Monday, March 17, 2014

Be water my friend, Bruce Lee adaptation for the mind

One of Bruce Lee's most famous phrases is the following:
Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
 
This concept has to do with the fact that water is able to thrive and adapt to any situation. If you can be like water you can flow from situation to situation seamlessly. If it is in athletics like MMA or any other sport, this works well because if you are in one situation, you can train extensively on how to handle that particular instance. Then if you are put in another position or scenario, you can train how to handle yourself in that circumstance. If you train and practice all these different situations, you have a very strong flow to your craft because you have trained to be comfortable in a plethora of positions and you can easily adapt to each environment. 
Aside from the physical plane, you can also take this Be Water strategy of adaptation into the realm of mental and emotional energies. If anger or fear or any other energy arises which oftentimes makes you very uncomfortable, challenges you, makes you want to run away from it, or makes you act hastily and unconsciously; that is quite normal. However, with practice of handling uncomfortable emotions and energies which arise inside of us all, we have them arise and then make conscious decisions about how we respond to them. The more we practice this, the less fearful we get when they arise, and the more simpler it becomes to make conscious decisions and take conscious action, or non-action, when these unsettling states emerge. This brings about a more fluid water-like life state for us because we are more seamless with our lives as we can peacefully glide from situation to situation both on a mental, physical, and emotional level.

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