Motive

"Motive" - a reason for doing something.

This blog is a bit of an off-shoot from a couple of my others, with a bit of a twist. 

My reason for joining the I Ho Chuan, year of the snake, does not single out to just one. It all really boils down to the simple fact that I recognized that I needed support to reach and rekindle some personal lifestyle goals - mental and physical. I admittedly will say that I am using this program and all of my teammates for this support. It sounds selfish, and maybe is, but I believe the program is intended to be used in this manner. 

I just want to get something off my chest. Not much seems to come easy to me anymore. What I continue to accomplish in my life is not mentally nor physically easy. My approach needs to be smart, adaptive, able to be consistent, challenging, results need to be visible and still mentally rewarding, but mostly I feel I need to believe that what I am doing is bringing me true value. I do not like addressing symptoms (get to the cause!) and I despise the one step forward two steps back approach (progress wisely). I admit many times I have learnt by error first, but as long as there is forward momentum during those trials, I can accept that.

Physically speaking, I have mentioned the mass of muscle I have lost over the last decade or so of trying to recapture my life; not to mention my mental capacity that slipped away through an extreme hormonal imbalance cycle which lead to a multitude of body issues that I continue to research, try to make sense of and heal. One just doesn’t rebuild that overnight. With a personal expectation to be better than I was, now takes more mindful effort than it ever did.

Nothing is easy! Nothing in my life has ever been easy, maybe that’s why I still have the drive that I do. I have not given up on me or my family. I include family into this equation as my mind had only three people for which it clung to at one point, and remains a driving force.

The mind is the body control panel; mine took over for many years and my body just depleteingly followed behind. But at such point that I was able to get my mind and body working in unison, the game was on! I haven’t looked back, I remain accountable to me and do everything possible to be cognizant of my mind status. My purpose in life has been what I stand on, my intentions and my daily actions are very vivid to me.

My motives are strong. I certainly still have many ugly days, days that my mind would like to pack it in. Those are still good days to me, because I realize that my mind still understands that things worth doing are not easy. The challenges that I put my mind and body through daily are not easy, but what keeps me going day after day is my heart…my soul. My drive is so deep inside of me, that what I eat has turned into thought, the crazy amount of push ups and plank I do turn into thought and the overall good that it is doing for me. 

This whole program is not about numbers at all, but as Master Brinker so passionately endorsed, the numbers are an excellent tool for me to gauge my direction. I didn’t always feel so strongly about what I just wrote here. But to live beyond the average, be an "over achiever" and strive to achieve mastery - for me. I'm in or I'm out! "Over-achiever" will be another blog.

Will my mind want to pull me onto another path, most certainly, but I believe I’ve learnt enough about my mind to understand why; it’s complicated but rather simple. The fact that our mind works off of hormonal activity (chemistry driven) makes it a bit easier to understand and redirect. The trick for me is to ensure that my chemistry doesn’t become so out of balance that my motive becomes fogged over. 

March 07 (day 38)

Acts of Kindness recorded - 72,

Push-ups - 5850,

Sit-ups and or equivalents - 6100,

Kilometers (intentional extra mileage) - 272.2, 

Meditation/ inversion table  (min.) - 86,

Stretching/ rolling (min.) - 159,

Sparring/ grappling (min.) - 68

# of forms re-familiarized - 6.5, 

Form reps - 52, 

Form time (min.) - 209, 

“Mastery” recite (min.) - 75,

Blogs - 8