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Sensei Joseph Hurtsellers: Hi this Joe Hurtsellers from ohiomartialarts.com and welcome to my podcast. Most people think of martial arts as something that going to be really difficult and hard, and that they’re concerned if they’ll be able to do it. Well we’ve made our passion making martial arts techniques simple, enjoyable, and easy for the average person.

Most people know that there’s an internal mental part of the martial arts too, but so often those things that been made complicated, and difficult, and hard to understand. The purpose of this show is to take complex mental aspects of the martial arts and break them down so that they’re so simple and enjoyable that the average person can put them to use in everyday life. Welcome to Mindpower. I hope you enjoy.

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Sensei Joseph Hurtsellers: The basis of the mental component that we teach is so important, and it’s kind of a little bit frustrating to me, because in the world of martial arts, believe or not, there’s not a lot of people that really understand this. They kind of get lost in what sometimes call “mystical dragons”. They get lost into all of this mysticism, and chakras, and energy, and meridians and all of this stuff, and there is certainly validity to all of that, but it’s so much simpler.

We want to make it so that the average person, a simple average person, can come into a class and walk out of that class and put some of this mental stuff to work like today, like tomorrow, right? And the basis of everything thing is moving energy, or what they sometimes call prana in India, or ki in Japan, or chi in China. How do you move energy? Well you move energy through thought. When you put your attention into something you’re moving energy in that direction. You’re calling forth energy every time you think of something.

Now thought is very rapid and very very fluid. So what will happen is, if I think of something, and for example— and please don’t do this right now, because I don’t want to bring down your day— but if anyone in here was to start thinking of something that happened to them that was negative in the past, in as little 15 seconds another thought just like it would join, and in 30 seconds another thought would join it, and pretty soon you’d start to create in yourself a mood or disposition.

If you’d keep that up for enough time, maybe in some cases years, then you begin to form a personality, and you have a negative character trait. When you have a negative character trait, your life goes that way. Your life doesn’t go well for you. It’s not good to have negative character traits, but the good news is that all started with 15 seconds of work. So if that can start in 15 seconds of work, you can take 15 seconds and flip that switch and lead to 30 seconds, and lead to a minute, and lead to 5 minutes, and 10, and then months, and then a mood, and then a new character trait. Does that make sense?

Students: Yes sir.

Sensei Joseph Hurtsellers: So when you understand that the direction that your thought goes is really  what accumulates everything, then you can start to see how this happens in all areas of life. So this is a universe of inclusion, not a universe of exclusion.

So what does that mean? What I give my attention to I’m drawing energy towards. So what happens to us when we fight against the things that we don’t like and that we don’t believe in? We make them stronger. This is the funny thing that I see happening right now in polarized political world that we have. It’s like one side is creating so much power in the other side, because of their hatred of the side, and the other side has this incredible genius ability to poke that bear to get stronger and stronger and stronger.

It’s the most comical thing that you see. But you see it not just our political world, you see it in medicine. We keep fighting against this disease, fighting against that disease, but the diseases they just keep leaping around and changing into other things. There’s a war against poverty. We have fought poverty for so long, and yet the rich continue to get richer and the poor get poorer. There’s a war against drugs, and more and more drug use is rampant.

So how do we fix this momentum that’s headed in the opposite direction? We stop pushing energy towards it. We push energy towards those things that are wanted, and we walk away from those things that are unwanted. So there’s real humorous story that happened to me not that long ago, maybe about year and a half ago at my condos. For many of you I’ve talked about condos in chapter eight. I go into this in my book a little bit, but it really does get to the point where it’s funny when you see the laws of universe in actual action.

So there’s a big long story to it, but let me just tell you first off, I live in the best place in the world. I mean, I love where I live to the point where there’s real work that probably needs to get done that sometimes doesn’t get done, because I’m having so much fun with my neighbors literally as recently as last night. Especially on the weekends, it’s just the most fantastic place, but with that said, like all things to the universe there’s two sides. There’s the yin and yang. So that’s the positive side, but the negative side to that is there are some really cantankerous kind of mean ornery people that live there. And they seem to me to be very unhappy, very unhappy, and they stay to themselves.

So me, not really thinking too much about the laws of the universe about a year and a half ago, I decided I’d form a club. The club I was going to form was, if you’re going to live here at these condos you’re going to be happy whether you like it or not, and I’m going to get you out of your shell. I’m going to make friends with you. I’m going to give you free beverages. I’m going to invite you over. I’m going to create this environment where even the grumpiest and orneriest of people feel accepted and loved and they are just going to be part of things, and I tried really hard.

In about 6 months’ time, you know what happened? I became one of those grumpy angry nasty people too. See, I was giving them my attention, and when I gave my attention to them, then they were transforming me, not me transforming them. Now, the truth of the matter is, I didn’t do anything that bad and it was mostly an internal thing. So how did I fix it? I fixed it by bowing to them and saying peace to you. Be who you are, it’s okay. Now I’m going to focus on my other neighbors even more that I get along with, and I became a happy person again, because of that, all right?

So here’s the basic moral of the story. The moral of the story is, is that what you give your attention to will grow, and it will grow, and it will come back and affect you.

So one day I’m sitting around the pool— this was just maybe 6 months ago—and there’s a group of us, and we’re having a wonderful time, and my old ways came up again.

I said to my friends around the pool, “Guys, you know, what we should do—this is so much fun—we should form a new club around here, and we’ll call it the “Happy Condo Club,” and everybody is free to join. You only have to do two things. One, you have to make sure you say, ‘I’m happy.’ You have to declare yourself a happy person, and nobody gets to decide that for you. You have to decide that for yourself. And number two, you can’t bad mouth anyone or anything in the Happy Condo Club.

I’ve got the copier in the office. I’ll make up fliers. We’ll put them in all the foyers and invite people. We could have a monthly meeting.We could have a coffee date. We could have bowling nights. There’s all sorts of things we could organize. We could even form a committee to be on the committee for the Happy Condo Club.”

And then one of my neighbors said, “Man, don’t you see it?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “Man, we already have a Happy Condo Club. Every time that sun comes out from behind a cloud all of us come together that are happy, and people that are unhappy come together too.”

So the point is, is place your mind where you want your life to go. Don’t place it anywhere else, because where ever you put your mind, that’s ultimately what you’ll experience. Seiza.

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Sensei Joseph Hurtsellers: Are you still there? Hey, here’s what’s happening right now here at Ohio Martial Arts. First, we’re very excited that we’re adding transcripts to this show, so by Friday, by tomorrow, that would be the first of November, there will be transcripts up. So you can go to ohiomartials.com/podcasts and see material that’s on the podcast in writing. The second is, is on November the ninth we have our full rank testing occurring. To get information on and register for the test go to ohiomartialarts.com/testing. And then finally, I just want to give big warm thank you to everyone that participated in our lightsaber seminar. We’re very very grateful to all the work that the people from MAAM did. We also want a special to Mr. Mike Snavely for his wonderful donation of that beautiful lightsaber that was won an auctioned off. We just thought that that was a wonderful event. And last but not least, I want to remind everybody that my first book, Break the Chain!: Volume I, is right now being redrafted in a rerelease form. There’ll be new content. There’ll be some interesting additions to that book, and that’s going to be released sometime before Christmas. So again, thanks for all your support, thanks for all of those of you that bought up my last book, and I look forward to seeing you on the mats.