Make Peace with your Warrior
July 10, 2012 – 5:29 am
At a yoga retreat, I was interviewed for a television piece. The reporter asked how I could practice yoga and martial art since they’re opposite intentions: the former to bring peace internally and the latter to bring war externally.
I explained that martial art and yoga have the same goal but that martial art is much more difficult to the ego since you’re interacting with not only your own Will but that of another who means to do you bodily harm. How do you hold your peace then?
The reporter asked if I thought warfare was necessary to enable peace, that martial art protected the boundary so yoga could happen. I said, “Yes, but you can’t have actual peace until you improve the quality with which you defend it. Martial art is just as much a transformational vehicle as yoga for as your skills are acquired and refined, your awareness, perspicacity and appropriateness improves, so as you develop as a martial artist you require less force to achieve greater good.
Martial art is not about teaching you how to fight, as you are born with that innately with genetically empowered reflexes. Martial art is about teaching you how to STOP fighting more efficiently, expediently and ultimately that means more beneficially for all the egos involved. The real question, I asked the reporter, is how can you be in the world practicing yoga and NOT practice martial art, since martial art brings about the peace between others so that you can have the opportunity to bring it about within yourself.
Certainly you can be a yogi and learn to translate its lessons into your interactions with others and you can be a martial artist and learn to translate its actions with yourself. But together, they synergize and synchronize to accelerate the lessons reverberating impact.
A segment of the yoga community becomes passive aggressive and socially judgmental. I suspect this behavior comes from a perceived vulnerability to external threats and latent fear of victimization by those capable of addressing force. This segment of the population misunderstands that they can either remove that vulnerability themselves or rely upon their brethren who can. But unfortunately they can, through misunderstanding the ability to address external violence as the want of violence, demonize those capable of defending against its tide.
V/R,
Scott Sonnon
www.facebook.com/ScottSonnon
2 Responses to “Make Peace with your Warrior”
It is amazing how many paths there are up the same mountain, but yet how hard it is for us to accept someone elses path as being a valid one. I also love how we make both yoga and martial arts more palatable by creating hybrids like cardio kick-boxing or active stretching.
By Richard on Jul 10, 2012
I agree with the sentiment posted. Martial arts can be a kind of “yoga”. Yoga means union and there are many yogas. Ultimately, all yogas are striving for union with God, the Creator, Spirit, or the Universe. Higher martial arts are all about finding unity and union: first with oneself, then an opponent, and eventually with everything.
By N8 on Jul 11, 2012