Manders Mindset
Are you feeling stuck or stagnant in your life? Do you envision yourself living differently but have no idea how to start? The answer might lie in a shift in your mindset.
Hosted by Amanda Russo, The Breathing Goddess, who is a Breathwork Detox Facilitator, Transformative Mindset Coach, and Divorce Paralegal.
Amanda's journey into mindset and empowerment began by working with children in group homes and daycares. She later transitioned to family law, helping people navigate the challenging emotions of divorce. During this time, Amanda also overcame her own weight and health challenges through strength training, meditation, yoga, reiki, and plant medicine.
Amanda interviews guests from diverse backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and wellness experts, who share their incredible journeys of conquering fears and limiting beliefs to achieve remarkable success. Hear real people tell how shifting their mindsets—and often their words—has dramatically changed their lives.
Amanda also shares her personal journey, detailing how she transformed obstacles into opportunities by adopting a healthier, holistic lifestyle.
Discover practical strategies and inspiring stories that will empower you to break free from limitations and cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and positivity.
Tune in for a fun, friendly, and empowering experience that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Manders Mindset
Beyond Strength: Building Focus, Flexibility, & Presence with Jeff Patterson | 129
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In this inspiring episode of Manders Mindset, Manders welcomes Jeff Patterson — martial artist, meditation teacher, founder of Northwest Fighting Arts, and creator of The Yielding Warrior. With over 36 years of experience, Jeff shares how ancient meditative and martial arts practices can unlock personal power, emotional balance, and resilience in today’s fast-paced world.
Jeff reveals the profound concept of yielding — a practice rooted in thousands of years of wisdom — and how it transforms physical strength, mental clarity, and emotional intelligence. Through his signature three pillars of yielding and five regulations of meditation, Jeff offers listeners a blueprint for building a focused, centered, and empowered life.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
🥋 What “yielding” really means — and how it transforms conflict into opportunity
🧘♂️ How physical, mental, and emotional yielding work together for personal growth
🛠️ The Five Regulations of Meditation that create lasting mindset shifts
🏆 How meditation improves athletic performance, resilience, and productivity
📚 The story behind The Yielding Warrior and why Jeff believes mindset is everything
🛤️ How to create a consistent meditation practice that sticks — even for beginners
🌟 Why consistency beats talent, and how small daily practices lead to major breakthroughs
Timeline Summary:
[0:30] – Meet Jeff Patterson: Martial artist, father, community builder, and lifelong learner
[5:24] – Building Northwest Fighting Arts Academy and the philosophy behind it
[8:04] – The Three Pillars of Yielding: Physical, Mental, and Emotional strategies
[12:17] – How a boxing coach’s advice to meditate changed everything
[19:29] – Meditation's impact on martial arts, leadership, and daily life
[27:08] – The Five Regulations: Body, Breath, Mind, Energy, and Spirit
[36:52] – The Story of the Stonecutter: Why unseen growth matters most
[42:14] – Where to find Jeff’s free book, training programs, and teacher certification
To Connect with Amanda:
~ linktree.com/thebreathinggoddess
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Follow & Support the Podcast:
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~ Join the Manders Mindset Facebook Community HERE!
To Connect with Jeff:
Website: The Yielding Warrior
If you loved this conversation, don't forget to rate, review, and share Manders Mindset! Your support helps others discover the power of one mindset shift at a time. 🌟
Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people when your host, Amanda Russo, will discuss her own mindset and perspective and her guest's mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Mander's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. As always, I'm your host, amanda Russo, and I'm here today with Jeff Patterson, and Jeff has over 36 years of experience practicing and teaching the meditative and martial arts. He's the founder of Northwest Fighting Arts, portland Tai Chi Academy and the Yielding Warrior, and we are going to delve down his journey today. Thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 4:Hey, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:So that's a great bio, but can you tell us who Jeff is at the core?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I've been involved in the meditative martial arts for 36 years. As a kid, I grew up in a small town and didn't have a lot of financial means, so I'd always wanted to do martial arts as a youngster, but I really didn't have the opportunity of financial means. So I'd always wanted to do martial arts as a youngster but I really didn't have the opportunity. And as a teenager, when I was able to get my first job, I made enough money to go to the local martial arts academy and started training and it just kind of stuck and stayed with me.
Speaker 4:I'm a father of two. My son right now is a few months away from 17 and my daughter turns 15 next month. I just love spending every minute I can with them. They're both in wrestling right now, so I'm at all their matches at least two or three days a week. It's just fun watching them grow up and be dad. And then my second family is kind of here at my community and my academy and on my online program I have students that have been here with me for 30 years, and so it's kind of like family here.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful. You said you wanted to get involved in it when you were a kid, but you weren't able to until you were about a teenager. Yeah, so what was that first job you got?
Speaker 4:Well, I've had a few jobs as a youth, but the one that enabled me to start training was at McDonald's, of all places. I worked there for a while and that allowed me to get insurance so I could drive and get a membership out of Martial Arts Academy.
Speaker 2:Okay, about how old were you 16. So you were determined yeah. Now how did that go once you started doing martial arts?
Speaker 4:You know, I started briefly and then, when I was 17, I joined the Marine Corps and so I was immediately taken off down to San Diego in North Carolina. I did that for a few years and continued to train while I was in the military and then, when I got back, I moved up to Portland Oregon and started going to college. As I was going to college, I was teaching part-time and training at a local martial arts academy and just kind of continued from there.
Speaker 2:So you started training at the academy, and that was post-college.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I was training before and after college and during college, and then I just kind of kept it going. After college was over, I started up my academy here with a training partner of mine and I've been running it ever since here, for a little over 30 years now.
Speaker 2:Did you know right along that you wanted to start your own academy?
Speaker 4:I didn't. I had a teacher back then who told me once that you want to create a life and not make a living. And my idea was going to college, I was going to go get some big, important job and do something important, and I started thinking about following my passion and what I really wanted in life. And even though I didn't think it could amount to much financially at the time, even though I didn't think it could amount to much financially at the time, I said you know, I'd much rather be doing what I'm passionate about and really love than sitting behind a desk doing something that I didn't. So I just took a swing and stuck with it and stayed true to it and brought me to where we are today.
Speaker 4:Wow, that's amazing. Okay, and so you start the academy and then from there, where do you go? 15 and 10. I've just been building this community here. Now the academy pretty much runs itself. I come in because I like to be here and teach, but most of my creative energy is working on my online programs, writing books, working on my next book right now and working with my teacher training program.
Speaker 2:And so you wrote a book the Yielding Warrior. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, yielding is a very fascinating concept and it's something that they use in both the meditative and the martial arts, and in my book I break it down into three pillars of yielding. We have physical yielding, mental yielding and emotional yielding. Physical yielding is the easiest one to understand and it's the idea that I push you, you push me. Whoever's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually is going to push the other person over. But rather than us trying to see who the bigger meathead is, with yielding I get out of the way of your force and now I can respond with less effort. So I'm not trying to butt heads with you and see if I'm bigger and stronger than you. Now it's easy to see how this idea is beneficial in athletics, because it doesn't matter what sport you play, you're going to come up against athletes who are bigger, stronger and faster than you are, and having this ability to yield to that force and get to an advantageous position without butting heads can save you a lot of energy and make you a lot more successful. Now, in order to be good at physical yielding, a lot of things have to come into play. You need to be well-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 relaxed, the breath has to be calm and the mind has to be present. While this may be a lifetime journey to really master these skills, from day one, by starting a meditation practice, we start to become more aware and in tune of these things that are happening inside of us. And this is where it starts to get very interesting, because not only do we see these things more clearly in ourselves, but we also start to see them more clearly in other people. And now we're moving into what I call mental yielding. So say, for example, you and I are having a conversation and I say something that unsettles you, and I pick up on it from that first sign of imbalance. At this point, it's a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place than if I'm not 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 our interactions is extremely powerful. One, you're being more considerate, which is something that we could all do more of, and two, it allows us to be strategic, to guide conversations to a positive outcome with the least amount of resistance, and this is good in relationships and business and sales and negotiations. I mean there's so many different ways we can apply this idea.
Speaker 4:Now, once you understand the mental side of yielding, then we move over into the emotional yielding. And emotional yielding is very much like mental yielding, but it's with your own interpersonal conflicts. So you think about many times something will happen to us and we'll respond and we'll go down this path and we might get an hour 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, but with yielding, if we could have taken a step back and been more present and not let our emotions get involved and be more settled when these things happen. Oftentimes we can make more educated choices that save us a lot of heartache on the other side. And you know I've been explaining this idea of yielding now for many years.
Speaker 4:I've been running this academy here for 30 years now and one of the most common things I'll hear people say is yielding makes a lot of sense. In fact, I use yielding all the time. Well, I would agree in that I think everybody does some degree of yielding all the time. But it's if you or I were to walk into a crime scene with a detective who's been on the job for 30 years, I guarantee you that person would see things about the series of events and the timeline that I know, at least I would have no clue of things inside of ourselves and inside of other people that I truly believe that most people will go through life and never have any clue of without a practice like this in their life. So we have the physical yielding, the mental yielding and emotional yielding.
Speaker 2:Now, how did you come up with these?
Speaker 4:Well, yielding is a concept that's been studied for thousands of years in the meditative and martial arts and I've never had anybody break it down into physical, mental and emotional yielding. For me this is just from a lifetime of practice and seeing how these arts applied and learning how they kind of fit into my life and how I use them, and so I thought that having these three pillars was an easy way to explain it to people, where they could kind of grasp the idea and see the practical applications and see how it can really affect pretty much anything we do in life.
Speaker 2:It does make a lot of sense. You know, like, even, like you said, everybody tells you it makes a lot of sense, but it does those main areas. Now, how would you say this is different from other type of programs like this?
Speaker 4:Well, the idea of my book is different than my program. However it's the same philosophy but it's like one piece of building and evolving life practice with the meditative arts. So in the program we learn how to one understand the different paths of a meditative practice. So I break it down into kind of five paths. There is more of the athletic path that teaches you how to be more in tune with the body, be more present, understand how to yield and control and to make those mind-body connections that improves our performance. You know, these days there's so many professional athletes that realize the benefits of meditation that you know across the board, in any sport you can think of, there's professionals that are using meditation to help improve their performance.
Speaker 4:Then we have the therapeutic path, and this is more geared towards your longevity and health and awareness when dealing with injuries. Then we have the medical side of the practice, and all of Chinese medicine is based off of Qigong theory, which has been around for thousands of years. Then there's the philosophical side of the practice and then, lastly, the meditative or spiritual side of the practice. And so once we have an understanding of these five different paths that we can follow, then we start integrating practices from movement. Meditative practices from sitting practices. Standing practices from breath work from sitting practices. Standing practices from breath work from philosophical ideas no-transcript.
Speaker 2:Now, how did you come to meditating?
Speaker 4:I got introduced to meditation in a bit of a off-center way in that I was a young guy I was about 19, and I was very much into Western boxing. I liked the challenge of it. It was very difficult in the beginning and it was very fast-paced and strategic and it was just a lot of fun and I was really resonating with it. I used to go to a boxing gym not too far here from my academy in Portland. For those of you that are listening that don't know this, they run a lot different than your traditional style fitness classes. It's not where there's one teacher leading a group of students. Usually in a boxing gym, there might be four or five coaches and each one of those coaches is rolling around and working with maybe a handful of fighters that they're focusing on.
Speaker 4:Well, at this one particular gym, one of the coaches that was there was a very well-known coach.
Speaker 4:He had created amateur and professional world champions and I really wanted to get a chance to spend some time with him, but he had a full card and he wasn't looking to take on any new people, so I would always show up at the gym when I knew he was going to be there and work hard and try to get him to notice me, and I kind of followed him around for about three or four months and finally he started giving me some tips and working with me a little bit and after about two or three weeks of him helping me out, he said something to me that changed my life forever and that he said if you really want to be a good boxer, you should start doing meditation and Tai Chi Now.
Speaker 4:At the time I was this 19 year old kid who didn't know much of anything, thinking isn't Tai Chi like for old people in the park? How's that going to help me be a better fighter? And I had a lot of respect for this guy and you know, every time he told me anything, I treated it like it was gold and I started the practice. And not only did the meditative arts influence my life in so many ways. Through the years, you know, I've had over 26,000 students come through the academy and I've heard hundreds of stories of how the meditative arts has positively influenced people's lives. And that's what's made me so passionate about the practice and wanting to really spread the message and get this word out there out there.
Speaker 2:Wow, you were pretty young, 19. Yeah, did you develop a meditation practice from there?
Speaker 4:Well, I did. However, it was very amateur. I've been studying the meditative arts now for a long time and it's just been growing and evolving. I've pretty much spent the majority of my career traveling around the world, training with teachers from all over and just seeking out the best people in all these different areas and trying to learn everything I can about the meditative arts so I can offer more to my students here and just for my own personal reasons as well.
Speaker 2:Do you meditate?
Speaker 4:Every day. Yeah, I have a morning ritual that I do. I haven't missed a day since I had hip surgery five years ago. It's just part of who I am. I don't miss it.
Speaker 2:I love that. How often do you think people should meditate?
Speaker 4:It's really easy practice to integrate into your life and what I found one of the most common things people will say is that I don't have time to meditate. And then think about it like you pre-frame it this way and it changes your mindset in that, rather than thinking, oh, I've got to go do this for 20 minutes or a half an hour every day and I don't have time for it. If you do this, what I've seen happen over and over again is people start being able to focus more and be more present and be more productive because of that shift. That happens spending maybe a half an hour a day meditating, but they end up getting more done because they're more focused and more productive. So I've never seen it be something that gets in the way of somebody's lifestyle if they wanted to integrate this practice into their life.
Speaker 2:It's so true. I love how you mentioned they see other results and more focus. There are benefits outside of just feeling more calm. So many people hear meditation and they think I'll be more calm, I'll be less stressed. But it's more than that, you know.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, very much.
Speaker 2:It's deeper than that. Have you used any sort of visualization in terms of your meditating?
Speaker 4:Yeah, visualization is like one piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 4:It's definitely something that's of value and we use visualization internally with different energetic circulations of the puzzle. It's definitely something that's of value and we use visualization internally with different energetic circulations in the body, and then externally when we're trying to think about movements and how to link muscle groups together to make an expressive movement with the body, and so a lot of times you think about like you go to grab a glass of water, your arm goes out, you pick up the water and you bring it back, but in order for that to happen, there's thousands of energetic impulses going on from the body, from your toes through the torso and out your hands to your fingertips, to pick up that glass, and the more that we can be in tune with that, understand and be sensitive and feel all those little things that are going on. Now we start to heighten our awareness and our sensitivity, which makes us more present and more observant of everything that goes on. It's we're expanding our peripheral vision to see things from multiple angles, and it really helps us have a deeper understanding of things.
Speaker 2:I love your example of the water. Something so simple, like so many people don't think about, like what it takes to pick up something, even if it's not heavy, even if it's not far away, that simple act of doing it grabbing the thing, moving the item, like there's that effort into it. It grabbing the thing, moving the item, like there's that effort into it. I'm curious how meditation has helped you with the academy and with martial arts.
Speaker 4:You know in so many ways. It's funny how my boxing coach was recommending it to help me with boxing. It helps with the ability to focus. When you get off center and you get distracted. It helps you come back to center. It helps your mind-body connection so you're more efficient in the movement, which can improve your speed and your timing. It helps your overall mindset and belief in how to build that power and that ability to be present within the movement when things are going fast. There's just there's so many different ways that it can influence you mentally, physically and emotionally.
Speaker 2:A lot of sense Now in terms of your book and the program.
Speaker 4:did you develop the program after the book or was the book Well, I've been teaching the meditative arts for many years and the online program is kind of a reflection of what we do here at the Academy and what we've been doing for 30 years, so it's geared around teaching people those basic five pillars, but then how to incorporate ritual practices, active practices and philosophical practices that help support them on whatever path they choose. With any meditation practice, there's basically five underlying principles that help build the foundation of the practice, and I call them the five regulations. They're regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy and regulating the spirit. And briefly, I'll touch on what I mean when I say those things. Regulating the body, which is our first regulation and very important because it's the easiest one to adjust, and you'll see some pretty good changes right off the bat by focusing on this and the basic idea of it is we're paying attention to our skeletal alignment and our muscular tension in the body. And an example could be you know, think about a time, maybe, when you're sitting down at your computer and your shoulders are hunched over and you're feeling lethargic and very depleted, maybe your neck's getting sore. And then another time when the most important person in your world walks in the room and your body perks up and you feel like you're on top of the world, we're in control of all day, every day, and just the idea of how to maintain that and be present enough to make those adjustments so we don't reach those depleted states can be a huge game changer for a lot of people. Now, on a little deeper level of body regulation would be maintaining some kind of muscular structure in the body to keep the metabolism up, to maintain flexibility, to eat a healthy diet, so our nutrients are putting good energy in the body and then getting enough sleep. All of those are kind of geared around that body regulation.
Speaker 4:Then we have regulating the breath, and regulating the breath is a very deep topic and in fact Qigong is often referred to as the science of the breath, because there's literally hundreds of different breathing strategies and because of this we kind of broadly categorize them into yin methods and yang methods, deeper, more holistic style of meditations that help bring the energy inward. And an example of a yin breath would be if you ever listen to somebody sleep, their natural breathing pattern is a longer inhale and a shorter exhale, and this is the body's natural way of bringing your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, which is where we are when we're sleeping and dreaming mind, which is where we are when we're sleeping and dreaming. And so if we want to capture this sort of energetic expression in our meditation, we can do longer inhales, soft retentions at the end of the inhale and shorter exhales to help bring that energy inward. This is great for stress reduction, dealing with anxiety, panic attacks, boosting our creativity. There's lots of reasons why we would focus on this side of the breath. Then there's the yang side of the breath and it's more aggressive. It's if you ever had to push your car, you pick up something heavy. Your natural instinct is to exhale and put tension in the breath, maybe even make the breath audible, and this helps generate energy and extend it outward. So when we start understanding how to use the breath and the different ways that we can control it, we can use it to adjust our physical, mental and emotional states throughout the day.
Speaker 4:Then the third regulation is regulating the mind, and one of the other misconceptions I hear from people is that they'll say I've tried meditation before, but I just wasn't any good at it. I couldn't quiet my mind, and somewhere along the way people got this idea that in order to be good at meditation, you have to reach this state of nirvana and be in this blissful place where nothing bothers you. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth, and nobody can reach this place indefinitely. And I've spent many years traveling around the world training with some amazing meditation practitioners, and I have never once met anybody who doesn't get distracted we all do. When you're meditating, if you're sitting for 20 minutes, or maybe even doing a movement practice, whatever it is, if you get distracted 50 times during that session. Every time you get distracted, you use your posture, your movement or the breath to bring yourself back to center. Breath to bring yourself back to center. And now you just got 50 repetitions on how to be off center and come back to balance. And this is the idea. And if you do this every day, every month, every year, you start to develop this power and this ability. Where nothing can throw you off center, you know you could have a bad day of work or a stressful conversation and you can come right back to being focused.
Speaker 4:There's this story that I really enjoy about these two old monks, and they're walking down this dirt road after a huge rainstorm and they come up to this big mud puddle and on the other side of the puddle is this beautiful little girl and she's standing there in a white dress and she's crying. And the older monk, he yells across the puddle and says is everything okay, can we help you? And she said I need to be somewhere, but if I walk across this puddle I'm going to get my dress all dirty. So the older monk, he rolls up his pant legs and he walks across the puddle and picks her up, puts her on his back, takes her to the other side, sets her down and she's off on her way. Well, him and the younger monk are walking a couple miles further down the road and finally the younger monk is just furious and he says you know we're not supposed to touch girls, but you did back there at the puddle. And the older monk looks down and says you're still thinking about that girl. I left her back there at the puddle. And how many times in life do we have to get two miles down the muddy road before we realize we got to let that thing go?
Speaker 4:And so regulating the mind and having the sensitivity to recognizing these imbalances is very important part of the practice. Energy is a very deep topic and something that we could literally spend hours talking about. But a basic idea of it is once you've reached a competent level in regulating the body, the breath and the mind, you now have the tools to regulate the energy in the body and lead it inward, extend it outward, to circulate it in the body, and we'll get different outcomes from these different energetic practices. And then the fifth and final regulation is regulating the spirit, and this is a very profound idea and it's something that meditation practitioners will spend their entire life's journey working towards that ultimate stage of enlightenment. But when you understand these basic five regulations and how they apply to everything we do in life, you can see, by cultivating this practice, it can really affect anything we do.
Speaker 2:Now did you come up with these five?
Speaker 4:I've heard of the five regulations of regulating the body, the breath, the mind, the energy and the spirit. However, all of the definitions I gave to those, that's words that I put to them Wow.
Speaker 2:And now, in terms of the story with the monk where did you hear that story?
Speaker 4:I heard that story from one of my longtime Qigong teachers. I used to love the way he taught because he would always teach in stories, and I've kind of incorporated that into my teaching style because I always just resonated so well with it, because they have these strong life lessons behind them but you remember them because it kind of leaves an imprint on you.
Speaker 2:It does. It resonates with me a lot, you know, even like the younger monk was like why did you touch the girl? And he's like I left her way back there. You know that's so true for so much in life that's a lot of us are carrying stuff with us thoughts, feelings, emotions, whatever it may be that why didn't you leave it back there? Why didn't you set it down? You know? Now you say there's three types of meditation. Can you tell us a little bit about those?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so you're asking about the kind of the three pillars. There's many different types of meditation, but I think you're referring to what we call ritual practices, which is one pillar, active practices and then philosophical practices. You're not listening to any audios, you're turning your focus inward, and it could be in a sitting meditation and a Tai Chi form and a yoga practice and a Qigong set. There's many ways that we could do a ritual practice. Then there's active practices, and these are great because you know it doesn't really make any sense if you meditate every day and you feel all at peace for 20 minutes or an hour or whatever that is for you, and then the rest of the day you're off centered and distracted, and so understanding how to integrate things into the day that help keep us focused and kind of living the lifestyle of a meditation practitioner rather than doing it as a hobby, doing it as a hobby. And so these active practices are great because you can do them when you're walking down the street or standing in line at the grocery store and they can be done in 60 seconds, they could be done in three minutes. They could be as simple as counting out 10 breaths or doing some spinal rotations or a simple movement practice, something to just bring our awareness back into the present and be more in tune and connected with our body, our breath and our mind. You know, all kind of comes back again to those five regulations, right, and so these are kind of controls that we use to help regulate those five different areas.
Speaker 4:Then the third pillar is the philosophical side of the practice, and this is something that I've always resonated with. It's been a passion of mine, and the reason why I like the philosophical side so much is that it's very strategic. It teaches you how to open up your vision and see things from so many different angles. You'll learn something and see into it and you'll feel like you have clarity, but then a year later, three years later, you'll see it from a whole different perspective.
Speaker 2:And so, keeping that open vision, and looking for those opportunities is something that I've always been very fascinated with. And now these three areas. Would you suggest people engaging in all three every day?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's just part of the lifestyle, right? So when you create an evolving life practice with the meditative arts, we have our ritual that we do every day. Maybe for those of you that are new, set a reminder to go off on your phone every 60 or 90 minutes and you know, for lack of not having multiple different options, even if you just counted out 10 breaths every time, it went off and stopped looking at any screens and just kind of turned your focus inward, you could get a lot of benefit from that one simple practice. And then the philosophical side of the practice. This is extremely deep. You know we could go into multiple different areas here, but we can integrate these practices in both our ritual practice and in our active practices.
Speaker 2:So is that what you would suggest for somebody listening to us that's new to approaching meditation? It's just maybe setting a reminder on their phone and even the 10 breaths in.
Speaker 4:I'm glad you asked that question because for me teaching for so many years one of the hardest, most difficult things I've faced when teaching is getting students to be consistent with the practice and make this a life practice so they can really receive the benefits that the meditation has to offer. And so I've broken down three kind of concepts that I have people consider when they're coming to the practice or wanting to improve their practice. That helps them find a deeper seat or a deeper place to come from, where it will help them be more successful with their training. And the first one is have them spend a little bit of time thinking about why they're being drawn to the practice. What do they want to accomplish by having meditation in their life? And when they have an idea of that, then think about 10 or 20 things in their life that are going to be positively changed by accomplishing this goal Maybe it's going to change your mindset or your relationships or your health or whatever that is for you and then flip the coin and think about 10 or 20 negative things that are going to be negatively affected if you don't do this, and what this does is it helps give you fuel. So you know we all face this. Tomorrow morning the alarm goes off and you're like, ah, hit the snooze button, I'll do my practice tomorrow. I'm a little tired today, but if you have that something pulling you towards the practice, it gives you a lot more desire. And now you start looking at it as something you get to do and get excited about, rather than a chore that you have to do every day. And so having a good, strong why is important.
Speaker 4:The second thing is understanding consistency, and I have another story for you with this idea, and it's about this ancient stonecutter from China who was very well known across the lands. He created these big animal sculptures and landscape scenery and just made this beautiful work. Because he was so well known, he would have apprentices from all across the land come to train with him and live with him for a few years at a time, to study from him and try to pick up his trade. Well, this stonecutter, every day he used to go down to the river and meditate, and one day, after his meditation, he was walking along the river and he had this very detailed vision of this beautiful, six foot tall, mystical Chinese dragon made out of jade. And he was so taken by this vision that he decided this was going to be his next project. And you can imagine, trying to find a piece of jade this size was no easy feat.
Speaker 4:So he spent the next few months traveling around looking for the perfect stone to create this dragon. Finally he found the stone, he brought it back to his shop and for the first few days he just studied the stone and felt the energy from the rock and tried to envision how this dragon would come to life out of the stone. Finally, when he started working on the stone, he grabbed his chisel and his hammer and he found one specific spot on the backside of the stone, placed the chisel and started tapping away at the stone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions, day after day. A few days go by, nothing happened. A few more days go by and thousands more taps on the rocks every day, and finally some of his apprentices were kind of second-guessing him, wondering if he was doing the right thing or why he didn't try something else. A few more days went by and thousands more taps. Then, finally, this big section of the stone broke off the back and created this smooth, slightly curved line that was soon going to be part of the dragon's back going to be part of the dragon's back. And one of his apprentices said how did you know that tap was going to break the stone? And the stonecutter said it wasn't that tap that broke the stone, it was the thousands of taps before it that broke the stone. And with a little bit of a discouraged look on his face, the apprentice said but I've been watching you and nothing was happening. There was no cracks, no marks, nothing was going on the stone. Why didn't you try something different? Why keep doing the same thing? And the stone cutter got down on one knee and he felt the smooth line that he just created as part of the dragon's back. And he said each strike was not wasted.
Speaker 4:The stone was changing beneath the surface and often what we do we can't see with the naked eye. And through consistency and repetition, not only does the stone change beneath the surface, but the one who wields the hammer often reaps the benefit of the change as well. And the reason why I like this story so much is that in the meditative arts we're doing these breathing strategies, we're doing sitting practice, movement practices, we're studying philosophical concepts, and oftentimes we don't see these changes happening day to day. But we're setting the foundation and we're making those changes beneath the surface. That bears many fruits for later days to come.
Speaker 4:And so having this idea of consistency is the second thing that you want to find a guide. You know the meditative arts is such a deep practice. I've been studying for 36 years and I'm still learning all the time. I'm nowhere near the master and if you think that you're going to go out on YouTube and sift through the millions of videos and figure out how to start a meditation practice on your own, you're going to waste so much time. I've literally had students come into the academy who have been self-taught and they've been training 15, even 20 years and they'll see somebody who's been under guidance for 12 months and get a little discouraged because they're further along in their practice, because they've had some direction. So you know your time is valuable. Find somebody to help point you in the right direction and if you do those three things, if you find a good, solid why you understand the importance of consistency and you have a guide to kind of help you navigate, you'll really increase your chances of being successful with the practice.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you speaking with me. Have you heard of a man named jay shetty?
Speaker 2:no, I haven't so he's got a podcast called on purpose. He's actually a former monk. He wrote a book, different. He a motivational speaker. But he ends his podcast with two segments and I incorporate them into mine. First segment is the many sides to us. There's five questions and they need to be answered in one word each. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as?
Speaker 4:Focused.
Speaker 2:What is one word someone who knows you extremely well would use to describe you as?
Speaker 4:Discipline.
Speaker 2:What is one word you'd use to describe yourself?
Speaker 4:Considerate.
Speaker 2:Consider it Difficult.
Speaker 4:Yielding.
Speaker 2:Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence what is the best advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 4:To create a life and not to make a living.
Speaker 2:Why is that the best?
Speaker 4:Why is that the best? No-transcript.
Speaker 2:What is?
Speaker 4:the worst advice you've heard or received.
Speaker 2:Don't think about other people. What is something?
Speaker 4:that you used to value, that you no longer value.
Speaker 2:Riding motorcycles. If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it?
Speaker 4:what would you want it to say? Someone who was a compassionate leader and helped millions of people?
Speaker 2:If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.
Speaker 4:I feel like if we could put other people in a place of consideration, that it would ease stress everywhere and people would live a lot happier life.
Speaker 2:I love that. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me, yeah thank you for having me Any final words for the listeners with me, any final words for the listeners.
Speaker 4:Just if anybody's interested in checking out my program, my website is theyieldingwarriorcom. I'm giving away a free copy of my book right now. If you want to check out theyieldingwarriorcom forward slash book, you can go there and download, or you can download a copy, but we'll also mail you one out if you just pay for shipping and handling. And then I also have my online program and my teacher training program up there as well.
Speaker 2:So if you want to check it out, it's there and I will link all of that in the show notes as well thank you so much for speaking with me and thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of mandando's Mindset.
Speaker 3:In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm booting for you and you got this as always. If you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five star rating, leave a review and share it with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget you are only one mindset. Shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.
