Do no harm. Do no harm to others. Do no harm to the Earth. Do no harm to yourself.

Easy to say, but not always easy words to live up to, at least not completely. Making a choice not to harm another when they’re standing right in front of us, is a fairly simple process (providing they aren’t provoking us). But what about when a person is not in front of us and we’re saying negative things about them, or calling them a few choice names we’d never dare to say to their face. Does that do them harm?

They may remain ignorant of our feelings toward them in this case, but it does cause harm to us, and, by extension, to our relationship with them. If that person is always an @$$%0!# in our minds, then we can never truly develop a kind and loving relationship with them.

Often we harm ourselves with negative feelings. Doing no harm to yourself does mean you need to avoid intentionally injuring yourself; an admonition that extends to psychological as well as to physical damage. The more negative feelings we harbor within ourselves, the more negative our view of the world becomes. We close ourselves off and sever our connection with the world.

So should we naively trust everyone and everything in this world? No. Like with enlightenment, we strive to view the world with our eyes, and all of our perceptions, wide open. We want to avoid harm as much as we want to avoid causing harm. By keeping our perceptions and our hearts open, we can become both accepting and wary of someone’s potentially dangerous nature. For example, a friend once complained to me about a mutual friend’s unintentionally harmful actions. I thought, “well, that’s just the way they are,” and found little offense in their behavior as I was prepared for it after a couple of peripheral experiences with them.

Martial arts teaches us many important things. The most important is how to protect ourselves and how to be prepared to protect ourselves. Yes it teaches us how to harm others, but in doing so it is also teaching us how not to harm others. When we learn that an action such as punching someone in the temples is a deadly attack, we also learn to not use that attack, unless we wish to violate our promise to do no harm.