CHAPTER 8

Living a More Powerful Life

At those times in our lives when we feel under siege, why do many of us turn toward the spiritual? Why do we begin asking questions about meaning? It’s because when we perceive that we’re beyond our own capacities and beyond our limits, we look for a source larger than ourselves to give us the energy and the strength to get through the challenging situation.

The Spiritual

By “spiritual” I am not talking about specific religions or belief systems. What I’m referring to is the universal human instinct to search for meaning and to draw upon an inspiration bigger than ourselves. Whenever we’re having challenges in our lives, whether large or small, we don’t want to feel that our own little energy system is all there is.

Among the many prayers used by Alcoholics Anonymous is a very simple and succinct one that can apply to all of us as we live our lives:

Oh Lord, help me to remember that nothing is going to happen to me today that you and I together can’t handle.

In the human condition we seem to need that sentiment. We need to feel that there is nothing we can’t handle. That feeling plays a role in helping us develop a sense of inner safety. If you feel that you can draw upon energies that will help you handle anything, whether you call that energy God, or inspiration, or hope, or higher self, or philosophy, you will feel safer in your own skin. In the sense that we all yearn for our lives to have some kind of meaning and purpose, we are all spiritual.

As you walk your life’s path, I guarantee you that the end of that path is death. That’s a hard fact many of us don’t want to acknowledge. Between now and your death, you are faced with making many decisions. The decisions you make reflect your values, your struggles, your hopes, dreams, fears, desires, goals, mistakes, and accomplishments—all of which make up the story known as “your life.”

Many times in my practice of the martial arts I have struggled with a mind-set of trying to overcome a difficulty. And then all of a sudden there would come a moment when something inside me just relaxed and I was perfectly aware of where I was supposed to be. The understanding that I was trying to come to terms with just fell into place. It wasn’t triggered by any specific event. It was more like an inner letting go of struggle. I had gotten in touch with the energy flow in my body and mind. The idea of energy is very important to the martial arts. If you block the energy flowing through you, you will not be an effective fighter. So on the larger scale, if you block the energy flowing through your whole life, you will not experience your full human capacity.

Some of the most interesting martial artists I’ve associated with and sparred with were brown belts. These individuals were one step below the black belt. They were totally motivated, totally committed. You didn’t have to psych them up in their practice. They were so close to attaining the black belt that they could smell it and taste it. They lived it. They slept it. They walked it. They worked three times as hard for their black than they did for any other level of belt ranking.

A big part of their intent was to do honor to the Sensei by qualifying to wear the black belt in their particular discipline. They knew that these traditions represented an outlook and approach to life that is larger than they were. They knew this every time they grappled. They knew this every time they used rolling waves, every time they got down on the mat. They did their meditations. They did their breathing. They called all their energies together, drawing upon the inspiration of the tradition, the example set by their Sensei, and their own determination to transcend the level of brown belt.

Maybe this process is a form of self-hypnosis. Or a form of self-talk. Or a competitive mind-set. But I think that it’s much more than that. When we spend time pursuing something we feel is larger than ourselves, there is a sense of wonder. For most of us, it’s not going to be the martial arts that give us the sense of wonder. It might be what we’ve done in our career, or in raising our children, or in our community involvements, or in what we have done for humanity or to protect the environment.

This sense of wonderment and the seeking of purpose does not come from our everyday mind, which can be the seed of war, competitiveness, and conflict. Rather it comes from the heart, where you reach out for a sense of connectedness to life. Is that not what spirituality is all about: reaching from the heart, assisting someone when she doesn’t necessarily ask for it? Part of the philosophy of the martial arts is to live honorably, to seek and promote peace, and to practice compassion. Any Sensei who does not teach this to his or her students is not worthy of the name.

The Warrior Mind

There is an expression in the martial arts world that says, “The warrior of merit wins the battle without causing others to feel defeat.” That’s a lot easier said than done. When you’re training as a martial artist, you’re training to fight. You’re training to fight with your body and with your mind. To learn and train in the martial arts, you must come to understand that the way of the warrior means that there might be times in your life when you have to employ the use of your physical or mental skills in combat. And so there will be times when, if you’re a skilled fighter, whether physically or psychologically, you will appear to defeat people. We’ve talked about many of those situations in this book. If you use a physical undulation move to break an attacker’s hold, you will certainly defeat the purpose of the attacker. If you use a mental strategy of targeted rolling waves to help you overcome harassment at work, you will defeat the harassment. So it’s easy to get lost in the idea of the battle itself and see it in black and white terms of winner and loser.

The warrior mind, however, looks at it in a different way. When a martial artist trains, what he trains for is to maintain peace. The martial artist learns that overt conflict is the last resort, that you do everything possible to use your energies to redirect negative energies. Your aim is not primarily to defeat an enemy. It is to use the energies in the situation to restore harmony both to yourself and to the environment. True peace-makers actually have to be the ultimate of warriors. They have to know that there is the power to fight at any time but do everything possible to fight in the least destructive way.

When it comes to the conflicts in our lives, we have choices. We can choose to block them out and pretend they aren’t there (denial). We can run away (flight). We can stay in our own habitual patterns and with our own small group of people with whom we’re comfortable (timidity). We can criticize. We can reject. All these are ways our fears taunt us. And they are ways we use our fears to taunt or reject others.

But we can also choose not to victimize ourselves. We can choose to embrace a larger, more inclusive energy. We can choose to be a peacemaker. In this mode, we never lose touch with our warrior mind. We are always at the ready to defend that which we most love in our lives. All the while, we always have a stance of seeking peace wherever possible.

This reminds me of an occasion two or three summers ago when I was riding my motorcycle. When you’re wearing biker leathers and riding, you look much bigger than you actually are. There was an SUV ahead that was making a right turn when its engine quit. I pulled my bike in front of the vehicle, got off, and approached the occupants of the SUV. They turned out to be two men who came from a foreign country. I don’t remember now exactly where they came from, only that they had a hard time speaking English. As I walked toward them in my biker gear and sunglasses, I could see that they were nervous. I removed my sunglasses and smiled at them. That broke some of the ice, although they were still looking at each other in a flustered way, not knowing how to interpret my approach. After all, you know how bad bikers are! We want to kill everybody! We want to be nasty and rude and take the people’s cars, and so forth! That was no doubt running through their minds.

I recognized what the problem was with the car. The driver had flooded the engine and it had stalled. Using a slower speaking pattern and lots of hand gestures, I was able to get the driver to follow my instructions as to how to get the car started again. Before long I had the throttle and the air filter off, reassembled everything, and gave the driver the signal to start the engine. Did I make friends? No. But I sure as heck made them less fearful of me. That’s peacemaking.

Attentive Curiosity Within the Larger Meaning of Your Life

Attentive curiosity in the spiritual sense means looking with eyes that are unfettered or unclouded with misunderstanding, hate, anger, or disgust, or any negative energy. The Zen Buddhist “beginner’s mind” comes in here.

The beginner looks at everything as if seeing it for the first time. Try it. Look at things in your life as if you have never encountered the situations before.

Come on, you may say, isn’t life about learning from experience? Who wants to look at his car as if he’s never seen it before? Who wants to go to a job interview as if he’s never been through one before? Who wants to ask for a date as if he’s never been through that before? But indeed there was a time when you did those things for the very first time. And that’s the feeling you need to recover from your memory bank.

Life is indeed about learning from experience. But it’s an interesting exercise to just lay all those life experiences aside and practice looking at things and situations and thoughts and feelings with a beginner’s mind. A friend of mine used to talk about her son’s sixth-grade teacher, who told her students that one way to get a fresh perspective on things is to pretend you’re a Martian and you’ve just landed from Mars. You haven’t ever seen anything that’s on Earth. How would you explain these things to yourself? How would you describe what you see? How would you explain to the Martians back up on Mars what you saw and heard?

Maybe you would report back to Mars that human beings spend a lot of their time in colorful machines with wheels following a labyrinthine pattern of roads—that they go one way in the morning and the opposite way at night. Maybe you would report that children spend their days in a room with a large board at the front and that the adult in the room writes on the board with a large white stick, and then a bell rings, and everyone runs out into the yard and makes a lot of noise until the next bell, when everyone gets quiet again.

Try it; it’s fun. Describe your life to yourself as if you are a Martian who has no clue what you’re seeing and try to make sense of it. When you play with attentive curiosity in this way, it actually loosens up your mental chi and leaves you feeling more alert and alive.

When you look at your entire life, at everything that happens, with an attentive curiosity, you find yourself living in the now, in the present moment.

I remember making business calls to a nursing home that bought supplies from the company I was running at the time. I would joke around with the elderly ladies who liked to tell me their stories. One lady had a gleam in her eye and a wicked smile, so I asked her, “So what have you got planned for your future?”

“Well, young man,” she declared, “I’m going where you’re going, where we’re all going—to the grave eventually. But I’m sure as hell not going to rush it! What matters is here and now, and right now I’m flirting with this big guy with a shaved head.”

I was really impressed by the spiritual clarity embedded in her remark—her awareness that fearing and fretting and forward casting into all kinds of worries or situations kills the presence of now.

I can’t remember whether it was George Burns or Paul Newman who said, “Nobody gets out of this life alive.” So, like that lady in the nursing home reminds us, why don’t we just get on with it, right now, as it is now? You know, the only folks who don’t have any problems are those lying in your local graveyard. That’s right—if you haven’t got any problems or issues, you’re dead.

Attentive curiosity is a mental position. It’s a stance of being able to step back from whatever is going on and just look at it. As soon as you go into a curiosity state, fear can’t follow because when you’re observing something, your thoughts are in motion looking at whatever you’re looking at but you are in stillness. You’re not trying at that moment to solve your problems. No fear can exist when you become curious about why something is the way it is.

When you’re attentively curious about the patterns of your life, you’re not trying to control it. You’re just looking at it. And when you see it clearly, then you can decide whether you want that circumstance in your life or not. It’s like being in a clothing store and looking at a red sweater, taking in the color and how it fits with the rest of your wardrobe, and deciding, “No, I don’t think I’ll buy it.” So with attentive curiosity you can look at any circumstance in your life and decide, “No, I don’t want that in my life anymore,” or “Yes, I do want this in my life.” You can’t know what you want in your life if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Attentive curiosity is the number one fallback position when you’re in any kind of distress. You may find yourself saying “yes” when you really want to say “no.” And then you get hard on yourself and start beating yourself up. But that isn’t what this is about. Attentive curiosity is the faculty of your mind that shows you that there is always an alternate way of looking at things. And that leads to undulation in the context of your life as a whole.

Undulate into Another Way

Very often when we seek patterns of meaning in our lives, we want things to make sense immediately. We want all the pieces to fit. We want easy answers and fail-safe conclusions. However, life has a stubborn way of not fitting into easy answers and fail-safe conclusions. When you look at life through only one lens, I guarantee life will kick your butt into having to look at situations in a different way.

“What do you mean?” many people ask me. “Are you saying that we shouldn’t have any core values?”

No, that is not what I mean. Yes, we have and need core values. They may differ from culture to culture and from person to person. For me a core value could be truthfulness. For you it could be compassion. For another person it might be justice. And indeed we all have more than one core value. If we follow a religious or spiritual tradition, our core values and our ethics will likely line up with that tradition. But even without a clearly defined spiritual tradition in your life, humankind is by nature spiritual in the sense that we are the only species that seeks meaning and purpose. Once you raise questions of meaning and purpose, once you start asking the big questions, you are in the realm of the spiritual.

A big part of the realm of the spiritual—and a part that is often missed by people who want to be dogmatic—is that there is much in life that is a mystery to us. Very often we just can’t know the “why” of things. Neuroscientists today will be the first to tell you that there is much about the human brain that is not yet understood. Medical scientists will tell you that there are diseases the cause of which we don’t yet understand. And every one of us, at one time or another in our lives, will ask the question, “Why is this happening?” whether about something happening to us or to others we know or hear about. What is the explanation for why innocent people get killed during wars? What is the explanation for why through no overt fault of your own you end up getting fired or your mate leaves you? Or as the title of a best-selling book by Rabbi Harold Kushner puts it, what is the explanation for “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”? Rabbi Kushner knows whereof he speaks. He had to face his own child’s fatal illness.

Another variation on that theme is to turn it around and to ask also why good things happen. Good things can be equally mysterious. What is the explanation for why someone won a huge lottery? How did you happen to be in the right place and the right time to be picked for exactly the job you wanted? How did you happen to meet the love of your life in a bookstore you ran into to get out of the rain?

Sure, there are factual aspects we can point to. We can say that people get killed in wars because war involves using weapons and invading territories where there are innocent civilians. We can say that we got fired because our industry is going through a shakedown. We can say that hundreds of thousands of people died in a tsunami because they lived on coastal areas and tsunamis are an awesome force of nature. We can say that we won the lottery because we’ve been buying tickets regularly. We can say that we’re more likely to find our soul mate in a bookstore because bookstores are important to us, too. We can say we got the job because our qualifications are right for it.

But none of that really answers the bigger why. The best we can do is point to certain circumstances. We can’t really have any inkling into exactly why things happen the way they do. To me, that recognition is what spiritual undulation is all about. Sometimes we have to let our mind dance around all the possibilities. Sometimes our mind has to do the dance around the mystery itself. You don’t know why something happened to you. But it did, and so now you undulate around it in order to discover how to integrate this experience into your life.

Sometimes you have to undulate around your own core values. This happens when you have an ethical dilemma that pits two or more of your core values against each other. For example, perhaps a core value for you is loyalty to friends and loved ones, and another core value is truthfulness. Let’s say that you witnessed a friend of yours shoplifting. The store clerk becomes aware that something is missing, and she asks you, “Did you see who swiped that shirt?” Which core value do you call upon—the value to be truthful or the value to be loyal? Maybe your friend stole the article of clothing because he has been out of work and is really financially struggling. In that kind of situation, emotions are going to enter the picture. What then? So you’ll need to undulate for a time around those values, and part of the mystery of life is that no matter which answer you give in a case of conflicting values, you will not be wholly satisfied with it.

In other words, your relationship with any circumstance in your life can be viewed from more than one perspective in terms of assigning meaning and purpose to it. The energy of undulation reminds us not to get too attached to our own version of reality but to be continually aware that there are many possibilities and many truths we have not yet discovered in our own lives.

Clear Intent to Be as You Are

We all have so many different influences on our lives. Being who we are in any given moment can change with the circumstances of our lives. Take, for example, the person in training to be a soldier, the person in training to become a lawyer, the person becoming a really good athlete, the person in the process of becoming a good parent. After any amount of training, whether formally or from life experiences, you are a different person from what you were when you first started. The person you were before you started is still with you but that person has changed because of the added experiences.

So on the level of purpose and meaning and putting our lives together, we can’t hang on to experiences or realities we experienced before. We can’t focus our intent to be the way we were ten years ago, or last year, or even two hours ago. If your intent is to hold on to some elusive sense of permanence, it is an illusory intent. Clear intent, as I have come to apply it to spirituality in living my life, is the intent to be exactly who you are in this moment of time right now.

The warrior mind lives with the intent of being in the moment, neither ruminating on the past nor attempting to forecast the future. It is only in the now that you can scan your environment and notice what’s going on around you. It’s only in the now that you can experience your thoughts and your emotions. Brooding about the past and worrying about the future takes up a lot of energy and this drains the warrior mind. The warrior mind is always in the present and holds to a clear intent to be there. We only trip ourselves up when we hark back to the past or forward into the future.

Many people don’t want to be in the present because they don’t like the present they’re in. They want to be thinner, they want to be richer, they want not to have to go through that divorce, they want not to have to get up every day at 6 A.M., and so forth. So many of us spend a lot of time thinking about all the things in our present that we don’t like, and we escape from that by going back into the past or projecting ourselves into the future. “If only I had done things differently” and “If I can achieve such and such a goal in the future, everything will be okay” are two of the most depleting mind-sets you could ever have.

I’m not saying that we should never think about the past, for indeed the past teaches us many lessons. And I’m not saying we should never make plans for the future. But there’s a big difference between the warrior mind and the undisciplined mind. The warrior mind knows that all thought occurs in the present, including thoughts of the past or the future. The warrior mind directs thought from the platform of the present. So many times when we think of the future—for example, of some goal we want to achieve or some change we want to make—we find our mind gets lost in that scenario until we lose touch with the present. That’s not the warrior mind. The warrior mind knows that the seeds of the future are in the present and that the past remains with us in our memories, but that all we have at any point in time is right now. “Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow,” wrote the ancient historian Heraclitus.

Make it your clear intent always to be in the now of your own life.

Grappling with the Gods

Someone once asked the great Jungian analyst James Hillman what the purpose of life was. “To serve the gods,” he answered. By “gods” Hillman meant the energies, archetypes, and intuitions in our lives that call us toward what our unique purpose is, to the unfolding of our own unique personhood and our own talents and strengths.

Many people today do not have a sense of even where their talents or strengths lie. We allow other people to determine our life’s purpose for us—the son who decides to be a doctor because his parents always wanted a doctor in the family; the woman who works at a job she really doesn’t like all that much because she doesn’t believe there could ever be a job in the field she is really interested in; the man who becomes a stockbroker but really wants to be an artist and in being a stockbroker eventually forgets about the artist inside him.

So often we abandon our dreams. So often we give up the most vital parts of ourselves in the name of practicality. And then we wonder why we are living in such a culture of discontent. But, as Hillman points out in his writings, particularly in The Soul’s Code, the “gods” are not easily placated. They are not easily denied. And so into our lives creeps a sense of dissatisfaction, the inner voice that says, “You know, I’m not really happy with what I’m doing.” And the minute you acknowledge that feeling, you are grappling with the gods.

You can choose to run away from that grappling. You can slip back into resignation and denial, or you can choose to really take on the question, to really grapple with what it is you want in your life. You can choose to take on the quest for your life’s purpose.

What stops us from grappling with our lives? What stops us from engaging in finding out who we are and what we want? Very often, it’s fear. When I begin teaching people in the martial arts, they say something like, “I want to learn to carry less fear in my life.”

Acknowledging fear and then learning to lay it down is part of the process of being completely human, completely whole in ourselves. Each time we master a fear, we have grown. Most fears, when we really put them to the test, are found to not really exist other than in our imaginations or in our perceptions of what we think the outside reality is. Very often, fear is merely False Evidence Appearing Real.

One of my fears has always been snakes. I’ve always had a very healthy respect for these critters—I just didn’t want to get too close to them. When Leah, a friend of mine who is an expert on dolphins, had my wife and me over to her home, what should I discover but that she had a pet python named Cirrus. Leah uses the snake in teaching classes to people about animal awareness and gaining familiarity with species we might not otherwise encounter. She said to me, “If you like, I’ll put Cirrus over your shoulders.”

My first thought was, “Whoa! This is a python we’re talking about!” A whole lot of other thoughts ran through my head, not the least of which was a consideration of what I would do if this eight-foot snake decided to choke me or crush my head. But here I was, this martial artist and former soldier, and I didn’t want to betray my fears. So I said, “Sure, go ahead.” I have to tell you that there is an unusually eerie feeling about a snake slowly wrapping itself around your shoulders and head. I remember the smooth feel of the snakeskin and I could feel the vibrating of his body. I had every faith that Leah knew her pet snake well enough and also that Cirrus had had a lot of experience being around humans.

That afternoon I lost a lot of my fear of snakes. That doesn’t mean that I plan to go sauntering up to rattlesnakes or boa constrictors to establish close personal contact with them the way I did with Cirrus. But I realized that sometimes what scares us is simply the unfamiliar and that sometimes it’s good to make the acquaintance of the unfamiliar.

Let’s say you’ve been repressing a lot of your dreams and hopes; you’ve set your wishes aside in favor of a life path that has not energized you. In all likelihood, at the point where you first feel the urgings of your discontent and begin to grapple with them, some of the stuff that comes to your consciousness may seem scary and unfamiliar, just as Cirrus was scary and unfamiliar to me. It may seem damn scary to really consider that you could be an artist and not an accountant. Or that you could climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Or that you could play the piano. Or that you could woo the sweetheart of your dreams and he or she would really say yes to you.

That’s the profound lesson that Cirrus taught me: that the unfamiliar can be scary but it can also be exhilarating to reach out and embrace that uncertainty, to take hold of it and really look at it. I’m glad I said yes to the Cirrus experience.

Let’s assume that you want to discover what your life’s purpose is, that you want to grapple with the gods. If you’re looking outward, you’re looking in the wrong place. When you are presented in your life with a major and significant challenge, rest assured that everything previously in your life—every adventure you have ever had, every trauma you have ever experienced, every happy event you have ever enjoyed, every dream you have ever dreamed—has given you the ability to cultivate the energy to handle the stress, challenge, or issue from inside yourself the moment it lands on your plate.

Rolling Waves and Surfing the Tides of Life

There are two things about ocean tides. The first is that they continually change from high tide to low tide and back again and the tidal floor never looks the same one day as it did the day before. The second is that the tides are eternal. Every ocean upon the earth participates in the ageless process of tidal motion, in and out.

When you surf the tides of your life, those tides change. Tides go out and tides come in. There are times in our lives when we will be at low tide. Other times we will be at high tide. And there is all the space in between. The image of the rolling waves is a wonderful analogy to put us in touch with the knowledge that life is a process of continual flow.

Often when we’ve got a nagging sensation of being stuck or of being frustrated, we are damming up our own flow. There is so much in society today to interrupt our flow—loud city noises, demanding jobs with long hours, difficult relationships, continual bombardment by media and the electronic universe. It’s not surprising that many people today are taking up yoga and meditational practices in order to help restore the inner quietness that will make them hear their own inner flow.

I recall seeing a mural on a restaurant wall in Santa Monica, California, that said, “You can find absolute truth in silence. Failing that, try music.” In silence, you find things of great beauty. In silence, you get in touch with the flow of your life, with the rolling waves that carry energy to you and then carry your spent-up energy back out, only to return it to you again.

Many of the most meaningful, magical experiences of our lives come to us in silence. There’s not a lot of talking going on when you’re in the middle of a passionate kiss. When you’re watching stars in the sky on a clear summer night out in the countryside, you’re silenced into wonderment. When you’re on a ship and the moon comes up on the horizon of the ocean, in your soul you touch the meeting of that celestial body with this celestial body, which is the Earth. The sheer beauty of it stuns you into silence.

And, as the Santa Monica restaurant mural says, if that doesn’t work for you, try music.

The analogy of rolling waves helps you keep your mind open both to new possibilities and to gaining new insights into experiences you’ve already had and into the patterns that occur in your life. If you have an open mind to the energy of flow, you’re not going to miss anything. You’re going to be able to fully enjoy all the idiosyncrasies. You’ll come off the top of a roller coaster and really feel that huge downward rush of speed and air—for truth be told, some of the rolling waves in our lives do feel more like a roller coaster than an ocean— but it’s all waves.

And, Finally, the Whirlwind

In the big picture of your life, the whirlwind is transformation. It’s the energy you feel when your life takes a sudden U-turn or you take a fork in the road you never thought you would ever travel. But don’t confuse the whirlwind with being blindsided. Remember that, as we have discussed, the whirlwind is a targeted energy. It’s a pull-out-all-the stops energy. It’s when you decide to make that U-turn in your life or go down that untraveled road.

It’s when you give everything you’ve got to following your dreams. It’s when you give everything you’ve got to battling an illness. It’s when you give everything you’ve got to meeting your challenges.

In a very real sense, the entire way of the Shadow Warrior is a whirlwind path. Why? Because the path of the Shadow Warrior is a path of transformation and transformation is a whirlwind energy. All of the other five energy moves combine to make the whirlwind. And the warrior walks in that energy, only he walks in the calm “eye of the storm,” where all is still and silent. It doesn’t look like a whirlwind or feel like a whirlwind when you’re in that calm eye center, but if you’re walking your life there, you are transforming everything about yourself and your world. You have become the whirlwind.

In the way of the Shadow Warrior, you walk with the knowledge that all the knowledge of the universe is available to you. You just don’t get it all at one time. The universe won’t give Shadow Warriors more information than they can handle at the time. When you live in the calm mind of the warrior— awake, aware, and attentive—you understand those periods when staying silent is appropriate. You understand when to speak. You understand when to defend. You understand when to walk away. You understand not to do violence to yourself by criticizing yourself and beating yourself up for your perceived mistakes.

You learn to resolve conflict by winning your battles as much as possible without hurting others. The warrior of merit wins battles without anyone else feeling defeat and before others even realized that a battle is taking place. That’s right—if you practice the six energy moves—attentive curiosity, undulation, clear intent, grappling, rolling waves, and the whirl-wind—and bring these images and disciplines into your life, you will find that you’ll be able to anticipate a battle or conflict and be able to take action to prevent it from happening. You will have made the transition from warrior to peacemaker and peacekeeper in your life. You will step out of the shadow of fear.

Standing in this center of who you are and surrounded by the energies of the six moves, you stand in the energy flow of your present moment. And where do you go from here? As I wrote on a card to my wife on her most recent birthday, “Happy birthday, and ever forward, my love, to the here and now.”

Reminders to Your Warrior Mind

1.It is human nature to ask questions of meaning and purpose, particularly at those times in our lives when we feel under siege. When we feel we’re beyond our own capacities and beyond our limits, we look for a source larger than ourselves to give us the energy and the strength to get through the challenging situation.

2.Our innate instinct to seek meaning is what we call “spiritual.” But “spiritual” does not just mean specific religions or belief systems. It’s a far wider concept—it’s the energy that causes us to seek for patterns in our lives and to plug our own energy system into an energy flow that is all around us.

3.The warrior mind is ultimately about seeking peace. There is an expression in the martial arts world that says, “The warrior of merit wins the battle without causing others to feel defeat.” Though there are times when we will be required to “fight to win,” the warrior mind sees overt conflict as the last resort and that you do everything possible to redirect negative energies. Your aim is not to defeat your enemy. It is to use the energies in the situation to restore harmony to both yourself and the environment.

4.From a spiritual perspective, think of attentive curiosity as “beginner’s mind.” An interesting exercise is to experiment with looking at everything as if you have never seen it before, as if you are a “Martian” who has to go back to Mars and explain what you saw on Earth. It is amazing the wonderments you will see when you look at the familiar through the eyes of imagining you are seeing it for the first time.

5.Life contains many mysteries and puzzles. Things happen that we cannot explain. Learning to undulate around the questions and to dance around possibilities can alter your relationship with the circumstances of your life. Make it your clear intent always to be in the now of your own life.

6.Too often we allow other people to determine or influence our life’s purpose. However, the only way you will find your own unique purpose is to grapple with it yourself. Not only can “grappling with the gods” help us find a sense of meaning, but also the energy of rolling waves will help us surf the time and tides of our own lives. The image of rolling waves is a wonderful analogy to put us in touch with the knowledge that life is a process of continual flow. And last, as we see our life as a series of transformations, we realize that the path of the Shadow Warrior is the whirlwind itself. The warrior of merit walks in that energy, only in the calm eye of the storm. If you’re living from that place of peace with all the energies swirling around you, yet your center remaining grounded and clear, you’re transforming yourself and your world.