health

Jiu-jitsu seems to suit my obsessive yet fickle nature

For as long as I can remember, I have had wide varying and ever-changing tastes. While I really like, or even obsess over, consistency in certain things, in many aspects of my life my preferences are complex and fluid. Whether it’s music, food, hobbies, or careers, I have been all over the map in my forty some years of life. 

At times, this constant changing of tastes can be expensive, both financially and emotionally. I tend to get obsessed with whatever new thing I’m interested in, diving deep into every aspect of it, learning everything I can about it, and sharing what I find with others. Eventually, the day inevitably comes, however, when my interest wanes and I obsess over something new. 

Luckily, there are certain aspects of my life where this is not a problem for me. In my relationships, for example, I tend to be loyal and consistent, often to a fault. I find comfort in the stability of my relationships and, if I’m being honest, this tends to afford me the ability to be more whimsical in other areas of my life. 

My ever-changing tastes can cause problems, though. There is a cost to changing directions over and over again. I cannot tell you how many things I have collected and hoarded over the years just to end up giving them away, donating them, or throwing them away when I tire of them. Like I said, I feel fortunate that I don’t treat my relationships, especially my marriage, this way, although once someone hurts me enough and I get up the nerve to move on, I move on for good. 

With this on my mind, it occurred to me today that this eccentricity of mine is one of the reasons why jiu-jitsu has been such a rewarding practice for me. In jiu-jitsu, there is plenty to obsess over, but the art is so vast that there is always something new to give one’s attention to. In this way, it satisfies both my craving for depth and for breadth. 

When I want to dive deep into some aspect of the art, I can do that. I can stay focused on a particular technique, position, or principle for as long as I want or need to. And then, when I tire of that thing or grow comfortable enough with it that its novelty wears off, I can turn my attention and energy to something else. 

In addition to this, because jiu-jitsu is a dynamic sport practiced against a live-resisting partner, there are an infinite number of variables to face and deal with on any given day. The size, intensity, and skill level of training partners varies widely from class to class. Constraints set by the instructor such as the length of the sparring round, the starting position, or the goal of the sparring session also create new and interesting problems to solve. In short, jiu-jitsu is never boring and one is never done learning. 

This has been on my mind a lot lately because I have found myself in a position wherein I have too many irons in too many fires and it has spread me thin. Normally, jiu-jitsu is a constant in my life and something I can turn to so that I can take my mind off of the other things I have going on, but I’m presently rehabbing an old injury that has been nagging me for a while, so I have had a lot of time to think and to overcommit to other things. 

I thought I had been making a concerted effort to focus on the most important aspects of my life: God, family, and my career, which happens to be as a jiu-jitsu academy owner and instructor. But then I found myself being drawn in multiple other directions by new, shiny obsessions, and for once, it didn’t feel good. I used to thrive in this self-imposed chaos, but recently I have been craving a more focused, contemplative life and, as these things go, I have failed at achieving this on multiple levels. 

It’s all a lesson, though. This discomfort is my teacher. I can feel that I have left the ever elusive sweet-spot and I’m out on the deep waters trying to paddle my way back to safety. Regardless of how far I go in the wrong direction, however, I am certain of one consistent, never-changing fact, and that is that God will use this experience to draw me into a closer, more meaningful relationship with him if I am willing let it be so. 

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. 

When you make your bed, make your bed for God

At night, my wife is always cold and I’m always hot. We used to try to share blankets, but inevitably, one or both of us was uncomfortable. For this reason, even though we sleep in the same bed, we sleep with separate blankets. This is our low-tech way of adjusting our personal heat settings. 

Because of our schedules, we both wake up fairly early, but I tend to wake up earlier. In fact, if my wife wakes up and I’m still in bed she knows I’m either exhausted or sick. In these rare instances, she is kind enough to just let me be and she gets our daughter ready for school, which is usually a task that we share. 

Each morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, the first thing I do is get on my knees to pray. I thank God for another day, I ask him to remove the things that are blocking me from being of service to him and my fellows, and I ask that he guides my thoughts, words, and actions so as to bear witness to his love, power, and way of life. 

After my initial prayers, while trying to remain quiet as to not wake my wife up, I fold the blankets on my side of the bed and go downstairs. This morning, however, when I looked at the blankets, I simply didn’t feel like folding them. I got up, looked at them, and turned to walk away, but then the thought popped into my mind, “When you make your bed, make your bed for God.” 

With this thought, I was overcome with a sense of great peace. For a moment, it was all so clear. Whether making my bed, brushing my teeth, cooking breakfast, washing the dishes, or giving my daughter a goodnight kiss, if done in a prayerful manner, it is all prayer. 

By setting my intention toward God and focusing my attention on the task in front of me, I’m no longer just folding of a blanket. I’m participating in an act of thanks, praise, and supplication. Maintaining this attitude of constant prayerfulness is not easy, but acknowledging the possibility and desirability of such a posture is a step in the right direction. 

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. 

The jiu-jitsu mats are the third place between work and home

In jiu-jitsu class this evening, like most evenings, there were practitioners from varied backgrounds. The class consisted of men and women, people in their twenties all the way into their fifties, students and professionals, law enforcement officers, restaurant workers, caregivers, veterans, active service members, computer programmers, and more. Jiu-jitsu attracts people of all ages, as well as folks from different economic, ethnic, political, and religious backgrounds, and they all seem to get along. 

It’s almost as if, in spite of what social media and the media would like us to believe, our differences are less important and less pronounced than the things we have in common. On the mats, there are rarely ever any political debates, arguments are all but nonexistent, and, even though we are learning how to most effectively pin, strangle, and break each other, everyone tends to get along. 

Jiu-jitsu truly brings people together who normally would not mix. Where else can a person train with a veterinary technician one minute and a Secret Service Counter Assault Team member the next? On the mats, the only thing that matters is skill, demeanor, what you know, and what you can execute against a live resisting partner or pass on to your students. 

People don’t just practice jiu-jitsu to learn how to fight, lose weight, or defend themselves. The reasons for practicing jiu-jitsu are as varied as the practitioners themselves. But mainly people practice jiu-jitsu because it makes them feel better. It challenges them, forces them to problem solve, gives them a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and community, and offers a “third place” between work and home for people to get away form worries and responsibilities. 

Tonight, for example, I overheard two different people say they came to class to get their minds off of a loss in their lives. One person had to put his dog down after over fifteen years together. It had gotten old and was suffering badly from some health conditions that made it more humane to put it to sleep than to allow it to suffer. Another person lost her brother suddenly to a mystery illness. Both of them were devastated by these losses and came to jiu-jitsu as a way to take their minds off their grief and sorrow. 

Upon hearing this, I was humbled, but also extremely grateful. What an amazing thing to be able to provide an environment that feels safe, healthy, and welcoming enough that people want to be there during difficult times of loss because it makes them feel better. Knowing this fact makes me feel better also. 

We all need something like jiu-jitsu in our lives. We need a practice and a community that brings out the best in us while also challenging us to be better than we were yesterday. We need a healthy, safe environment for self improvement, connection, and sometimes even distraction. We need somewhere we belong, where they miss us when we are gone, and where they are happy to see us when we return. 

For many years, the mats have been this place for me. I’m fortunate to have a loving family as well as other communities outside of martial arts that I’m involved with, but martial arts have been a constant for me for over twenty years now. When I’m feeling good, when I’m feeling down, or when I’m feeling confused and out of place, I go to jiu-jitsu and I leave feeling better. 

Over the years, I have heard many people say that they never leave jiu-jitsu feeling worse. Even when they didn’t feel like showing up, they were glad that they did. Injuries notwithstanding, I can honestly say that I feel the same way and I’m thrilled to be able to provide an environment for others to get away for a bit, forget about their problems, and challenge themselves and grow in the process. It truly is an amazing life. 

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

Meditating on not saying something stupid and regretful to my wife

At night, my wife wears a night-guard from the dentist because she grinds her teeth when she sleeps. Often at night, before going to bed, she talks to me with the night-guard in her mouth and I find it extremely annoying. My hearing is not the greatest and, in spite of the fact that her English is near perfect, English is her second language which can sometimes make her more difficult to understand than if she was a native English speaker. Combine these two factors with the night-guard, and her speech sounds mumbly to me, which often frustrates me more than it should. 

Tonight, was one of those nights. I came home after spending several hours at the jiu-jitsu academy for kids classes followed by team pictures for my daughter’s wrestling team and, when I got here, it was relatively late and my wife was already ready for bed. My daughter and I both needed to shower and eat dinner, and while we were each getting squared away for the evening, my wife began talking to me about something. She had the night-guard in and I immediately got irritated. 

As I felt myself growing increasingly more annoyed, the thought came to me that I had not yet eaten dinner. I was hungry, tired, and wanted to take a shower. Maybe my irritation had nothing to do with my wife talking to me with her night-guard in her mouth. Maybe I simply needed to eat, clean up, and sit down. It then occurred to me how many of our marital spats might be avoided altogether if one or both of us simply acknowledged that the thing we think is bothering us is not actually the thing that is bothering us. 

Life is funny this way. Very rarely is the perceived problem the actual problem. There is often more going on beneath the surface than what presents itself at a superficial level. But it can be very difficult to go deeper when we are always in a reactionary state to the stimulus that is right in front of us. Without a buffer between ourselves and our environment, the world bumps into us and we bump back into it. It’s like a never-ending pinball game of actions and emotions. 

The very fact that I did not react to my wife when she was talking to me with her night-guard in, in spite of my being hungry, tired, dirty, and grouchy is unusual for me. It is not in my nature to keep my mouth shut when something irritates me. I have a long history of speaking up with the wrong words at the wrong time. I’m very good at making things worse. But I have noticed that something has been different with me lately. Something has been changing. 

I’ve observed that I am not nearly as reactionary as I used to be. I have far fewer knee-jerk reactions to the things that annoy me. In fact, I’ve noticed that fewer things annoy me these days. I have no doubt that this change that has taken place within me is the direct result of a consistent meditation practice. 

For quite some time now, I have been extremely disciplined about setting aside time every morning to meditate before I leave the house. I try to do this before my wife and daughter wake up. Along with my other prayer and spiritual reading, meditation is an essential part of my morning routine. In fact, it is probably the part of my morning I look forward to the most when I wake up each day. 

There are many different forms and styles of meditation and I have tried several over the years, but the one that works best for me, and the one I have stuck with for the longest, is called centering prayer or contemplative prayer. There’s just something about this particular style of meditation that really resonates with me and, like I said, I look forward to my quiet time each morning. 

It took a while before I started to see results from my meditation practice which was a bit frustrating when I first started out. Like most of us, I wanted to see immediate, noticeable results. I wanted instant gratification and instant transformation. Spiritual change is often slow change, however. Unless you have some kind of life-changing white light or burning bush experience, you are likely to have what I have heard referred to as “the educational variety” of spiritual experience. That is, if you practice consistently, change will come slowly, over a long period of time. 

As I said, one of the changes that I have seen from my meditation practice is that I am less reactionary. It’s as if meditation has given me a built-in pause button that allows me to process stimuli for a moment before reacting to it. This buffer between the world and my reactions to it has saved me from making things worse on multiple occasions. And what is most interesting to me is that this pause simply comes. It’s not something I initiate. I’m not doing it. It’s just there.

If not getting myself in trouble by saying something stupid and regretful when my wife talks to me with her night-guard in were all that meditation gave to me, it would be enough. Meditation has become one of the most important things that I do every day and, as I said, I look forward to it each morning. I can honestly say that there is no other single practice that has had a greater impact on my mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being than meditation. But I know I have only scratched the surface on the depths of this practice and I look forward to going deeper. 

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 mental, emotional, and spiritual health issues

In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art most well known for specializing in ground grappling, the goal is to pin and control your opponent and then submit them with either a joint lock or a strangulation. John Danaher, who many consider the sport’s greatest coach, describes it as “The art of control that leads to submission.” Greg Souders, another prevalent voice in the sport, describes jiu-jitsu as “The game of immobilization as it leads to strangulation and breaking.” 

However one chooses to describe it, the general idea of jiu-jitsu is the same: take your opponent to the ground and, using superior angles, positioning, and leverage, make it difficult or impossible for them to escape. Then, isolate and attack their arm, leg, or neck, and apply sufficient force to either break said arm or leg or cut off the blood or oxygen supply through the neck until your opponent taps in submission. 

Of course, this is all easier said than done. Every advantage must be earned when dealing with a fully resisting opponent or training partner. The person you are trying to pin and submit is also trying to pin and submit you. It’s a constant struggle. It’s a battle of wills as much as it’s a battle of skill, pride, strategy, and athleticism. Everything in jiu-jitsu matters, and nothing in jiu-jitsu is easy. That’s one of the reasons it is such a rewarding practice to participate in. 

With this in mind, a shared joke in jiu-jitsu is to yell, “Just stand up!” When someone is pinned and struggling to escape, it’s simple advice but often quite difficult to act on, especially against a resisting opponent and the force of gravity working against you. For this reason, “Just stand up!” is often said with sarcasm and received with scorn or laughter, depending on the recipient’s mood. 

Much like “Just stand up!” in jiu-jitsu is absurd advice to give someone who is pinned under a resisting opponent, “Just get over it!” is ridiculous advice to give to a person suffering from grief, depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, or some other psycho-emotional ailment. While it may seem like helpful advice from the onlooker’s perspective, it is often less than useless for the person struggling with whatever issues they are experiencing. These usually well-intentioned comments can even exacerbate the recipient’s mental, emotional, or spiritual health issues by diminishing their seriousness and making it seem as though it is merely a lack of effort that is preventing them from being overcome. 

Like jiu-jitsu, our mental, emotional, and spiritual health is complicated. Many forces are working against us as we try to persevere through this thing we call life. While those of us being pinned by another jiu-jitsu practitioner would love to “Just stand up!” and those of us grappling with mental, emotional, and spiritual health issues would love to “Just get over it!” there’s usually more to it than that. As hard as we are fighting, our opponent is also fighting back, and sometimes we are outmatched. 

Sometimes, our opponent is bigger, stronger, faster, or more skilled than us, and we cannot escape our difficulties alone. Sometimes, we need help. This is true in both jiu-jitsu and in life. No one ever became a jiu-jitsu world champion without a coach, or several coaches, and a variety of skilled training partners. If you are struggling with mental or emotional health issues, don’t assume you can do it alone, either. 

When I was at my absolute lowest in my addiction, I had to come to accept that I could not overcome my problem by myself. I needed help. My parents helped me get into rehab. The rehab facility helped me get into a halfway house. The halfway house helped get me in touch with people who could lead me out of addiction and into a spiritual experience that would solve my problem. It took the proverbial village to raise me from spiritual, emotional, and psychological death. 

Likewise, many years later, when I finally admitted that I was struggling with anxiety and depression, I didn’t simply “muscle my way out of it.” I couldn’t. I couldn’t “Just stand up!” and “Just get over it!” I couldn’t do it alone; once again, I needed help. I needed my wife’s support to work through my issues; I needed friends who had been through similar problems and who could recommend good therapists; I required the therapists themselves, and finally, but most importantly, I needed God to guide me through all of this as I found my way back to him. 

Whatever you are grappling with, whether it is another person or your demons, know that you are not the first to struggle with this issue; you won’t be the last person to do so, and you are not alone. Countless other people have had whatever problem you are having and are willing to help you. Don’t waste your time trying to “Just stand up!” or “Just get over it!” You can’t. I couldn’t. We can’t. 

We all need help, and we all need each other. I love you, and we love you. Please do not give up. You are truly not alone. 

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 yuck someone else’s yum

I once asked my wife how she learned to eat chicken feet, something I have never developed a taste for. She said, “When I was growing up, we had three generations living in our home and, in my country, the oldest people eat first and the youngest people eat last. If we had chicken for dinner, my grandmother took the pieces she wanted first, then my parents took the pieces they wanted, and the kids ate whatever was left. So we learned to eat every part of the chicken and, unlike here, we didn’t just buy chicken pieces. We bought and cooked the whole chicken. From the head to the feet with everything in between, nothing went to waste. I learned to eat everything because I had to. It’s all we had.” 

Hearing this was not only enlightening, but also humbling. It made me realize how easy I truly had it growing up. Not only did we generally get to eat food that we liked, albeit within reason, but we also had such an absurd surplus of food that we never really felt the burden of having to eat anything we didn’t like out of necessity or threat of going hungry. We could afford to be picky and, with junk foods, snack foods, and frozen foods abound, our cupboards reflected this fact. 

My wife, on the other hand, having grown up in post-genocide Cambodia, had way fewer options. Her family shopped, cooked, and ate, first and foremost, for survival. One chicken had to make multiple dishes, feed multiple generations, and had to last across multiple meals. They cooked and ate every part, perhaps grilling the legs and wings, making a stir-fry with the diced up breast meat, and making soup with the thighs, feet, neck, head, and the carcass. Even the organs and the blood were cooked and eaten. 

The more I thought about this, the more spoiled and insulated I began to feel. It wasn’t a sense of guilt or even shame, as I knew that I did not choose to grow up where I did, how I did, with the family I had, and the luxury to choose my food from day to day and meal to meal. We were each born into the worlds we were born into and we only knew what we knew. Rather, she helped me to understand just how little I knew about the world outside of my own culture and upbringing. 

Now, whenever I see someone eating something I don’t eat or wasn’t exposed to growing up, instead of judging or criticizing it, I take a moment to think about what my wife said when I asked her how she learned to eat chicken feet. Even though my mom encouraged us to try different things, I think about how there are entire cultures and customs that I simply don’t understand because of how I was brought up. But most of all, I am reminded, as my daughter says, “Not to ‘yuck’ someone else’s ‘yum,'” because you have no idea what life circumstances led them to develop the tastes and preferences they now have.

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. 

Being a better training partner

This past weekend, I was helping with my daughter’s jiu-jitsu class and, when it was time to roll (sparring in jiu-jitsu), I picked out a couple of kids I wanted her to work with. These two girls in particular are both new, but have been pointed out as having a lot of grit and a lot of potential. I put them with my daughter because she has been training for a long time and has become skilled enough to handle tough kids her age, but she is also a thoughtful, helpful training partner. 

My expectation, which I mistakenly did not communicate to my daughter, was that she skillfully, but mercifully submit the other kids. I did not want her to do this for the sake of winning or exerting dominance, but as a way of showing them that jiu-jitsu works, that an otherwise sweet young girl can develop effective fighting skills, and that you don’t have to injure someone in order to control and defeat them. But that’s not what happened. Instead, she just laid there in her guard and let them work. 

This is not an uncommon thing in jiu-jitsu when people are working on static drills meant to develop new skills, but this is not how rolling is supposed to work. Rolling is supposed to be live practice against real resistance. Instead of being skilled, my daughter was being nice. It’s hard to fault her for it, but truth be told, no one involved got better at jiu-jitsu because of it. 

On the ride home after class, we had a long talk. I explained to her why I paired her up specifically with these two girls. I told her that I wanted them to experience good jiu-jitsu done with thoughtfulness and care because I know that she is capable of that. I also explained that, by not trying, she did these girls a great disservice. 

By her not trying, these girls weren’t challenged, and it’s our challenges that make us better, stronger, and more resilient. Whereas she thought that she was doing them a favor by letting them work, she had actually robbed them of the opportunity to experience jiu-jitsu as it can be. Instead of inspiring them, she gave them a false sense of confidence. 

I did my best to explain this from a place of compassion and understanding. I know that she is a kind, caring girl and doesn’t like to hurt anyone. She most likely thought she was being nice. The problem with this, however, is that it didn’t help anyone improve and, ultimately, we are in jiu-jitsu to help each other improve. 

Without good training partners who are both tough and trustworthy, jiu-jitsu is kind of an empty practice. It is our partners and the skillful resistance they give us that brings out our skills and pushes us to strive for improvement. Without the tension created by good training partners, we stagnate and training becomes pointless. 

It is her job as their senior, I explained, to push them her partners’ growth. It is the senior student’s role to give their juniors enough resistance that they have to get better, but not so much that they can’t. The goal isn’t simply to beat them and it is especially not to humiliate them. Rather, the goal is to show them what is possible and to lead them by example in that direction. 

As with most lessons I try to teach my daughter, however, she wasn’t the only one who needed to hear this. As the words came out of my mouth, all of the times I was a lazy, passive, and apathetic training partner flashed through my mind. I needed to hear all of this as much as I needed to say it to her. 

In fact, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine with whom I do jiu-jitsu said something quite similar to me as I was saying to my daughter. He approached me after practice one night and said, “There are people who train here who have never felt your real skills and your top pressure, and you are doing them a disservice.” Confused, I asked him what he meant. He replied, “It’s cool that you want to work on your weaknesses and I know you are trying to be nice, but you are giving these folks a false sense of confidence. You are allowing them to believe they are better than they are. They don’t know what it feels like when you roll with intention and really put it on them, and they should. They need to know. They need to know as a student what you are capable of, but they also need to know, through your example, what is possible.” 

Once again, fatherhood proved to be a reflection upon my life and my character. It is the mirror I was incapable of staring into until this little blessing of a child came along. Much like I wanted her to do with her training partners, she pushes me to be better. She forces me to look at my own deficiencies and makes me question what I thought I knew about myself and my place in this world, and her presence does this, not in a way that is humiliating or demoralizing, but that feels true and generous. 

We are not islands unto ourselves. We have to have other people in our lives who are going to push us to become our best selves, and we have to do the same for others. This is what community is for. We are not here to lie down and let others walk all over us. Nor are we here to trample and take advantage of the weak. We were put on this earth together so that we can lovingly and thoughtfully push each other to be better, and to help those who cannot help themselves. 

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. 

Guidelines for a morning prayer practice

I tend to overcomplicate and overthink things, and this often results in my being overwhelmed and overextended. If I don’t have a routine and a structure to my day, I can be all over the place and the time will get away from me without my ever having actually accomplished anything. It’s not that I just sit around doing nothing, but that I lack focus, or rather that I get overly focused on the wrong things or too many things and gain no headway on anything. 

I’ve never been diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that I have some level of ADHD. When I was a kid, ADHD diagnoses were much more rare and, not being physically hyperactive, I suppose I didn’t cause enough trouble to warrant attention. It wasn’t until I was in my early 40’s that it occurred to me that ADHD doesn’t necessarily mean a person has to be physically hyperactive, but it can also mean that they are mentally hyperactive with no outward signs of hyperactivity at all. 

Following this train of thought, I reflected back on my life and my complete inability to pay attention to things that didn’t interest me, coupled with an absolutely laser focused obsessive attention on things that did. In school, I either got A’s or I got C’s and D’s. It all depended upon my level of interest in the subject or the teacher. Eventually, I found things outside of school that interested me more than school and I stopped attending altogether. 

Fast forward many years and this dichotomy of inattentiveness toward things that don’t interest me and obsessiveness toward things that do still rings true. It’s both a blessing and a curse, a double-edged sword if you will. However, by accepting to the best of my ability the truth of who I am and how my mind works, I have learned to harness this aspect of my nature as more of a feature than a bug. 

As an aside, I have a friend who insists that there is no such thing as ADHD. He states that there are two types of people: farming-minded people and hunter-gatherer-minded people. Farming-minded people, he theorizes are those who can sit still, stay in one place for extended periods of time, and pay attention, even when it’s boring. Hunter-gatherer-minded people, on the other hand, are always active, can’t sit still, and tend to be always on the go, unable to stay focused on the mundane, but capable of completely obsessing over that which interests them. 

Either way, not wanting to be a victim of my own mind, I have had to develop certain tools that make it possible for me to focus on what matters and accomplish the things that need to get done. Perhaps the most important tool in my toolbox is routine. Having a set routine, at least to the degree that it is possible without being overly rigid or driving my wife crazy, helps me get more of the important things done without my mind wandering to all of the unimportant things that distract me from my goals. One of my most important routines is my morning prayer hour. 

Almost every morning, I wake up at around 5:30am to do my morning prayers. Some days, I wake up earlier and some days I give myself the grace to wake up later, but it usually averages out to around 5:30am. This time is significant because it’s an hour before my daughter wakes up to get ready for school and I need that full amount of time to give the time to my prayers that feels best for me. 

One challenge with whatever condition I have, whether it be ADHD or hunter-gatherer mind, is that I can even overcomplicate prayer. For this reason, I have created a set of guidelines for myself that keep me on track. I don’t always adhere to these guidelines perfectly and if I tried to, I’d probably get burned out, but I use them as guardrails to ensure that I stay the course. 

The guidelines I made for myself are strict, but the order is not strict. In fact, the order is one place where I give myself flexibility so that I can follow the spirit, as it were, and also so that I don’t get bored. Keeping this in mind, here is a list of the things that I require of myself during my morning prayer hour. Again, the order changes from day to day. 

  1. Biblical Reading: I use the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ daily Bible readings for mass which I receive in my email inbox every morning. This allows me not to have to think about what to read from day-to-day. The readings are provided for me so I can save that creative thought energy for some other task. 
  2. 20 Minutes of Silent Prayer: I use the Centering Prayer app. I’ve been using this app for quite some time now. It’s free, simple to use, and follows Father Thomas Keating’s guidelines for centering prayer. There are plenty of other prayer and meditation apps out there and I’ve tried several, but this one just seems to suit me for now. 
  3. Spiritual Reading: This is where I really let the spirit guide me. I have a stack of books next to my prayer chair and I am in the middle of several of them at any given time. Did someone say ADHD? Some of these books are old books of spiritual wisdom, some are more modern, and some are books of spiritual quotes or sayings. Some days I read a little bit from a few of them and other days I stick to just one. This freedom keeps me interested which is what makes the practice sustainable for me. 
  4. Spiritual Writing: Every day, I write and publish something for my blog Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. These are short prayer-like poems (Psalms?) which serve multiple purposes for me. On one hand, they help me listen to what I feel like God is saying to me and to channel that creatively. On the other hand, these prayer-poems are an act of sharing. I put them into the world with the hope that some reader somewhere may feel moved by upon reading them and, therefore, by God through them, bringing that person closer to him. Additionally, I feel called to creativity and writing is one way by which I answer that call. 

As I stated above, these are merely guidelines. I follow them to the best of my ability, but I’m not perfect. That said, at night when thinking about the following day, I always take this prayer hour into consideration. My time with God in the morning has become the most important part of my day. With it, I feel closer to him. Without it, as my therapist once said, “It’s amazing how quickly things fall apart.” 

Adhering to this structure may seem burdensome to some, like it robs one of spontaneity and creativity, but I find the opposite to be true. By starting my day off with structure, with a routine, I don’t have to think about what I’m going to do first thing in the morning. I know exactly how the first part of my day is going to go, give or take. By not wasting precious energy and attention on the beginning of my day, I am therefore freed up to direct that energy and attention elsewhere, like on my daughter and my wife. 

It’s important to note that I did not develop this routine overnight. It has been worked out over a long period of time with things added and removed as the spirit directs me, but I have been using this iteration for a while and it seems to be a good fit for me for now. As my wife says to our daughter, “Subject to change.” It’s a practice and the important thing is that it requires practice. 

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. 

Evolution of a blog pt. 1

Every day, for quite some time now, I have been writing and publishing a short blog post for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog. I’ve been doing this for several years and, other than missing a day or two here and there, and a couple of longer periods where I thought I had quit altogether, I have been faithful to this practice. I honestly can’t even remember how or why I started, but I do know that I got the idea of posting daily from listing to an interview with Seth Godin who has been writing and publishing a daily blog post for well over a decade.

My blog didn’t start out as what it is now. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was posting on an entirely different site than the one I’ve been using for the last few years. The name has also changed over time. At first, I don’t think it had a name. Then, it became Holistic Budo. 

Sometime before my first martial art teacher, Joe Sheya, passed away, I had started doing a form of qigong, a mind-and-body movement practice for developing so-called internal strength, to supplement my hapkido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu practices. Upon hearing that I was studying qigong, Joe said to me, “That’s good, but don’t make the mistake I made by thinking your qigong practice is separate from your martial art practice. Find a way to integrate them.” 

The name Holistic Budo was meant to embody this idea of the integration of the holistic arts with the martial arts, with budo being the Japanese word for ‘martial arts.’ I thought that I would use my blog to document my journey through the arts, but art tends to have a mind of its own and the idea we start with is not always the art we end up with. In spite of my intentions, Holistic Budo evolved into my writing short philosophical posts wherein I shared experience, wisdom, or advice for living a better life. 

Sometimes I wrote about something I had experienced throughout the day. Sometimes I was writing to myself, basically giving myself advice for how I could have handled a situation or experience better. Other times, I imagined that I was leaving a trail of literary breadcrumbs for my daughter should she need it someday if I were no longer here to talk to. Eventually, wanting a name that better reflected what the blog had become, I changed the name to what it is now, Meditations of a Gentle Warrior. 

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.