Complete Self Protection By Al Peasland


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Terry Barnett's
Integrated Arts

British Combat
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JUGGLERS		Return to Articles
I’d like to send a special thanks to me very good friend and inspiration, Tony Terranova, for this weeks article. Tony has kindly given me permission to share this article with you, as it was Tony who imparted this story late one evening as we drank tea after an evening’s seminar at his martial arts academy, Fighting Fit We are all jugglers, everyone single one of us are like the circus entertainers juggling ever increasing numbers of balls high in the air. What you need to imagine is that, upon every ball, there is something written. Something pertaining to one aspect of your life. One ball has the word “WORK” written in bold letters, another has “FRIENDS” and a further one will have “MONEY” or “FINANCES”. But that is not the end, there are lots more balls in the air than that, all with other words branded upon them such as, “TIME”, “MORTGAGE”, “HOBBIES”, “GOALS”, “FAMILY”, “TRAINING”, “STUDIES”, and so the list goes on.
I suggest, right now, you pause for a moment and give thought to all the balls you are juggling at this present time and imagine what would be written on them. However, I have missed the most important one, and I’ve done that deliberately because it’s often the one we miss when we are actually throwing and catching all of these other life-commitments. It’s the ball entitled “HEALTH”.
Now, when we’re juggling all of these responsibilities, and commitments, sooner or later we’re going to drop one of them. We’re going to miss the catch because we’ve taken our eye of the ball for a moment. We’ve been distracted or we’ve become too focused on just one thing and missed the other ball on it’s way back down. Or, more often, we’ve simply taken too much on and now have more up in the air than we are skilled or capable enough of coping with. I suggest you pause again for a moment to ponder this next question. “Which one do you think we are most likely to miss and drop”? In my own experience and that of my close friends, it has almost always been the HEALTH ball that gets overlooked first. The reason for this is that the Health ball likes to keep itself to itself. While all the other balls have their letters emblazoned across them in big bold bright letters, the health ball is in small, lowercase italics that are hard to spot in our high paced lives. The WORK ball will shout to remind you to get to work, to focus on your career, to clock in on time, to get the job done in order to keep the boss happy. The FINANCE ball will be screaming at you to keep track of the money, make sure you have enough for the bills. The MORTGAGE ball will send you letters when you are going to miss payments, and remind you constantly when its interest rates have changed. Even the FRIENDS and FAMILY ball will be quick to remind you of your lack of time shared with them, to hound you to go out and socialise, to spend more quality time with them. All of these things are obviously important, none more so than Friends, Family and Loved Ones, it’s just that the little old HEALTH ball keeps quiet, letting you get on with things without causing you any fuss or hindrance. Until….. it’s too late! Only when the HEALTH ball is firmly on the floor will it start to shout and scream, but by then it’s quite late. Certainly, too late to react and catch it before it hits the floor. What this metaphor represents is how we will often neglect our health and prioritise most things above it, and only when we are ill, stressed, or at the point of nervous exhaustion, do we start to listen to its shouts. We all do this to one degree or another, I’m probably one of the worst examples of this, which is why perhaps, I feel I can write this article to share with you. Obviously, being proactive, bearing all of this in mind, we can address this issue before we drop the ball. Start paying more attention to our physical and metaphysical well being, ahead of time, so that we don’t neglect the health ball or relegate it to the bottom of our priority list. Perhaps, even allowing other things to drop in order that we can maintain our focus on our Health, ensuring it’s always in our reach and under our control. However, what if it’s already resting on the floor, already slipped from our grasp in our haste to juggle all of the other balls? We obviously need to pick it back up but the only way to do that is first put everything else down. One by one, put all the other balls on the floor – ridding yourself of all of those commitments that are adding pressure, stress, anxiety, and taking up valuable time and energy. Once you have your hands and time free, you can pick up the health ball and start juggling it on its own. Get comfortable with it, start to get to know it, know the weight, become familiar with the feel, the texture, the way it flies and lands in your hand. Once you have it under control, then you can start to pick back up the other balls – but the great thing now is you can choose which ones you want to pick up and start to re-introduce to your life one at a time. Again I suggest that the first be that of your loved ones and your friends, and then you move onto the rest. We’re all jugglers. We all have lots of balls in the air, lots of plates spinning, and sooner or later we’re going to take on one too many. We’ll have too many in the air to keep track of and to pay enough attention to, to ensure we can catch them all when they fall. We just need to make sure that we are focused on the ones that are most important, even if they are the ones which are quiet and don’t scream or shout for our attention.
Thank you for reading Stay Safe and Have Fun Al x
More articles to be uploaded soon