grappling

Sabbath rest by choice or by force

Days like today make me realize how human I am. Once again, I have found myself overcommitted and overtrained which means that I was exhausted to the point of a migraine. Some ibuprofen, a hot shower, and an unusually long nap later, and I am still feeling the after-effects of the physical and emotional drain that a migraine can cause. 

My friend and jiu-jitsu mentor came in to teach this morning and, since he was coming down specifically to see and train with me, I didn’t want to miss it. As a result, what is normally a morning of rest and spiritual renewal for me turned into a morning of work, fun work, but work nonetheless. 

This isn’t a bad thing and I’m not complaining, mind you. I love jiu-jitsu and I’m glad I got to see my friend and learn some of his new strategies and techniques, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and I paid the price after class. 

The older I get, the more I understand why God gave us the Sabbath rest. We only have so much physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy we can give to the world before we are drained. Once we are drained, if we keep going, instead of our labors making us stronger, sharper, and more useful, they make us weaker, sicker, and less effective for God and those around us. 

Each of us has a certain capacity for work, whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, and that capacity is limited by the limited nature of our humanity. If we attempt to exceed this capacity, if we try to draw more from the well than the well has to give, we start taking from our health. Much like with finances, overdrawing from our well of health is an unsustainable way to live. 

In the past, I would have simply popped some ibuprofen, downed a cup of coffee or two, and kept going. Lacking the sense to see that my body was trying to tell me something, I have medicated my way through many a migraine over the years. While it made me relatively successful, this drive eventually led me to panic attacks and a near ruined marriage.

After several years of therapy, prayer, meditation, spiritual work, and a lot of soul searching, I have begun to see things from a different perspective than I was capable of in my younger years. The push forward is not as important as my health and longevity. And as I have gotten older and more sensitive to what God is trying to tell me, I’ve begun to see that sickness, in whatever form it takes, is my body or mind’s way of telling me to slow down, rest, and recover. 

So today, after I crashed from exhaustion and a migraine, I took a couple of ibuprofen, a hot shower, and a long nap. When I woke up, thinking about the rest of the week ahead and realizing that a decision to rest and recover now would mean that I will be more capable of doing the things that are required of me later, I rescheduled a private lesson I had set up for this afternoon and took some time for Sabbath rest. 

“The Sabbath was made for man,” as Jesus said in Mark 2:27 (NIV). It is a gift from God for us and it’s free. We need only accept it. And Sabbath rest is not only available to us on Sundays (or Saturdays depending on your belief). Sabbath rest is available to us any time we decide to set aside time for God and rest. My friend who is a pastor takes Monday as his Sabbath because, even though Sunday is a day of worship for him, it’s also a work day because he works at the church. 

Having a whole day each week for God and rest is obviously desirable. God gave it to us for us to take advantage of. But that doesn’t mean we must limit ourselves to only that day for Sabbath rest. God is happy to spend as much time with us as we are willing to spend with him, whenever and wherever we are willing and able to do so. We don’t have to wait until we crash before we rest in God, like I often do. His arms are open for us now and forever. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Don’t leave all of your ego at the door

Armlocks hurt. This is one of the first lessons a person learns in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, right after they learn how to tap. Tapping is the pressure relief valve of the practice that, for the most part, keeps people safe. 

As long as the armlock is not applied too quickly, the person on the receiving end of it taps, and the person applying it respects the tap and lets go, the pain of an armlock is temporary. It goes a way relatively quickly once the submission is let go of. 

That is to say, if practiced safely, armlocks rarely lead to injuries. A person can get arm-locked hundreds of times over years of practice and competition without taking serious damage. This can cause practitioners to develop a false sense of security when it comes to submissions. There is a tendency, especially in practice, to simply accept the loss and move on. 

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this attitude, as it helps a person to not take training so seriously as to get upset about the many losses they will experience in practice. It also helps a person to continue training for a long time through all of the inevitable ups and downs that come with jiu-jitsu. 

Taking these losses too lightly, however, can become a problem. A person might grow so accustomed to losing that losing itself becomes a habit. It stops meaning anything and, therefore, offers no real motivation to improve. 

If it doesn’t bother a person at all to get submitted, they are likely to make the same mistakes again and again without being driven to change the behavior that is causing them to get put into this compromising position in the first place. For this reason, the idea that a person should “leave their ego at the door” before stepping on the jiu-jitsu mats is neither practical nor useful advice. Without some degree of ego, or at least a healthy amount of pride, a person will have no reason to improve. 

This is why, in my opinion, jiu-jitsu competitions are so important for skill development. On the mats in the academy, a person can roll, tap, and start over against the same person or group of people over and over again without any real sense of consequence. Being able to try again takes a lot of the sting off of the little losses experienced in the academy. 

In a tournament, however, a person really only gets one shot. If they tap, there are no do-overs. Add to this the money and time it takes to go to a tournament, and there are real consequences not doing one’s best. No matter what anyone says, losing in a competition match matters more than losing in practice, and it should.

The pain of a tournament loss lasts much longer than the pain of an armlock. This pain, really the effect of pride and the ego’s desire to win, is the motivational fuel for improvement. Channeled in the right way, it is a powerful tool for growth, as well as skill and mindset development. 

Of course, having too much pride, being overly sensitive about losses, and allowing this to affect one’s attitude and performance isn’t healthy either. The ideal is somewhere in the middle, where a person has just enough pride and ego to want to learn from mistakes and to improve, but not so much that one gets upset over losses. Armlocks hurt, but ultimately jiu-jitsu should be fun and something a person is able to do for a lifetime. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Jiu-jitsu and parenting

I have recently realized that one of the most important truths about parenting is that I don’t really know how to do it. Most of the time, I’m just making my best guess as to how to handle a given situation, waiting to see how my decisions play out, and then adjusting based on the results. In this way, I suppose parenting is a lot like jiu-jitsu. 

The thing about jiu-jitsu is that it’s not just about you and what you want. Your training partner always gets a say. You may think things are going to go a certain way, but your training partner has his or her own plans, strategies, and goals as well. Even if you have a specific outcome in mind, your training partner may block or counter your move, or even use your own move against you. 

In this way, Jiu-jitsu is much more of a conversation than it is a monologue. Very rarely can you simply impose your will on your partner without any resistance. Even when you can, it’s not really that satisfying or beneficial to either party. 

All of this also applies to parenting. I have certain goals and aspirations for my daughter, but she gets a say. And when I try to guide, lead, or correct her with a specific outcome in mind, it often does not go as planned. She has her own personality, emotions, ideas, and aspirations that all influence how our interactions go. I may start with a plan, but I am often forced to pivot because she didn’t react or respond the way I anticipated. 

This is not to say that I am powerless over her and that she always gets what she wants. That would be neither desirable nor beneficial for either of us. Rather, my best parenting takes into account her personality, desires, and responses. It’s a conversation not a monologue. 

Another similarity between jiu-jitsu and parenting is that, no matter how long I do either, I realize that there is way more to learn. Both jiu-jitsu and parenting keep me humble. As soon as I think I have it all figured out, I am quickly reminded that I don’t. I must remain a perpetual student. 

Both also require presence and intention. I have realized that I can neither be a good parent nor jiu-jitsu practitioner if I am not present, in the moment, and undistracted. My complete attention is required if I am going to be effective. I also cannot phone it in. If I want to be a good parent and a good training partner, I have to be intentional about it. Half measures get less than half results. They get me nowhere. 

Ironically perhaps, in spite of their similarities, I think parenting is way more difficult than jiu-jitsu. I’m way more scared of messing up my daughter with bad parenting than I am of messing up my training partner with bad jiu-jitsu. Actually, if I have bad jiu-jitsu, I’m the one who gets hurt. Whereas, if I parent poorly, my daughter has to live with the consequences. Raising another human being is lot of pressure. 

That said, I love my life. I love being a father, even on the bad days, and I love practicing and teaching jiu-jitsu, even on the bad days. I am also extremely fortunate that I sometimes get to do both at the same time. As painful and frustrating as it may be sometimes, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Grappling with a ghost

In December of 2020, Jerry Seinfeld did an interview on the Tim Ferriss Show where, among other things, he talked about helping his daughter develop a writing habit. One recommendation he made to her was to set a time limit on her writing. “Just do an hour,” he told her, “Nobody writes all day. Shakespeare can’t write all day. It’s torture… You have to have an end-time to your writing session. If you’re going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you’ve got to get a reward for that. And the reward is, the alarm goes off, and you’re done. You get up and walk away and go have some cookies and milk. You’re done.”

As someone who is often plagued with all-or-nothing thinking, this really hit home for me. It’s important, when building a habit, to start small. Ask yourself what amount of time and effort each day is both sustainable and productive. It has to be both if you are going to stick with your practice, and that is really what building a habit is. It’s a practice. Your practice has to be sustainable because otherwise you will quit when it gets too difficult or inconvenient, but it also has to be productive because, if you don’t see noticeable results, or at least progress, you are also likely to quit. 

But the thing that really struck me about what Mr. Seinfeld said was that the reward for writing is to be finished with it. That, for him, the reward is not in the writing process itself. Rather, the reward is that it’s over, that he gets to stop, to get up, and to move on to something else. I can see the truth of this in my own writing practice. Like many writers have said before me, “I don’t like to write. I like having written.”

Writing, especially when it’s personal, is difficult. The best way for me to describe it is that it feels like I am grappling with some hidden, mysterious force inside me. I am simultaneously attempting to submit it while also submitting to it. Much like my jiu-jitsu practice, writing is not something I dreamt of doing or even necessarily desired to do before I started. It’s something I felt and feel compelled to do. It’s like chasing a ghost that is also chasing me. 

Also, like my jiu-jitsu practice, writing is often painful. It’s a struggle. It’s a fickle mistress. Some days, it leaves me feeling accomplished, inspired, and fulfilled, but other days, it leaves me feeling hurt, frustrated, and disappointed. In the long run, however, I am always glad to have done it. I’m glad to have shown up to practice, to have put in the effort, and to have faced myself in the process. And so, for better or worse, day in and day out, I will continue to grapple. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.