Choice

Do you realize that today you may or may not receive certain phone calls, compliments, e-mails, surprises, letters, or visitors? Do you realize that today you may or may not receive word of good or bad news? Do you realize that today you may or may not encounter certain challenges, triumphs, problems or victories? And to think, you're the one who decides. 

A man sees in the world that which he holds in his heart. Goethe

I feel it real before it is real

It is always the case that I feel what is real long before it is actually real. I feel it inside me, as a truth that I live in until becomes outwardly, tangibly true.

Right now I can feel the success coming. I can feel the money coming. I can feel the confidence coming. It is all building up inside me and each night I go to bed and give it rest so that it can breathe bigger, fuller and stronger in the morning.

I can feel myself walking taller. I can feel myself smiling more. I can feel myself laughing with more ease. I have a purpose again, and I can feel a biological imperative pushing me towards women with whom I actually enjoy spending time.

I can feel the building. The slow drums off in the distance. I can hear it through the silence knowing that out there, just past the horizon, there is an orchestra slowly building in crescendo to set my life to music.

I feel the triumphant pacing of it. I feel the knowing of it. I feel the glacial force of it. I know how powerful this is. It will cut rock and forge valleys. It will create new mountains and beautiful vistas.

There is a moment, not too far from this one, where my foot will firmly kick through the ass of tomorrow.

Emotional Hygiene

Copied in its entirety from Koyel Bandyopadhyay
https://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/What-is-the-only-one-skill-that-if-you-have-will-completely-change-your-life

Once you get to understand language and how certain things are conceptualized in a language, you get to hear an adage time and again, with its rather timeless appeal: time heals all wounds. 

Interestingly, we get to hear it when we face some setback. Setbacks that shoot pain in through psyche, cut through our emotions and sense of rational logic, and during crisis situations that we wish we weren’t there.

We are told, “Time heals all wounds”.

We are told, “Leave it to time”, where it could be gaping wounds in your trust levels, sensitive wounds in your psyche with scar tissue formed over time and you are still feeling the rawness of those wounds as you act out in irrational (but not illogical) ways in defense of your wounds, as a reaction to being controlled, as a reaction to being manipulated, as a reaction to being constrained.

The consequences are depression, sickness, high blood pressure, high cholesterol,  frustration, anger, lack of creative juices, dissociative tendencies, jealousy, commitment phobia, creation of barriers from people that matter to you (and to whom you matter), fear of being judged and creating a smooth, shining, rock hard exterior to protect our fragile selves, that is only but paper thin.

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We live a life of regrets. We don’t do things we feel we should do, because we are afraid of failure; of rejection; of being left alone; of being shamed. We search for association with others as derived from achievement-oriented utility only.

We learn to fear darkness and keep a rock to cover and bottle it up. And when we move that rock sometimes, we see ugly things crawling under. We cover it up by several masks, as for example, eating un-mindful junk, performing only for viewer appreciation (mostly on social media), calculating every possible risk to self-realization and building solid installations of those risks that limit us.

This is because when we are told time heals all wounds, we are told that pain can only come one or two times, or at best… is intermittent. We are not told it’s a constant feature of our lives. And that it is possible to get up and treat ourselves.

The one thing that makes a big difference in all that we do and think, and that one thing which we are not taught by some bizarre sense of worldliness is emotional hygiene.

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When we fall down and our skin is abraded, revealing open little blood vessels and minuscule patches of flesh, we apply ointments. We bandage it up for healing.

When we have fever, we take medicines.

When we play in dirt and after we come back home, we wash up before eating.

When we pass on toxic substances, like snot, shit, piss, pus, we do not hold onto them because they come from us. We recognize they are bad for our bodies, we get rid of them, clean up and forget about them. We become ready to go.

We are taught physical hygiene, but when it comes to emotional hygiene we believe nothing like that exists, and yet emotional hygiene continues to impact our lives in much less illusory ways than we’d like to think. 

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When we fail at something we want to succeed, we run marathons in circles in our head as to why. We don’t stop at just identifying the reasons and hoping to correct them in the future; we don’t stop at reckoning that certain things could just not be achievable.

We ask ourselves, “Why the fuck couldn’t you get that? Why didn’t you try hard enough? What’s wrong with you?”

When we are rejected in love, we think the reasons lie with us; because we are not good enough. And then we keep on trying to be good enough and live with the gunk that comes with rejection. We don’t let it out of our system. We try to keep up with snowballing criteria of being “good enough” till we lose the essence of who we are in the process.

When we feel insecure, we don’t hug ourselves. When we feel lonely we don’t open up our heartache because we fear being further wounded in the process, knowing that we are surrounded by people who think like us.

Because we are not taught that emotional hygiene is important. Because even though a 3-year old knows where a physical wound lies, and by the time we are 5 years old we know when and how to put on a band-aid when we hurt ourselves, we are not told to be kind to our psychological wounds that limit us, make us hurt others, make us restless and make us responsibilize others for our own happiness.

By the time we are adults, we have perfected the art of masking our emotional health and anesthetizing our pain with the understanding that “time heals”. The truth is, time doesn’t.

We need to heal ourselves.

We need to pay attention to how our minds react to failure, rejection, loneliness, ideas of success and capabilities. When we believe we are incapable of something, because ofwho we are, we are reacting to a gaping wound in our psyche with a band-aid. This is why most people stop short of self-actualizing, and of being better versions of the selves they believe they are.

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However, when it comes to a friend who we hold dear, a family member who is more important to us than anything else in our lives, we are much kinder. We don’t tell a friend who’s suffered a break-up “See, the reason lies with you. You are an abominable character, you were not caring enough, you didn’t try hard, you are not good looking enough, you should take a good look at yourself”.

Yet, we feel and tell ourselves things like these, when we are cheated by our partners, as well as when we are rejected by people.

We are beating ourselves up all the time. We are not friends with our own selves. We are not kind to our own selves.

Because we don’t know how to maintain the emotional hygiene; because we don’t pay enough attention to emotional health. Because we are fed the idea that looking after yourself borders on self-centredness or overlaps with narcissism, and because stoicism is celebrated being an indicator of emotional strength.

Yet, when we have a fever we don’t tell ourselves, “Let me go and stand under a cold shower and see how worse it could get”. We are careful with our bodies.

But when it comes to our minds, we keep digging…at the wounds themselves, hoping they would go away based on the process of scooping them out.

Countless studies document evidenced effects of loneliness and unhealthy self-esteem on physical health, stress levels, their impact on horrible diseases like cancer, their impact on suicide rates, their impact on heart conditions. 

So, next time your boss yells at you, your colleagues play the game of politics on you, your significant other demeans you and attempts to manipulate you, don’t keep digging at your wounds.  Don’t let others' projections form your own self-esteem. Fight negative thoughts.

Be kind to yourself. Be compassionate to yourself. 

Practise emotional hygiene.

It will change your life.

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Here are some links which could be a good start towards that: 

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/...
2. http://www.helpguide.org/article...
3. 5 Surprising Habits Of Happy People

Image Sources:

1. Girl with Mandolin, 1910 by Pablo Picasso

2. berlin-artparasites

3. Google Images

FOMO

FOMO is the Fear of Missing Out. It's also called anxiety and busy-ness.

I have been encouraged by many around me to become more busy. To work more, do something, do ANYTHING.

But that's just the thing. Doing some thing and doing any thing are assumed to be better than no thing. And that's not always true. I'm not advocating for complete inaction, only to say that most people are stuck in positions where they are forced to do some thing, or can't do any thing or try to do every thing.

And the reason is that they fear that they will be missing out. If I can accept that sometimes I will miss out, then I can give it up as a fear. And then I can focus on the things that I want to do, or choose to reflect in a space of no thing and possibly, just maybe... achieve every thing.

Because believing in some thing and believing in no thing are contradictory, logically speaking. And believing in no thing and believing in every thing are polar opposites, yet have essentially the same world view, because believing in every thing would include believing in no thing, and believing in no thing is universal and thus applies to every thing... ha ha, now I sound like a Buddhist making an argument.

But seriously - nothing and everything as belief systems don't work, or they work equally well. They require us to make a choice of system, which is some thing. Actually, it's a big thing. That requirement of choice is critical.

We choose the world that we live in. All worlds are possible. No world is impossible.

Live in Fear of Missing Out? Congratulations! You're already home.

Live in Fear of Commitment? Congratulations! You're home too.

So Remolishing requires choice. The choice is ours. It's mine. It's yours. What world do we live in?

The big idea

Ideas popped up today to be part of a new fitness boom that I believe will naturally emerge from the walking wounded of CrossFit.
I started CF in 2004, and it was great. It combined the best concepts of myriad fitness modalities like gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting, kettlebells and short distance running. It trained all metabolic pathways by interchanging heavy training with endurance performance.
But where it fails is that it repeats a narrow set of exercises and applies only high intensity concepts while encouraging friendly competition and tolerating form breakdowns that result in a disproportionately high number of injuries.
I know, because I had all of those injuries. But I loved the learning of new concepts in motion and efficiency. I loved the purpose of it and the way that it had the potential to make my body feel practically bullet proof. It was a huge confidence booster to conquer the workouts even though some of them would be so intense that they frightened me. Yet, every day, I would suck it up, often alone, and often early in the morning to bust out a session and post my times to the discussion board. There was definitely something about it.

Now that I have quit, I rarely hang out with the people who do these exercises. Their whole demeanor appears to change - they become tougher, they mix with more militaristic aspects of the society, from actual soldiers (the Special Forces love this stuff) to the police, firemen and wannabes that flock to test their mettle in gladiatorial fitness at the Cross Fit Boxes.

But Kelly Starrett was launched through this growth as focusing on the rehabilitative techniques to help Crossfitters recover and maintain optimum performance.
The Paleo diet came out of this boom.
One thing that CF has is a focus on evolution - they test, they score and they either adapt it because it works or discard it because it doesn't. And that is a fair process.

So what about combining the modalities of the movements THEMSELVES from CF, those efficient, powerful and often beautiful motions with the pacing of a yoga class, the specific muscle focus of a barre method or mat pilates class, then varied intensity of spinning and the purpose and structure of kundalini krya segments. The focus would be to heal the body in a way that makes it stronger, that uses the same motions but changes the plane of the body to remove the emphasis on "pounds lifted, time scored or points given" and come back to the centered mindfulness of becoming the body.
No mind, all motion, powerful life results.
BAM.
40 year old fitness boom. Market segmentation, sell the classes to the CF boxes as trademarked, copyrighted fitness systems that is collaborative and combinatorial with CF objectives. Sell certifications, produce videos, get great music, convert the world to the new religion of feeling sexy, alive, beautiful, strong, happy and resilient.

Example of exercise: the motion of the Olympic Lift, but done to music, with no weight, with the same specific muscle and neurological sequence to fire hamstrings, knees and glutes backwards to activate posterior chain, then demonstrate that this is also the most efficient rowing motion of rolling the body up through the pull of the flywheel, but now change the plane of the body by having the participant lie on their side and complete the same motions using the same sequence but without the interference of their normal gravity or normal standing alignment.

Rebuilding can only begin when the demolition is complete

Demolishing one thing implies its complete destruction. It would also be wise to wait until that process is complete until beginning the rebuilding process. But what defines the end of a demolition?

I would say that it's when you clean up all the debris and take it out to the trash. It has to be removed from my life before I can even consider rebuilding. And it is trash. There is no point in holding on to the broken pieces of my life as though they are vintage, heirloom or antiques of a time that I would prefer to forget.
It is trash. Throw it away. Never think of it again. Relish in the removal of its emotional burden, now lifted. Feel the freedom of the new space that I have created.

Do I want to just sit in that new space? Do I want fill it with new things, memories, habits, people and thoughts? And if so, which new things, memories, habits, people and thoughts?

Maybe I should sit for a bit on this one.

Rebuilding requires an architect.

Remolish: the rebirth of possibility

I used to have dreams, and then my life became one. But I forgot that it takes continued dreaming to stay in that dream state, lest I be awoken suddenly by the jolt of real life.

So I woke up into my real life, which had increasingly become a life that I no longer wished to live. So I have decided today, in fact, right now, to destroy it and rebuild it. Just like in real estate where a building must be demolished before it can be rebuilt or where an a kitchen is remodeled from an old form into a new one, destruction is intimately connected to rebirth.

I call it Remolish.

I don't like my life so I intend to remolish it.

It started with a slip of the tongue and a resulting spoonerism while talking to a friend about a remodeling project, and the word was born into my mind. Originally it just a mistake, but like any good mistake in an improvisational life, I decided to repeat it, to keep it and to make it my own. Thus, remolish.

This blog is about rebuilding. I am not going to dwell in the past. It happened. It was, it lived and now I am me. So that's where I will start, with me right now and my path forward.

I will discuss my goals, my audacious, hairy and presently unachievable goals. I will discuss my progress. I will seek out feedback, and provide it to myself. I hold the unwavering opinion that I am whole, complete and that I need nothing to succeed. I have all the pieces, I have the answers, it is now up to me to bridge the gap between potential and my present actuality.

Remolish.

Let's use it in a sentence: I am going to remolish the shit out of my life.