Blacklisted

Over the last year I've been preparing to test for my black belt in Kukkiwon Chung Do Kwan Taekwondo.  Now that the actual test is 33 days away, I'm beginning to have to face some things I thought were long gone.  Stuff I thought I'd successfully buried and repressed like any sane person would.  But over the last few weeks, I've been trying to write my black belt essay (in which we're supposed to talk about why we want to become black belts and what Taekwondo means to us), and in brainstorming for that essay, I've come face to face with some very ugly truths about my own self concept.

People have asked me how I feel about the test -- what I'm nervous about (if anything), what I feel most confident about, etc.  And as I've been about to spout off routine answers, like, I'm nervous I'll forget the moves or I'll freeze up and not be able to perform or I won't be able to break my boards, or I feel really good about the poomsae (forms), I've realized a couple of key things:  

1)  My fears are my strengths; my weaknesses are my wisdom.  That might not make much sense outside my own head, but it's similar to a lesson I learned a long time ago from Pema Chodron (wise Buddhist teacher).  In the last few months, I've had to relearn that lesson over and over again.

2)  The thing that scares me the most -- the thing that stops me in my tracks when I'm going to the gym to build endurance or when I'm stepping up to a set of boards to break them -- is the fear that I don't belong here.  That I'm trying to wedge my way into a milieu, an arena in which I simply don't fit, have never fit -- a party to which I am not, never have been, and never will be invited.

In short, to my great surprise, my biggest obstacle in achieving black belt is...myself.