Saturday afternoons were something else. Especially during autumn. His mother had the TV going—at the same time two radios kept up their persistent background chatter, each one monitoring a different ball game. Young Joseph Cardillo used to get a real kick out of how she could listen to all three games at once.

“My mother was Italian and an incredible sports enthusiast. In high school she was a cheerleader. She had a great uplifting positive energy that was contagious. She was the type of person who always saw others as doing the best they could. I remember going to night football games with her as a child. She would wrap a blanket around us, buy us a couple hot chocolates, and narrate the game for me.”

Which suited the energetic little boy to a T.

“The family joke was that the reason my mother waited four years before she had another child (after me) was because she had her hands full with me! As I got older, martial arts became a way of focusing that energy and of calming me down. If my mother had known it would have this effect, she probably would have enrolled me when I was a year old… I was, in a way, a miniature version of pretty much all that I am today. I was athletic. I don’t think there was a sport I didn’t like, and I tried everything I could, even archery. I played baseball on various teams as a teenager, a lot of soccer, and track. It was also during this time, at the age of fourteen, that I began training in martial arts.”

Cardillo, a professor of creative writing and literature at Hudson Valley Community College, the State University of New York, is an authority on martial arts philosophy and psychology, and the author of the best-selling book Be Like Water – Practical Wisdom from the Martial Arts (available at Amazon.com). He is a long-time practitioner of several martial arts including Kenpo Karate, Wing Chun Kung Fu, Tai Chi Chuan, Kali and Dumog and has worked as a martial arts expert for Men’s Fitness Magazine.

His father, passionate in his love for opera, was a classically trained musician whose focus was the piano and violin. Cardillo, a unique creative hybrid, and the oldest of four children, grew up speaking Italian at home and embodying his parents’ deep appreciation for ethnicity, music, athleticism and more:

“Both of my parents were quite religious. By the time I was in elementary school, I was able to pray in more than two languages, and I was familiar with multi-cultural religious customs. I admit that I used to fight my parents when they pushed me in this direction, but the seeds took root. By the time I was in high school, I used to drive out to Colgate University on Friday nights with some like-minded friends and practice meditation. I had become an avid reader of philosophy, particularly Eastern and by the time I left for college I had become deeply interested in the fusion of philosophy, martial arts, and psychology—which was an evolution, I guess, considering that my first involvement in martial arts was purely athletic and for the purpose of self-defense.”

Growing up in the small city of Norwich, in New York’s dairy belt, Cardillo used to hike the surrounding mountain trails at every opportunity, helping to inculcate a love of nature and its healing and spiritual properties that persists to this day.

“Now, I live in the mountains and you can see me out there every day at sunrise jogging around the lakes near my house. But you don’t need mountains. You can enjoy solitude anywhere, even in a crowd. The purest solitude is deepest inside you. When you hit the mark, you wind up outside yourself everywhere. These are great Zen moments. You experience your connection to all things and to the Infinite. Eventually you start to see what you can do with this spiritual power. You start to use it to get healthy, happy, heal yourself and others and eventually get in touch with the ‘other side.’”

Being alone isn’t always easy but Cardillo, who makes the distinction between being alone and being lonely, embraces solitude as an opportunity to relax, to engender calmness, to indulge his creativity.

“I think it is necessary to make time to be alone, to find out what you’re all about. Deepak Chopra once said that most people wouldn’t live with a total stranger, yet many remain total strangers to themselves… But I enjoy being with people and socializing a lot and always have. I think you need both to grow. You can learn a lot about yourself through your relationships with others. Plus people are forever interesting. Being harmonious is the natural state of every particle in the universe. The martial mind stresses being completely who you are and at the same time fitting in wherever you go…Solitude is not required for deep spiritual experiences, but it weighs in heavily when you are training yourself to have them. But of course, they can occur anytime, anywhere.”

When he was a little boy, Cardillo, used to spend time at his grandmother’s house where he would make his own storybooks—writing and illustrating them himself and storing them in a drawer in his room for safekeeping. He made the early decision to write—teaching as a vocation occurred to him later.

In high school he took a class titled Great Ideas—precipitating one of his own.

“The two teachers were fantastic. Some of the things they did and said echoed inside me and woke me up to the possibility of teaching and so I followed the trail, knowing it was real. Although we were outwardly different (they seemed quite formal to my young mind back then, and they too were quite different from each other) there was a commonality based on the notion of pursuing 'ideas' that I think came and tapped each of us on the shoulder. That’s the way the Tao works. You look back and you see how you’ve gotten to where you are. I thank those two teachers a lot.”

His interest in martial arts is evolutionary—beginning as a self-defense strategy and developing into the recognition that the practice is less about fighting and more about living. Somewhere along the way, Cardillo began to experience his body’s energy differently.

“This is your invitation to start pursuing what can be done with this energy spiritually. That’s the difference between MA and many other institutions that teach spirituality. MA shows you how to locate this powerful energy in your body and use it to generate great muscular strength and to co-create what you experience in this life. The latter of these is the core principle of martial arts—and fascinatingly its best-kept secret. Both of my books, Be Like Water and Bow to Life (forthcoming Spring 2006) address this.”

The fusion of body, mind, spirit is expressed in the daily content of Cardillo’s life. He runs every morning, does 90 minutes of martial art Katas—movements strung together reminiscent of dance—and spends time in meditation.

“Sometimes to get the job done you have to go over things. Other times you have to go around or through them, sometimes you have to become hard as ice and other times you have to become invisible, sometimes you have to be still and other times you must be explosive, sometimes you have to be soft. The best martial arts lesson comes from the Tao Te Ching and was my first lesson: When you need to know how to get through the rough times or for that matter make the good times more joyous, be like water.”

To teach, to write, to impart your views in the context of advice or life lessons, is, in some important ways, a function of self-confidence. For Cardillo, that confidence emerges in his belief that whatever happens is supposed to happen, that everything works out in the end and our part of the drama is to enjoy the unraveling—because it is infinitely interesting.

“Take anything good that has happened recently and make an event map tracing backwards all of the things that occurred for this event to have come into your life. You’ll see some really pleasurable things. But there will also be a few difficult days and situations that pushed you in a direction that otherwise you may never have taken. When these things happen, you tend to feel disappointed or worse. Many times, no one could convince you that they are really part of the overall good. If you could see from a distance (as you can with the map), you would see that every one of these events was what we refer to as a Zen Blessing. People everywhere I talk to on my lecture tours have admitted to many Zen Blessings.

“So, it’s that kind of confidence—to keep your senses wide open, go with the flow, trust in life, do the best you can, recognize that others are doing the best they can, be grateful for all your blessings. As soon as you see one, take a moment and send your gratitude to the Infinite.”