Almost 1,500 years ago, Japanese samurai began perfecting the form of horseback archery known as yabusame (yah-boo-sah-meh).

On this sun-after-rain afternoon, beneath a glistening, snow-capped Mount Fuji, I join the yabusame festival my rural community has celebrated for over nine centuries.

Every year, on the April 29 national holiday, mounted archers display their martial art at Lake Kawaguchi, a three-minute walk from the front entrance of Energy Doorways, the Japanese publishing company I established here.

After a ritual ceremony at the nearby shrine, male and female archers ride out in measured procession towards the lakeshore.

Their finery replicates 13th century formal hunting costume – jaunty hats, deerskin chaps, jewel tone silks, black velvet chest protectors embroidered with gold crests, and soft leather shoes that slip into stirrups shaped like oversized, decorated slippers.

And, of course, the elegant, recurve bow, one of the longest in the world.

Although many in the West are familiar with the mystique of the Japanese sword, early samurai defined their warrior creed as The Way of the Bow and Horse.

Yabusame echoes that lost era of thundering hooves and singing arrows.

Conditions this year are especially challenging.

Morning rehearsals under heavy rain have churned the dirt track to mud, and a ferocious wind gusts.

Galloping at full tilt each archer readies the arrow for aim at targets spaced along the narrow track.

In successive rounds these are replaced with ever smaller targets – a bulls-eye board, then a wooden square, finally a suspended clay pot.

Since the archer needs both hands to load the arrow, draw the bow, and shoot, the horse is controlled with the knees, implying total trust between rider and animal.

At the precise moment of aim, the archer raises the body, twisting the bow at full draw, and releases the arrow with a special shout meant to align energy and intention.

Even in these unfavorable circumstances, with some horses slipping and arrows blown off course, several archers achieve the satisfying thwack of targets soundly hit.

Yet yabusame is not a vying for the title of the best archer.

Traditional training taught discipline, focus, and finesse.

Breathing practice harmonized mind and body under the most intense pressure, allowing the horse archer to overcome doubt and fear.

Imbued with spiritual significance, the martial art accorded respect to the divine, natural cycles, and human skill in delighting the gods.

Can such aspirations have any relevance in today’s world?

I invite you to share your thoughts about the following personal growth inspiration I gleaned from this year’s horseback archery event.

Yabusame-Inspired Actions

Identify exactly what and where your target is.

Execute every step necessary to support your aim.

Become really good at what you want to do.

Root your efforts in confidence and spiritual purpose.

Display your flair by dressing for the part.

Go all out, galloping at full tilt.

Face hostile situations with equanimity.

Recognize that authentic action yields its own reward.

Trust what carries you forward.

Celebrate the moment as all there is.

Yabusame-Inspired Lessons

It’s not about competing with others.

It’s about being the best only you can be in the present.

It’s not about winning applause.

It’s about dancing with your unique abilities and talents.

It’s not about taking home the prize.

It’s about reflecting harmony, prosperity, and shared abundance.

Yabusame-Inpsired Insights

Be what you are:

Express your passion with your true colors flying.

Act with courage:

Hitting your target requires your initial willingness to try.

Adjust your attitude:

Adverse conditions are simply that – your real test is how you respond.

Discover your inner power:

True aim arises from the certainty of centered stillness.

See the bigger picture:

When your arrow misses the mark, sense the gods are smiling anyway.

Show gratitude:

Appreciate your horse and trust teamwork – each one needs and helps the other.

Be bold:

Leave the crowds gasping with astonishment at your bravado.

Live fully, live well:

Look back and say, “I had a great ride.”

How do you feel about hitting your target at full gallop?

What other comments would you like to share?

When Gail Brenner at A Flourishing Life invited me to take part in her collaborative blog project I felt honored and thrilled to accept.

The result is four women bloggers – three in the US and myself in Japan – each sharing our thoughts today on “Getting Unstuck.”

Working with one another has been a joy of united effort and interwoven connections.

Just as we are all sustained by the greater web of life, this project has affirmed the power of mutual support that can enlighten the worldwide web.

Moving clockwise from the bottom left of the photo the bloggers are:

Tara Sophia Mohr – Wise Living

Gail Brenner – A Flourishing Life

Robin Easton – Naked in Eden Blog

Catrien Ross – Energy Doorways

To read more about “Getting Unstuck” please click on the above links.

Letting Go of Loss

Someone you loved is gone.

Something you needed is no longer there.

Your heroic commitment has faded into failure.

The foundations of your existence lie crumpled beneath you.

You surrendered solutions long ago and your answer ahead seems impossible to fathom.

What remains?

Today, there is nothing and no-one.

There is only you.

Out of pain and disillusionment you admit all you once cherished is indeed lost.

Faced with emptiness, you breathe into your untapped courage.

You discover that in grasping nothing you are now free to embrace everything.

You are getting unstuck.

Letting Go of Masks

So you peel off your myriad masks to reveal the face you knew before your outer world was made.

For the first time in years you understand who looks back at you in the mirror.

You are this one genuine face.

Yet what your features reflect may be too much for those you meet.

Some will gasp, dismayed.

Others will shrink back, embarrassed by what you now expose.

Even your closest family and friends might retreat.

In your clarity of recognition you observe yourself fronting this face, no matter how discomforting.

You are compelled above all else to be the face of what you truly are.

You are getting unstuck.

Letting Go of Maps

You step around a sudden curve and the contours of your inner life open into unfamiliar territory.

You realize the poles have shifted and your compass no longer points your true direction.

Your former maps are useless.

Disoriented in place and time you can confirm only uncertain and difficult terrain around you.

What happened to the paths you once traveled?

Where do you go from here?

Mapless, you have only your intuition to guide you.

Now you must trust the honesty of your own emerging senses.

The way the land lies: how the sun falls; where the water flows.

Now you must deepen awareness of what is real in yourself and what you love.

You test your footing on fresh ground that has never been walked before.

You expand into the unknown, an authentic explorer at last.

You are getting unstuck.

Letting Go of Limits

You long to cry rivers, but your eyes burn parched as desert sands.

Your heart extends in natural connection, but your rhythms are stifled.

You yearn to share your essence with others, but you dim your response.

Your mouth fills with the truth of what you are, but you silence your song.

And then your energy shifts.

You find yourself letting go, little by little, of limits that define and constrain you.

You are getting unstuck.

Letting Go of Aloneness

Your lone voice echoes in the mountains.

A wind, too, blows through the canyon.

Birds together sing the oneness of spring.

Rain lifts in singular purpose from the Earth’s living waters.

You accept your own reconnection as a journey of transformation and compassionate wisdom.

Year after year, you have tuned and repaired this instrument you are.

Now you are become the music of your life.

And your true melody is thrumming.

So you play and you sing and you leap and you laugh and you touch and you cry and you sense and you know and you thrill with delight and you nurture with joy and you dance with inspired abandon in the landscapes of your soul’s desire.

You are getting unstuck.

Are you getting unstuck by gently letting go?

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

I just did.

Something here in Japan knocked the smile out of my life for several days.

So engulfing was the personal trauma I found it hard to sense even the slightest hint of brightness.

I lost my smile.

My innermost wisdom knows, of course, that such perception of darkness is distorted.

There can always be a doorway out to where a smile signals.

No matter how darkly I perceive my world, the reality of daylight arises in my face every morning to challenge me otherwise.

In visible manifestation, the sun appears whether or not I choose to appreciate its presence.

The light arrives in welcome regardless of my acceptance.

Embracing natural rhythms is like blinking myself out from the dimness of a self-restricting cave.

As my physical eyes open to outer realities, my inner vision, too, expands with renewed awareness.

I smile despite myself.

Once again I sense that no matter what unfolds, I need never trap myself in a shell of hardness and unfeeling that shuts out the light.

Something traumatic happened: This is a fact.

Let it flow through me.

All is darkness and sorrow: This is a perception.

Let it fall from me.

So today, please share my meditation on finding 9 powerful meanings in your smile when you don’t feel like smiling.

What the power of your S-M-I-L-E can do:

Stretch-My-Inner-Love-Energy
Smiling stretches muscles that lift your face, instantly stimulating your inner joy.

Start-My-Internal-Life-Engine
Smiling gets you going when your life rhythms are at their lowest ebb, releasing your energetic flow.

See-Miracles-In-Life’s-Environment
Smiling helps you perceive the world through new eyes, reconnecting your sense of wonder and gratitude.

Spark-Motivation-Into-Limitless-Enthusiasm
Smiling spurs you to begin again, reigniting the innermost fire that fuels your visions.

What the power of your S-M-I-L-E can be:

Simple-Mindfulness-Inviting-Life’s-Embrace
Sometimes you smile because things are just what they are, and through all of it, life is good.

Splendid-Magnificence-Illuminating-Love’s-Essence
Sometimes you smile because such compassionate generosity suffuses the heart of love.

Shared-Moments-Inspiring-Laughter’s-Expression
Sometimes you smile because good feelings tickle links to the best of yourself and community.

Special-Magic-Invoking-Luminous-Enchantment
Sometimes you smile because sudden knowledge stirs awareness of extraordinary dimensions.

Your S-M-I-L-E contains unique significance and the energy of transformation:

So-Make-It-Last-Eternally
If a bell can reverberate forever in the universe, why not your smile, too?

Are you finding powerful meanings in your smile when you don’t feel like smiling?

Please share your thoughts and let’s S-M-I-L-E together!

Where intention goes, energy flows.

In a future post I will expand this idea within the context of Oriental Medicine’s 5,000 years of applied knowledge about the body’s energy cycles.

But today I offer a simple exercise that demonstrates the link connecting your mind, your real power of intention, and your energy flow.

Have fun with what I call Stretching Your Potential:

Stretching Your Potential

• Stand or sit comfortably.
• Look at the palms of your hands.
• At the bottom of your palm, where your hand joins the wrist, is a horizontal line that resembles a baseline, as it were, of your palm.
• Place your hands together in prayer position, exactly mirroring the position of this baseline, one palm against the other.
• Look at your fingers.
• You will see that either your left or right hand is slightly shorter than the other.
• Separate your hands.
• Focus your attention totally on your shorter hand.
• Say, either within your mind or aloud, “My fingers are longer, my fingers are longer.”
• Mentally direct your power of intention into your shorter hand.
• Take a deep breath in through your nose and breathe out through your mouth.
• Repeat the words, “My fingers are longer, my fingers are longer.”
• Now place your palms together again as you did before, exactly mirroring the baseline.
• Look at your fingers.

What do you find?

Are you surprised?

Focusing your attention stimulates the real power of your intention to direct your own energy.

What holds true for this simple exercise is equally true for the more difficult tasks you set yourself.

You already have within you all the power you need to manifest your intentions.

It is that straightforward.

It is that authentic.

You can direct your energy flow exactly as you want, at any moment in your life.

Whether your goal is immediate or long-term, stretching your potential is powerfully and relevantly possible.

How do you feel about this simple exercise?

Do you notice anything different about yourself afterwards?

And knowing your intention is a real power already within you, how else will you stretch your potential from now?

I welcome your reactions, so please join the discussion with your comments.

Have a wonderful day stretching your potential!

How about you?

Are you alert to the vibrations reviving your passion and purpose?

Spring flowers broadcast frequencies that sing to your indifference, stirring you with renewed motivation.

Their vibrations spur your spirit’s shift from winter rhythms to the freshness of enlightened inspiration.

Spring also awakens you to the rippling of a myriad sentient beings.

Your sensory experience, encountered in every breath, defines you, reflects you, confirms you and supports you.

In the same way, the vibrations you broadcast reach outwards to affect each person you meet and each circumstance around you.

You live in a sea of vibration that resonates in your cells, informing your DNA and transforming your choices.

You do not know when vibrations arrive from afar to influence you.

You do not know how widely your own vibrations reach.


Manifestation taps the power of this vibrational continuum.

Your first impulse for creation takes shape within its energetic vortex.

Where intention goes, energy flows.

Your intentions unleash creative changes in the energy field that surrounds you.

Positive intentions combined with positive actions excite energy to move in desired directions.

Why should this be so?

Is it because the underlying principle of the universe is the joy of co-creation?

Is it because you share accountability for expressing the abundance of this creative intelligence?

Spring flowers flaunt their splendor, unabashed in their magnificence.

How about you?

Do you celebrate the forms and colors of your personality and character?

Do your dreams astonish with their boldness?

Do you unfurl your talents to a delighted world?

As spring vibrations quicken within you, how are you reviving your passion and purpose?

In Japan, I welcome the ripples of your response.

As I write this blog post, live-fire artillery is blasting Mount Fuji to bits.

Rocket bursts explode the calm of this early March morning.

Even at more than 30 kilometers distance, the earth here shudders.

Windows in my mountain minka rattle.

Blasts reverberate through its ancient beams.

The eyes of my dogs and cats reflect alarm, but they no longer express terror as they once did.

Like me, they have grown accustomed to this frequent disruption of country life rhythms.

For the fifteen years we have lived here, every year, several months a year, the cultural symbol of Japan, revered as Fuji-san, has been blasting to bits in our ears.

Each live-fire artillery exercise lasts several hours and is so sustained we shelter indoors until the assault is over.

I decided to write this blog post in response to readers who noted how much easier it must be for me to connect spiritually because I have fewer distractions, living as I do amidst such natural beauty.

Can live-fire artillery be considered sufficient spiritual distraction?

Or is experiencing a situation akin to a war-zone a peculiar sort of modern mystic training that will somehow deepen my spiritual awareness?

As a metaphor for the splintered reality in which so many of us live, blasting Mount Fuji to bits is particularly fitting.

Both inside and outside Japan, the solitary peak of Fuji-san is showcased in travel poster perfection.

Venture closer, however, and your reaction to the withered lower slopes can be visceral.

Acres upon acres of denuded landscape, fenced off with ominous warnings to sightseers and other careless intruders.

A desolation of decimated flora and fauna.

This ravaged wasteland is never mentioned in the drive to designate Mount Fuji as a World Cultural Heritage Site.

A World Cultural Heritage of what, exactly?

As an example of World Cultural Heritage that perfectly mirrors the reality of the world we have imagined for ourselves?

Is there some spiritual lesson to be gleaned from knowing that approval of World Cultural Heritage status is hampered by the fact that Mount Fuji is a gigantic toilet and garbage dump heaped from the vast amounts of human waste and trash left by climbers?

Year after year, Mount Fuji is portrayed as a singular cultural symbol associated with spiritual pursuits and the purity of Japanese feelings towards nature.

There are some 13,000 shrines on Mount Fuji, and hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit annually.

Fuji-san is now a magnet for a new generation of spiritual seeker, including many Westerners, in quest of higher self enlightenment.

Official Japanese promotion efforts include brochures filled with stunning images of shrines, temples, lakes, and other natural wonders of the area around Mount Fuji.

Although some photos show the current “Operation Clean” at Fuji-san’s summit, there is not one picture of the scorched, demolished landscape in the artillery area.

And what of this description from a military support website?

“Camp Fuji was turned over to the Marine Corps from the US Army in 1953… Camp Fuji’s mission is to support military training by US Forces in the adjacent 34,000 acre Fuji Maneuver Area. The Fuji Maneuver Area has been the premier training ground in Japan ever since.”

For close to six decades, the foot of Mount Fuji has shuddered as a shelling range.

As if in recoil, our psyche, too, is denatured, devastated, and divided.

Splintered, we mentally inhabit the landscape of a blighted facade.

The inner contours of our genuine nature remain obscured by a lifetime’s store of our own and other people’s waste and garbage.

How can we live with this splintered self?

My answer is, we are not truly living at all.

We are simply moving through the days of our lives in a shell-shocked numbness that alienates us from our own authentic feelings and senses.

Whether unconsciously or deliberately, we prefer the masks of our cultural, social, religious, and educational conditioning.

Because we do not recognize they are only masks, we allow their destructive hold over us.

All the while, our inner mind desires revival, like the wasted firing grounds of Fuji-san.

So that is why, on an early morning in March, 2010, I am jolted by the blasting to bits of a Japanese national treasure called Fuji-san.

Meantime, the images of a pristine Mount Fuji continue to be shown.

And the illusion of spirituality and nature connection continues to be treasured.

But do we cling to such illusions because in our innermost soul we cry out for a better and more genuine way of connecting with our world?

What kind of a world do you and I live in now?

If blasting Mount Fuji to bits through live-fire artillery does indeed count as spiritual distraction, how can you and I recover the expanded awareness that makes sense of it all to yield authentic meaning in our everyday lives?

Given the choice, and the power to realize our deepest longing, what kind of a world would you and I envision?

What if we recognize our blighted landscape as a distorted mask we need only remove to reveal the fertile growth budding beneath?

What if we clean up our store of inner waste and garbage to uncover the treasures of our own genuine, loving hearts?

What kind of a world would you and I live in, then?

And what prevents us from realizing that world into being right now?

Under a volley of live-fire artillery at the foot of Mount Fuji, I welcome your thoughts.

Catrien Ross

Well, you can.

For several years I have been physically blowing out any feelings of negativity in a simple shift of energy I now call A Positive Puff.

I naturally learned this while fuming one day about a personal situation in Japan.

Living in the mountains, the first thing I do whenever I feel low is go outside.

Stepping out into the vista of hills and sky instantly expands my senses and perception.

I do so whatever the weather, as the wide eaves of this Japanese minka shelter me from rain, snow, hail, and even typhoon winds.

That day, fuming and spluttering, I was so upset I let out a hiss of noisy breath.

I also threw my fists downward in a gesture of anger and disgust.

At once I felt a dramatic and positive shift.

My body released its hostile tension.

My dark mood ebbed out of me.

I had physically released my negativity.

Refined since through practice, here is A Positive Puff for you to try:

• If possible, go outdoors to an attractive, safe area.
• Stand lightly without locking your knees.
• Relax by breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Mentally bring up what bothers or upsets you.
• Scoop your negative feelings up into your cupped hands.
• Raise your hands, full of these feelings, slowly in front of your face.
• Take a deep breath in through your nose and release it in one strong puff over your cupped hands, as if blowing away your feelings.
• Immediately drop your empty hands to the ground as if releasing your negative feelings into the earth.
• Shake off your hands.
• Breathe deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth.
• Repeat the same movements two or three times if you feel you need to.

You will most likely sense an immediate lightness, both physically and mentally, as if your tension had both blown and dropped away.

Which it has.

You are actually blowing out your negativity in a puff of positive intention to shift your energy.

Do you think this can work for you?

Why don’t you try for yourself and share your experience?

In my last blog post I wrote about how judging your day creates your experience.

But what about self-judgment?

What emotional damage do you sustain from how you judge yourself?

Judgments you impose upon yourself can generate guilt that blights years of your life.

The negative verdicts of your inner judge destroy your self-confidence, diminish your self-esteem, cripple your choices, and quash your creative expression.

Yet the beginnings of negative self-judgment can often be traced back to an outside opinion that became your own limiting belief.

For example, who first judged that you were not beautiful, or talented, or capable?

Someone in your childhood who criticized or compared you to others?

Who judged that you had no ability for drawing, or writing, or dancing, or singing?

A teacher, or another insensitive adult?

Who judged that your dreams could never be realized, or that your deepest desires were futile, or that your passion was ridiculous?

A parent? A spouse? A partner?


At some point you not only acknowledged such valuations as truth, you accepted them as your inner reality.

Thus you began the lifetime of negative self-judgment that now defines you.

Years of piling up one false belief after another builds a mountain of guilt that can crush you.

Shifting this deadly weight means shifting your inner guilt.

This, in turn, requires confronting your inner judge.

As impossible as this may seem, one way to start is by understanding how
negative self-judgment is created.

How do you determine what is good and what is bad?

Why do you perceive one person or thing as beautiful and another as ugly?

How do you develop the likes and dislikes by which you respond to people and situations?

Your inner judge is formed out of the mental framework, the world view you constructed from external factors such as:

• where you were born
• what your parents and other caregivers taught you
• your culture and your religion
• your friends and your peer groups
• the books you read and the subjects you studied
• the games you played and the passions you discovered
• the work you trained for and the job you do

Your personal framework teaches you to separate, discriminate, and judge.

It defines how you perceive your life and how you react to everything that happens.

Your world view is the basis for the guilt that confines and perhaps even paralyzes you in the present.

It will most likely be painful and may require years of personal effort, but tracing back through honest self-reflection can lead to breakthrough concerning your negative self-judgment.

You begin to see why you make the choices you do.

You start to understand your motives and perceptions.

A first step can be as simple as looking in a mirror and asking yourself what you see.

Or spending time at the close of each day in reviewing all the self-judgments you made in so many hours.

Or lingering in bed a few moments after awaking and requesting fresh insights from your own inner wisdom.

By engaging the courage of your deepest self you open the doorway to dissolving the negative self-judgment that creates a lifetime of guilt and limitation.

How has negative self-judgment affected your life?

Do you have a personal story you would like to share?

Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.

When I suspend judgement of good versus bad in whatever happens to me or around me, suddenly I perceive the world through fresh eyes.

Which is much easier said than done.

How many judgements have you made today since you got up?

Think back.

What was your very first thought on waking?

A smile of acceptance or an expression of distaste?

What were the first words out of your mouth this morning?

Thank you, or…?

How did you greet today’s weather?

With equilibrium or an expletive?

What feelings did you show towards the first person you encountered?

An open joy or a scowl of annoyance?

How did you react to your first food or drink of the day?

With satisfaction or a critical grunt?

In what attitude did you begin your work?

Inspirational motivation or disillusionment?

How did you complete your work?

In grateful accomplishment or disappointed complaint?

When you judge the world in terms of dualities your expectations define your response.

And your judgmental response creates your experience.

You like something so you feel good.

You dislike something so you feel bad.

But why the need to judge at all?

Step for a moment into the reality of nature.

The sun does not rise because you desire light.

The moon shines whether or not the water catches its reflection.

The seasons refresh their cycles because they are seasons.

A tree is a tree, a bird a bird, your spouse your spouse.

From my vantage point above Lake Kawaguchi, the view of Mount Fuji reminds me:

The blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains;
The white clouds are of themselves white clouds.

By observing without judgement I can see things simply as they are.

By relinquishing expectations I can accept what unfolds.

Perhaps I can even experience my true nature as I am of myself I.

Whole, yet a part of all I see, and feel, and know.

And all of it, a part of me.

How did judging your day create your experience today?

Red ribbons in the February snow.

Meantime, deep inside this 300-year-old minka in the mountains …

The stone hearth warms.

Fire and Snow Meditation in a Japanese Minka

Beneath the snow

A redness of rejoicing.

In the stone’s enfolding

An inner fire’s glow.

Catrien Ross, February 2, 2010