Zen in the Martial Arts

So I started reading Zen in the Martial Arts and it is amazing. I am planning on building it a shrine where I will worship it. Not really. But it's great. I really like how Joe Hyams, the author, tells of his learning the given Zen principle in the martial arts and then how he took it "out of the dojo and into the world". I have not had much chance to use the things that I learned from this book, but last night I was given the opportunity to break a board. My Youth Group is doing a segment called "Breaking Free from Depression" which is supposed to help teenagers be happier, I guess, and to physically "break free" we wrote one thing that makes us feel unfulfilled on the board and then broke it. Ironically, some of the breaks actually missed the words all together, but whatever. It was a metaphor. When it was my turn to go up, there was a lot of pressure because I was "that girl who does karate. It'll be a piece of cake for her." I had no problems breaking the board, but I like to think it was helped by the techniques I learned in the book: to clear my mind, visualize my hand hard as a rock going straight through the board.