Machine Guns, Mantra, and Breathing.

So the soul is to divinity what a spark is to fire.

(Speaking of new sparks, today is the day my wife gave birth to our first child!)

Soul experiences life through Body/Mind.

Body/Mind communicate with each other through central nervous system.

Central nervous system has two halves, sympathetic and parasympathetic.

I'm gonna assume that you are picking up what I'm putting down and that you have even considered finding a place to go to chill for at least 3min of silence once a week.

I can hear you now, " great Ben you have given me 3 minutes worth of training a week.....super....thx."

Ok, so the place to chill is for asking big questions....who am I really, what do I actually want out of life independent of the uniform?

Big questions, bigger still are the amounts of time between these ideas and their fruition.

Simple fact of the matter is that during and after your pivot there will be challenges.....things that get in the way.

Ain't no getting around this fact....that's just the way it is.

There are however, tools designed perfectly to help u move forward under fire, so to speak.

You ever heard machine guns talking? Ideally machine guns talk to each other in 5-7 round bursts. The reason machine guns talk in this manner is to maintain suppressive fire without running out of ammo too quickly or melting the barrel.

Machine guns delivering sustained suppressive fire force the bad guys to keep their heads down which then enables supporting elements to move.

Now because counting the rounds being fired from the weapon is challenging, some enterprising gunners created a mantra to maintain their focus and shot count.

"Die Mutha Fu$&er Die" "Die Mutha Fu$&er Die" "Die Mutha Fu$&er Die"

You squeeze the trigger long enough to say that phase in your head and your shot count will be right on.

See where I'm going with this? I've said this 100 times, our military training is still useful outside the uniform.

Down range
shit gets in the way,
open up with talking 240B (bravo) machine guns
Chanting
"Die Mutha Fuc$er die"
move on the objective......score one for the good guys, Hooah!

At home
Challenges arise
Chant in your head
"Breath Mutha Fuc$er Breath" as you inhale and exhale.
Calm down the old central nervous system and drive on, Hooah!

My teacher, Daniel Hickman....who by the way has been teaching yoga to warriors at Walter Reed before teaching yoga to warriors was cool.... taught me that chanting and breathing interrupt the mind.

In other words, when you inevitably run into to some part of the day that's challenging start chanting "breath mutha fuc$er breath" and see if you can do the same thing with your breathing that machine guns do down range......create a little space so that you can move forward.

This post was guided by the 71st stanza of the Art of Peace, a book written by Morihei Ueshiba
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Try this meditation I created around the seed sounds of the chakras.

Thrive as a civilian.