Bare with me, this is a work in process.  There are three types of change.  The three types are Internal Change, Environment Change, and Time.  Environment change is the easiest one to describe.  It’s the change that occurs outside your soul.  So when I say I want to lose 20 lbs (by the way, thanks to the stomach flu, I’m down to about 188 lbs, yea me), that’s really an environment change.  My body is the environment that surrounds me.  But there is also outside my body environment.  Spring is a time for reflection for me; (not to mention hormones due to the shorter skirts, hubba hubba) it’s also a time for allergies.  I’m affected by the spiritual connection with spring, new life and therefore new possibilities but I’m also connected physically to my environment by the effect that it has to my body, which is another part of my environment.

 

So my environment around me I have some control over.  For instance, I discussed that during my 48 hour fast, my allergies go away to a point.  I cannot control the coming of spring and the pollen, but with proper diet I might be able to eliminate some of the symptoms.  More importantly, with the proper mind set, the symptoms of my allergies might not bother me as much as they do.  That’s the internal work.  In my humble opinion, internal change MUST PRECEDE ENVIROMENTAL CHANGE! 

 

Wow, that’s a powerful statement; I even capitalized it.  What does it mean?  We don’t do it very well anymore.  A long time ago, the beginning of spring was celebrated with rites and festivals.  I still do, generally by having a Cinco de Mayo party.  There was time taken to change the internal to prepare for the external change.  Back before the human being started believing that it could understand everything about the environment we live in, we celebrated nature and the universe in a more child like manner.  We had awe.  More importantly to this essay, I believe that celebration allowed us an opportunity to prepare internally for elements of our environment that were out of our control.

 

You cannot always control environment change, but you have the responsibility (as a martial artist) to control internal change.  Let’s say, for a moment, that you buy into my idea that change to the body is environment change.  You might question the statement about controlling environment change.  Let’s say I want to lose 20 lbs (did I mention that I’m below 190 lbs now?), I have some control over that; I can work out more and eat less.  Now let’s look at it from my friend Anthony’s perspective.  He lost about 50 lbs in a handful of weeks.  Unfortunately it put a 5’ 10” formerly muscular young man down to about 130 lbs.  Anthony had a thyroid issue.  The lost was startling when I saw him during Christmas two years ago.  He had little control and the medical community had to intercede and kill off his thyroid to protect him.  Anthony was my mentor in weight lifting, so it was hard seeing him that thin and unhealthy, but it was an example of not always being able to control your body.  A simpler example is injury.  I hesitate to bring that up, because my boss is a big believer in there are no unpreventable accidents.  Still, stuff happens right? 

 

Internal change is the important thing.  Preceding environment changes with internal change is the only way to make permanent changes in your life.  Again, I go back to weight loss.  I can lose 20 lbs, but until I turn my internal understanding of ME to that smaller weight, I haven’t lost it.  Lost you right?  I have a belief that eating disorders start this way.  The person doesn’t change their mental image of themselves, so they constantly see every meal as something that packs weight on them.  I can make this easier to understand too, until you make the mental changes to accept a healthier life style of eating less and better, and working out, you haven’t lost your 20 lbs, you’ve just set it down for a few months or years waiting to be picked back up.  Part of accepting the responsibility of being a martial artist means to take control of internal change.  The phrase “time heals all wounds” is not true.  If left uncontrolled, no wound is healed.  Recognition of the necessity of internal change and a conscious shaping of that change is a key to healing any wound… especially if you don’t want a mental scar.

 

I like the concept of changing around my internal understanding of ME.  Recognizing the ego/destruction of the ego.  Until you can look at yourself as you truly are now at this moment, you can not make internal change.  It’s akin to: how can you find your destination if you don’t know where you are?  I’ll talk about this some more another day, but I can give you a thousand examples of why internal change must happen before environment change.  The challenge is: are you prepared for environment change?  When you don’t see that injury coming, can you internally prepare for it?  My Sifu talked about this a long time ago in perhaps my favorite discussion: the universe (God) as the ultimate partner not opponent.  Basically the crux of the talk: you are sparring with God.  You have a choice of treating God as either an opponent or as a partner, but no matter how you perceive it, God is always the perfect partner.  That’s where faith comes in.  Can you look at the universe and accept that whatever environment changes come along and accept that there is a lesson to be learned; A LESSON THAT IS BEING TAUGHT!

 

Those are big concepts, and only two of the three types of change.  The third is time.  That nature of time is a physicist’s dream.  Since I only have a BS in it (ha ha), I don’t think I’ll try and tackle it in that manner.  Time is entropy.  Entropy is the nature of the universe that we live in to trend to disorder. And any good chaos theory proponent will tell you that eventually disorder is order.  Blah blah blah.  What does it mean to the three types of change?  Time happens.  You can try to be healthy; in fact, I believe to be a good partner with the universe you need to live healthier (which is what I’m trying to do).  Still you age; you are not the same person you were a minute ago.  Again, you have a responsibility to change internally to prepare for this.  I read an article in “The Best Life” (April 2008 “The Science: Riding the Storm”) talking about the researchers are seeing that the decline in athletic ability isn’t due to age, it’s due to the decrease in training.  The decrease in training is due to the social pressures that increase as you get older and the eventual “aww, I’m too old for this crap” mentality.  So if you train at a superior level, you can perform at a superior level (practice what you want to perform).  This does not mean you do not age.  There is environment change that comes with time, but more importantly there is internal growth that goes along with time.  If you choose to ignore that growth, you will inevitably lose that opportunity.  It has nothing to do with loss of performance; it has to do with growth. My belief is if you don’t accept that you are getting older, you miss the richness of your life and possibly stunt your spiritual growth.  But that’s just my humble opinion.