donutszenmom.com

Walk through every fear.

As it turns out, I’m finding it’s not a “problem,” nor even a distinction.

I’ve been sick all week, with the symptoms getting worse and worse. Usually there’s an uptick by now, but it doesn’t seem to be kicking in. Bleh.

Okay, so one interesting thing: I am gauging my condition via how my mind feels as well as how my body feels. You know, like it’s ONE system.

I was brought up hearing “listen to your body.” This always baffled me, because my mind has always been a LOT louder than my body. That was my karma (habit). How in the world could I make my mind quiet down so I could hear my body? How could I be convinced it was my body talking and not my mind pretending to be my body? Gah!

I took up lots of physical practices to try to sort this all out: zazen, weightlifting, tai kwan do, climbing. Note a progression here? Yes, the “sport” got progressively more scary. It had occurred to me that the only way to circumvent my loud mind was to scare myself enough that my mind couldn’t fool me. If I could freeze my mind, I’d see what my body did on its own. Climbing was definitely the apex of my scare-yourself-until-you-can’t-think experiment.

But I don’t think that experiment worked, at least not the way I intended. I didn’t manage to turn off my mind, as distinct from my body. All that happened over 100 feet was that my mind didn’t noodle around with extraneous things. So my mind never shut up or went away. But what I did get was an opportunity to pay lots of attention to my system (body and mind) under different stressors. At least 10,000 hours, I’m sure.

So now Ashtanga is in the picture. The zen practice has had time to kick in. And I am sick as a dog.

What’s interesting is that I can feel “how I am” in the moment as a MUCH more integrated system. This integration is super-obvious at work (and yes, I do think of work as a sport and as a practice), where my body has to be still so my mind can see what’s going on in different situations. Kind of like zazen, where it’s really cool if the body can kind of pipe down and the mind can get really light. But it’s not a denial or disappearance of the body, so much as a coordination of body-mind. A specific configuration that doesn’t blot one out while favoring the other.

***

What got me thinking about this is a story on a friend’s blog, about a yoga newbie who was watching him do dropbacks. She watched carefully, then arched back further and further until she dropped back (one-handed, no less!).

Reminds me of my climbing buddies. Advanced climbers, natural athletes. Ex-gymnasts and martial artists. I say mind/body, they say body/mind. They definitely were super-gracious to lay out the path for me. All I had to do was exert myself and not allow my mind to freak out and doom everybody else.

In my next incarnation, I would like to be a body/mind person.

***

I went into work for one meeting yesterday, and it was utterly fascinating. Every single person I spoke with (and these are people outside my department, who did not realize I’d been out sick or that there was anything unusual about my state) reached out at some point and touched me on my shoulder.

I’m seen as a friendly, warm person at work, but I am not seen as a “touchy” person, so this touching was very unusual. I assume people were just subconsciously aware of my system being weakened, and they reached out to share some energy. (Oh my, I can totally see The Cop rolling his eyes when he reads this post!)

Likely another busy day with no time for posting. Instead, a few climbing pictures.

Below is a picture of Neptune, a 5.10a climb in a notch canyon called Atlantis, located just outside of Superior.

The approach to the canyon is, um, interesting. The canyon is just off the highway, so people have thrown (sigh) all kinds of trash in there. Someone wrote on rockclimbing.com:

Scramble down and slightly right past orange paint, trash and an old car. Watch out for broken glass! Scramble is worth it.

This is by far the ugliest approach to a climb that I’ve ever seen. Usually it’s an hour or two of beautiful hiking to a climb. In this case, though, it’s a short, totally trashed walk. But once you get deeper into the canyon, where people who throw things out of car windows are to lazy to go, you are treated to a beautiful canyon.

A bunch of sport routes in there, including one of my all-time favorites: Neptune.

Here’s me on Neptune. Such a great climb: pockets, underclings, roofs (you can see the roof just above my head, which I miraculously managed despite the fact that it involved grabbing a handhold behind me that I couldn’t actually see). There is nothing better than a dihedral in my book. I was never at all mathematical, but give me a bunch of planes in space and I’m a happy person.

Writing about the Ashtavakra Sutra the other day, I thought of Ashtar Command. A nice two pitch climb in Zion.

Here’s looking down from the first belay ledge. That’s my leg in the image.

Here’s a shot of the rock.

Here’s some of the scenery — spectacular! The exposure on the climb is pretty intense.

View from the second rappel ledge.

I am working from home. People at the office are creating dramas and chaos, and I’m hearing all about it from different people’s perspectives, phone call by phone call. Crap. Why does this happen?

I am annoyed, I have a ton of things to do, and I need to calm down.

So here’s a picture of the huecho wall in Kolob canyon. What you can’t really see clearly is how the wall leans in toward you. A LOT. So when you are climbing, it’s like you are falling over backwards the whole time.

Okay, all better.

The image on the header of this blog was taken on the saddle of Courthouse Rock in Tonopah, which is about 75 miles west of Phoenix. [Sorry, that was the old header.] I was about 600 or 700 feet up on the climb, but 1100 feet from the very bottom of the formation: you climb up about 400 or 500 feet on scree before you get to the bottom of the climb.

The whole thing is surrounded by hundreds of miles of wilderness. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

The climb itself is quite easy, but the whole thing takes a full day. Start early in the morning, finish after sundown. You carry your water, which means you don’t bring much. Desert climbing always has a “how much water should I bring and how much weight can I save before I risk compromising my performance (and wits) by toying with dehydration” factor built in. I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty as I was after this climb. Need to check the photos for dates, but it was summer, and I know the temperatures were well over 100.

I was looking for a new header photo this morning and ran into dozens of climbing pictures on my hard drive. Will start posting some. They’re just amazing to look at — not the people so much as the landscapes…