practice

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. 

Willingness is a prayer in itself

Centering prayer has become an integral part of my morning routine. Thomas Keating recommends doing two, twenty minute centering prayer sessions each day, one in the morning and one in the evening, however. For whatever reason, I find it difficult to make the time for an evening session. 

One of the issues I face is that, when I try to sit down to practice centering prayer in the evening, I almost always fall asleep. This isn’t a terrible problem to have, and it most likely just means I’m tired. But after a while, it can be discouraging to have a twenty minute silent prayer session turn into a twenty minute nap. 

In addition to my falling asleep, it can just be more difficult for me to find the quiet space and time necessary to practice centering prayer in the evening than in the morning. In the morning, I wake up before my wife and daughter, which allows me to make the time I need for this practice. In the evening, on the other hand, my schedule is more complicated. My daughter is home from school, I teach jiu-jitsu in the evenings, and when my wife comes home from work, I like to spend time with her. 

None of these are deal breakers though. I know that it’s possible to fit a second centering prayer session into my day. I simply haven’t found the right space or timing for it, which is to say that I have not yet made it a priority. The important thing is that I’m willing. 

Willingness is a prayer in itself. It’s my way of telling God that, with his help, I will make it happen. He need only show me the way. As long as I remain prayerful and willing, I’m sure that he will. He has yet to let me down thus far and I don’t think he’s going to start now. 

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. 

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. 

If you aren’t having fun you’re doing it wrong

If you aren’t having fun, you’re doing it wrong. From self defense to sport, there are many different reasons to practice jiu-jitsu. Training can and should be very serious at times.

Violence and power are serious subjects after all, and the martial arts are, at the end of the day, the study of violence and power. But it’s not all serious.

Through the practice, we develop a camaraderie and light-heartedness in spite of all of the pain, suffering, and difficulty we put ourselves through in the pursuit of whatever intangible goal we may have.

Through the losses, the frustration, and the injuries, we make friends we otherwise would not have made. With these friends, we joke, we laugh, and we find reprieve from the outside world, even if only for an hour or so a day.

Most of us are not practicing jiu-jitsu for life and death, after all. We practice because we enjoy it.

We practice because it makes our lives better. We practice because it’s fun.