There’s a guy named Joe at my jiu jitsu school. Actually, this is kind of crazy — there are like, 5 Joes at my school and I have no idea why (one of them is the famous podcaster Joe Rogan). I’m sure there’s more Joe’s I haven’t met. Anyway, while all the Joes are super great people this Joe in particular is like a big brother to me. He coached me all the way from white belt to now and he always teaches me something I’m not noticing and I really appreciate that about him.
Anyway, I was rolling with Joe last week and I got ragdolled like I always do. But you know, I’m a guy who at least tries to improve so there was a new position / situation I normally don’t get into with Joe. This was interesting to me because Joe’s the type of guy who has a very consistently developed game that always puts me in the same body puzzle time after time, and for me to have arrived at a new position: that must mean I’m doing something differently.
After the roll Joe and I talked and Joe told me how I could have went one step further from that position and it made total sense. I needed to off balance him just once more to establish a deeper control. But after this he said something very interesting to me:
“Sometimes I don’t care what we learn, what other people are doing. I play this game by myself, ‘how many times can I make the other person plant their hands on the ground?’. I just play that game by myself and the more I play it, the more it just works.”
We’re all playing the jiu jitsu game and we’re all training the same sport. But it doesn’t mean we have to apply a uniform way of developing our game. Joe turned the art of training jiujitsu into his own game; he’s not following the rules that somebody else created for him, he’s creating his own game and following the rules for that. That I think is such a great ownership of life itself.
A few of my students would have experienced the Sǒn Buddhism workshop I developed late last year. The motivation for that workshop is the Buddhist training I did last September. The story behind that training is also very interesting. The founder of our Buddhist order, Ven. Pomnyun Sunim, was imprisoned because the government framed him as a North Korean agent. So while he was locked up, it was easy to tell he was a Buddhist monk so the fellow inmates asked him about Buddhism.
One of them said, “This Buddhism stuff is so hard and complicated, I don’t know how people do it”. This was strange to Pomnyun Sunim because he thought Buddhism was the most intuitive thing ever introduced to mankind. So he started to think, “how can I teach these people Buddhism?” and he said, “starting tomorrow I’m going to teach you Buddhism in the most intuitive way”.
That is how the Buddhist training program started. But in the middle of the program, the regime changed and the wardens opened up the cell: “You’re free to go now”. Sunim replied, “I can’t go; the program is not done yet”.
Whenever you feel like you’re playing by someone else’s rule, your power is drained away because you’re not in charge of what you do or don’t do. But the thing is… As long as the goal is being met, you have freedom in how to get to the goal. For Joe, he plays the game of off balancing because off balancing will either lead to a better position or a submission. They’re both goals of jiujitsu. For sunim, the goal was to stay in government captivity but they had no control over what he did inside captivity. They contained him, but they could not take away his freedom.
The more power you want in your life, the more freedom you can invite to your life. Freedom has four dimensions. The freedom to do something you want to do, the freedom to not do something you don’t want to do, the freedom to do something you don’t want to do, and the freedom to not do something you want to do. The latter two sound hard. But it’s in your personal power to make it an enjoyable experience for you.
This game of life. Are we all playing the same game?