Barbara's Success Story Part 1
by Barbara D. Allan
Author of Conquering Arthritis
What Breaking a Board With Your Bare Hands Has in Common with Healing From Arthritis
Overview:
What do breaking a board with your bare hands and healing arthritis have in common?
- Most people don’t understand how
- Focusing only on the problem (the board or the disability) is a recipe for disaster
- Correctly focusing allows for a seeming miracle
To break a board, you have to:
- use proper technique and
- focus properly emotionally, mentally, and spiritually (which allows you to connect with the space beyond the board.)
This is also what is necessary to heal from arthritis.
Breaking Through Barriers
The Miracle
Being able to break a board with my bear hands still seems like a miracle, as much so as healing from my arthritis. When I still had arthritis, my hands were so painful that I often couldn't turn doorknobs. I used adapters on all my pens and pencils because pain made it hard to close my hands very much. I also had a hard time touching anything that was cold, like a cold steering wheel or touching something long enough to pull it out of the freezer. Now that I have healed my arthritis, my hands are fine again.
How to Achieve This Miracle
As stated before, breaking a board with ease with your bear hands involves:
- correct physical technique and also
- proper emotional, mental and spiritual focus (which allows you to connect with the space beyond the board).
The same is true for healing arthritis. In fact, the act of board breaking, is exciting to me precisely because of how it so clearly demonstrates exactly what is needed to heal from arthritis.
Video of Barbara breaking a board.
When I was taught how to break a board in my dojo, we were asked to write an obstacle on the board. The board then represents that obstacle. The first time I attempted to break a board I was successful. The obstacle that I wrote was that I was afraid that some day I might get arthritis again. What that showed me was, because I was successful, that's not a fear that has any real power over me. The key was that remaining healed matters so much to me (proper emotional, mental, and spiritual focus) that I was able to connect with the space behind the board, which represented being arthritis-free. In breaking this board, I had acted in accordance with the first three success principles: 1) Striking All the Way Through, 2) Proper Technique and 3) Self-Deservement.
The First Success Principle: Striking All the Way Through
The first principle in healing anything is to connect to the space beyond the obstacle, beyond the illness. No matter how solid, how impossible your obstacle may seem, whether it's healing arthritis or anything else, you must connect to that space beyond. If there is something in your life that you experience as wonderful and you can connect to as if you were already experiencing that, then that connection can motivate you and create a sense of ease that makes the barrier (the arthritis) seem like next to nothing. Focusing only on the seemly solid surface of the obstacle (the symptoms of arthritis) causes failure. After all, who wants to focus all their energy on hitting against the surface in a painful way? That is a focus that doesn’t allow for a break through, just pain. The first success principle is striking all the way through, not stopping at the surface of the obstacle, but having a clean strike that connects all the way into the space beyond the board (the arthritis).
The Second Success Principle: Proper Technique
The next time I attempted to break a board in our dojo , I hurt my hand. There were two reasons why. The first reason is that I didn't have proper technique. I didn't know what I was doing. I had never done a knife hand strike before. With a knife hand strike if you hit too high up on your hand, you can break bones. If you hit too low down you can break bones. You have to hit with the fleshy part of your hand just below the beginning of your little finger to correctly break a board. Anything else is going to hurt your hand, as I quickly discovered.
With arthritis there are many, many things that people try to heal themselves, but only certain techniques actually work. And when they work, they work well. It doesn't matter how many times you've hurt yourself using a technique that doesn't work. If you stop doing that and you do what works, you can successfully break a board (or heal your arthritis).
To find out about how the other principles are important to breaking through your barriers read my next article here.
