Re: Tell me your life story.
What's your story top? haha
What's your story top? haha
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Re: Tell me your life story.
it is very interesting to see where sources of stress come from in a person's story
for some people it's specific people as causes of stress, for others it's the school system, for others it's people involved in the school system but not necessarily school itselfComment
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Re: Tell me your life story.
Edited with the rest of it
Originally posted by LeKrispyKremeComment
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Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun beepComment
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Re: Tell me your life story.
Might post up one, just need to find some pen and paper and start writing my life stuff down in order to remember heh.
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Re: Tell me your life story.
As does mine, perhaps an UNCUT edition is something I need to add.
In fact, one of the most important things, I forgot to entirely mention. My years doing kungfu.
From grade 7 and onwards for nearly 8 years, I went to the kungfu school Twin Mountain Martial Arts. In those 8 years I slowly progressed through white sash to green sash (no belts in this kungfu, loose silk sashes instead), but after that the sash system sort of dissolved. It became obvious to everyone in the school, which is what I think was a huge goal of my teacher, to understand that the sash colour we wear carries no validation of our skills. It's what we do on a day to day that shows it, and only that. To prove that, he passed down his very first black felt sash to the very first black belt of our school-- a sash he used to wear in class every day.
I should start from the start, however, instead of foreshadowing the whole ordeal. Kungfu started with an interesting goal for me: how long can I exhaust myself for before I can no longer bear it. I got a first taste of this when we learned our first painful stance, horse stance. This simple stance involves legs shoulder width apart, knees bent 90 degrees, arms chambered into your pits, and just stay there. Later we would do punching drills for long periods in this position, but usually it was used as an intense punishment. Any deviation from your legs being at 90 degrees, a large amount of pushups would be given to EVERYONE in the class.
This was the first of the really important lessons of kungfu, which did not become obvious for a long time to me, which is letting go. The intense pain, filling your mind with so many responses, screaming at you to "JUST STAND UP, YOUR LEG IS BREAKING!!!!!" but you have to push that aside, and occupy your mind, find a place where you can interpret the pain as something different. Mentally you can convince yourself, "The next 10 seconds, I'm taking a break..." and intensely imagine the feeling of relaxed legs, for as long as you can. Eventually, with enough practice, you'll learn to overcome the pain for so long that you can just stay there indefinitely (maybe 2 hours~). Before learning horse stance, it was implied to us that we would learn this lesson too. My teacher told me that HIS teacher would not be allowed to learn anything until after he could sit in horse stance for two full hours, with a glass of water on each knee. It took him about 6 months IIRC; at the very young age of doing that, that's some immense discipline.
There are countless lessons like this I would learn in kungfu, which I now know is rooted a lot in buddhism, but I recognized them far before I had any sort of label for them. They were all some of the most important lessons I would ever learn, things that I am never a day without. Perhaps it was the painful process of learning them.
Not all lessons were painful however. One of the most intense and at first, most difficult to grasp lesson was to listen. Not in an auditory sense, but physically listening. By staring "2 feet behind" someone as you're standing to fight them, you see their entire body in your frame of view. Because this is not something you're sharply staring at, it's all peripheral vision in a sense. Peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement and your response time WILL be far quicker. The trick was to look, and listen, and not anticipate a thing. This was a hard thing to get, and it took me far over a year to learn quite well. Once I did, though, there was not a punch from anyone I could not make contact with to block. Even my teacher's hands. Of course, blocking is not everything, I was still destroyed by his ability to set up openings to be hit like a perfect game of chess.
Another listening excersize was with pushing, with one hand on someone else's hand, just moving around, listening to the movement of the other person. When the time is right, keep going in the direction you feel them moving, and you have the upper hand. Very simple; the principle for drunken style kungfu too, actually. It's something people always get frustrated with when they try to push me into a pool, because they go in and not me : > that's a very simple, one point system of listening though. An entire fight, or a wrestling match/pushing war or whatever, is much more elaborate. They are intriguing.
Finally, listening was learned to be internalized, and to be able to read someone's whole bag of tricks by just watching them. During tournaments we would sometimes attend, for the solid hours I was not partaking, I would be a statue, staring and listening to the chemistry of the fight. For this ability to take so much from listening to the two fighters, my teacher made me begin coaching during some classes, which I enjoyed a lot. Something I needed practice in was saying the right words that would project the things they need to change quickly-- I can explain "because your right foot is always more forward it makes it easy for them to kick it and to take advantage of spinning around the side of the leg!!!!!" but I needed to just say "Stay squared, stay tight", despite the impulse to elaborate.
Listening in kungfu was bar far the most important lesson I would ever learn. Without it, as I explained in my bigger post, I wouldn't have been able to manipulate the associations on my mind that allowed me to break free of a lot of depressive episode triggers. By listening on a nano level, to the nuances, to the collective of as few synapses as you can, and listening to where those things go to, the map of my mind was easy to build overtime. Everyone does this, I'm sure, to some extent, or we would have little sense of identity and self control; harnessing the ability to swim around in that neurosoup, to know where to go, is something powerful, that I can hope everyone learns to do. It leads to pushing away the unnecessary mental toxins, can dust parts of your brain that aren't at it's peak, which leads to a lot more positivity, when there's only what you require on your mind.
Reflecting on all this, I had no idea it was at the root of buddhist ideas that all of these things sort of connect with. I was very turned off when I discovered this, because I have a thing about labelling my experience, especially with a kind of "religion". This is naive though; the spiritual side and the realistic approaches of buddhism are never required to be both present. After all, the same lessons can be learned simply by paying attention to your experience as you go about life. I'm very grateful to have taken so much from what started out as just physical excersize.
Last edited by Spenner; 08-22-2013, 11:28 AM.
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Re: Tell me your life story.
Really interesting reads from a lot of people, several experiences I really relate with. I might do this at some stage, not that many people know me here though so we'll see if I can actually get myself to do it.Time to start indexing again.
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Re: Tell me your life story.
not that anyone cares, but
i was born in detroit, michigan. healthy, i guess to my mom and dad. when i was like 2 or 3, they divorced. can't really say it had that much of an impact because i was so young. my stepdad came in around that time. hes cool. when i was 5, instead of kindergarten, i was put into the first grade because i knew math really good, or something like that. from the first to third grade, didn't really have that many friends. i dont know why. when i went into the fourth grade, i was invited to another school. i made good friends there and one day i remember i met my best friend when he defended me in a fight with this dude who took my pencil. i got suspended that day and wasnt allowed to go to the halloween party :'( things went pretty cool from 5th to 8th grade. i made lots of friends even though everyone in my grade was at least a year older than me. middle school graduation (whoo). high school. 9th grade went pretty cool. going into the 10th this fall. hype.
tl;dr: skipped a grade, have lots of friends, i get good grades, 10th grade this fall
edit one
h yeah and i moved like 4 times.
edit two: dang im forgetting a lot of stuff; i have 5 brothers, 2 have moved out and the other 3 live with me. i am the 4th oldest out of 6 children.Last edited by SethColeman; 08-22-2013, 06:19 PM.Comment
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Re: Tell me your life story.
you are living the best life
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Re: Tell me your life story.
One time I was eating ice cream and it turned out to be top flavored.Comment
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