Just call me Mulan

I started making headway on another New Years Resolution on Tuesday.  This would be a resolution that falls into the decluttering category.  I think there are a lot of things in my life right now that hold me back and prevent me from being the person I want to be and doing the things I want to do.  I feel over-stuffed, unorganized, and generally ten steps behind in life.  I don't often do one thing and one thing only.

I'm a multi-tasker.  While this is excellent for the job I have, I think it's become a hinderance in my non-work life.  At times I'm so obsessed with being productive and trying to do more than two or three things at once that I get bogged down by the incessant back and forth, and possibly ADHD, that I never truly accomplish anything significant.  For example, I never sit down and write a blog post.  It's written over a matter of hours or a whole day because I get distracted by some thing or many things.  Oh, was that a squirrel?  What's that shiny thing?  I'm hungry.  What was I doing?

If I ever expect to complete any of the projects on my never-ending to do list, I need to stop trying to complete them all at once.  I need to act like a camera and FOCUS.  Enter martial arts.  All schools of martial arts tout discipline, focus, and self confidence as benefits to the sport.  In treating myself like an unruly 8 year old, I enrolled in hopes of finding me these things.

Since starting my new job last year I've been wanting to start taking some type of self defense training.  As with the most everything else I've been wanting to do, I put it off.  Well, a few weeks before Christmas I finally stopped piddly dinking around and called a place I knew some people at PD have attended.

So, Tuesday night I had my first self-defense jujitsu class.   The only class that I can attend during the week is the one for family night.  This works to my advantage.  The kids were oblivious to the fact that an obese, almost 30 year-old woman was struggling to do the things they did.  And the few other almost-adults and adults in the class were in my shoes in their not to recent past and were encouraging and helpful.

We lined up for warm-ups, which involved stretching and break falls.  My pear-shaped weight makes these incredibly hard to do on count with everyone else.  I have the equivalent of 10 milk jugs of extra fat on my body.  This slows me down.  After warming up with break falls, which is basically falling backwards gracefully and slapping your hands to your side to disperse energy and getting back up again, we moved on to somersaults.

A little over a year ago, somersaults were the bane of my existence.  My non-athletic self pulled a groin muscle doing rolls in my nightmarish week of Defensive Tactics training at work.  I brushed away my bad memories and with more courage than ever walked into a somersault.  Walked into it!  It wasn't graceful and it was far from perfect, but I DID IT!  And it gave me confidence, which was good because I had to do it about 30 more times.  And just when my rear was getting used to being over my head, we switched to take downs.

Take downs are fun.  Take downs are what will keep me going back.  The general idea is someone grabs you from behind or from the front, and in a few swift moves they are splat on the ground wondering what just happened.  I learned four moves and repeated them over and over for the duration of the class, which zoomed right by.  I have no idea how many times I hit the mat, but I would guess it's over 200.  Splat, splat, splat.

My body is achy all over and muscles that haven't been used since my DT class last winter are screaming at me for waking them up.  It's a great feeling.  And in one hour's class, I learned why martial arts can teach discipline, focus, and confidence.  It takes discipline to practice each move over and over again.  It took complete focus on what I was doing so that I didn't end up having a concussion or breaking any bones. And I built confidence every time I got my fat ass over my head without pulling a groin muscle!  By my 30th somersault, I wasn't so afraid of them!

It was nice not thinking about anything else but that one single thing for an hour.  No distractions, no interruptions.  I felt accomplished.  And alive.  Just call me Mulan!

"We must be swift as the coursing river.  With all the force of a great typhoon.  With all the strength of a raging fire.  Mysterious as the dark side of the moon!"