This website is dedicated to the Students of Seifu A.S. Umar Sharif, MA. It is also dedicated to the promotion and propagation of the Traditional Afro-Asian Martial and Healing Arts. Our goal is to inform, educate, inspire, encourage, and motivate others to improve their lives by applying The Wisdom of the Ancients.
As your teacher and host, Seifu Sharif [aka: Xia` Xue' Gong] [aka: Tobi Alakoso] is dedicated to helping each of you to remember and nurture the Spirit of Wu-Te and the powers dormant within you.
Namaste’ Students and Fellow Martial Arts Enthusiasts!
As we enter into the second month of the 2017 New Year, we all hope that the New Year will bring about some positive changes in our lives. People around the world are filled with hope and anticipation of dreams to be fulfilled and goals to be achieved. The tendency to look ahead at the turn of the year can actually limit our ability to be successful in the future. Ask yourself how many times you have made New Year’s resolutions that you never kept. Quite a few, huh? Don’t feel too bad, since you are not at all alone. It is not a personal defect or anything like that! It just has to do with how you approach the New Year and the resolutions you make. The most important thing, even before planning what you want to accomplish in the future, is to look back over the past year and imagine what if you had done all of the things that you had planned on doing in the past until the present moment.
The 7 Circles Blog is devoted to the principle of Wu-Te, we practice our martial and healing arts for the purpose of mental, physical, spiritual, and social development and wellbeing. So let us focus on your training and your possibilities going forward. This time last year you may have been thinking about how far ahead you wanted to be in your training. You may have thought about techniques and forms you wanted to master, qigong and strength goals you wanted to achieve, or health and wellness lifestyle changes you wanted to make. If you failed to achieve your goals in 2016, all is not loss. Those 2016 goals can still play an important part in helping you to achieve your goals for 2017. Here is what you do!
Spend some time meditating on each of your unachieved past goals. Allow you mind (which needs to have blanks filled-in) to ask the question, What if I had done what I said I was going to do?What if …? Permit your imagination (which loves stories) to fill-in the blanks that your mind is seeking to fill. As you imagine all of the positive changes that could have taken place your nervous system will be drawn into your imagined experiences. Don’t be critical, asking a lot of why you didn’t do it questions. What you want to dwell on is the positive ways that things could have changed. You want a joyful and positive experience of the past possibilities, not the negative experience of their loss or past failures. This process will allow your body/mind to actually experience the biochemistry of success and this will motivate you to seek that feeling and experience by actually being more successful in meeting your new goals in 2017. Remember, your nervous system does not know the difference between an actually experience and something that is vividly experienced in the imagination. You can use this to your benefit. Look up Psycho-Cybernetics for more information on this idea.
Basically, Cybernetics is the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. Maxwell Maltz found that his plastic surgery patients often had expectations that were not satisfied by the surgery, so he pursued a means of helping them set the goal of a positive outcome through visualization of that positive outcome. Maltz became interested in why setting goals works. He learned that the power of self-affirmation and mental visualization techniques used the connection between the mind and the body and effect change. He specified techniques to develop a positive inner goal as a means of developing and achieving a positive outer goal. This concentration on inner attitudes is essential to his approach, as a person's outer success can never rise above the one visualized internally. So visualizing yourself actually doing the things you plan, achieving the goals you set, and enjoying the benefits of your aspirations is the fundamental starting point for success. We refer to this as, As If Meditation, which we also use as one of our Qigong Meditation techniques.
After spending some time drinking in all of that positive energy produced by your powerful imagination, set your short-term and long-term goals for 2017. Goals are very powerful catalyst! They act like high potency fuel and a directional guidance system. Great minds and those who accomplish great things (large or small) have been guided by goals. It has been said that you should not expect to get a different result if you continue doing the same thing. That means if you want some different results in your life during the New Year and into the future then you need to set some goals to bring about change. This wisdom applies to your martial and healing arts training and to every other area of your life.
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It is not simply practice that makes perfect. It is perfect practice and consistent practice that makes perfect.
