Keep Coming Back to the Path
"In the end, a person whose karma is too good falls head first into hell." –Kodo Sawaki
We live in constant flux and paradox. We all have kind, caring impulses mixed with greedy, unkind impulses. Many of us claim to care about the world’s big problems—and many of us do genuinely care—yet we spend the majority of our time wrapped up in self-centered concerns. Who can blame us? It is not easy to survive in today’s world. With the advent of AI, many of us have to wonder if our jobs will still exist in 10-15 years. (The Japanese Zen master that I quoted above had something to say about AI and robots, but I’ll save that wisdom for another article.)
With our societal instability, it is easy to justify our widely shared obsession with personal comfort and survival. However, in focusing so heavily on our comfort and survival, we cause our worries and troubles to compound. Anxiety begets anxiety. Lethargy begets lethargy. Rumination begets rumination.
I know these cycles well. My mental and physical health has hardly ever been in perfect balance. Nobody’s is. During the pandemic, when I could not train jiu jitsu, I often ate out of boredom. I was pursuing the false god of comfort, and my weight increased significantly. Coming out of the pandemic, I lost approximately 40 pounds. All it took was training like a demon, competing in jiu jitsu and judo, and getting strict about the balance of macronutrients in my diet.
This is not a fitness/weight loss Substack or a self-help Substack. However, any sort of meaningful change typically begins with the self. That is a point that my Zen teacher, Richard Collins, recently made in our dojo. He stated that Zen practice is self-help in the beginning—until you’re ready to go beyond the self and the concerns of your ego.
The retired pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, who started up his own brand of yoga/calisthenics, says something similar to his students. He uses the metaphor of oxygen masks coming down in a plane. You have to put on your own mask before you can help your children or the person next to you.
It’s true. Helping others in any meaningful way begins with helping oneself. Early on, you have to focus on yourself, whether it be in martial arts, meditation, yoga, or any empowering practice. There is a reason why we use the term “self-actualization” when we describe such practices. I know from my experience in Brazilian jiu jitsu that one has to focus heavily on oneself for a while in order to be able to guide and nurture other BJJ students and competitors in their development.
Later on, the process comes full circle. Increasingly, we have to give more and more of ourselves in order to help ourselves. If we want to keep driving our own practice forward, we need to start nurturing others. (In my BJJ practice, I reached the point where I had to start teaching in order to continue growing as a student.)
Over time, if we stick with any challenging communal practice or discipline, our sense of separation from the others starts to weaken. It weakens naturally if we embrace mushotoku mind—the mind of no personal profit or gain, no agenda.
We do have to make a profit if we are running a business, but we cannot carry a transactional mindset into every corner of our life. On the Chewjitsu Podcast, BJJ coach Nick "Chewy" Albin gave some of the best advice that I have heard about being a martial arts coach: Invest in other people, and they will invest in you.
If we merely look at other people as potential sources of profit or personal gain, our lives will become rather stagnant. We “hold back and dry up,” as Charlotte Joko Beck puts it. I learned this lesson firsthand during my time in Hollywood, CA, where many people approach social relationships with a transactional mindset. I did too, to varying degrees while I was part of the Los Angeles filmmaking hustle.
Nobody is perfect. We have all tried to use or manipulate others, to push our own agendas on them, to use them in service of our agendas. In the process, many of us have done damage to ourselves or others, in ways big and small. Often, we do not even see the damage we do when we allow our ego to sit in the driver’s seat of our lives.
However, regardless of our past mistakes, helping ourselves and others in the present and the future requires that we give our life our full attention here and now. You have to stay in the game—no matter what mistakes you have made or how tangled and knotted up your karma has become in the past.
In my experience, the only thing that works is this: Keep coming back to the Path of discipline, effort, and self-actualization—whatever that path looks like for you. It does not matter whether you are a creative person, martial artist, meditator, yogi, athlete, or something else.
Kodo Sawaki, the great-grandfather of my Zen lineage, fought in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. He said the following about his experience:
“In the soldier’s handbook it says that in war you must be prepared for a thousand different possibilities. That doesn’t just go for war. There’s no rulebook for life either.
When you try to live your life according to a manual, you’re sure to fail.”
What Sawaki was saying, I think, is that life requires you to not just be durable, but adaptable as well. Adaptability makes you more durable. The only “failure” is surrender. Giving up. Like Jocko Willink says in his famous “GOOD” video, “if you’re still breathing… you still got some fight left in you.”
So, you stumbled and lost your way? Good.
Now turn back in the right direction and move forward on the Path. No fear.