Transformative Practices for Mental Clarity

What if you could transform your life by simply moving out of the way of force rather than confronting it head-on? Join us on Healthy Mind Healthy Life as we chat with Jeff Patterson, the founder of Northwest Fighting Arts Portland Tai Chi Academy, who has over 36 years of experience in meditative and martial arts. Jeff takes us through his fascinating journey from western boxing to discovering the profound impacts of meditation and Tai Chi, leading him to create the innovative Yielding Warrior method.

Uncover the secrets of seamlessly integrating meditation into your daily routines. We explore practical strategies to make meditation as habitual as brushing your teeth, with Jeff sharing active practices like counting breaths to help reconnect with your body and center your mind. Discover how meditation not only enhances focus and body awareness in sports and martial arts but also boosts creativity and productivity in professional settings. Jeff demystifies common misconceptions about meditation, emphasizing that the real challenge is returning to focus amidst distractions.

Navigating the meditative path can be daunting, and Jeff underscores the importance of quality mentors and guides. Hear inspiring success stories from over 26,000 students who have used the Yielding Warrior program to overcome anxiety, depression, and more. Explore the Yielding Warrior book for strategies on incorporating yielding into various life aspects, and learn how dedicating just a small amount of time each day to meditation can yield significant long-term benefits. Tune in for invaluable advice on staying consistent in your practice and witness the transformative potential of embracing the concept of yielding in both combat and life.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Healthy Mind Healthy Life with your host, avik. This podcast is all about exploring the latest research, sharing personal stories and providing personal tips for improving our mental health and well-being. Each episode will be joined by experts in the field of mental health, as well as individuals who have experienced the transformative power of a healthy mind first-hand. Together, we will dive into a range of topics, from managing stress and anxiety to building resilience and cultivating happiness. So join us on this journey to discover new ways to take care of our minds, bodies and souls, and let's work together to create a healthier, happier world, one episode at a time. So let's get started.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Hello and welcome to Healthy Waves. I'm your host, javik, and today on Healthy Waves, your live group podcast, where we dive into a sea of topics with a wave of experts definitely so join us as we explore the insightful discussions and the expert advice all aimed at enhancing your building and enriching your life. So, as I always mention, each episode brings you closer to the knowledge and the wisdom of professionals across various fields, making waves in their industries. So get ready to ride the wave of knowledge with us on Healthy Waves. So today, we have a very special guest with us, jeff Patterson. So welcome to the show, jeff.

Speaker 2: 2:06

Hello, thank you for having me here.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Lovely. So, jeff, before we start, I'd love to mention this to all the listeners that Jeff from Portland, which brings over 36 years of experience in practicing and teaching meditative and the martial arts. So, as the founder of Northwest Fighting Arts Portland Tai Chi Academy and the Yielding Warrior, jeff emphasizes theive power of the meditative and martial art practices, particularly the yielding concept. So he has also published two books, hundreds of instructional videos and has walked with thousands of students worldwide through the Yielding Warrior online program. So his unique approach, known as the Gilding Warrior method, which incorporates the ritual, active and the philosophical techniques helping individuals build a personalized and evolving meditation program that seamlessly fits their lifestyle. So, without further ado, let's start. So welcome to the show again, jeff.

Speaker 2: 3:30

Thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Lovely so, jeff, to start with, if you can tell us a bit about your journey into the meditative and the martial arts and how it led to the development of the yielding warrior method yes, so I was turned on to the meditative arts in a bit of a roundabout way.

Speaker 2: 3:54

I used to be very much into western boxing as a youth and I used to go to this boxing gym that was just a few blocks down the street here from my academy, and in a boxing gym it's run a lot different than a regular class environment if you've ever been to an athletic class before and that usually there's a handful of coaches and each one of those coaches has four or five six fighters that they work with pretty regularly. Well, there was one coach there that I really wanted to get to spend time with. He was an amazing coach. He had created national and world champion level fighters and I wanted to get him to notice me and spend some time with me, and so I always show up at the gym when I knew he was going to be there. I'd work really hard, try to show him that I was disciplined, and after following him around for about three or four months, he finally started giving me some tips and showing me a few things, and it was only two or three weeks from getting to work with him that he said something to me that changed my life forever, and that he said that if I really wanted to be a good boxer, I should start doing meditation and Tai Chi.

Speaker 2: 5:04

Now, at the time, I was a young kid thinking you know, isn't that for like old people in the park? How's that going to help me be a better fighter? But I started doing the meditative arts and it changed my life in so many ways, and through the years you know, I've been running my academy for 30 years I've had thousands of students come through the academy and I've literally heard hundreds and hundreds of stories of how people's lives have changed by integrating the meditative arts into their life, and so it's been my mission to share these arts with as many people as possible, which is why I've written my last two books and created the Yielding Warrior online program books and created the Yielding Warrior online program.

Speaker 1: 5:49

Wow, that's really lovely. So also one more thing what exactly is the concept of yielding Like? How does it play a role in both the meditation and the martial arts?

Speaker 2: 5:58

So there's many different philosophical concepts in the meditative arts and in the martial arts. Yielding is one of my favorites. You know there's many life applications to the idea of yielding. I break down yielding into three areas. There's physical yielding, mental yielding and emotional yielding. Physical yielding is the idea that I push you, you push me. Whoever's a bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually is going to push the other person over. But with yielding, instead of us trying to see who the bigger meathead is, when you push me, I get out of the way of that force and now I can respond with less effort.

Speaker 2: 6:40

Now it's easy to understand how this is valuable in a combat scenario, because you're not always going to come up with somebody who's just weaker than you. You've got to be able to deal with people that are stronger and more powerful than you, and yielding helps us even that playing field. Now, in order to be good at physical yielding, a lot of things have to come into play. You need to be very rooted. The lower part of your body needs to be strong and flexible so you can change your central equilibrium without getting tight. The body has to be relaxed, the breath has to be calm and the mind has to be present. Now, it takes years and years to get to a high level of this. However, from day one, you start recognizing things inside yourself, physically and mentally, with a higher sense of awareness. That helps you in everything you do in life. Now, not only do you see those things inside yourself, but you also see those things more clearly in other people, and this is where we start moving into what I call mental yielding.

Speaker 2: 7:47

Mental yielding is, say, for example, I say something to you and it unsettles you and I pick up on that right from the beginning. It's very easy to adjust the conversation at that point and keep us on a harmonious path. Then, if I wasn't paying attention to that, and pretty soon I'm so far off track you want to knock me upside the head. Learning how to use yielding in all of your interactions is extremely powerful. Not only are you just being more considerate, so you're more of a pleasure to be around, but you're being more strategic in your approach to deliver information, which is beneficial in anything we do in regards to relationships, business, sales, negotiations. I mean, there's so many different ways that you can apply this idea of yielding and this improved sensitivity through your awareness. Then there's also emotional yielding, and emotional yielding is very much like mental yielding, but it's with your own interpersonal conflicts. So oftentimes something will happen to us and we'll respond and we'll go down this path and we might get an hour a day a week down that road and realize maybe that wasn't the best choice.

Speaker 2: 9:02

But with yielding, if we would have been able to take a step back and recognize everything that was going on and maybe make a more educated decision, a lot of times it can save us a lot of heartache on the other side. You know, and I've been explaining this idea of yielding for years here at the Academy and one of the most common things I'll hear people say is that, ah, that makes a lot of sense. You know I use yielding all the time and I would agree in that. I think people do use a certain degree of yielding in their lives in many different areas. However, it's kind of like if you or I were to walk into a crime scene with a detective who's been on the job for 30 years. He would see things about the series of events and the timelines that I know, at least I would have no clue of.

Speaker 2: 9:48

The meditative arts helps us see things inside of ourselves and inside other people that I feel you could never get that kind of connection without incorporating a meditative practice into your life. It's also very much like you know, a lot of athletes practice meditation to improve their performance. It's easy to get an athlete to 85% of their potential If they're disciplined, they're coming all the time and they're regular, they're easily, they're coachable, they listen. However, to get that athlete to 90%, 95%, 97%, you know now you're looking at athletes like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, who are almost magical when you watch them play. Well, I don't feel like you can get to that 95% or 97% without incorporating a meditative practice. A meditative practice and that's kind of why we do this in order to fine-tune all the different directions and areas in your life that you can integrate these practices exactly.

Speaker 1: 10:55

So I mean for the meditation program, like how can someone start crafting a personalized meditation program? So what would be the first step they should take?

Speaker 2: 11:08

The first step is to think about what is your why? Why do you want to incorporate meditation into your life? Because I guarantee you there's going to be times tomorrow morning the alarm is going to go off and you're going to think, ah, I can just hit the snooze button, I don't want to get up and meditate tomorrow, I'll get it the next day. And you've got to find that reason inside yourself, whether it's for your own personal health, maybe you want to live longer to watch your grandkids or your kids grow up, or maybe you want to improve your performance, or you want to improve things in your business life, whatever it is Find out what that list of whys are for you and really let it sink in and resonate with that. And then, once you have a good, strong reason to why you want to take on the practice, then we got to get strategic about how we're going to integrate the meditative arts into our life, because you could literally go on YouTube and find a million videos on this meditation and this practice and that practice and it's overwhelming. It's so easy to get lost in the mess and when you're building a meditation practice, especially an evolving life practice, you want to have a strategy behind that. You don't want to just pick random things from here and there and see if they're going to work for you. And, believe me, I've had students that have come in here that have been practicing the meditative arts for 10 plus years and they'll come in and see somebody who has had a guide and direction in the practice and they've only been practicing six or 12 months and they're way more advanced in their practice and so having a guide to help you is very important. Once you have a guide, then you want to think about the three different modalities or ways that we do the meditative practice, and the first one is ritual practice. Ways that we do the meditative practice, and the first one is ritual practice. Ritual practice is where you set time aside every day to practice a little bit and build a foundation, come back to looking inside yourself and resonating with your heart and kind of feeling that present state of being, and if we do this regularly it helps build up positive momentum. Now a lot of people will say and I've heard this over and over again that they can't commit to doing that every day. They're too busy, it doesn't work for them. Well, there's a saying that the Dalai Lama once said, and that everybody should meditate for 20 minutes a day. Unless you're too busy, then you should meditate for an hour, and I love that saying and that everybody should have the time to come back and connect with themselves and spend a little bit of energy being more in tune with who we really are.

Speaker 2: 14:05

You know one of my meditation teachers. He always talks about everybody wearing their masks, and we wear masks when we're out on the streets and we're trying to hide our feelings or we don't want people to see something about us or whatever it is. And oftentimes in today's society we go through life wearing the mask for a lot of the time. When we're in our waking hours, sometimes we do this so much that we start looking at ourselves in the mirror and we're still wearing that mask. Meditation is one of those things that helps us take that mask off and make sure that we're staying true to who we really are, and that's the purpose of a ritual practice.

Speaker 2: 14:49

Then we have what we call active practices, and active practices are great because you can do them in as little as 60 seconds or two minutes. They can be done when you're walking down the street or standing in line at the grocery store. It could be as simple as counting out 10 breaths and reconnecting with your body, maybe doing a movement exercise, maybe doing some spinal rotations, something that brings our awareness back into who we are. Because, remember, the meditative arts is not meant to be a hobby we do once or twice a week, it's meant to be a way of life. And how can we integrate these practices into everything we do?

Speaker 2: 15:28

And then, lastly, the third phase would be the philosophical side of the practice, and these practices can be either ritual based or active, graced, and if you have this as your foundation now, when we start building a life practice around meditation, it's really pretty easy. And then we can start focusing on whatever direction that you have an interest. So, within the meditative arts, there's basically five different directions of the practice. You have the combative or the athletic side of the practice, the therapeutic side, the medical side, the philosophical side and then also the meditative or spiritual side, and not everybody that comes to the meditative arts comes for the same reasons. We can start integrating ritual and active and philosophical practices that will help us down that path and get us there in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort, because now we're focusing our energies on what we want our outcomes to be Got it.

Speaker 1: 16:39

So what advice do you have for the individuals who are looking to seamlessly fit meditation into their daily lives?

Speaker 2: 16:51

Well, the first and most important thing again is doing that ritual practice, making sure that you're doing a little bit every day, like you brush your teeth, you know there's always an excuse not to do something. You want to be finding the excuses to do something. Then the other thing is a lot of times I've heard people through the years come to me and say I tried meditation but this didn't work for me and I can't quiet my mind. And this is a common misconception and misunderstanding about meditation, in that it's not meant to be in this place of nirvana all the time. You know, I've met some very advanced meditation practitioners in my journey in years through training, and all of them get distracted. Everybody does, you know.

Speaker 2: 17:44

And so when you sit down to meditate for 20 minutes or an hour or whatever that is for you, you might get distracted 50 times, 100 times, but every time you get distracted you use your practice, you use your breath, use your posture, use the movement if it's a movement practice to help bring your focus back to center.

Speaker 2: 18:05

And now you just got a one repetition of being distracted and now coming back to that center, that awareness state. You do that a hundred times in a meditation and then you do that for the next hundred days. You're going to start building that muscle and getting so good at being distracted and then coming back to focus. Now, when you're walking down the street or somebody cuts you off or somebody says something rude to you, it's so easy to come off of that distraction and come back to center and approach it from your heart rather than from your emotions and get so much more benefit and more of an educated, heartfelt response in how we live our lives. And so that's one of the ideas you want to approach the practice with is just understand that it's not about being perfect. You don't have to quiet your mind for 20 minutes. Everybody is going to have distractions when they practice.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Exactly so. Also, I mean for the benefits part, like how do meditative and martial arts practicing complements each other in promoting the holistic health and developing?

Speaker 2: 19:25

Yeah, so the meditative arts helps any kind of physical activity, whether it's the martial arts, whether you play football, you play soccer, you play basketball.

Speaker 2: 19:37

They integrate very well in that it helps improve your focus, it helps improve your overall body awareness, your timing, your ability to respond. All of these different things help to get to a high level by developing a meditative practice, and that's why so many professional athletes you look at you know, when Phil Jackson was coaching the Chicago Bulls and they had their winning seasons with Michael Jordan on the team, he was having his team practice meditation and Tai Chi to help improve their focus and to get their game to a higher level. And so it can be used in so many different directions, and you'll see a lot of business professionals these days and entrepreneurs that are turning to meditation to help improve their focus and their creativity and to get more out of their their uh business as well exactly, exactly, and um along with this, I mean um, what are some of the common challenges that people face when, uh, starting a meditation practice, and, if so, then how can they overcome them?

Speaker 2: 20:51

One of the most common challenges is finding a good quality teacher and a guide to help you to save time, because we're only on this planet for a short amount of time. Years go by quick and it's easy to get lost on something that takes us down a path that might not be the right direction for us, and so if you don't have somebody guiding you on that approach, it can be very distracting, and so that's the first thing With that. There's a lot of books and videos and different things that you can read out there that can help you have a good understanding, and I recommend reading as much as you can. I mean, there is a lot of great stuff out there, but try to keep in mind what is your goal by incorporating a meditative practice.

Speaker 2: 21:49

What path do you want to follow? Are you more on the athletic path? Are you on the spiritual path, on the medical side? Whatever that is for you and start looking for practices that are going to help you down that path. And you know the program, the Yielding Warrior program that we have. It's very great with teaching you about these different paths and how to incorporate practices down each one of these areas, as well as our teacher training program, if there's, you know, if you're interested in integrating this. If you're a coach or you have a yoga studio or a martial arts studio and you'd like to integrate the meditative arts into what you're doing, this is very helpful as well, bringing a new pillar into something that you already have existing okay and um also at the same time, do you have any success stories or maybe the testimonials from your students that illustrates the impact of your methods?

Speaker 2: 22:49

hundreds. Uh, you know, I've I've had over 26,000 students come through my academy here in my physical location, not to mention all the students through our online program, and I've been hearing stories, for you know, the last 30 years, of how it's been changing people's lives, from somebody who's dealing with anxiety or depression and helping to overcome this. I've even had a few students come here saying that they were thinking about committing suicide and this helped them through that journey and finding purpose in their life. I've seen athletes improve their game. I've seen businessmen keep their focus and get out of their funk and their depressions. It really is endless as far as the benefits that you can see from a meditative practice and you know, don't just take my word for it Go Google the benefits of meditation and you'll probably see a million articles up there on all of the benefits of the practice. It really is to everybody's benefit to take on the meditative practice.

Speaker 1: 23:56

Oh, okay, and also tell us about your book, latest book, the Yielding Warrior. So what can readers expect to learn from it?

Speaker 2: 24:07

So the Yielding Warrior talks about the yielding concept which we addressed a little bit earlier, but it goes into how you can integrate this idea of yielding in everything you do, through physical activities, through business, through relationships, through your own personal development. And then it gives you different strategies and techniques and ways to start to build a practice to help fine tune that awareness and get to a higher level of will yielding so you can incorporate it in whatever you want. If you would like, I'm offering right now a free copy of the book. You just pay for shipping and handling. You can go to the yieldingwarriorcom forward slash book and you can get a free copy of the book there.

Speaker 1: 24:56

And any opinion like where do you see the future of meditative practices heading, especially in the context of modern day stress and lifestyle?

Speaker 2: 25:07

I see more and more people opening up to the idea of meditation, which is awesome. It's everybody out there that is practicing meditation. Tell your friends, you know, get it. Let's spread it out there. I've. I believe that if everybody would just meditate for 20 minutes a day, this world would be a much better place, and it's has so many benefits to offer all of us. Just by coming back to thinking a little bit more from our root and who we are and being more considerate in our actions. It really is an amazing practice wow, great and uh.

Speaker 1: 25:52

So before we have like uh, finally like what one piece of uh advice you'd give to someone who are looking to begin their journey into the meditation and the martial arts stay consistent.

Speaker 2: 26:09

There's going to be times where you feel discouraged and like maybe you have hurdles going on, something's going to come up in your life and try to take you away from the practice. Just commit to doing a little bit every day and I promise you, if you do that for one year, five years, 10 years, you're going to look back and be very grateful that you spent the time and the effort on cultivating a meditation practice.

Speaker 1: 26:39

Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much, jeff. It's really been an absolute pleasure having you on Healthy Babes, and definitely your insights into the meditative and the martial arts, particularly the unique yielding concept, has been truly, truly inspiring and enlightening as well. So we appreciate the knowledge and the experience you have shared with us today. I believe people are going to resonate with this and they're going to utilize this and definitely practice meditation, which is very, very important for us. So thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to seeing the continued impact of your transformative methods. And with this, dear listeners, I would love to mention like, uh, just uh, take the lessons, uh, uh, from today's episode and do let us know the changes, the impacts and how you are liking it. So we'll be waiting for your response or feedback. Thank you so much. Thank you.