“Always, whenever possible, stop thinking negatively, always think positively.” (End Quote) – Yoshizo Machida 8th Dan Shotokan
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Anxiety and fear can stop you dead in your tracks and hold you back. It’s not easy to face your fears and push through them, but for the martial arts, it is essential.
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Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now, we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive. It’s great isn’t it?
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I worried a lot. Will it rain today, will my paycheck last the whole month, will I be late for work, what’s going to go wrong today, and if it does, how shall I correct it?
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Worrying is often based on baseless nonsense and situations that may never happen.
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Our default state of being is negative. We’re unhappy, ill-informed, discontent, and often worried. Becoming happy, content, grateful, and fulfilled requires hard work. Prior to the advancement in technology, medicine, agriculture, and housing, we worried about surviving and living off the land. Now we worry about succeeding at work, or the dojo, paying the bills and having a social life.
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You could say technically that most of us have nothing to worry about, because if you live in a developed country we have food, health-care, shelter, and entertainment. But in actuality we always have something to worry about. There’s always some new perceived, obscure threat to our existence.
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This is why we need to cultivate a life where we count our blessings and enjoy what we have, rather than worry about the next problem in our life.
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“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.” – Henry Ford
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In the martial arts the reasons for, and the experience of fear and anxiety, will never go away – but you can learn to handle the symptoms of fear. In fact fear is a vitally important aspect of combat. The way to look at it is to recognize that those feelings are just one side of the coin. The anticipation of combat, being afraid of the violence, is what kicks your body into fight and flight mode.
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You need to learn to embrace that initial feeling of dread and begin to recognize it as your friend, and that can only really happen through training, working at it, just like any other technique or principle. In my experience it is not the fear that’s prohibitive, but the “feeling of the fear”. 
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“Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.” – I Worried by Mary Oliver
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 Photo Credit: Yoshizo Machida
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