 In Kempo, we have strong symbolism with the tiger and the dragon. The tiger embodies physical and earthly strength, while the dragon signifies a higher level of being, awareness, and discipline. We learn how to become the dragon so that we can control the tiger. But what we're going to discuss today is, sometimes you have to keep the dragon in check too. Now, we're not going to spend a ton of time on the obvious mental benefits. I mean, we all know what they are. We all know about how you're going to get better memory and how you're going to get better intention and all that. That's ingrained in us as we train. But today I want to talk about more of a few things that, if you're a beginner, some things you can look forward to and stuff to keep in mind, and also stuff that might be easy to forget even once you get experience. So the first thing is, understand the material better. This to me is paramount because why train if you don't understand it? If you are a new student, don't just memorize what you're being taught. It's not a matter of just learning the motions, learning the movements, and then repeating them. You have to break them down. So, and that's a big mistake that a lot of beginners make is, oh, my instructor told me to do this. I'm just going to do this. If you're allowed to ask questions, I know a lot of traditional arts are not allowed to ask questions, but a lot of modern day ones you are, I encourage asking. Understand what you're doing. If you're not sure why you're stepping a certain way or why Akata has this move or why you're doing this grab, ask. Ask for a breakdown and be mindful of it. So as you train and get more moves, see how they relate to each other. So as you continue, it's just like in school, if you're just going to memorize a paragraph for a test or memorize test answers, you're not going to retain that information. You want to understand it. So and my instructor always used to say to me, too, is you don't really understand the technique until you can explain it to somebody else. So that also rang true, and that helps when you're teaching. If you can teach a technique to somebody else or at least explain it, then that gives you a better understanding of it versus just memorizing the motion. That also applies to if you're experienced, you know. If you've been doing it for 20 years and you probably know the techniques inside and out, it doesn't hurt to go back. Go back to your wipeout level, see if you can find anything new. A lot of systems, it's not just you do A, then you do B, then you do C. There's layers. Kempo, especially, I'm going back to my earliest material, and I know people, other arts, they're going back to their wipeout material, and they're finding patterns. They're finding things, even little tiny things they didn't know before, and it's kind of reinvigorating them. I'm appreciating the material much better because I'm seeing the relationship better. So even if you're experienced, go back to your beginner stuff and see if you can find more. Or how can you, if you figure it out, how can you apply more meaning to it if you don't find it already built in there? And this even applies. I know I said the word cotton. A lot of you are like, oh, cotton is garbage. This doesn't help you fight. This applies to all martial arts, in my opinion, even MMA and sports fighting. When you learn to be a better fighter, are you just memorizing how to throw a jab or punch, or do you work strategy? There's always a better way to go back to material and make it more efficient, make it more effective, whether it's speed or less damage to your body, whatever. There's a lot of ways you can still go back and refine. And on that note, I do want to recommend a channel called Hard to Hurt by IC Mike. He's an MMA fighter. He's got a lot of fantastic tips. He takes a lot of basic fighting tips, and he expands on them, and he kind of breaks them down, and he shows you a lot of great insight. So basically, this topic relates to all martial arts, whether you're in it for sport, whether you're in it for self-defense, or you want it just for kata or mental health, whatever. You can always find a way to improve what you're learning. So the martial arts are great for stress relief and focus. Well, why? Well, there's the obvious reason. One, exercise is known to help you with blood pressure and help you kind of focus on what you're doing. To me, and a lot of martial arts I know, it just feels good to move sometimes. When you get into a groove, when you're focusing on your motions and you get your body and mind working together and sink, sometimes that feels amazing. Stress is sometimes feeling like you're out of control. Things are out of your control. You get overwhelmed. Martial arts, and when you have that mind and body connection, you're in control of something. It gives you a little bit of something back, even if it's just you're taking a break out of your day and you're doing a kata for a half hour or whatever, you're getting some sort of mental control back. So I think that puts something in perspective, and I think that helps in terms of stress relief and that respect. And that's one really good application for kata. A lot of people poo poo on kata. I think there's a lot of good reasons you could do kata, and it's not always just for self-defense and fighting, but there's a lot of good knowledge in them. And look, me personally, I have a really busy mind. I work all the time, way more than I should. We do the channel on top of that. I should meditate more. I'm working on that, just to kind of silence and slow down and be in the moment. To me, the martial arts in kata is kind of like my form of meditation in a certain way. I find peace when I start to review techniques. So sometimes I'll do reviews. If I'm really trying to be academic, I wanna break something down or I wanna study and analyze. Sometimes I just wanna move. If I haven't had a rough day or if I'm kind of feeling overwhelmed, I'll take a break or go in the backyard and I'll just do a kata or I'll just do moves. I'll just focus on the movements themselves. I find peace in just slowly doing the movements. Meditation is focusing on breathing. I like to focus on movement. And it's just me and my movements and my body and mind working together. That to me is my form of meditation. And sometimes I like to take it up a notch. And if you like to work outside, I'm sure a lot of you do too, is the environment. And I personally love working out in the rain. If it's raining, I love going for a jog or just doing a kata or just doing movements. Like the sensation of water hitting my skin, it makes me hyper aware of my presence and space. So just going outside, just doing like just certain katas and slow moves, feeling water or winds on my body helps me kind of focus the sand, the dirt under my feet. If you're out in the snow, just the interaction with the environment to me takes me another step out of everyday world and overwhelming feelings, just at least for a split second and just kind of be one with yourself and your motion. So I definitely highly encourage doing that. To me, it feels great and it helps me but I'd be curious to know what you guys do. What puts you in the moment? I want to go back to self-esteem for a second. Yeah, we all know martial arts helps with self-esteem, but what does that mean? I mean, there's the generics. You see that in every marketing flyer, everything on the school, each self-esteem, what is that? Well, for beginners, I think it's important because it gives them a sense of accomplishment. People join the martial arts for a reason, whether it be for health or they want to protect themselves, they want to feel safe, they want to just be in better shape, maybe they want to learn culture. They have an objective. They've got a reason for joining. So any achievements helps them towards that. It builds your self-esteem because they're learning. They're starting to work towards a goal of theirs. Children is a little bit more special case because it gives them a feeling of not just accomplishment but more of ability because kids learn, they have so much stimulation with them all day between school and friends and they don't understand the world just yet. And I think the martial arts helps them lead to problem-solving skills. The more they learn what they're able to do because you build that kind of confidence in the kid. When the kid learns that they are capable of doing something that they can accomplish a task, that's going to set them up for a life that have these problem-solving skills. And whether it be martial arts or any other daily tasks, that's just going to help improve them as they grow. Even advanced students, there's still some self-esteem because it's very easy to get to the point of complacency where you're just like, okay, yeah, I noticed, yeah, I've done this. You can still reinvigorate yourself. It's easy to become stale but find a new perspective, find a new way to try something, maybe set new goals, maybe if you've done something, okay, you've got that cod, you've mastered your board with it, do it backwards, do it on the other side, or do it outside. Find something, find challenges for yourself. Always set new goals because if you reach the point in your training and you're like, I've accomplished all of it, then it's time to ask yourself, have you really accomplished all you want out of the martial arts or did you just kind of hit a corner? Definitely goal setting helps even the most advanced students can still build self-esteem. A concept that comes up with a lot, especially in traditional martial arts is the concept of the four Zen states of mind. And we're going to go into each one in much more further detail later because there's a lot we can break down with these but let's just review them really quickly. The four general states of mind in Zen. The first one is Shoshin, which means beginner's mind. This is the frame of mind that you're in when you're eager to learn. So you're keeping your mind open to new ideas, you're letting go of any preconceived notions, drop any prejudices and be ready to learn. So when you're beginning the martial art, you're going in there with an open mind, ready to learn, except new ideas. So you're not judging yet before you do. So that's the beginner's mind, Shoshin. The second one is Mushin, which means without mind. That is literally being in the moment, not distracted by other thoughts, you're free of worry, consequences. It's like if you're meditation, you were actually focused on the one task, you're in the zone. That's when you like get so ingrained and so involved in something that you've blocked out the rest of the world, your mind is focused and laser sharp. Mushin without mind, without distractions. Next one is Fudoshin, the immovable mind. Having focused and not letting anything derail you. So you see your goal and you keep going forward to that goal. You're in full control and full discipline. But you're not pursuing your goal out of anger and stubbornness, but you're focused, you're basically have the mindset like, I'm gonna do what I wanna do, no one's gonna talk me down, no one's gonna stop me, I have my goal and hell or high water, I'm gonna achieve it. It also kind of reminds me of a scene from Rocky Bobo. One of my favorite movie speeches was, you know, life is not about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep on going forward, keep getting up. You know, the expression fall down seven times to the end of eight. Nothing derails you from your goal. That's Fudoshin, the immovable mind. Then we have Zanshin, remaining in mind. This is full awareness of your surroundings and your environment, what's going on around you. So it's actually kind of a two-parter. It's being aware of what's going on around you in the moment. So noticing any suspicious activity or perceiving any dangers that might be, or you know, if you feel like there's a threat, how many people are around you, it's just being aware of your surroundings. Also, the other part of it is, part of it applies to when you do a technique. So say you do have to defend yourself, being aware of your follow-through. Just because you defend yourself, okay, I'm done, I go home. No, still be aware of what's around you. Is there more threats? And it's just doing that. There's some styles, well actually, and there's some tournaments that when you score a point, you're supposed to stay in your stance and be ready to attack. It shows that you are aware. If you dance around or you're like, oh, you should celebrate your point, sometimes you don't get it because they wanna see that you've got that discipline in your mind of saying, hey, look, I did the task, but I'm still aware of what's going on around me. Almost do like a fifth one. I wanna expand on this concept of Zanshin a little bit. And this is a big part of being the dragon and this is an easy pitfall to fall into. I wanna kind of talk about the state of mind in which you can project consequences, be aware of consequences. A lot of people wanna act in the moment and growing up, there's a lot of times that I could have been in some serious fights, but I didn't because I mean, they thought of what's the consequence versus what's the gain. Sometimes pride is a big problem. People will stand up for themselves because they feel like they've been insulted or you have to kind of think about consequential actions. For example, I was in high school, it was my senior year. Two weeks before we were graduating, table next to us was trying to start trouble. They were throwing fruit, they were throwing apples at us and it's like, and it got to the point where we all stood up and we're starting to face off and my thought was, what are we doing? This is stupid because if I get in the fight, guess what? It's an automatic suspension for two weeks. I'm two weeks away from graduation. That'll drop my attendance down. I'm gonna fail, am I gonna fail over that joker? No, we just got up and we made the decision we're gonna just move because it wasn't worth the consequence. So I think a big part of being aware of your surroundings in the situation is being able to at least give an educated perception of what consequences might be of your actions because yes, there's living in the moment but you also have the consequences of what you do in that moment. So that's a big pitfall and like I said, pride. Pride is a big pitfall sometimes that people fall into. It's okay to be proud, but don't make harsh arrest decisions because you're proud. Pride is good, but it can also be a fatal flaw if you let it be. When you come into class, you come into the dojo, leave your day outside. We all have bad days, don't bring that with you inside the school. This is the time to reset. Remember, motion, be in the moment, give your mind a mental shower. You take off your dirty clothes before you get in the shower, right? Same thing here, you walk into the dojo, this is for time for you to refresh your mind, grow your mind, wash your day off, leave it outside, those problems will still be waiting for you later if you wanna deal with them so right now is your time to step away from it and you wanna cleanse yourself, cleanse your spirit, your mind, feed it with something more wholesome and then start again fresh. Do not bring your bad attitude of your day into the dojo with you, it just builds resentment and it just causes more problems and then you're not doing anybody any favors, especially yourself. And related to that note, never, ever, ever take your aggression out on other people. We all get upset, we all have frustrations, we all have bad days, but you not take your frustration and hurt somebody with that because you're mad. There's healthier ways to deal with stress but never take your aggression out on another person who didn't deserve it. Martial arts also should provide us with an outlet and yes, there's all sorts of psychological ways you could deal with stress, everybody is different, everybody has drawn different methods. To me, again, martial arts I think is great as an outlet. If you feel overwhelmed, go work out. On a personal note, I experienced this not that long ago when my father was sick, this was a long ongoing thing and of course life derails, okay, work was in the back front training was so on the back runner, it wasn't even funny. The last few weeks, when it got to the point and when we really realized he wasn't gonna come home from the hospital, I went home that day, I went in the backyard, I was letting my dog out and I just saw the bad and I just hit my wave master. It felt good just to hit something. I hit it again and again and again. I got so focused in the moment, next thing I realized it was about 40 minutes later, the wave master was halfway across the yard and there was a trench dug in the dirt. I just got so locked in the moment and I had just so much outlet to get out but it helped. Did it help situation overall? No, of course not but in that moment it was just a way for me to get my anger out. It's just sometimes you just have to let the energy out and I think the martial arts are a healthy way to do that as long as you're not doing it to another person and if you have a wave master or a pad I know a lot of you can relate to this so I would like to hear your stories too of how you handle stress and frustration with your martial arts in a healthy way and related to that too is I think martial arts are good for finding your sense of balance and your center again. I did. When the dust settled, when he passed and we kind of dealt with everything and life was starting to kind of get back normal, we're trying to focus on work again it's like I had to do something and I actually went back to the martial arts which is about when we started this channel. I started studying again I started really getting back to the material. I had to focus on something that I was familiar with and that meant something to me my whole life and again going back to it feels good to move it feels good to connect your mind and body again and a lot of us forget that and I think doing the martial arts if you kind of go back to your roots at the beginning of your training a lot of us can reset even if you've been doing it for four decades I don't care how long you've been training it's a good way to balance yourself and get back to your center find your route get your mind and body working together again and then from there that gives you a foundation that you can now problem solve with with whatever else you have to deal with. So in our recent Black Belt episode we talked about the Black Belt is all about being a better you so make it happen not just physical we learn the tiger first and then we ascend to the dragon but it's a cycle because a healthy dragon will raise an even stronger tiger so keeping the perfect balance between them is what it means to truly master the arts. So thank you guys so much for watching I know this is a little bit more of a personal episode and I'm sure it resonates with a lot of you out there and I would love to hear from you how you use the martial arts to kind of help build yourself mentally and what your experiences are with that so please like this video, subscribe and be sure to click here on our Patreon link we're going to be releasing the History of Shodokan soon so our Patreon members will be getting early access to it so if you want to see it first please be sure to support us there it's a thank you to all of you who have helped us so far thank you guys so much and we'll see you next time.