Finding Balance in Life with Jeff Patterson

Welcome to the season and Self Love podcast. I am your host, Namibanks, and I am thrilled to have you joined me on this transformative journey. You see, every day we dive into a powerful conversation about self discovery, healing and empowerment. This podcast is brought to you by ax Naomi and Elevate Me Self Discovery what we believe that loving yourself is the first step to live in a fulfilling life. You can expect insightful discussions, practical tips, and inspiring stories. Plus we're occasionally welcome special guests who will share their unique perspectives on self love and personal growth. So get comfy, grab your favorite beverage, and let's embark on this journey together. Because it's time to embrace the beautiful person that you are. So let's elevate our lives one episode of time. Now, let's get started. All right, hey, and welcome back to this is in a Sephlar podcast. I'm your host, Nami Banks, and I am so excited for you to be here with us today as we continue our act the Balancing Life series. This month, we've been. Exploring how to create more harmony and balance in our everyday lives and today episode is truly something special. But before we dive in today's episode, I want to remind you that we have some amazing resources available to you so support you on your journey. So be sure to download our free mini Harmonist book on five simple ways to set your intentions for a harmonist life. As well as for those of you who are ready to take a step further, we have a full ebook workbook Balancing Act, a Guide to Harmonize in your life. Both of these resources are available on our website and are design to help you to find more balance in your daily life. Now, I am thrilled to introduce our today's guests, but before we do that, I want to take a quick break and then we come back, and then we're going to bring our guests to the stage. All right, Gurdy, God is not banks here on the Season and Stuff Love podcasts? And we'll be right back. What are some commons that. Prevent people from heys your gurty? God? Is not many banks here from the Season and Self Love podcast? Yeah, I would say remorse. So shame and guilt is a very divided emotional. And these are one of the many amazing conversations that we have every day Monday and Friday right here on the season and podcast with Myself Now and we Banks, as well as our resident therapist, doctor Will Washington Washington Welno, come by our relationship, come by a lot of times I'm afraid of how people will look at us and so that compassion can't enter it. You can hit us at this season of some Love Podcasts dot Com with the Truth is It and Hey, my beautiful people, this is your girl your host not see other season and self Love and I just want to take a quick moment to share some exciting resources from our series that Act, the Balancing Life. Are you ready to bring more harmony into your life? Where we have a free mini e book. Just for you find simple ways to set your intentions for a harmonious life. It's perfect for helping you to align your goals with your values. And if you ready to go a deeper dive. Check out our one hundred and two page e book slash workbook Balancing Act, a guide to harmonizing your life, loaded with strategies and exercises. Plus, don't miss our twenty one day challenge of living life and Balance. Aad over to our website right now and grab you a free mini ebook and start your journey towards a balance life to All right, well, welcome back to the Season and suff Well podcast. I am your host, Fami Banks, and today we're talking about finding balance through the Yielding Glori Method. And I am so thrilled to introduce today's guests, and that's mister Jeff Patterson. Jeff'son experienced martial art and meditation expert who has dedicated his life to teaching the principles of meditation, martial arts and balance through his unique Yielding Glorial Method. He's worked with individuals from all walks of life through his Portland Tai Chai Academy in Northwest Fighting Ours, Jeff, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you very much for having me. Thank you. You are so zen. I love. So Zen, so Zen. Excuse me, so, before we get into the our topic, I used to do a nice little goad of meditation before we started the show and then we can get deep in topic, all right. Jeff sounds great? All right, my beautiful. People, you know how we get started, all right? If we can all close our eyes, we're junionail deeply through your nose filling your lungs with their I want you to hold on for a brief moment. Now exhale slowly. And completely, releasing any tension or stress. I want you to feel your body relaxing with each breath. Now, as you continue to breathe at your own pace, I want you to bring awareness to the present moment and feel the weight of your. Body grounding you to the earth. I want you to notice any sensation within your body without judgment, just simply observing. Take a deep breath, thin, drawing in peace and clarity, and I want you to exhale any distractions or words that may be cloud in your mind. With each breath, creates space for insights and intuition to flow freely. Now reenvision a bright light at the center of your being, radiating warmth. And wisdom, And with each and l allow this light to expand and illuminate your mind and spirit, and feel a sense of calm and serenity in you. Take one final deep breath in embracing this moment of stillness and interconnection, and exhale slowly, carrying this sense of present and openness with you. As you move forward. So when you are ready, gently open your eyes and carry this feeling of mindfulness. Throughout your day. You are grounded, You are centered and open to the insights that away. Welcome back, all right if you are new here to the season, and Cuphaler podcast is something that we do every day Monday through Friday, just to help ground ourselves. Before we get into the topic hand, Jeff, let's start by talking about your background. You've had an incredible journey from martial arts to meditation, eventually creating your own approach to yielding called Yielding Warrior Method. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and what inspired you to explore this method. Yeah, so I was introduced to the meditative arts in a bit of a roundabout way in that when I was about nineteen years old, I was very into Western boxing and I used to go to a boxing gym just a few blocks down the street here from my academy in Portland. And you know, at a boxing gym, it's run a lot different than your traditional style kind of fitness oriented class, and that it's not just one teacher. You come in and the whole group follows along with a teacher. Usually there's a handful of coaches around and each one of those coaches might have three or four fighters they're working with. Well. At this one particular gym, there was a coach there who was very well known. He had created national and world champion level fighters, and I really wanted to get to spend some time with him. So I would always show up to the gym when I knew he was going to be there and work hard and try to get him to recognize me. And after following him around for about three or four months, he finally started giving me some tips and helping me out a little bit. And it was only maybe two or three weeks of getting to work with him when he said something to me that changed my life forever, and that he said, you know, if you really want to be a good boxer, you should start doing meditation and taichi. Now, at the time, I was this nineteen year old kid who didn't know much of anything, thinking, you know, isn't tai chi for like old people in the park, How's that going to help me be a better fighter? And you know, I started doing the practice and it's changed my life in many ways and through the years. I've been running this academy now for thirty years, and I've had over twenty six thousand students walk through the front door, and I've heard literally hundreds of stories of how the meditative arts has positively influenced people's lives. And that's what's made me so passionate about writing my last couple of books and creating my online meditation program and my teacher training program to just try to get this information out to as many people as I can. That's beautiful, you know, when I saw the Yielding worry of method. With that method, it seems to be just readings just a little about the form and the strength of it. It has a beautiful metaphor of life. Can you share with us what are some key principles for guiding practice for that? Yeah, So, yielding is a very interesting concept, and you know it's one of the many concepts in the meditative and martial arts, and so it's not the core really of the practice, but it's one that I'm really passionate about. And so my most recent book, The Yielding Warrior, I broke down yielding into three categories. So we have our physical yielding, mental yielding, and emotional yielding. Physical yielding is the idea that I push you, you push me, whoever's the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually is going to push the other person over, but with yielding, instead of us trying to see who the bigger meat heead is. When you push me, I get out of the way of that force, and now I can respond less effort, so I'm not trying to butt heads with you and see if I'm bigger and stronger than you. Now it's obvious how this is beneficial in any kind of athletics, because you're always going to come up against somebody who's bigger and stronger than you, and if you don't know how to yield to that force, you're going to lose those physical confrontations, and so it's very valuable in any form of athletics. Now, in order to be good at physical yielding, a lot of things have to come into play. You need to be well rooted. The lower part of your body needs to be strong and flexible so you can change your central equilibrium without getting tight. The body has to be relaxed, the breath has to be calm, and the mind has to be present. While it may take a lifetime to really master these skills, from day one, you start learning how to be more in tune and more aware of these things inside yourself. But you also start to see these things with more clarity inside of the people. And now we're moving into what I call mental yielding. And this is where it really starts to get interesting, because say, for example, you and I are having a conversation and I say something that unsettles you, and I pick up on it right from that first sign of imbalance. It's a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place than if I'm not paying attention to that. Pretty soon I'm so far off track. Maybe you want to slap me outside the head. And so learning learning how to use yielding and all of our interactions is it's very powerful. You know, One we're just being more considerate, which is something we could all do more of. And two, it allows us to be strategic in our interactions, guiding conversations to a positive outcome with the least amount of resistance, which is helpful in you know, your relationships, business, sales, negotiations. I mean, there's so many different ways that you can apply this skill. Then the third pillar of yielding is emotional yielding, and this is very much like mental yielding, but with our own interpersonal conflicts. So you think about, oftentimes something will happen to us, and we'll respond, and we'll go down this path, and we might get an hour a day, a week down that road and realize maybe that wasn't the best choice. But by adapting a meditation practice into your life, it allows you to stay more present and aware and balanced when these things happen to us. And so now we can respond from that stability in that centered place rather than that distracted place, and oftentimes we can make more wise decisions that save us a lot of heartache on the other side. You know, And I've been explaining this idea of yielding now for over thirty years. I've been running this academy for a long time, and one of the most common things I'll hear people say is, ah, yielding makes a lot of sense. In fact, I use that all the time. Well, I would agree in that I think everybody uses some degree of yielding all the time, whether they recognize it or not. However, it's kind of like, you know, if you or I were to walk into a crime scene with a detective who's been on the job for thirty years, I guarantee you that person would see things about the series of events and the timeline that I know at least I would have no clue of Meditative arts helps us see things inside of ourselves and inside of other people that I truly believe most people will go through life and never have any clue of it these things unless they have a practice like this in their life. Yeah, you know, I believe you. So, So let me say this because even from our first interaction and interaction you were, you were so very calm. You were so very calm, and can I be very honest, it was I don't want to say alarming, but it was like, hmm, he is very very calm, like Zin at a zen moment, and even when you're speaking right now and you're explaining it's at a very Zin moment. But what it does for me. Is that. It makes me pay attention that it's that it was something shaken within me. To get there. Does that make sense? Yes? Yeah, So in that aspect, as you were even talking and explaining, like right now, I was just diagnosed with vertigo, and throughout I am trying to physically, even when we sit here, it's trying to not only balance myself physically, but also balance myself mentally and emotionally. Why doing all of this while listening to our conversation and talking and making sure that I'm in lining each one? So as you explaining, not knowing that these are the three that these are the three core of your method form, I'm like, wow, this. I understand it. Because even when you take a breath, you say, you know, you wait a moment, and it was like, at times, I have to take a breath. So even listening to you, it's like, Okay, you have to take a breath so you can balance and bring yourself together so you can be here mentally and emotionally because there is no physical balance. Right here between you and I will. Have a conversation and talking. Does that make sense? Yeah? And you know there is a sense of balance and energy that's going back and forth even when we're not in the same room, and I think being able to be sensitive to that so there's not a lot of hard angles, if you will can make it seem a lot more soothing. Yeah, yeah, I get that. Okay, Jeff, Okay, okay. I like that. To the practice, do you want to stay healthy into your older years? And be more mobile and watch your grandkids grow up. Or are you dealing with stress or anxiety or panic attacks and you want to have some tools to help deal with that, Or maybe you're an athlete and you want to learn how to improve your performance on the field. But don't just think about that why at a surface level, think about all the reasons why if you do this, how it will make your life better. And then also think about if you don't do this and you keep suffering and dealing with this problem, all of the reasons how it will hurt you as well. And so what we're doing here is we're really trying to find that fuel because it doesn't matter who you are and how much discipline you have, there's going to be a time tomorrow, next week, next month where your alarm's going to go off and it's time to get up and do your meditation practice, and you're going to say, ah, I'll just hit my snooze button, I'll do it tomorrow. And if you don't have that motivating why that's going to give you the energy to get up and do the practice, you're really going to be missing out. And the goal is to not look at meditation as a chore you have to do, but more as something I get to do it. You know, I've seen so many benefits from this practice. I get to do my practice today, and you start looking forward to it rather than it's just another to do that you have to do every day. The other thing to think about is the importance of consistency, you. Know, and. We talk about using ritual practices and our meditation and it's meant to be something that we do every day. You know. The Dalai Lama once said that everybody should meditate for twenty minutes a day, unless you're too busy, then you should meditate for an hour. And I love that saying in that, you know, we have that consistency, we develop this discipline, this integrity, this perseverance that not only affects us in our meditation practice, but it bleeds over into our relationships and our work and our hobbies and everything else we do in life. And then the third thing to consider is it's extremely important to find a guide somebody to point you in the right direction, because you know, you could go on to YouTube and see a million different videos teaching this and teaching that, and what I have seen over and over again is people who try to self teach themselves the meditative arts and build a practice off of this practice here and this here, without any kind of guidance. They could spend ten, fifteen, twenty years of their life just kind of get into the surface level and not really ever accomplishing what they're looking to do with the practice. And through the years, I've literally had students come in here that are self taught, that have been practicing fifteen twenty years, and they'll see somebody who's been following an approach for twelve months, who's deeper into their practice, and they'll get frustrated sometimes because they realize that, man, I just spent fifteen years doing this and all these hours and I'm still not able to figure this out. And so you know, life is short, your time is valuable. It's not that hard to find somebody to help guide you and point you down the right path. So with these three things, if you develop a strong why, you're consistent with the practice, and you do a little bit every day of a ritual practice, maybe twenty minutes a day, integrate some active practices into your life, find yourself a guide. If you keep this up for a year, I guarantee you that not only will you do this for the rest of your life, but it'll be one of the best things you've ever done for yourself. Beautiful. I love that. Thank you, Thank you for sharing that with that with us, with that one and that everyday moments of mindfulness. Yeah. Yeah, it really does make the practice feel more accessible. So before we kind of wrap up, I want you to can you share three simple meditation practice from your Yielding Warrior Methic book for our listeners so they can start implemating that today. Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that would be important for people to think about is the underlying principles in a meditation practice. And I've broken these down into what I call the five regulations. And if you have an understanding of these, you can do any meditation practice, whether it's tai chi, chigung a, sitting practice, yoga, breath work, it doesn't matter what it is. And these are kind of something that you really want to cultivate, nurture and if you do that, you'll be successful with your practice. And in these five regulations, they are regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy, and regulating the spirit. And briefly I'll kind of touch on what I mean when I say these things. So regulating the body is basically your skeletal alignment, your mind, scular tension in the body. You know. Think about maybe a time when you're sitting down at your computer and you've been there for three or four hours and you're filling lethargic and maybe your next getting sore and you're just kind of feeling a little beat up. And then another time when maybe the most important person in your world walks in the room and your body perks up and you feel like you're on top of the world. Well, we're in one hundred percent control of these two different energetic states all of the time. And the idea is is how are you choosing to show up? You know? And with this practice and this awareness in our physiology, we can make a huge change in our physical, mental, and emotional states. And this is kind of a surface level of regulating the body. At a little bit of a deeper level, we have talking about doing things to maintain some sort of muscle mass in the body to keep us healthy and keep our metabolism up. We have keeping the flexibility up in the body. We have regulating our diets, so we're taking in good nutrients, making sure that we're getting enough sleep. All of these things are important with affecting us and how our body responds. Then the next regulation is regulating the breath. And regulating the breath is an extremely deep topic and something that you will study for the rest of your life if you get into the meditative arts, and in fact, chigung is often referred to as the science of the breath because there's literally hundreds of different breathing strategies that we use. Now we have broadly categorized these strategies into Yen methods and Young methods. An example of a Yen method would be if you ever listen to somebody's sleep, their natural breathing pattern is a longer in hell and a shorter exhale. And this is the body's natural way of bringing our conscious mind into our subconscious mind, which is where we are when we're sleeping and dreaming. And so if you want to create this kind of energy and bring that energy inward closer to your center line and your meditations, we can do longer inhales soft retensions at the end of the in hell and shorter exhales, and this will help us to bring that energy inward, which is great for stress reduction, for dealing with anxiety and panic attacks, for boosting your creativity. There's many different ways that we could use this style of practice. Then we have the young side of the breath, which is more aggressive. This is like if you ever had to push your car, you pick up something heavy, your natural instinct is to exhale and put tension in the breath and make the breath audible sometimes and this helps generate energy in the body. Now, when we start understanding how to use the breath as a strategy, we can a our physical, mental, and emotional states throughout the day. And in Chinese philosophy they call this balancing the Khan and lee or the water and fire. You know, we all go through the day with emotional ups and downs, but rather than being like a roller coaster, when you see yourself starting to get a little bit excited, we can use the yend breath to bring it back down. And when you see yourself starting to get depleted, we can use the young breath to bring us back up. And now we can find more balance throughout the day. And so this is a very valuable tool when building a practice with meditative arts, then we have regulating the mind. And regulating the mind is an extremely deep topic as well, and something that you'll be working on with your practice from now until the end. And you know, the idea with the mind is that a lot of times through the years with teaching the meditative arts, I've had people come to me and say, I tried meditation, but it just didn't work for me. I couldn't quiet my mind. Well, somewhere along the way, people got this misconception or this idea that in order to be good at meditation you have to reach this blissful place of not thinking of anything and being in just this state of nirvana. And you know, it couldn't be further from the truth. I've spent the last thirty six years of my life traveling around the world training with meditation teachers from all over the planet, and I have never once met anybody who doesn't get distracted. We all do. We're all humans. It's just part of nature. The trick is changing your mindset and thinking that this is not failing. We're recognizing these imbalances. So now say you're doing a sitting practice. And. You're there for twenty minutes and you get distracted fifty times. Every time you get distracted, you use your posture, your breath, your mood if it's a movement practice, and you bring yourself back to center. Now you just got fifty repetitions of being off balance and coming back to center. And if you do this every day, every month, every year, you're going to develop a kind of power and resiliency that helps you in any distraction. Whether you have a stressful day at work, or you're dealing with anxiety, or somebody says something to throw you off your game, it doesn't matter. And so this idea of these developing these skills to increase our awareness and our mental power is extremely beneficial. You know, there's this story of these two monks that I really enjoy, and these two older monks that are walking down this dirt road after a big rainstorm and they come up to this huge mud puddle and on the other side of the puddles this beautiful little girl standing there in a white dress and she's crying and the older monk he yells across the puddle and says, everything, okay, can we help you? And she says, I need to be somewhere, but if I walk across this puddle, I'm going to get my dress all dirty. And so the older monk he rolls up his pant legs and he walks across the puddle. He picks her up, puts her on his back, takes her to the other side, sets her down, and she's off on our way. Well, him and the younger monk are walking a couple miles down the road, and finally the younger monk is just furious and he says, you know, we're not supposed to touch girls, but yet you did back there at the puddle. And the older monk looks down at him and says, you're still thinking about that girl I left her back there at the puddle. And how many times in life do we have to get two miles down the muddy road before we finally let something go. And so this ability to regulate and pay attention and notice these imbalances and use these tools to find that centered state can save us a lot of heartache. On the other side, the fourth regulation is regulating the energy. And this is an extreme, stremely deep topic as well, and something that we could literally talk about for hours. However, I'll just briefly give you an idea what I mean. So, once you've reached a competent level and regulating the body, the breath, and the mind, now you have the tools to regulate the energy in the body, and with a lot of meditations, we will circulate the energy, we will lead it inward, we will extend it outward to get different outcomes in our practice. And then lastly, we have regulating the spirit, which is a very profound and deep idea, and it's something that you know, meditation practitioners and monks will spend their entire life's journey working towards that stage of enlightenment. Now, when you have reached an understanding of these five regulations, and you're working on ways to cultivate these ideas and integrate them into every area of your life, you can see how there's really no nothing in life you can do that can't be positively affected by putting this practice together and integrating this idea into your life. Thank you, you know. There was there was well, I got everything, but it was quite a few keywords in there that I got, especially with the monk. The monk story that you shared with us, and about the. Young monk. Holding on thinking about the little girl, And that's about what our problems and our issues are, our situation that we tend to keep holding on to instead of leaving them there and moving on with So I like that that kind of I kind of felt good. That was that was me, that was me in there. But I thank you for all of those tips right there, Jeff. I think our listeners as well as myself will find them incredible, incredible useful on our journey towards balance. And like I shared before earlier in the show, is about my vertigo and truly trying to understand what it is for me moving forward, just in life in general, you know, with everything. And so I do believe that this show right here was not only ideal for my guests, but also for me too. So know that I'm listening to everything that you say as I am going through my practicing of meditation as well. So just know that and I thank you for that. I truly do. I thank you for that one. Now, as we wrap today's episode, I wanted to write everyone, there's some of the key points that we discussed that they've been great. Like I said, if I can just share with. You all in it. I would do this on another show and share with you all what happened on this show. Then you will understand why I have to get this book. I myself have to get this book. The Yielding Worry of Method that teaches us that balance is isn't about being rigid or forced in a way up through life, but it's about yielding when necessary, in use in our in strength to navigate our challenges. You know, through our meditation and our mindfulness and setting clear intentions, we can create a more harmonious and fulfilling life. And I encourage all of you to download our free mini ebook as well as our toy one day Living in Balance challenge. Jeff, I want to thank you again for just sharing your wisdom with us today, and for those who want to learn more about Jeff's work or The Yielding Worry of Method, be sure to check out his links to his website and his resources in his show notes, Jeff, is there anything else that you would love to tell our listeners where to find you ad how to get that book? You know, if somebody's in organ possibly getting your course or your you know your services or if you do online services. Let them, know. Sure, So if anybody's interested in this methodology and they like to check out my book, I'm offering a free copy of the book. You just pay for shipping and handling if you go to the yieldingwarrior dot com Forward Slash book. Also at the yieldingwarrior dot com, we have an online meditation program that teaches you how to build an evolving life practice with all of these different ideas and meditation and how to find something that works for you and create the right direction for you as well. We also have a teacher training program up there. So if there's any life coaches out there, or people who own yoga studios or martial arts studios and you want to learn how to create another pillar in your academy or a studio that can be another resource, there's that out there as well. Beautiful, beautiful, So right now where you are, is this a building or is this you know how they have the do you have like a whole organization to where what do you call it? Like a resort? Not a resort, but you know, yeah, yes, so yeah, we have a studio here. It's in Portland, Oregon and Southeast Portland, and we've been I've been running a physical location here for thirty years, as well as you know our online programs. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Well again, Jeff, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you for all of you the tuning in here to the Season and Self Love. I hope that today's episode has gave you some valuable insights and practical tools to help you find balance in your life. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast and join us next week as we continue to act the Balance in life series of mote till then, take care of yourselves and keep striving for a balance. Have an amazing day. Thank you for joining us on this journey of discovering and empowerment here at the Season and Self Love Podcast. Remember, embracing self love is a continuous journey, and we're so glad to have you with us. So if you enjoy today's episode, please leave us a review and don't forget to join our community on Facebook at Season and Self Love connect with like minded individuals who are also on their self love journey. Now, if you have any questions or topics that you'd like for us to explore, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at seasonousseelflove at gmail dot com and let. Your voice be heard. So until next time, take a moment for yourself today and remember you are worthy of love, joy and all the beautiful things that life has to offer you. A