Training is an event
Posted in life on 23. May, 2010
In my walk back from the coffee shop to my apartment, I spent some time reflecting. We spend tons of time training our bodies to do great things, but how much time do we spend training our minds? Many don’t. So when life deals a shitty hand that can’t be resolved with strength of body, you’ll need strength of will and strength of mind instead.
That thought immediately brought me to two quotes from Rip, here’s the first:
On response to a guy who had some life problems lately and afraid of sounding like a “pussy”: You don’t sound like a pussy at all. You sound like a normal human being, just like me, who thankfully has a barbell to keep him sane when things get shitty…and realize that one workout out of thousands does not affect your overall progress. Training is a process, not the events of one day. [Source]
That sounds like it was directed to me, even though it wasn’t. And if you wanted to recap the last few “personal posts” of late, that’s the general message. Powerful people are powerful in body, mind, and spirit. You must train all three.
Second quote:
There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.
So that tells me how to train my body.
What are the most powerful exercises to train one’s mind and spirit?
When (not if) I find that I would like to take a barbell and throw it at someone/something, I go back to lots and lots of Sun Salutations. If things are really really crummy, try the “Prayer of Loving Kindness” (ref Sharon Salzberg for most easily digestable descriptions). Turns out that (for me at least) the hardest part of training one’s mind is learning/training to forgive oneself for one’s role in the shitty-ness. Physical training is about making your body “hard” – mental/spiritual training allows you to keep yourself “soft” but sane.
With tongue a bit in cheek:
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World Class Mental and Spiritual Health in 100 Words:
Read everything you can: Magazines and newspapers, some websites, few blogs and little television. Keep stimulus to levels that will support growth but not overwhelm you. Practice and train mental skills: Reading, writing, speaking, problem solving, and analysis. Similarly, master the basics of spirituality: Meditation, introspection, journaling, reflection, joie de vie, passion and love. Ponder, wonder, imagine, dream, etc, often and joyfully. Mix the elements of your passions and interests to find new passions and interests. Foster your creativity by solving puzzles, playing games, having “deep” conversation. Banality is the enemy. Regularly change your habits. Keep relationships long and meaningful.
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Seriously though, I think that the problem of training the mind and spirit is closely connected to the problem of meaning in life, a serious one for our generation. If you think about it, our generation and our social class is one of the first in a while to have the luxury of pondering these issues. My grandfather was a peanut farmer during the great depression. Every day he would load the donkeys up with peanuts to sell at the market. He did not have the luxury of wondering whether or not what he was doing was fulfilling or fresh.
Luckily, we are in a time and place in the world where we have at least the first few rungs of Maslow’s ladder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) scaled, and yet it is so easy to look with bewilderment at the levels of love/intimacy, Esteem, and actualization, with no idea of how to get there.
Sometimes we don’t need the strength of will and mind to get through something. The vague malaise we feel, the lack of motivation can be akin to that nagging ache we feel when working out; not a message to man up and work through it, but to stop, at least for a while, and possibly change direction.
The fool, to paraphrase Laozi, mistakes pleasure for happiness. We also live in a world full of distractions, with a signal to noise ratio so low, it is difficult to work through the noise to pick up the signal that our subconscious mind is trying to send us. What our history, parents, society tells us we ‘should’ do is not necessarily what we are meant to do.
@Heather, you make a good point and one that certainly hits home at the moment. I have yet to honestly forgive myself, and my mind keeps circling back to what I could have done different. That has to stop, and I have to change the toxic behavior that got me to this point to begin with.
@Ryon, you’ve got a way with words dude. That “tounge in cheek” 100 words is actually really well done… you should put that somewhere prominent. Seriously.