Importance of Physical Fitness
In late 2019, I found myself in a lousy physical shape. After having two kids, 3½ years of bad burnout and 6 years of bad insomnia had prevented me from working out and this resulted in weak muscles throughout the body and lots of overweight. I was 115 kg/250 pounds then.
In early 2020 I had rested a bit after my second divorce and felt like I both wanted and needed to start working out again. I had been, I would say, a pro athlete at points in my earlier life when I was practicing lots of martial arts and marathons so I felt bad being so out of shape. I started strengthening my body with basic exercises like push ups, sit ups, squats and dips, combined with stretching. I also started walking outdoors, from 45 minutes and increasing little by little up to 90-100 minutes. I kept that daily routine for about 6 months during which I lost a lot of weight and felt a lot better.
But then in late 2020, I lost my motivation. It felt strange because I knew I wanted to stay in shape but somehow I hit a wall. One affecting factor was the Winter that was much more severe than the previous one. It isn't much fun to walk in icy slush that soaks your shoes in minutes or walk on icy surface where you're slipping every second step. I loved severe conditions as a 20+ year old and ran half marathons in freezing temperatures without a shirt but at 40+ you're just too old for that shit. Several months passed by during which I kept practicing Vajra Body/Physical Dynamic Concentration exercises, which is an isometric workout but didn't do any cardio and therefore my weight began to rise again.
Then, the very day I finished my purification, March 15th 2021, I went out for a walk again but had to turn back after a kilometer because my back and legs were so stiff that it felt like they were made of bricks. I had to use all my mental and physical power to take a step and it wasn't fun. This is the point when a struggle that would last almost a year started.
Despite of icy slush, occasional sleeping problems or problems in my personal life I kept trying to take walks a few times a week for months but it was as if my body didn't want to do that. Every time when I started out for a walk, after 200-300 meters, it felt as if my body shut down saying, ”No, I'm not doing this”. My back and legs were not only hard as bricks but also painful, especially my lower back. I was both puzzled and very frustrated about the situation, and tried everything in my toolbox to get going. It was extremely frustrating for 10 months.
During this time I often thought about few of my students who had told me they had similar problems that prevented them not only from exercising but living a normal life when, for example, one can walk a short distance to a supermarket without any difficulties. Particularly I remember a male student who lost his ability to walk for some period of time due to an illness. I didn't loose my ability to walk altogether but if you had seen me walk at home from my kitchen to the living room, you'd have thought that I walked like an old man. It's alarming to experience that at 42 years of age.
Finally, this January I had enough of it. I booked an apointment to my trusted masseur who I knew could help with the all around stiffness in my body and started to do daily sessions with a Ryobi R18B-0 polishing machine to release those deeply ingrained tensions that would enable me to start moving more normally again. The polishing machine is made for polishing cars but it is basically the same as massage guns you can get nowadays. Massage and Ryobi helped!
Having defeated the stiffness, and already having strong muscles since 2 years back, I've gotten back into proper workouts, this time with much clearer motivation to take care of my body fo the rest of my life. I am grateful that this struggle is now behind me and despite of last year being one son of a bitch, I see meaning in this series of challenging experiences.
I work as a dharma teacher and I think that to be a really good dharma teacher one needs to have a wide array of both positive and negative experiences in life so that one can understand and relate to students and their situations. For example, if I hadn't experienced depression, panic attacks, being poor, heavy drinking, getting married, getting divorced, having kids, having 29 different jobs, burnout, insomnia, obesity and other things, I wouldn't know the nature of those experiences and therefore I could not relate to these typical human experiences.
Sorting out this recent physical problem, it has made it diamond clear how important it is to take care of one's physical body, if we only are able to, until the day we die. Of course, our Western culture tells us to exercise but you really don't know that until you loose the ability to do normal things. That's what hit it home for me.
In Asian buddhism at large, apart from Japan where martial arts are an extension of buddhism, and the Chinese Shaolin tradition, there is no emphasis on physical fitness, even though health is considered important. In Indian, Tibetan or Far East Asian cultures at large there is no concept of exercising for fitness and this, I think is due to the fact that historically there was very little time for leisure in people's daily lives. However, the same applies for yogic cultures and apart from few exceptions, we can say that yogic traditions at large were not involved or interested in physical fitness.
For years I have seen youtube videos, often from China, sometimes from the West, where aged people from 70 to 90 years of age display amazing physical fitness, and most importantly don't look or feel at all as if they were old! On the contrary, they feel and look very young, with straight backs, strong body, robust vitality and bright eyes.
For these reasons, to be able to live a truly happy and healthy lives for as long as possible, as well as from the perspective of dharma, I want to emphasize physical fitness in my work.
Much blessings,
KR, 26.2.2022
