How Martial Arts Helped Me Express Love and Caring for My Brother, the Felon

have a brother who is in jail.  He has been in and out of jail and prison for several years now. 

My brother is an angry, obsessive and sometimes violent man.  I have very little contact with him.

Last week I visited him in jail for the first time ever.

This all started because last fall I heard myself tell a friend that there was nothing I could do for my brother except pray. I realized after I said it, that that wasn’t true.  I decided to do more.

I have studied Kenpo Karate for several years with Harley Swiftdeer Reagan and the Deer Tribe Metis Medicine Society dojo.

In deciding to "do more" for my brother, I kept three martial arts principles in mind:

1) Never focus on moving your opponent, only ever focus on moving yourself.

2) Your opponent is never the other person, it is merely patterns that are out of integrity.

3) It is only possible to perceive something outside of yourself that you already have inside of yourself.


What I decided to do was EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) that uses accupressure points and body awareness of physical and emotional pain, in order to release dysfunctional and entrenched emotional patterns.  It is possible to do this remotely for another person.  For about six weeks I spent a little time each day doing surrogate EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) for him.

I found this practice resulted in healing for me, and probably for him as well.

From what my parents said, at the time it had a surprising and noticeable effect on his behavior for the better. My guess is that whatever benefits he got are still there, but mostly hidden by other problematic layers that are still present.

However that might be, for me the surrogate EFT work was profound. In my willingness to touch into whatever was going on with him in the moment (for a couple weeks it was primarily anger and hatred and then for about a month it was despair), I touched into some deep pockets of my own that I had been carrying as pain in my head for as long as I can remember.

It is amazing to have been able to tap into my pain and release it. It is amazing to have a tool so readily available for releasing each new layer of pain I discover. It is also amazing to be able to tap into places within myself that are largely hidden from myself, using someone else’s more obvious (to me at least) stuck places as a more readily accessible point into that feeling tone.

Once I connect to a feeling tone, I can feel the resonance in me where I also hold that pattern. It is quite a turnaround for me to feel so grateful to my brother for making my own healing easier.

Lately it seems like the best way to proceed with external problems is to look for how I carry, contribute, or help hold in place those problems and then do whatever I know to release my contribution.

These three martial arts principles have made me more aware of how I can still love my brother and express care for him, even though I have stopped wasting my energy attempting to remedy his external situation.  My guess is that until he releases some more of his internal demons, he will continue to recreate the problems he is experiencing.

Even though releasing his internal demons is still his responsibility, because I love him I am willing to pitch in now and again to do what I know to make it a little easier for him to release them.  I also stay humbly aware based on martial arts principle three, that since I can percieve these demons outside of myself (in him), I have them inside of me.  Any aid I render must, first and foremost, begin with me taking personal responsibily for releasing my own version of these demons.

Mainly, I do what I need to do to take care of myself and stay physically safe.  Almost anything else seems like a such a waste of time and life force. 

The more I study martial arts, the more deeply I know that it really is most effective to focus on moving myself, not my opponent.  If I do that well, my opponent has very little choice but to move.

And since my opponent is not a person but patterns that are out of integrity, when I take responsibility for moving myself, my movements are really about bringing myself into greater integrity.  The more effectively I can do this for myself, the more impact I have. 

Indeed, the steps I have taken to heal myself, seem to be the only ones that result in any healing whatsoever for my brother and his situation.

I can only give what I already have.