weird dreams - and the realizations that followed
Submitted by dont_know_karate on Mon, 02/05/2007 - 9:16amThe past few nights I've had some weird dreams. I've been sleeping long and hard and it feels good. I can't remember dreaming like this in a LONG time, sexual dreams, fun dreams, and now stress dreams.
I woke up from a dream where it seemed like my whole growing up life was condensed into one situation which caused me to have a breakdown/panic attack in my dream. I could barely breathe and that's what woke me up.
Today was the first time when I woke up relieved to be living my current life. To have the first thought not be "fuuuck, still here?". And as I woke up nice and slowly with the sun shining on my face and a purry cat on my hip, I realized that I am living the life that I would've *loved* to have at 15. That I created everything to work for me, and it mostly does.
And I realized that my new situation is something I've jumped into like a life raft to prove to everyone that "I'm okay", but that I don't have to stick with it if it doesn't work for me...I can create something else.
Last night I read a snippet of an Abraham book with a Q&A section at the end. The question was about how a mother can get her head-strong 5 y.o. to obey. (Jesus, I was that 5 year old.) And the answer was that the kid is okay and is following his own guidance, so get out of the kid's way and deal with your uncomfortable feelings around non-conforming. Abraham explained socialization (something) like this: we live in a society where it is normal that everyone limps along - if someone doesn't limp naturally then society demands the limp and even goes so far as to take a baseball bat to a healthy knee to cause a limp.
I wasn't born with a limp. It took a lot of blows to get me to limp. I don't have a permanent limp, I just walk this way almost all of the time because I don't want to get hit again. My knees constantly ache from walking this way and I'm sick of it.
The School of Hard Knocks
The School of Hard Knocks indeed... here's a related story, alluding to both your blog handle & my favorite sport:
In his book "Moving Zen", C.W. Nicol tells about this guy who just passed his black belt exam. The next time he came to the dojo to train, all the other students plus the instructors lined up to spar with him until he was completely exhausted. The justification given to the author was, "In Japan, a nail that sticks out gets hammered". It seems that it was some sort of established dojo rite of passage, to remind the newly promoted guy thatpassing this exam didn't make him anything special, that he was still bound to the rules of his little community, etc.
This story issometimes told in karate books to teach one the value of humility but I don't really buy it. 'Sparring' heremeans that nobody can actuallyhit or kick you full forcein the head while punches or kicks to the body don't reallyhave to be pulled. Like in your baseball bat simile, the punishment administered to guarantee conformity is painful but not actually life-threatening. Whether the whole charade makes sense is another question. More likely, you come prepared, try to get it over with with as much diginity as is possible in that situation, then go back to normal.
Anyway, the good news is that you heal up after some time. It's strictlya one-time thing. They don't do this to you every week. My first sensei was of a similar traditionalJapanese (or what he perceived to be traditionalJapanese) mindset. His methods combined with a bad temper made most guys drop out, turned some into rebels, and only a tiny handful into remote controlled karate automatons. My present senseileft his school some time after me, took up with a genuine Japanese sensei instead ofa localcopycat fanatic, then went on to found his own school. His leadership is very laissez-faire, the exact opposite of his original karate socialization (and he'd been training there about a dozen years longer than me).
Yet life and/or society are capable ofdelivering debilitating blows. I'm just not sure they're doing it deliberately. There are competing authorities, with different-sized bats. Others may specialize in healing the wounded, genuinely concerned with your welfare or harboring separate agendas with secret conditioning programs of their own. There are jurisdictions where baseball bats are completelybanned.Others may teach anti-baseball bat defense. Dunno... you could spin this on forever. All I'm trying to say is that one can get hit AND get healed from the consequences. It's what we're trying to achieve here, after all.
[sorry for being so long-winded and preachy]
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Man's capacity for fooling himself tends towards infinite