Here’s some ninja wisdom that has hugely practical applications for us: Space is your best defense. In fact, until you become aware of space, you won’t be able to defend yourself at all. When you spar in martial arts, much of what you’re doing is navigating…
I realize it’s a bad time of year to tell people to pay attention to that churning feeling of urgency within. It’s the holiday season, and we are all bombarded with overwhelming to-do lists and parties and cards to mail. We are stressing about the holiday…
It’s one thing to know the way. It’s an entirely other thing to DO the way, to commit to making it happen. The Tao Te Ching teaches us this in its very name. Tao, as you probably know, means “way.” And Te translates as “virtue.” But the…
Kokoro is a Japanese word that means heart. But it’s so much more than that. In the world of martial arts, kokoro means something closer to “indomitable spirit.” You could also call it grit. When someone has kokoro, they have the kind of energy and passion that…
Ten thousand years, only go straight ahead. -Seung San Sunim Here’s the thing about heroic perseverance: it requires a really, really long time. There are no quick fixes or fast and tidy happy endings. Every hero story requires a long, winding, and arduous journey. You could…
As I’ve pondered heroic perseverance this week, I keep coming back to this famed quote from Theodore Roosevelt (I’ve changed “man” to “one”): It is not the critic who counts; not the one who points out how the strong one stumbles, or where the doer of…
There are three kinds of effort that describe the Buddhist virtue of virya, heroic perseverance. Each of them is so simple and wise, so read and digest slowly. 1. Diligent Perseverance The first is diligent perseverance. It simply means doing the work. This form of effort…
Friends, I’ll be practicing heroic perseverance in December as part of the Paramita Project. Energy, zeal, and heroic effort also describe its meaning. The “heroic” connotation shows up often because the Sanskrit word, virya, comes from the root vir, which means hero. (One of my many…
Losing your patience can teach you a lot. You just have to listen. In fact, it may be that the best side-benefit of practicing patience is what you learn when you lose it. I was talking with a friend today about expectations (which, if you’re like me…
I’ve been talking about the three definitions of patience, or kshanti, and the third is patience as clarity. This is by far the hardest one to grasp, and to practice. Others describe it as the acceptance of truth. Patience as clarity asks us to see the world…
