Martial Art of Self Aldin

When we think about all the things we need or want to change, it can become daunting. But often we make it more difficult to change than it has to be.

In this episode of the Martial Art of Self podcast, we talk about the things that can stand in our way of self-change and how to become aware of these and not let them drag us down when we become inspired to change our lives for the better.

We specifically look at how our thoughts and past can turn against us, loading an additional weight onto our shoulders.

I share a brief story about how I faced such a moment of my mind turning against me when I wanted to change a simple thing in my life, and the lessons I sourced from this instance.

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Martial Art of Self is a Martial Arts Self-Awareness Journey with a focus on self-development. Bringing the essence of Martial Arts back to self. Martial Arts Podcast and Blog.

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Table of Contents:

[00:00:00] Episode Intro

[00:00:44] Why it is so difficult to change

[00:01:08] When past failures shoot back

[00:02:43] Failures from the past, dooming the present and future?

[00:03:11] Losing confidence in our ability to change

[00:03:59] The old self taking over again

[00:04:52] Listening to your discouraging thoughts

[00:05:37] Deciding to move instead of listening to thoughts

[00:06:02] Starting small

[00:07:33] Doing something that is of self-movement to get out of the mind

[00:08:03] Lessons Learned

[00:08:08] You don't need to listen to the discouraging voices

[00:08:36] I don't have to stay where I am just because I once decided

[00:08:58] A decision can be changed any time

[00:09:22] Change comes down to me deciding to

[00:10:08] The is no universal law of having to stay with a 'bad' decision

[00:10:54] How to change in the middle of an experience?

[00:11:51] Every new moment is a chance to start over

[00:12:09] Change can feel daunting in the beginning

[00:12:25] When your past is against you

[00:12:44] Don't take your mind personally

[00:13:37] Focus on what you can change instead of everything you did wrong

[00:14:20] The is no limit to creativity in the methods to facilitate change

[00:14:29] We are masters of making things more difficult

[00:14:56] The pitfall of waiting for the right mood

[00:15:35] Episode Ending

[00:16:13] Episode Outro

In this episode of the Martial Art of Self, we are looking at martial arts as a path to self-understanding.

Here I share a story of how I used to see martial arts in my life. I was obsessed with perfection and wanting to excel for the wrong reasons. The training turned more into stress than an aid for me, my self-experience, and my life in general.

Further, I touch on how the simulations we create in our minds about our skills can have adverse effects when we meet physical reality with such imaginary simulations.

In this episode of the Martial Art of Self, we discuss the transformation of our motivation for doing our martial arts so that it is no longer rooted in fear.

When we do something, like our training, out of fear, and we practice individual skills out of a fear-based reason, we are only feeding into the fear. Instead of evolving inside ourselves, we are merely improving our external physical skills, while at the same time developing, strengthening, and expanding our fears.

What if we could transform our martial arts to be a support to become less fearless over time instead of growing our fears?

In this episode, I talk about my discovery of doing martial arts and training for specific things due to fear at the root of my motivation. I mention some of the realizations I gained in the process and walk you through a practical approach I used that lead me to see, understand and start changing my starting point for doing martial arts from fear to something more useful and fulfilling.

Hi everyone, I am Aldin, and this is the Martial Art of Self podcast.

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by martial arts. The training and philosophy has helped me through difficult times, and I've had this inner itch to explore what more there is to it that can enrich all aspects of my life.

In this show, we explore how we can bring the principles, philosophies, and strengths of martial arts into our daily life.

We focus on transforming our martial arts journey into more than just an external discipline. Self-understanding, self-awareness, self-change, and self-creation are the themes we aim at.

We go beyond the martial application and straight into the heart of ourselves: How can we bring martial arts back to self?

Welcome to the Martial Art of Self podcast - this is my personal recorded journey where I focus on bringing the essence of Martial Arts back to Self.

Listen on Spotify, iTunes, Anchor, or wherever you like to grab your next podcast from.

In this episode of the Martial Art of Self, we discuss a pattern of being too militant in our training, or life in general. 

For me, I discovered how this militant approach towards my martial arts training, as well as to other parts of my life often lead me to burn out, and losing interest, and joy in the things I do, or which are part of my life.

Being too rigid with our plans or goal settings suffocates the necessity to be flexible and to adapt to real-time moments and contexts of what we are doing. It is good to plan and set goals, but I find all plans need space to breathe freely. After all, life doesn’t move as a straight line, but rather more like a wave that seems able to travel up, down, back and forth, and sometimes it feels like it moves in all those directions simultaneously.

In this episode, I talk about the importance of practicing sensitivity. It is vital to establish communication with what our body feels like and goes through.  

Then we can assess a challenging moment in self-honesty and establish if such a moment is a chance to push a bit more for growth, expansion, and creation, or if we are demanding too much too soon from our body, mind, and self and should slow down.

In this episode of the Martial Art of Self, we continue exploring some further dimensions of the Martial Arts personality.

In particular, we open up and discuss the pattern of chasing positive feelings through our art, or whatever it is we are doing.

More often than not we are trying to generate some powerful positive feelings to boost our ego, or we look for positive feelings to superimpose onto the negative way we truly feel deep within ourselves, or life.

Here I tell my story of how I chased some positive feelings to boost my ego or compensate for the negative emotions I felt inside. I list some of the core applications that I use to face and work through my negative emotions.

The essential question I ask here is whether the things we do - such as martial arts - grow our person or our ego.