The old 'ostrich technique' of sticking you head in the sand, hoping something will go away if you ignore it just doesn't seem to work. Two things made me think about this recently. I read Herman Hesse's 'Steppenwolf' which got me thinking about the multifacetedness (don't think thats a real word but you get the idea) of human beings. Then I got to thinking about aggression in human beings and particularly, men. We often seem to deny aggression, anger and so on or at least label them as negative emotions. They are though, part of our make up.

As we can see from looking around, the more an emotion is repressed, the more likely it is to show up somewhere in a more destructive and subversive way. I then came to thinking how martial arts are such a fantastic tool for acknowledging and expressing emotions such as aggression in a positive, controlled way. In martial arts, aggression can be channeled and expressed and tempered by compassion, control, honor and respect so that your training partners and opponents don't get really hurt, and when there is the occasional injury, it happens in full knowledge and consent of the risks involved. Thanks goodness my parents had the wisdom to introduce me to the martial arts at and early age!

Chinese Medicine has always acknowledged the emotions as a cause of disease when excessive or unbalanced (excess anger for example injures the liver), no wonder then, that so many of the masters of Chinese Medicine were also martial artists. Maybe Western Med will catch up one day ;-)