Movies and plays will always be current because good against evil is an endless story that represents the cycle of life. In fact, this is the story! The way they are portrayed in movies with the good character representing everything we want to keep and live up to and the bad character representing everything we want to get away from and avoid and pretend that it doesn’t exist. In real life those two sides come together and they are present within us, inside of us. They are a part of the same whole, one can’t exist without the other. The battle of the hero against the villain is nothing but the battle of our inner self: gratitude, love, joy, compassion, serenity, harmony, the high frequency energies struggling to defeat fear, anger, doubt, hate, frustration, the low frequency energies that also live inside. It’s the dark side and the light! And has Jung would put it, the way to deal with it is to actually bring the dark side into the light, allowing the light to shine in the darkness.
The beauty about Kung Fu is that it is clearly a tool to face this battle. It has been used for centuries by monks to re-establish the Mind, Body, Spirit connection: the Union of the Triple Equation (or as I learned when I was a child: Father, Son and the Holy Spirit). It is not by chance that the origins of Kung Fu date back to Bodhidharma, who had a deep knowledge of Yoga. The roots of these arts are the same and each of them has developed to different styles suiting different needs and evolving with the circumstances of the world and its people. Perfectionism, impatience, frustration, self-doubt, fear: I can feel them peeling away as I close my eyes, breathe deeply and practice the Shuang Yang. The harder I train, the better I feel! It’s a very powerful feeling unlike any I’ve ever had before.
Even though it has only been a couple of weeks since I’ve started the Kung Fu Training, time here feels different. It’s like a day is two days or more, because it is long and packed with intense activities and perhaps because we are no longer used to live deeply in the moment with mindfulness and appreciation for each single detail of the experience of being alive. I knew when I engaged that there would be a lot of sweat and tears and I can already “check” both. I also knew I would need a great deal of sense of humor to go through the trainings and honestly that’s one of the main things that keeps me going (nothing like a smile to face any demon, right?).
As the drops of sweat run through my spine and the tears may occasionally run down my cheeks, I know that – as one of my teachers said – I must trust the process. This isn’t something that happens overnight and let us remind ourselves that Kung Fu means hard work for a long period of time. So I guess the warrior season is open! What frightens me the most is that it may (it is!) a never ending journey. Will I have the strength to hold on? Will I have the resilience it takes like Wallace had in Braveheart? Do warriors have time to love as androids dream of electric sheep? I guess there’s only one way to find out: trust the process!
“Shadow work is the path of the heart warrior.”
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