Dancing With Life Instead of Fighting It – By Jason Liosatos

To dance or fight with life is a choice we have in every moment, and it’s easier to dance than to fight’.

We have a tendency to be fighting and wrestling with life, and when you consider what the system is doing to us it’s not surprising, it has us in a head lock of work and bills most of the time. So it can turn into a literal wrestling match, a bill comes that throws us to the floor, we struggle back to try and pay it, then another one comes and we grapple with the anger and frustration with it, then wrestle our way through what we must do to get it paid, often pushing and pulling with it in our heads for weeks. Of course we must act to get something done but with consciousness and focus its so much easier, and we drain the fangs of the worry and fear which is so paralysing to us.

If you have seen a wrestling match it’s all about holds and throws. So being in a match with life’s problems our hands may be grabbed and twisted and we wriggle free, an arm may be grabbed and bent behind our backs and we have to counter by using all our strength to break free. This is very similar to our system of punishment and reward and rule by fear, so we wrestle with the fear of being punished, be it a mortgage payment, walking in the wind, stuck in the traffic, feeling ill, not being able to pay bills, car tax, MOT, a leaking roof, or a pimple on our noses, it seems a continual barrage of wrestling matches.

Have you ever seen anyone doing Tai Chi or Kata in Karate? It is a beautiful dance of movement which doesn’t push resist and fight necessarily: it more often uses the energy to flow with the resistances, which creates harmony. An expert practitioner has rarely any need to even land a blow, because s/he will just use the opponents propelled energy to dissipate itself by helping it through, past and on its way. This is how we dance with life we use its energy in each situation and flow with it not push at it, or if we have to in a situation then get out of its way and avoid it completely, give it up, let it go. This could mean changing jobs, house, country, car or whatever.

Sometimes just not being where something can affect you is the wise way rather than wrestle with it. Just don’t turn up for the fight! A great mentor of mine Charles Muses talked of this, and used the karate analogy. He said that in karate the optimum thing is to just ‘not be there where the blow could fall’, that advice helped me so much in situations, often the best thing is to just get out of the way of a situation or a person.

So often we have to wrestle with the same situations again and again, like a previous one that damaged us or being around the same person or people that we know we would be better off avoiding, and generally falling into the same old traps again and having to wrestle our way. Remember ‘just don’t be there where the blow can fall on you’, or put simply ‘don’t bang your head against the wall to feel how good the liniment is’. Enough said.

Let us dance then with our lives, like a beautiful waltz, and navigate our way through the dance hall with foresight, grace, care and wisdom rather than blindly bashing our way through. And let us know when we need to sit on the edge of the dance of life and take a break and re assess and take stock, and even perhaps change our dance altogether if our old dance routine has become problematic, tedious or even obsolete. – Jason Liosatos. www.jasonliosatos.com