Gift of Empowerment
In a world of increased screen time, remote work, and independent learning, we often find ourselves alone with our thoughts. While flexibility in our lives and time to ourselves is important, feeling isolated in our fragile yet powerful minds can be destructive, especially considering how fast-paced, competitive, and comparison-oriented our digital worlds have become. As a result, it is critical that we develop a versatile toolkit to help us build resilience, put up boundaries and create mechanisms to redirect spiraling thoughts.
It is important to remember that our thoughts are in the realm of our control – we get to control them; they don’t have to control us. If we succeed in controlling our thoughts, we become regulated and in command. Otherwise, we become a slave to our emotions, following whatever impulse to which they might lead us. Emotions play a huge role in keeping us safe, driving our passions and facilitating our connections with others. However, they are also responsible for creating our unshakable anxiety, directing our negative self-talk, and buffering our motivation to be productive. A lot of the time, we try to avoid the less-favored side of emotions by shutting them down completely. When we attempt to close the door to our emotions, though, we cut ourselves off from their benefits, many of which define the human experience. Instead, we must learn how to efficiently take control of them.
There are numerous skills and resources that we can develop to optimize our emotional regulation, stress management, and general ability to cope with unease and discomfort; however, most of them are far easier said than done. They’re difficult to conceptualize and often relatively abstract in nature. While practice will make these abstract skills much more practical and (eventually) even form new habitual patterns of thinking, creating tangible resources in the physical body may be a sound starting point for developing control and proving to yourself that you can be resilient and in-command.
Self-defense, for example, crafts a mind-body connection while strengthening and empowering us on physical and emotional levels. Developing self-defense skills, of course, is a form of physical protection, but the benefits span far beyond the body and well into the mind and psyche. Self-defense is a practice of self-discipline; it teaches us to control our bodies just as much as it teaches us to control our minds. Through self-defense, we learn how to regulate our fight-or-flight response, how to avoid danger, and how to react when it’s time to protect ourselves. Controlling our fight-or-flight response is the first step to developing the ability to safeguard our emotional states.
The skills we learn through self-defense training translate into the crafting of resilience and regulation. In fact, becoming more comfortable with self-defense will teach us that we have the tools to cope with and even take control and that these tools merely need to be developed and practiced through repetition, just as a muscle is developed through practice and repetition. As we start to prove to ourselves that we can be in command of our thoughts, we will also realize that we can be in control of our lives; we will be more apt to step outside our comfort zones, to lead freer, happier, healthier and more confident lives.
Learn more about our Self Defense: Thrive and Survive workshop, and register today!