This is Your Journey
- By Janis McGrath
- Published 05/3/2008
Janis McGrath
I am co-owner of an internal martial arts/healing arts school. We teach the arts of Hsing yi, Ba Kua, Tai Chi, and QiGong. Our students are dedicated individuals willing to do the hard work it takes to achieve excellence and spiritual growth. I am the written voice of my partner who has taught martial arts for 15 years. He rejected a death sentence by western doctors and sought healing and life through the Eastern Healing and Internal Martial Arts.
What choices will you make for this journey? Will you choose weakness or strength? Will you choose sickness or health? Will you choose to quit each time that something gets difficult or painful or will you choose to persist and find a way to succeed? Will you choose to serve yourself or to serve others? Will you choose to center your life on your wants and desires or will you be able to set those aside to nurture and support those around you? Will you choose to indulge in addictions of the physical world or will you choose to experience the wonder and insight of a more spiritual path? Will you choose to sit on the sidelines or will you jump right in with both feet, looking forward with joy to each new adventure?
Most people would answer these questions in the positive as long as the questions are hypothetical and don't require a actual long term time, effort, and integrity committment on their part. Who would honestly say that they would choose weakness or addiction? But look at how many people's lives revolve around emotional weakness or addiction to prescription drugs, alcohol, or illegal drugs. Those same
people have chosen to set aside the needs of their families in order to support and indulge in these weaknesses. They live in denial that their poor choices affect their children.
Parents make choices every day that affect their children for a lifetime. They are their children's strongest role model until the time the child goes to high school. Then the influence of friends takes over. Parents who choose to respond to their frustrations of failings by calling their children names and hitting them are teaching their children that they should feel shame for just existing; that love equals verbal and physical abuse. They have taught their children to seek out mates who will demean them and physically harm them. They have taught them that they are not worth much and they shouldn't expect to be treated with respect and value. Those same parents will wonder why their children never make good choices in their friends, or in the people they choose to date and marry. Unfortunately, the parents will probably never make the connection that they trained their child to seek out someone just as emotionally damaged as they are.
This is your journey through life. Choose carefully and let no one else make those choices for you.
Most people would answer these questions in the positive as long as the questions are hypothetical and don't require a actual long term time, effort, and integrity committment on their part. Who would honestly say that they would choose weakness or addiction? But look at how many people's lives revolve around emotional weakness or addiction to prescription drugs, alcohol, or illegal drugs. Those same
Parents make choices every day that affect their children for a lifetime. They are their children's strongest role model until the time the child goes to high school. Then the influence of friends takes over. Parents who choose to respond to their frustrations of failings by calling their children names and hitting them are teaching their children that they should feel shame for just existing; that love equals verbal and physical abuse. They have taught their children to seek out mates who will demean them and physically harm them. They have taught them that they are not worth much and they shouldn't expect to be treated with respect and value. Those same parents will wonder why their children never make good choices in their friends, or in the people they choose to date and marry. Unfortunately, the parents will probably never make the connection that they trained their child to seek out someone just as emotionally damaged as they are.
This is your journey through life. Choose carefully and let no one else make those choices for you.
