Originally the word "health" meant "whole" or "undivided.” However, today the word "health" has come to mean something quite different. Today, it is more likely to mean free from illness or able to pursue your daily activities.

Shambhala Black Belt Life-Skills bring us back to the original meaning of the word "health" by recognizing the interconnectedness of the mind, the body and the spirit. Shambhala Black Belt Life-Skills unify and strengthen the bond between the mind and the body, resulting in a powerful spirit that becomes your guiding Life-force.

The Shambhala Life-Skill of SELF-RELEASE allows you to learn from your past experiences. It enables you to accept both past and current behavior as indicators of your needs and past habits, not as something in which you need to remain positively or negatively invested.

SELF-RELEASE allows you to not hold your past and current actions against yourself. It encourages you to let go of your constant preoccupation with the fear of embarrassment. It frees us from shame and self-recrimination. SELF-RELEASE lets you know that your less than conscious behavior is "O.K., because it's just part of being you." SELF-RELEASE enables you to pardon yourself, to move on, to learn from your old behavior rather than berating yourself, rather than filling yourself with self-doubt, self-anger, and self-hate. These self-depreciating feelings only generate more self-destructive behavior. SELF-RELEASE lets you step beyond self-depreciation to self-observation.

The Life-Skill of SELF-RELEASE also frees you from feeling that you have already invested too much time, money and energy into your old ways to change now. It helps you to focus on the "now." It helps you to realize that it is never too late, that now is better than never.

The Life-Skill of SELF-RELEASE gives you permission to continually re-examine your personal and cultural priorities. It frees you from being a prisoner of priorities which may have been important, but no longer serve you.

The Shambhala Life-Skill of SELF-RELEASE also reduces your susceptibility to being guilt manipulated by yourself and others. It requires you to question the usefulness of guilt. Guilt gives you the message that you are not doing the "right thing." And you have all been taught that people who do not do the "right thing" are, at the least, wrong and frequently, just plain bad. So when you indulge in guilt you do one of two things: (1) fall into a pit of worthlessness or (2) mind-spin yourself into endless rationalizations until you completely distort reality.

Neither will serve you. Neither opens your eyes and encourages you to become a student of your own behavior. Feelings of worthlessness and/or endless mind spinning do not allow you to take the time to trace the roots of your behavior and intelligently question the wisdom of continuing to behave in ways that sever you from your Integrity.

The Life-Skill of SELF-RELEASE calls you to attention! It gets you out of the worthlessness and the mind spinning of guilt. It encourages you to study and create new behavior out of your continually emerging priorities rather than to manipulate yourself into doing what you have always done or been told you should do.

SELF-RELEASE allows you to be patient with yourself. It affords you the freedom from self- and other-imposed standards of behavior and unrealistic expectations. It lets you know that you are a worthy individual who deserves a great deal of room to experiment, change and follow your own invigorating path through life. SELF-RELEASE lets you know you deserve, if nothing else, an abundance of your own time, energy and good company.