Karate Lessons for Coping with Pain and Building Mental Strength

by this time we go through a lot of losses a lot of pain a lot of disappointments even betrayals i mean so many things it's um you know that story just keeps turning and um for me uh karate i mean it's something that i'm not great at but i learned it with my son so we both went for karate classes and we both got the black belt and i'm not saying i'm fully deserving compared to a very flexible or the karate grandmom or kid or whatever but what it has given me is you know there you go towards you you know you're going to be hit but you go towards that hit because that's also where your victory is and what it's as an approach to any difficult situation what it's given me is this thing of not expecting things to be easy not expecting um the other person here because you you know that you when you're in a ring you know you're going to be hit and that person's there to defeat you so this whole idea of i'm not saying it's an adversarial because actually it's like a dance and they're also helping you while they're defeating you by pointing out where you are weak so um that's that's an attitude i've taken into um you know difficulties that you don't let them totally beat you down i mean for a while you take it and you suck it in like a bit hit in the stomach and you know you wait and then the pain goes away and then you think about what you did wrong and the journey actually begins does begin with you where you say how could i have seen this there's somewhere that i was in my own head and i wasn't in this moment and i wasn't in my body and that's when this has hit me so hard so the next time around i should be able to see things coming and i should be able to uh prevent it and you still get hit but you know when you keep looking at it as almost like a game then you say well you're gonna get hit but you're gonna have to and sometimes you know it's like a punch a punch that's coming and you're resisting it it'll hit hard but if you're moving with it yeah you take away the pressure so that's or a punch or a chop you know so if you can move with it and block it and it's like a dance so that's what i figure that's how i try to deal with things i tell myself