Jeff Patterson, Author Of The Yielding Warrior On The Benefits Of Meditative Practices

 

In this episode, Jeff Patterson delves into the transformative power of meditative practices for mental health. Jeff shares his journey from martial arts to incorporating tai chi and other breathwork techniques into his daily routine. Host Tim Hayes engages Jeff in a deep conversation about the benefits of yielding, both physically and mentally, to improve overall well-being. Discover practical strategies and insights on how to incorporate these practices into your life for a more balanced and joyful existence. Tune in to learn how meditative arts can help you navigate life’s challenges with ease.

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Jeff Patterson, Author Of The Yielding Warrior On The Benefits Of Meditative Practices

Discussing The Book And Its Inspiration

Jeff Patterson has over 36 years of experience practicing and teaching meditative and martial arts. As the Founder of Northwest Fighting Arts, Portland Tai Chi Academy, and The Yielding Warrior, he emphasizes the transformative power of meditative and martial arts practices, particularly the yielding concept. He has published two books and hundreds of instructional videos. Again, he is the Founder of The Yielding Warrior online program. He has worked with thousands of students from around the world.

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Jeff, welcome. Thanks for being here. It’s good to see you.

Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Introduction To Yielding And Warriorship

I’m hoping you can let us know a little bit about how you decided to write a book about yielding and warriorship.

I was drawn to the meditative arts in a bit of a roundabout way. When I first started training in martial arts, I was very into Western boxing, and I loved the thrill and the pace of the sport. I used to go to this boxing gym that was just a few blocks down the street here from my academy in Portland, and there was a boxing coach there who I wanted to get to spend some time with.

He was a very well-known coach. He had trained national and world champion-level fighters, and he was just somebody who I looked up to. I would show up at the gym all the time to try to get him to notice me and see if he’d spend some time with me. After following him around for three or four months, he finally started giving me some tips and showing me a few things.

It was only about two or three weeks from getting to spend some time with him when he said something to me that changed my life in multiple ways and I’ll always be grateful for it. He told me that if I wanted to be a good boxer, I should start doing meditation and Tai Chi. Now at the time, I was this young kid, 19 or 20 years old thinking, “Isn’t Tai Chi for older people in the park? How is that going to help me be a better fighter?”

I started doing the practice and it changed my life. I’ve been running this academy now for 30 years. I’ve seen thousands of students come through the academy and I’ve heard hundreds of stories of how the meditative arts has positively influenced people’s lives. Seeing all those positive changes as a result of that motivated me to write my last couple books and create my online program, teaching people how to build an evolving meditative practice. That’s where the original inspiration came from.

The title of the book is The Yielding Warrior. As I mentioned to you, one of the aspects that jumps out at me as a psychologist is the listening section. When you’re starting to talk about using yielding as a tool in listening, can you talk a little bit about the interface between listening, good communication, and yielding for you?

Yes. I break down yielding into three categories. We have physical yielding, mental yielding, and emotional yielding. Physical yielding is the easiest one to understand and it’s the idea that I push you, you push me, and whoever would be the bigger, stronger person with the most leverage eventually would push the other person over.

With yielding, instead of us trying to see who the bigger meathead is, when you push me, I get out of the way of that force, and now I can respond with less effort. Now, this has been used in the combative arts for generations. It’s used in any form of contact athletics that you may see. It’s very valuable. A lot of professional athletes these days are using the meditative arts to help improve their game.

Now, to be good at physical yielding, a lot of things have to come into play. One, you need to be very well-rooted. The lower part of your body needs to be strong and flexible you can change your central equilibrium without getting tight. The body has to be relaxed. The breath has to be calm, and the mind has to be present.

Now, it takes years and years to get to a high level of this but when you start noticing these things inside of yourself at a more detailed level and a heightened awareness, you also start noticing these things in other people. When we move into what I call mental yielding, say for example, we’re having a conversation and I say something that unsettles you and I pick up on it right from the beginning. It’s a lot easier to adjust the conversation and keep us in a happy place than if I’m not paying attention to that, and pretty soon I’m far off track, you want to knock me upside the head.

Learning how to use yielding and all of our interactions is extremely powerful. One, you’re just being more considerate, which is something we should all do a little more of anyway. Two, it allows you to be very strategic in that you can guide conversations with people to a positive outcome with the least amount of resistance.

It’s obvious how this is good in relationships, but it’s also good in business, it’s good in sales, and it’s good in negotiations. If you ever study any military history, they use this in combat. There are many different ways, and a lot of times people think when they hear the term yielding that they’re being weak and they’re giving up. It’s not about giving up and being weak. It’s about strategically positioning yourself to get the outcome you want to achieve with the least amount of resistance. That would be an example of what I call mental yielding.

 

Then, there’s also emotional yielding. An emotional yielding is with our own interpersonal conflicts. You think about oftentimes something will happen to us and we’ll respond and we’ll go down this path. We might get an hour a day, a week down that road, and realize that maybe that wasn’t the best choice but with yielding and our heightened awareness to be present and to pay attention to what’s going on, when these things happen to us, it allows us to stay centered, make a more educated decision on where we want to go.

Oftentimes this can save us a lot of heartache on the other side. I’ve been explaining this idea of yielding for years. I’ve been running my academy now for 30 years and one of the most common things I’ll hear people say is, “That makes a lot of sense. I do yielding all the time.” While I would agree, that maybe they might not understand the terminology of yielding, we all do some form of yielding all the time.

However, it’s like if you or I were to walk into a crime scene with a detective who’s been on the job for 30 years, I guarantee you he would see things about the series of events and the timelines that I know at least I would have no clue of. The meditative arts help us see things inside of ourselves and other people that most people will never have a clue of without this practice.

 

Starting With Meditative Arts

You’re weaving in the martial arts and the meditative arts in your current teaching. What do you start with to help people get interested in the meditative arts?

Yes, we do have our academy here where we do martial and meditative arts, but we don’t combine the two unless somebody is interested in going down that path. A lot of people who come to the academy or the online program just want to focus on the meditative arts. When I talk about the meditative arts, I’m talking about things like sitting meditation, standing meditation, different forms of movement meditation through Qigong and Tai Chi, different breathing exercises, and breathwork practices.

Also, the whole philosophical side of it as well. That would be what I would include in that meditative art category. At the Academy here, we also have a martial arts program where we do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, and Western boxing. Those two have some similarities and there are things that you could do that would help benefit the other. They’re two very different things.

When you’re starting with people, getting them introduced to the meditative arts, do you start them with walking meditations, or sitting meditation? Do you have specific, structured meditations you give them or open-form meditations? How do you approach it?

I think having a good understanding of the overall practice and how to build a life practice is the most important thing. I break down the three categories of practice and meditation into ritual practices, active practices, and philosophical practices. Ritual practices are things where you set time aside every day and you do a little bit of practice. Maybe 20 minutes, whatever that is for you, and you do a ritual practice.

In that ritual practice, for you, it could be a sitting practice, it could be a standing meditation, it could be a movement meditation. If you are somebody who has a difficult time sitting in one place for 20 minutes, then I would recommend maybe doing a Qigong set or a Tai Chi routine, something to help get used to that idea of quieting the mind and being in that present state.

Once you have a good ritual practice that you do every day, like brushing your teeth, the Dalai Lama once said, “Everybody should meditate for 20 minutes a day unless they’re too busy, then you should meditate for an hour.” I love that saying that we’ve got to take a little bit of time every day to just stay connected to who we are.

In today’s society, we’re caught up with all of the distractions and things that are going on. It’s not uncommon to go out in the world where you feel like you have these barriers up and you’re wearing these masks because maybe you don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings or you don’t want them to see how you’re feeling or how you truly take something. We get caught up doing this that sometimes when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we’re still wearing these masks.

Meditation helps us let go of that and stay connected to who we truly are. That would be the purpose of our ritual practice. Then we have active practices where these are great tools that we can use to integrate into our day. An active practice is something that can be done in 60 seconds or three minutes. It doesn’t mean that you need to retire to a cave and meditate for the rest of your life to see all the benefits of this.

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As we do this, they could be things like maybe just counting out 10 breaths or doing some spinal rotations or a simple movement practice. The idea is to keep our presence and our state of awareness in tune all day every day we start living the practice rather than doing meditation as a hobby that we do once or twice a week.

Once we can integrate these practices into our day-to-day activities, that’s when we start reaping all the benefits of the meditative arts. Lastly, there’s the philosophical side of the training and that can be both active or ritual-based practices. As we’re building an evolving life practice around the meditative arts, you can pull things from all of these directions as we’re building a practice for you.

The Philosophical Aspect

Help me understand if you can, what you mean when you say the philosophical aspect of that. I got the ritual and I got the active. What do you mean when you say the philosophical aspect of it?

That’s a pretty deep practice in that you could do things from doing different sounds and vibrations that help resonate different energies in the body. You could do things by memorizing different sayings. One of my old meditation teachers, always used to have me memorize different sayings from philosophical life concepts around virtue and mindset training, which led me to if you’re familiar with the Tao Te Ching. I memorized the Tao Te Ching and I used to say that in my head every day.

All 80 some verses?

Eighty-one verses, yes, sir. I used to say those every single day in my head. I memorized those. It took me about three years to memorize them and have them down solid. I set them every day in my head for about twelve years. I still go back to it fairly regularly and revisit it because there is a wealth of knowledge in there. That would be some idea of the philosophical side of the training and how you could use that.

I’m getting that, you’re saying, the philosophical aspect of the meditative practices and my languaging around that would be basically restructuring my negative thought patterns into more positive ones.

You could use a form of gratitude meditation to help be more positive. there are a lot of little things that you could do to help reprogram our minds because we think all these thoughts every day, but a lot of times we get in a rut and we start thinking the same thoughts every day. If we don’t change our pattern and focus on a more positive direction, inspire new thoughts and new energies going on in our mind, we could go by with 10 years of seeing very little change in our lives.

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Not only not seeing very little change, but we’ve been strengthening the negative just out of habit, if we’re on autopilot with negative thoughts, they get well rehearsed and they have a lot of momentum.

Yes, very true.

The Role Of Toning And Chanting

You mentioned this briefly. In the book, you’re talking about it at one point. Doing some breath work, but then adding toning or chanting, whether it’s “Om” or “Ah” or some other things. It had me thinking about the deep benefit that’s come from chanting and toning for thousands of years. One of the books, Echoes of an Ancient Dream by Dale Allen Hoffman is one when I was reading that book and experimenting with it, as he was inviting us to, how deeply I felt some of the energy resonance with that. Can you talk a little bit more about the role of toning or chanting in your experience?

Yes, there are a lot of different directions that you can use this in Chinese medicine, first off with Qigong, we break down the practice into the athletic or the martial side, the therapeutic side, the medical side, and the philosophical side. Also, the meditative or spiritual side. When we talk about chanting, we can use this to stimulate different energies in the body.

It is believed through the different five directions that some different energies and sounds vibrate different organs in the body and create different energies and we could use this for that purpose. We could also do something, for example, you mentioned the idea of using om or that chant that we could do over and over again. Just the sound of that vibration can help us find that space in the body and our mind to tap into that present moment. It starts to help us let go of tension in the body and helps us find a rhythm within our practice.

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Then we can also use these to attach a meaning to it. For example, you could say, “Om the change of strength and beauty of true nature. We all possess the Buddha’s body brings peace, bliss, clarity, firmness, courage, stability and strength.” You could have something that has a purpose behind it and if you do that, it’ll program the mind to be thinking those specific thoughts. There are a lot of different directions you can take.

As I mentioned when I was reading and practicing the visceral, the thought sense got much more amplified of whatever good thoughts or good intentions were present. If I allowed not just the silent mental working but the vocalization and the energy that resonates through. Many people that I’m sure you’re aware of do sound healing, sound meditations, gong baths, etc. It’s another way to get that vibration moving. If I can align myself with that vibration without having to go to a gong bath, if I can just do it through chanting or toning, it’s much more efficient. Not that it’s exclusive from the other. They can both be a good part of my self-care.

That’s the one thing that I enjoy about the meditative arts because there are a lot of things out there that are good for us. Going to get a massage or getting acupuncture or whatever but when you start learning how to direct the energy in the body, be in tune, and get these different outcomes, you can do a lot of that just through your own internal practice. The breath, for example, there are a lot of different directions in how we can use the breath.

We can use this to get different outcomes by changing our excited state or depleted state and using it as a strategy. It is something where it is a science. I’ve been studying it for over 30 years and I’m still just a student. I’m nowhere near the master and this is my life’s work. It’s one of those things where it’s not something that you can learn by watching a video here or there.

That’s something for you newer practitioners out there that I highly recommend while I think it’s good, especially if in your area you don’t have any qualified teachers to go to, it’s okay to learn things from a video but when you do your ritual practice and you’re practicing every day, it’s meant to be a time where we turn internally.

It’s called the internal arts for a reason. Our ritual practice, we shouldn’t be watching a video. We don’t want to be listening to audio. It’s just that time where we can connect with who we are and be a little bit more in tune and present in our bodies. while you may be forced to learn from a video program or an audio program, that’s a great resource. Just remember that for an ongoing practice, we want to get to where we can do these things without outside distractions.

You’ve mentioned a few times spending time with yourself, and each time you’ve mentioned it, I’ve thought many of us need to discover who we are. To form an awareness that there’s more going on here than just the physical body and then what is that? What is what are the thought structures that I have accumulated around who I am and what I am that might be counterproductive at best?

This internal quieting practice, you’re calling us to this meditative practice without listening to a video or having outside distractions, I know several people who talk about one of the hardest assignments is you just go into your bedroom, turn off all the music, lights, and incense. No distractions and just sit there for an hour or two.

Most people just are unwilling or unable to make that happen because there’s much that comes up that’s inside them that they’re not used to dealing with. We’re used to dealing with it through suppression, denial, and avoidance. When you turn into this internal meditative practice, you have to get past the denial.

The other thing I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about is the breath techniques, you were talking about it. You can have breathing techniques that are there to calm you. They have breathing techniques that are there to energize you. There are breathing techniques that are designed to help you focus. Do you work with specific different techniques when you’re working with your students?

Yes. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a little detour before I answer that question, because you mentioned something a minute ago that I think would be worth noting in that. One of the most common things I’ve heard people say when they come to the meditative practice is, “I tried that before and it just didn’t work for me because I couldn’t quiet my mind. I just got too distracted.”

Somewhere along the way, there’s been this misconception or this belief about meditation where you have to quiet your mind for it to be beneficial. That’s not the case. When you sit down and do a meditation practice, you may get distracted a hundred times in 20 minutes. That’s perfectly normal. I’ve been fortunate to be around some very well-known meditation practitioners through my years.

I’ve never once met anybody who doesn’t get distracted. The idea with meditation is that when you do get distracted, you use your breath, your posture, or your movement if you’re doing a movement practice to bring yourself back to the center and focus. Now, if you do this a hundred times a day and you do this every day for a month, for a year, or five years, you get good at one, recognizing the distraction at the first imbalance, and two, learning how to bring that distraction back to the center.

By doing this over and over again, now, no matter what happens to you, you’re walking down the street and somebody says something rude to you, or you get stressed out at work because many things are piling up, you recognize these feelings of imbalance right from when they start. You can use these tools and strategies to help bring yourself back to the center and find a more clear focus on what you’re doing. That’s just something I wanted to take a little detour on.

Regulating The Body And Mind

With talking about the breath, I think it’s a good point to tap into what I call the five regulations. In the five regulations, we have regulating the body, regulating the breath, regulating the mind, regulating the energy, and regulating the spirit. Regulating the body is the easiest one to do. If you’re disciplined in two or three months, you can see a lot of physical change from regulating the body.

What I mean by this is think about a time maybe when you’re sitting at your computer for two or three hours and your shoulders around forward, you start feeling lethargic, and start feeling just low on energy. Your neck may get sore, your body may get tight. Now think about another time when maybe the most important person in your world walks into the room and you perk up. You have all this energy and your whole state changes.

This is one thing we can control all day, every day. If you sit with correct alignment, if you walk around with good posture, your overall energetic state is going to change. The next thing we have is what we call Regulating The Breath. Now, this is a very deep practice and something that you could study for the rest of your life. Oftentimes Qigong is referred to as the science of the breath because there are many different breathing strategies, literally hundreds of them.

We broadly categorize them into the Yin methods and Yang methods. The Yin methods are often a deeper, more holistic style of meditation. An example of the Yin breath would be if you ever listen to somebody sleep, their natural breathing pattern is a longer inhale and a shorter exhale. This is the body’s natural way of bringing our conscious mind into our subconscious mind, which is where we are when we’re sleeping and dreaming.

If we want to emulate this with some of our meditative practices, we can do longer inhales, and soft retentions at the end of the inhale to help bring that energy inward, which is extremely good for helping with stress and anxiety or getting to deeper levels of meditation. Then we have the Yang side of the breath.

The Yang side of the breath is more aggressive. Think about if you ever had to push your car or pick up something heavy, your natural instinct is to use the exhale side of the breath, put tension in the breath, and make the breath audible. This helps generate energy and power. Like a lot of athletes and people who compete in combat sports.

You’ll see them use this style of chanting, this exhales to help build up that energy and to get them prepared for whatever event they’re getting ready for. Now, once we start learning how to use the breath as a strategy, it’s a very valuable tool in your meditation toolbox. We all go through the day with emotional ups and downs. Some people are like a roller coaster, others may be a little more balanced.

When you start to use the breath as a strategy and you see yourself start to get excited, you can use the breath to help keep you down a little bit. When you see yourself starting to get depleted, you can use the breath to help bring you back up. Now, you’re going through the day with a little more balance rather than being on this roller coaster ride, which is very depleting and energy-draining. The breath is a very valuable tool and asset we use within the practice.

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Next, we have the Regulating the Mind. In regulating the mind, we talked a little bit about the five meditation strategies, when you get off center, you use the breath or the posture to come back to the center. This is something that you could spend the rest of your life working on. We’re all trying to get better at this.

There’s a story that I love about these two monks and they’re walking down a dirt road after a rainstorm and they come up to this big mud puddle. On the other side of the puddle is this beautiful lady and she’s standing there in a white dress and she’s crying. The older monk hollers across the puddle and says, “Ma’am, is everything okay? Can I help you?”

She says, “I need to be somewhere and I can’t get across this puddle without getting my dress all dirty.” The monk rolls up his pant legs, walks across the puddle, picks her up, puts her on his back, takes her to the other side and she’s off on her way. He and the younger monk are walking down the road for a couple of miles.

Finally, the younger monk is just furious and he says, “You know that we’re not supposed to touch ladies, but yet you did back there at the puddle.” The older monk looks down at him and says, “You’re still thinking about that lady. I left her back there in the puddle.” We do this all the time. We’re all guilty of it. We’ll have a distraction. We’ll have a negative thought in our mind and we’ll follow it two miles down the path before we ever even deal with it or let it go.

Or 20 years.

Exactly, yes. When we learn how to recognize these imbalances from the beginning, it’s a lot easier to let them go than after they’ve had two years’ worth of distractions and negativity building up from the distraction. That’s one of the things that’s valuable about meditation is it helps us see these things. When you drop the pebble on the hill, it’s easy to pick up the pebble, but if it starts rolling down the hill and creates an avalanche, it’s difficult to stop.

Learning how to make these adjustments while they’re easier is very beneficial in many different areas of life. The next regulation is Regulating the Energy. Regulating the energy is a deep topic. We could talk for hours on this one thing, but a basic understanding of it is that we learn how to do different energetic circulations in the body and lead the energy towards different things with some of these meditative practices.

Once you’ve learned how to regulate the body, regulate the breath, and regulate the mind, regulating the energy is easy, but it takes some work. Then lastly, we have what we call Regulating The Spirit. This again is a very deep concept and for a lot of monks who live the meditation lifestyle or Qigong masters who live this lifestyle, their ultimate goal is to reach this stage of enlightenment.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been training for 36 years. I’ve traveled around the world many times training with different teachers all over the planet and I’ve never once met anybody who I would consider as fully enlightened. I don’t even know if, in today’s society, this is something we will ever see. We catch glimpses of this.

You get those, “A-ha” moments, or if you’re in athletics and you have that flow state and you’re in that period where everything is just clicking and you’re 100% present. This is the idea of regulating the spirit. These five regulations are extremely valuable and part of the core of any meditation practice, whether you’re doing a sitting practice, whether you do yoga, whether you do Tai Chi, Qi Gong, or each one. It doesn’t matter what it is, these are the fundamental basics that you develop through practice.

The more I hear you talk about it, the more I hear what we do in any good therapy is the same awareness of the internal process, finding the earliest warning signs of upset or tension, and giving people options for how to respond at that moment, including canceling everything you think that you want and asking for a whole different way to perceive the moment. Again, it’s much easier to do if you catch it before the momentum has built up.

Living A Meditative Lifestyle

If we could just get everybody to live that lifestyle, then we don’t need to wait until they need therapy because they’re so far down this path. When we do it with the little things, we drop our keys in the mud, which could imbalance us, but if we practice it all day, every day, and we start living this lifestyle of meditation, now a lot of times the bigger things don’t affect us as much as they used to.

It’s an extremely valuable practice. I’m sure you’ve seen this a lot in what you do. The same thing could happen to two different people and they could be seriously traumatic events. One person could ruin their whole life, and the other person moves on and goes on to have a positive life. What is it that made that happen? How did they learn how to deal with that mentally in two different ways? I think the meditative arts are one of those things that teach you how to do that and how to incorporate this way of living into your life.

Even more to the point is that the same thing can happen to the same person on two different days. On one day they’re having a bad day and seem to be disruptive. Then another day they’re having a good day. Who cares? It’s much about what I choose as a meaning or an interpretation for this event and place on it that generates all of this tension. If we can help people understand how much they are architects and builders of their experience from moment to moment, rather than just witnesses or victims to it.

I agree. I think to do that, they have to have a system in place that helps them live that lifestyle because naturally in today’s society, there’s much negativity out there if we just get caught up blindly doing our day-to-day activities that we’re going to get distracted. It’s hard to stay on that positive path if we don’t have a plan.

If you would take a breath and get centered here and think about it since we’re winding down on time. You can answer either of these questions. Is there something that we haven’t even talked about yet from your book that you want to highlight? Something we’ve already talked about that you want to go back and repeat or just one of the major takeaways that you would want people to get from the book, The Yielding Warrior?

Through the years, I’ve had thousands of students come through the academy and we’re only on this planet for a short amount of time. Your time is extremely valuable. If you’re interested at all in taking on a meditative practice, I can’t stress enough the importance of finding a guide and somebody to help you. If you have never seen the sport of basketball before and somebody gives you a ball and says, “There’s the net, go play the game.”

Think about how long it’s going to take you to even be at a grade school level in basketball but if you have a good coach and he teaches you about footwork, strategy, and how to develop the game. The dribbling skills and your shooting skills. Think about how much more you can accomplish in a short amount of time.

I’ve had people come into the academy and say that they’ve been meditating for 10 or 15 years. They’ll come in here and they maybe look like they’ve had a practice for six months. It’s not that their intention wasn’t there or they didn’t put the effort in, it’s just that they learned from a video or they had nobody pointing them in the right direction.

Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from a video program or an audio program, you need to have somebody helping to steer you in the right direction. Otherwise, you go onto YouTube, you see a million videos out there and it’s easy to get lost in the mess. Probably, half of them aren’t even worth watching in the first place. There’s a lot of good content out there. I’m not saying that there’s not, but if you don’t have somebody to help and guide you through it, it’s easy to get lost in the mess.

Yes, there’s much out there. If you don’t know what the good stuff is, because you’re just new to this, you don’t know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to speak. You can get years of practicing how to do it poorly. Just develops bad habits for me, right?

Yes.

I greatly appreciate your willingness to share with us and that you’ve written this book. How do you prefer people reach out to you if they want to find out more about you, your work, the academy, and the book?

If they like this idea and the methodology that I’ve put together with The Yielding Warrior, you could get a free copy of the book if you just go to TheYieldingWarrior/book. Also, at TheYieldingWarrior.com you can check out our online program. You can try it out for a couple of weeks. There are several different ways you can get involved with it there.

I also have a teacher training program there. If you’re somebody who owns a yoga studio, or a martial arts studio, or maybe you’re a life coach and you want to learn how to give this information to your clients or build another pillar in your business, that’s an option for you. Also, if you’re in the Portland area and you want to come in and check out the Academy, you’re always welcome to do that as well.

Thank you very much for the work you’re doing and being willing to share it with us.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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Jeff Patterson has over 36 years of experience practicing and teaching meditative and martial arts. As the Founder of Northwest Fighting Arts, Portland Tai Chi Academy, and The Yielding Warrior, he emphasizes the transformative power of meditative and martial arts practices, particularly the yielding concept. He has published two books and hundreds of instructional videos. Again, he is the Founder of The Yielding Warrior online program. He has worked with thousands of students from around the world.

 

Important Links

• Jeff Patterson – LinkedIn
• Northwest Fighting Arts
• The Yielding Warrior
• TheYieldingWarrior/book
• Echoes of an Ancient Dream

 

About Jeff Patterson

Jeff Patterson, from Portland, OR, USA, has over 36 years of experience, practicing and teaching the meditative and martial arts. As the founder of Northwest Fighting Arts, Portland Tai Chi Academy, and The Yielding Warrior, where he emphasizes the transformative power of meditative and martial arts practices, particularly the yielding concept.

He has published two books and hundreds on instructional videos. Founder of The Yielding Warrior online program and has worked with 1000’s of students from around the world.

 

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