You can’t fix anyone but yourself and it looks on the surface that you were not broken to begin with. If you break your own cycle, whatever that is or means what you have achieved is a bit of perspective. For example it means little to anyone else because of perspective. Perspective being a way of seeing things from wherever you happen to be. You can’t see everything from every angle. One lesson I learnt from my Karate trainer after he had already trained Qigong for years in his own time was about tension and release.

I keep coming back to this fundamental lesson because so much of what people do is based on tension and release. In martial arts you move into a strike at times and the tension is momentary. The strike is the point of tension and release. When I went to Qigong a few years later and met my Senseis trainer I found out that tension wasn’t even necessary at all. Tension was like a magnet for negative energy. That is most people’s reality and most people spend their lives wound up and tense. That is a point of perspective.

On the other hand you don’t function by being completely relaxed as well. Best to be nothing at all as then you can be anything when you need it. That is more about not struggling and having an awareness. It isn’t about letting go and really it can’t be put into words because it is a physical practice that empties the mind. If any crude description can be used it is a lack of tension that readies you for the unknown. The unknown is constant, even if you know more than you should you may not know the fine details.

So I return to tension/anxiety/abuse as though they are all the same thing, it is reductive but what does everything come to? Your body. You could say every physical body is different but the functionality is the same. If you know how bodies work in fine detail you can control these bodies enmass. Is that reductive? Well yes because bodies can be mapped even though they are all different. Why do people use mobile phones like their lives depended on it? People studied bodies/minds/functionality. It’s all the same thing although you can zoom in on specifics. Control bodies. Money. Power. Influence.

Coming back to martial arts it also reduces to controlling bodies, hopefully your own body ideally. Hopefully you can control yourself. Why compete with others? Why do you want to force your ideas and values onto other bodies? Control. The most important question that needs to be asked is can you control yourself? The reason this is important is because so many other influences vie for control. Some people want to be told what to do and others resist. Resistance isn’t always possible and there is a lot out of our control. Yet if you have self control and reliance that is one issue solved.