Jiu Jitsu and the Unbearable Lightness of Being

the process of processing

I realize that I have not been too nice to myself, lately. After having a few good weeks of expressing self-compassion and love to myself and others, I found myself snapped back into reality as I wandered into internet and mind places that I didn’t want to be.

I’m not a perfect individual and I don’t expect others to be, but it has surprised myself how difficult this journey of self-compassion can be. It seems that every time I find myself in the throes of ecstasy over a new epiphany, I experience a setback that knocks me down and tells me to try again. I realize that I’m not as superior or great as I want to be, nor that I can be smug about all parts of myself all the time. Even the smugness, when it comes along, is something that I can’t distinguish as justified satisfaction, or shallow arrogance.

Over the past year I experienced a shattering of one of my friendships in jiu jitsu. We have, as one mutual connection pointed out, dealt with things in our own ways. I have made slighted, not so subtle comments about my experience there. Whatever the mode of my processing has been, I realize that part of the healing process probably involves becoming more neutral about the whole experience with time, not constantly wishing for things to turn out badly for them or to somehow be proven that I was right, and to hopefully just get on with my life and not hold ill will towards the whole experience.

That’s something that is easier said than done, and frankly, going through the process has been difficult for me. I would like to think that I’m not a toxic person who did bad things, but in truth, I’ve kept on jabbing the wound and making things bleed worse, even though at the time it felt like there was some sort of short-term relief. I don’t even know if an apology would be accepted as such anymore, but I’ll keep on trying, even if the trust has been broken, probably never to be regained, and differences persist. This is what a breakup feels like, and the pain hurts, even if I probably deserve it.

I think desperately, we all want to be loved. But I’ve realized that this is not possible all the time with all people in all places. And as hard as this realization is, even harder is the attempts to figure out to what extent I’m to blame and to what extent it was an inevitable consequence. Like most things that have bothered me for a long time, it’s the unanswered questions that get me the most. It’s those moments that I look back and think to myself if I had just made a difference choice, if I had just not listened to this or that, then somehow things would have turned out so dramatically different. Who is to say that I’m a victim of anything here, but rather, an aggressor?

Sometimes, when people lose, they post about their experience with the phrase “no sad stories.” Yet I don’t know if I can pretend any longer that sad stories do not exist. The same sport that can bring me so much joy can also be a place of a lot of heartbreak, and accepting that level of complexity has been a sobering experience. It hasn’t stopped me from training altogether but it’s definitely put a damper on things sometimes, as I try to navigate the muck of what the hell was that with only a shred of mustered up objectivity.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ...When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

I have a heavy heart with a lightness of being. I wish to be in one or the other, but for now, I must embrace both. I must understand that the moments of joy in jiu jitsu are inevitably pounctuated by moments of pain, and that to point is to keep being, to look upon my entire experience as crucial to forming the sense of who I am, and then, one day, to let that go.