Recalibration

This Winter has been a time for inner retreat and recalibration. I’m getting over a difficult series of events in my martial arts life. Three really hard things happened in the past two years, and processing them has taken a lot of energy. The hard things were:

1. I had a difficult break with my teacher Master Shanti in June of 2024. She did something that betrayed my trust, and when I told her that her actions were a problem for me, she got defensive and turned it around on me. She wrote me a list of all of things that I had done wrong– things she had never mentioned before. Her response felt cruel and emotionally abusive. I ended the relationship to protect myself.
2. A man grabbed my breasts in a training situation in December 2024. When I told his teacher that the man who grabbed me was not a safe person, the teacher refused to believe me and took the man’s side. The teacher had been my friend, but after his student grabbed me he refused to talk with me about finding resolution. Talking about it was so uncomfortable for him that he told me he didn’t want to be my friend anymore. I was so hurt that he pushed me away.
3. Our Women’s+ class got kicked out of our time slot at North Portland Martial Arts in July 2025. The teacher kicked out our class so he could teach a women’s class himself.

All of these situations had difficult emotional and psychic aftermath. I have felt drained and defeated. I’ve been having trouble getting over these things– why can’t I just move on? I think if I can’t move on, maybe there are still some things I need to process or learn.

A couple weeks ago, with these things in mind, I wrote a mental map of the “good” and “bad” things that happened in my martial arts life in the last few years. The exercise helped–I could see how the good wove into the bad, and the bad led to the good. I could also see that there was more good than bad:

Then I distilled the lessons I learned through these hard times:

The distillation helped me get out of the problems circling in my head and start reconnecting to the deep “why” of my practice. A writing friend of mine reminded our writing group recently to be “rooted in something bigger than self.” This reminder was calming, and helped pull me back into my body and out of my swirling thoughts.

The bigger thing that I root into is the earth. It’s the felt sense of the body. It is connections with others, life, spirit, nature. I can allow myself to feel the emotional pain of these wounds, and I can allow myself to feel that pain for as long as I need to.

But, at the same time, as I root into the lessons I’m learning from those painful experiences, I can begin to move forward. Slowly, so slowly, I can move a little bit forward, out of the pain and into new possibilities. I can let the pain inform me so that I’m not inflicting the same pains on my students and practice partners. I can hold space for myself and let myself feel hurt if I need to.

But along with the pain, I can allow myself to feel the joys in my practice: laughing with a training partner, making a new discovery with a student, enjoying the warming weather in outside practice. I can hold space for pain and joy, and can move forward with more wisdom and compassion than I had before.