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TRUTH is challenging. This is very challenging. You will find arguments against it, find ways to explain why I am wrong and how ridiculous and simplistic this is. Ready? LIFE is a series of choices. EVERY-THING that happens to us, everything we experience, everything that we feel, do and say, how we act, respond and think; Every-thing is a choice. Every-thing is a choice. CHOICE happens consciously and unconsciously. Our reactionary choices are caused from what we experience in the moment and in our past experiences, how we expect our lives to pan out. Still, the actions and thoughts and decisions are all choices. FANTASTIC news; everything is a choice. This means that all your life is down to you to decide how to respond. How you respond creates the makeup of your future experience. TAKE traffic lights. The bane of the modern road user. Are they always on red? Constantly? Surely they must be. But why does this annoy us? Why does a red light cause a rise in our temper? Because when we are on the road we are going somewhere, we have a destination and we want to get there. We have made a choice to use our time and our energy and our effort to travel from one location to another, maybe under duress of some duty - which we have chosen to take on. SUDDENLY, our compulsion, our motion, our choice is interrupted. A little disk of glowing lighted up plastic pops up in our way. It is culturally accepted and anticipated that red lights are something to be annoyed over. ON the other hand, we frequently cite the pace of life being too frantic, too hectic, and yearn for 'days gone by' when life was slower and simpler and the only thing that gets in the way of a good commute is a herd of sheep in the road. Red lights also give us time to do other things in relative safety too, such as retune the radio, skip to a different song, adjust the seat, apply mascara, sort out our hair, check out the driver next to us, watch the clouds... the list is endless. On a green light you have but one choice: Go. HOW else does this choice affect our life? How can we embrace the use of our choices to perform better? We can choose to look positively and openly at our tasks. We can choose to visualise mindfully before we begin. We can choose to take lessons from the hard times and how we are being forced to improvise through difficult times. We can choose to take positive lessons from a failure. Nothing needs to be taken as a negative experience when we choose to make it positive. Or you could get frustrated, scream, shout, throw things, stamp your feet and yell petulantly. You have that choice. SHAKESPEARE said: “There is nothing either good nor bad, only thinking that makes it so.” (from Hamlet) Today it is your choices that create your reality. Your choices make your life positive or negative. Choose today to redress every event positively, to see all things that happen to you as benefits to your life and see how much of a difference it makes to your life. More on Conscious Choice and focusing the mind to improve performance in my e-Courses, find them HERE. Alternately, sign up for my FREE 4-Week course in Visualisation, coaching how to focus on what you want and to create power-full images to help you succeed. ON learning: We do not learn to climb. We do not do a three week beginners course and then suddenly, pop, we can ‘climb’. We learn by doing. We learn by getting onto a wall and climbing. When we are two holds up, half way, one hold off our first glorious victorious ascent, are we learning? No, we are climbing. WHEN we begin training and getting better we are not learning new techniques and skills. We are doing them. We practice our drop knee, and our rock over, and our crimping. WE learn by doing. WHERE does this doing occur? To best achieve use an environment that lacks danger, stress, worry, terror. We first step on to – usually – grade 3 routes. The reason we learn on easier routes than we are be capable of is because the brain can only handle a certain number of stresses, generally accepted as three. ‘Learning’ of new skills is a stress on the brain. Add in panic about the height and danger, Fear of falling or not being ‘any good’, and the usual mix of worries when beginning new skills and our brain cannot easily take in the new information that is being sent to it. COMFORT is what is needed to do these new tasks and to become capable of repetition, for this is what ‘learning’ is, really. The ability to repeatedly do the same action, over and over, with the same result. SO when taking up new challenges in climbing it is best to begin new skills and techniques on routes of lower grade than you may expect to climb at. This is how redpointing works; you take part of the stress – the leading and big falls element – out of the climb. Practice doing the moves, do them again and again, repeating the route until you feel sure that you can do it. TAKE the favourite analogy of riding a bike. We do not begin by being pushed into the traffic at 6 o’clock in Piccadilly Circus. We begin on flat grass with a soft landing and a guiding hand on the back of the bike. It is wise to take the same approach to new climbing techniques, even – maybe especially – with the mental training. USING techniques of visualisation and route planning on your hardest possible grade is undoubtedly vital, however, when you step back a couple of grades to use the technique and to practice it you find that you can read the route and the moves easily. This allows you to practice the process and get familiar with it before applying it to harder routes where you have a lot more difficulty and danger involved to get derail your efforts. WHEN you have new techniques, skills and strategies to practice, step back and think of that grassy meadow and the gentle hand on the back of your saddle. Practice gently and soon you will naturally discover that the hand is not there anymore and that you are doing it beauty-fully on your own. MORE on visualisation is available in the Free Mini-Course available by clicking HERE. Taking the Leading Outside at Birchen Edge, Autumn 2004.
28K through our 32K river descent, last two corners, one straight and its all ice cream and sleeping on the bus from Saint Martin home. Sweet. Then the storm broke. Darkness wrapped around us, and a chill. Prepared well for 30 plus degrees all day on the river we paddled in a buoyancy aid and board shorts, t-shirts on for the politeness of river lunches. Tanned arms – from three months of paddling this 64K run twice a week – get pummelled by a wave of hail that catches us as we glance around, wondering where the sun went. Then the thunder booms overhead. The hail stones are golf ball sized, bouncing clear out of our canoes and slamming into us. TIME to get off the water. Now. OTHER boats are filling beaches and we ram into a small section of beach, instructors on beach calling in our twenty boats in to them, others on the water shepherding our boats in and wrestling others out to angry responses. ALL boats on the beach, children clear of their boats and running up the hill into the trees and campsite within to hide from the continuing hail. LAST three instructors on the beach have flood water washing over our feet as we run for cover too, turn around and watch as half the boats at dislodged from the beach and set adrift, crazy mad running and shouting for thirty seconds and we have all the boats back on the beach. WE run uphill too. Thunder rumbles overhead and the clouds crackle with energy. We are deep in the bottom of the last section of the Ardèche gorge, the lightning has no chance of finding us in the trees this far down, so the trees and campsite are the best place to be. We watch paths and litter and debris and branches and leaves and sand and shoes get washed away towards the river. TEN minutes later it is over. We slide down the dirty track back to the beach, account for all the boats and children, launch and join the smiling-bewildered faces on the river. The river surface seems to steam as the temperature settles from having had a ton of ice pumped into it, up ahead the sky has had an ink well spilled across it. The storm continues south ahead of us and away. WHAT can I learn from this moment? I learn to harness the power of the storm. The need to react and find the energy to do so, one moment I was drifting sideways encouraging paddle-weary children to keep paddling, keep paddling, nearly there, nearly there. Then, in an instant, we were all hands on deck; boats on the beach, fight off a few French holiday makers, kids out, up the beach and save that boat, get that one, over there, that all of them, yes? sure? err, ok, RUN! HOW can we go so instantly from a relaxed, calm and tired state to one so effusive of energy? In evolutionary terms the body and mind need to be able to react instantly, the fight/flight/freeze response, gauge the needs around then crack into it. See what needs doing and have it done. Now. You will not see a pack of wolves circling in the long grass, you just hear a sound, or see a bird fly up, or notice the horses getting spooked. Then you react. REACTING is empowered by being able to accept the need to Do. The need to get tasks x, y and z done. Division of labour here is not carefully considered and discussed. It happens, in a moment. Instinctively. WE all need to react at times. Whether to a storm breaking over the river, to wolves closing in, or on situations at work and at play. Being able to harness the energy of the storm, accept the shift in brain patterns and allow the mind to take over and do what needs to be done allows our body to react faster, faster than thought it seems. Much of the sport that we engage in requires this focused state that allows the body to react to the mind – without the actually (impeding and slowing) process of thought take place. NEXT time you feel your stomach tighten, or your heart race, let the energy of the situation aid you as you encounter and overcome your difficulties. “In the heart of difficulty lies opportunity.” Albert Einstein. ALLOW the power of the difficulty to enable you to throw your-self into its heart and to find the underlying opportunity. Allow the energy within your problems to help you to solve them. Fine weather on Day 1 on the Ardèche. Not a bad office!
TODAY is the summer solstice - in the Northern Hemisphere. The longest day, the day when the sun reaches its most northern position above the earth before beginning its steady slide back toward winter. TODAY is also my Wedding anniversary, two years of fantastic adventures with my wife and boys. What an inspiring trip it has been. TODAY I re-live my wedding day, and the huge party that we had on the 18th June to celebrate, sharing our vows and our love with our friends, family, community, Gods, and the universe. Loving gratitude to Mother Earth and Father Sky for their blessings on our special day each year and the continued blessings of finding time to watch deer, spot dragonflies, admire meadows and dance in really silly ways! TODAY I re-call the flittering of moments of passion and the spectacular scenes of love that I have had an opportunity to share with my family and friends. TODAY that is what my blog is about, passion, love. As the earth (Mother Earth) and the sun (Father Sky) turn on, shifting us past another solstice and rolling around to move together and find us another season to explore and enjoy. Making for beauty-full changes to our lives, our hearts and our minds. TODAY I want to share my love and my passions with you. My blog is my love, my passion. It allows me to share some of the things that I am finding out about the world as we spin and tilt our way through the seasons and circle around each other endlessly. TODAY I want to share my love, my passion for learning, and growing, and discovery. To remind you that you can do something that scares you, something huge and exciting Today, Now. You can send that letter, you can write that poem, you can sing that sing loud, you can drive home the long way, you can. And you must. TODAY only You can do it. As only Mother Earth can support us as we circle on around the sun, plunging on through space. And as only Father Sky can provide us the sun and the wind and the rain and continue to balance the world. Together they keep this crazy old world going. Together they let us all make our decisions, make our choices and to fly on through space, and through our lives to find our way. TODAY take pleasure in this the Longest of Days to celebrate your passion, your love. Tell someone about something you love to do. I love to weave fast through traffic on my bike. I love to find the perfect mix of balance and power to edge my way up rock faces. I love to feel the air blasted out of me as I plunge into cold water and kick hard to swim. I love to drift canoes sideways down rivers and power upwind across lakes. TODAY, consider what your passions are and how you can share them with someone, with anyone, with every-one. TODAY share your love. TODAY share your passion. THANK you thank you thank you for Today. ACM PS: Song of the moment, "I Wanna Be The One", by Coby Grant. Look it up, it's beauty-full. My wife likes to sing - instead of the La la la la section - Thank you thank you thank you for today. THANK YOU. Positive Power-full Passionate Performance. My-self, Vicki (sharer of my adventures and William (our eldest - age 13 months) at ou
HAVE your-self a beauty-full and fantastic day. ACM A Climbing Project:
DEPARTURE: You step up to your chosen route. You choose to look closely at it, plan it, visualise it. There is a good rest and shake out at half height. Before then it looks like easy ground to cover; lie back up the edge, rock over and pull up to the rest. Straight arm hang, shake out, chalk up. Smile, exhale and go push on. Lots of jagged and sharp little edges, crimps and a side pull. Focus on footwork and go for the last piece of gear, which looks easy. Step up to the wall, pull down on the first few holds, pushing quickly through a few metres and swing onto the lie back. Smoothly stepping past that into the rock over and hit the rest. The rock moves slightly, then holds. Smile. INITIATION: Breathe in the dry chalk dust scent. Look through the sequence up to the top. Exhale. Chalk swirls around you for a second in the dead calm of the moment. Match hands and go. Feel the sharpness of the edges tugging at your fingertips. Watch your feet closely as you step through the moves, crossover, high left foot, match to right hand, heel hook. Push through the holds. Pause to clip gear. Watch the wall slide past inches from your face. Focus on the thin edges and cracks. Your mind drifts to the yawning void behind you. Pause, place gear. Left hand feels like it’s slipping as you pull rope out and clip. Know that your can do it. Left hand solid now. Push on. Mind focused on the holds. Think of nothing else. Just ten feet of rock above your feet, there is nothing else. Pause. Clip. Foot pops off and you swing on one hand, reel yourself back in and feel the texture of your rock as you hit the side pull and go for the last clip. Hit the big edge next to it with a sweating palm. Smile. Clip the last piece of gear. Exhale. RETURN: A few minutes later you are laughing through the moves with your partner, talking vividly, dramatically about the route, the near misses, the narrowly averted disasters. Smile now as they settle into your chalk-flecked memory; enjoy the thoughts of how the route went. What was good, what was bad? Focusing on the points to learn from, how the relaxed and smooth lie back allowed for lots of energy for the power-full finish. Spotting the side pull from the ground. Relaxing on the rests to save energy. TAKE all of life as a Hero’s Journey. You're the Hero. The Journey is yours. Hero-You chooses the battle. Departure; hoping to be equipped well enough with tools and skills. During your journey you face your moments of Initiation. The fight. The moment – or the minute, hour, day... – when Hero-You must remain focused and truly believe in their abilities. Finally, Hero-You steps out of the fray. Victorious, or not, Hero-You Returns. Upon their Return Hero-You finds time to look over the events. Find where you can improve next time, what to do the same, what to change. So that your next Hero's Journey can be success-full again. Be your own Hero. You're the only one who can. ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance. TODAY Monkey Mind came to play.
RECENTLY I spoke of Critic Mind and Doer Mind (Blog: Let You-Self Play, June 10th 2013). Your internal voices that speak to you, the Critic telling you to moderate your thoughts / language / actions and fit in and tread the sensible, worn trail, versus the voice of the Doer, who is your artist brain, your scheming, plotting, adventure seeking voice, the one who wants to stay up all night and do a Star Wars Marathon, or go on a canoe expedition across Sweden or cycle from Lands End to John O'Groats, and sings really loud and maybe slightly off key in the shower. DOER Voice took a cosmic leap today. My Doer Voice in my head decided she no longer wanted to be Doer. That's Boring. Doer Voice declared: I am, henceforth Monkey Mind. Monkey is wildly leaping from branch to branch, dashing across exposed areas to get to that tree over there that is covered in ripening fruit, but which is much too far for all the sensible Critic Voice driven masses to attempt to reach. Monkey grabs at the thinnest branches and jumps high and far, reaching out for the next thing to grasp hold of. MONKEY is making it up as Monkey goes along. MONKEY is loving that. Monkey is comfortable far out of Monkey's comfort zone. Monkey talks fast, acts instantly and speaks hard truths swiftly, chest out and proud. AND who, you ask is Jiriki? Jiriki is Japanese for the process of self-selection and self-promotion. Jiriki is the monkey, who grasps at his mother to be rescued. The opposition to this is Tariki, Tariki is the kitten who needs saving. Tariki is saved by his mother who comes and gently carries him to safety in her mouth, putting her down and licking him to make sure he knows he is safe, Tariki needs higher authority to select her, to move forwards, to remove risk, to endorse her. Jiriki grasps tightly on, saves herself and knows he is plenty safe enough. JIRIKI is bold and proud self-selection, the in-your-face artist who has declared herself Monkey Mind. My task as a person operating to keep my body and actions and language encountering this wonder-full beauty-full world is to hold on and see where Monkey Mind wants to go, then to go there. MONKEY Mind is that bumper sticker: 'Get in, sit down, shut up, hold on.' That's what Monkey Mind says. Then pauses… well, actually… Hold on? Forget that part, wave for the cameras! Shut up? Whoop loudly with joy-full abandon! Sit down? Sit down, not likely! Get in? Well… maybe. Only though the window though! MONKEY Mind is now in charge. Monkey mind is running the show. Critic Voice has not yet spoken up and decided on a new title, Doer Voice did not offer any suggestions and Monkey Mind is having too much fun to throw out any ideas for boring old Critic Voice as yet. LONG Live Jiriki. LONG Live Monkey Mind. ACM Positive Power-full Passionate Performance. Reference: The Icarus Deception: Seth Godin, 2012. Page 47: The Kitten and The Monkey. Copyright: Do You Zoom, Inc. A beauty-full book. Buy it. Release your-self into your-self. Fly High! LET your mind dream. When you see this route, that holiday, that project, a line up a cliff or down a mountain and feel your heart leap this is your inner child trying to go play.
YOUR inner child / artist / voice is an embodiment of your desires that you do your very best to hide with a little common sense and being 'sensible', 'mature' and 'responsible.' The inner voice that wants to play is the counter to all these sensible and socially conditioned voices. Your play-full voice sees the possibilities of joy, not the probabilities of failure and catastrophe. THIS sensible voice, the one telling you not to go play on the swings, not to buy a canvas and oil paints, not to run down a hillside as fast as you can is your 'Critic'. Your Critic is your conditioning, there to ensure you stay safe. SAFE? Safe from what? We live in a world where the danger is designed out of existence. We are surrounded by crash barriers and impact zones and air bags. We have rubberised matting and wood chip and protection. We are safely wrapped in cotton wool. So why do you need a Critic voice? THE danger is from society. You do not want to be told you are too old, stop being so silly, of course you can't… And so on, and so forth. Society conditions you well to listen to the voice of sense and reason. MEANWHILE inner child wants to go play. This is your Doer voice. Your Doer wants to express your feelings and dance under the stars and feel the wind in your hair and laugh raucously. The Critic will tell the Doer all the good reasons why this project is a terrible idea. Why that won't work. How much it is going to hurt - physically, mentally, spiritually - when you slip at any point. TODAY, your mission is to listen to your Doer. Your Doer could well be one very small voice. Assailed by your Critic into near silence. Look to the walls, the hills, the art supplies and stationary shops and see what stirs you. Then embrace the idea. IDEAS do not even need massive outlays of income. Maybe your Doer wants to write that card with the sunset and send to you an old friend. Or to sketch the trees down the road that you can see from your sofa. Or to sit quietly in a park and watch the birds. YOUR Doer does not have to break the bank to have fantastic fun times. How often as a child did you have the very best day with very little outlay of income? A few sheets of paper and some old paints dug out of the back of the garage. TODAY: GO PLAY. ACM For more joy-full expressions of your Doer voice get enrolled for an e-Course, click here for more details. THE process of positively believing in and visualising success is at the core of everything I do. The ability to choose to let your-self be success-full is key to finding continuing success. Each action is a choice, every word, every move, every-thing.
PART of living in a positive and affirming way is to allow the world to be viewed positively as much as possible, to assist in this a positive choice that can be made is to choose not to complain. INDULGING in the process of complaint allows your energy to be directed onto negative events and negative outcomes. We tend to get what we expect; Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do something, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.” The experiences we attract when we complain are not necessarily the positive experiences we may believe that we desire. GOING complaint-free does not have to be difficult, begin by choosing to consciously observe where complaints are occurring, coffee breaks are a key one, and when you meet up with someone - for example when you arrive home from work. Choose not join in the complaining process if you feel it begin. While the complaints happen work through all the things that you are grateful for about the particular complaint, it could be a particular problem with a sports team member, or a tough section of a course that you are doing, or it could be a person who you can find challenging at times. BETTER yet, drive the conversation towards positive discussion and make people aware of some of the positive things that are going on in your life and in theirs. Vocalise the positives that you are creating, they will be more power-full when you let them out with your voice. SWITCHING from complaining at events to conscious choice not to complain allows you to find those positives in life, finding positive outcomes from what is going on in the world. By finding ways to not join in with the complaint, aiming always to find the 'silver lining' we allow our minds to become orientated around positive results and successes. RE-TUNING to listen for complaints is a simple shift, you will be astounded by how much of your language, speech, conversation, and therefore implicitly your actions and emotions too, are dictated by complaint. CHOOSING to live complaint-free is a huge and beneficial step to your life. Let us begin with smaller goals. Start easy. Start by not complaining about the easy things, making breakfast, driving to work, walking the dog in the rain. Then move on to choose to not complain when a project is challenging, a sale is difficult, or when you are struggling with finances, or relationship trouble. FEELING a complaint or negative emotion rising, you can consciously choose to not allow it to surface. Exhale, write it down then rip it up and throw it away, yell, scream, punch the air, hit a pillow. Release the negative energy. You can choose not to articulate the problem, this only builds and affirms the power of the problem, serving only to extend the difficulty. ARTICULATION is going to make the difficulty easier or the problems smaller. If complaint will enlarge the problem, and exacerbate the issues, then not complaining is going to shrink them. Choosing to release your negative energy and continue on positive energy will help. Positive energy and a positive mindset will allow you to create beneficial results from your actions. NEXT time you are faced with complaint, focus on the language that you are using. Every-thing that you say, do and think has an effect on your emotions and energy. Choose to allow your-self to bring only positive experiences into your life. USING our conscious choice to generate positive experiences is a key point of my e-Courses, find out more in the e-Courses page, click here. Alternatively, check out my mini-course on visualisation, learn how to positively visualise to succeed more, click here. ACM |
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AuthorAndy Clubley-Moore: joyful outdoor sports activist, writer, father, husband. Lover of life, activity, success and barefoot living. |