In the Hands of the One Who Loves Me

A samurai and the love of his life had just gotten married, and were traveling by boat to their honeymoon, when a massive storm hit.* The samurai's wife began to tremble in fear, for there was no shore in sight, and their boat was being tossed and turned in the massive waves that were sure to capsize it at any moment! She ran to find her husband, a brave warrior who she thought would provide her comfort in their seemingly perilous situation. But when she found him, he was peacefully looking out at the sea, as if the sun was out and the waves were calm.

Lightning cracked across the sky. Thunder rumbled from all directions. The boat lurched forward violently.

"How can you be so calm?!" the wife yelled, frantically clinging to her husband. "We are about to die! Do you not value your life?"

When the samurai heard these words of his wife, he looked down upon her, pulled out his katana, and put it to his wife's neck. She looked at him. And laughed.

"Why are you laughing, woman? Are you not afraid?"

She smiled. "I know you love me, and would never hurt me. In your hands, there is nowhere more safe."

The samurai sheathed his sword, looked his wife in the eyes, and said, "I too am in the hands of the One who loves me, so how can I be afraid?"

*Adapted from the book "Secrets of Divine Love" by A. Helwa, from a much older legend.

Comments

Grease-the-Groove Workouts and High-Frequency Training for Mass and Power, Losing Bodyfat, or Just Getting BIG!

An “Easy” High-Frequency Training Program for Plenty of Size and Strength + Some Other Tips and Workouts for Transforming Your Physique I began training in martial arts more than 40 years ago, when I was around 10 years old. By the time I was a teenager, it was my life. (In many ways, it still is.) I was at the dojo just about every day of the week but I also trained at my home every day. However, when I was around 16 or 17—I’m not really sure of the exact age; I just remember that I could drive by that point—I only started going to the dojo about once per week. Sometimes just once every two weeks. I’m pretty sure that a lot of my fellow karatekas—especially those who had known me for many years—thought I had become lazy or that something was “wrong” with me or that I no longer took my martial training very seriously or even cared about it anymore, for that matter. But I had a reason for it, though I didn’t really c...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan magazine. In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.” I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time . In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...

The Wisdom of Train Long, Not Hard

Simple Methods to Improve Your Workouts and Obtain Better Results Over the years, one of my most popular articles has been my “ Train Long, Not Hard ” feature that I wrote for Testosterone Nation around the beginning of this century. The title comes from a saying of Arthur Jones, the creator of Nautilus equipment and the father of so-called “high-intensity training” and the whole one-set-to-complete-momentary-muscular-failure approach to workouts. He and Mike Mentzer are responsible for brain-washing an entire generation of lifters and quite possibly ruining real strength training, at least here in America—though I’ll save my ramblings on that for another essay or you can read my article on REAL High-Intensity Training . Anyway, his saying goes like this: “You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.” Jones, quite obviously, believed that “train hard” was the answer to that conundrum. In my article...

C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

Search This Blog