Jesus and Judo

JESUS AND JUDO

One of my favorite Jesus parts of the Bible is when Jesus is talking about loving your enemy. He essentially says: anyone can love someone who is treating you really well, but when someone starts to act poorly, then the job of loving makes your ability to love real.

Moshe Feldenkrais, in a book I’m just discovering called Higher Judo, talks of a similar function of judo. He says that, Yeah, we seem like we are handling life as long as things are going our way, but what if they aren’t.

And he says, what if things really aren’t going our way: as in: we are being attacked, or are falling, or are being chocked. In these circumstances if we can, through judo, retain, poise and creativity and the ability to act, then when life throws annoying people our way or someone giving us some verbal guff, we are going to be easily able to deal with it.

So the way of judo, is to be able to act with freedom and creatively in all circumstances. Then we are a truly independent and free adult. The way of Jesus is to be able to love no matter who ratty and rotten someones else is: again, we are free and able to live from ourselves.