofficial Kao shi teammate to me, because he lives every day what we talk about so often as a team. My dad is not miserable, although he certainly would have reasons. I forgot to mention that his workshop also burned down or out just before he had his accident. He keeps telling me how this has been the most interesting awareness exercise of his life, and he says that with a genuine smile and excitement. He had surgery and was released after a week and is now managing life alone at home with a walker and only a functional left hand and no support system around. My grandma still lives in the same town, but she is almost 97 and was recently hospitalized for two months. She is also back home now, managing life alone, and these two can't even visit each other right now. Anyway, when my Dad felt blue for a few days recently, he told me he was sitting with it and that his goal was to find out where he actually feels the sensation. If it is a feeling, then where is it felt? In your brain, but how, or in your stomach? It's an interesting question, and I have been trying to pay attention in some of these moments that I found really uncomfortable to try to pinpoint where the discomfort truly sits and what actually makes it so uncomfortable. 

These things that happened to my family are unfortunate and  I'm sure they weigh on me for several reasons but they are only the tip of the ice berg when talking about the last month.

Another interesting thought I was latching on to, came up in a brief video from Shi Heng Yi from the European Shaolin Temple the other day when he was asked if he is happy.

This is not new to me, of course, but as always, the timing and phrasing of a certain concept can make these insights sometimes seem so powerful. He says, or I heard basically, that happiness by definition has to be fleeting. Happiness is defined as an "emotional high" and can only coexist with its lows. Therefore, if you are searching for happiness, you'd better be prepared that you are also inviting the opposite, which is "suffering". If you are aiming for the absence of suffering, however, your goal should be searching for Peace instead, which is not at all the same as Happiness.

This is very simple, but it makes me wonder now, what I'm more scared of in life, suffering or peace!?