“Thanks to this guy for getting me out in the rain to play in the mud and climb stuff to challenge my weird uneasiness with low heights.”
Marie Skilling
Most of us love to get back to nature and being like kids so running around in the woods climbing trees, balancing and jumping over and around fallen logs which is also a great mirror for all of us to realise how much more we can do and how much fun it can be.
If you want to change something, find someone who loves what you would like to do or learn and ask them if you can hitch a ride.
If you are serious and committed, they will embrace the opportunity to show you their world and how you can be part of it.
What better time to shed my 5 layers of winter clothing and climb into a freezing rock pool to take some cold resistance mind/body training that I’ve been doing over the last few weeks a bit further.
Takes all my mental strength to do this process, and each level takes some self conviction to proceed, but the body and mind, given the right instruction is incredible and natures a great teacher if you follow the rules!
Didn’t have a heart attack and drown and comfortably bobbed around happily in the freezing water for a while before getting out and drying off easily afterwards, rather than shaking like a shitting dog, which is an amazing feat for a skinny boy who hates the cold, so onwards and upwards!
It doesn’t matter if you can take a ‘little’ or ‘a lot’
You only need to find your “edge”. Your edge is that place where you are challenged, where you start to think “this is impossible for me” or “I can’t do this!”.
And that edge is situated at a different place for everyone. Some need a lot of challenge, others need to face a little less cold or go a little slower.
‘Find your edge
Everybody has his own individual edge, and this is about meeting your edge. Wherever it’s situated.
As long as you’re being honest with yourself about what you can take, then it doesn’t matter how ‘much’ or ‘little’ that is.
(Because at whatever level you might be, there’s always the next level. You’ll always have an edge to explore, whether you’re considered ‘beginner” or ‘expert’.)
Your particular comfort level doesn’t matter
I know people who just take cold showers, and that seems to be enough for them to be challenged.
That’s great. This is not a race.
There’s no pressure to prove anything to anyone else.
What matters is the feeling you have, and your commitment to yourself.
Don’t underestimate yourself either
There are people who go in fully, and challenge themselves hugely.
Just be honest with yourself. If you feel you need to up your commitment, then do that.
Take your time
You choose your level of challenge. Don’t go to the extreme just because others do it.
Selling happiness is big business at the moment, but the quickest and cheapest way to find what will make us happy as individuals is simple.
A book, a lecture or a workshop will never disclose to you what you already know.
Running and jumping around on the rocks several weeks ago I caught myself present to the fact that I was totally ‘happy’ in that moment. Perfectly aligned and totally captivated by what I was doing. I don’t know if it was an epiphany but it certainly made me stop and consider ‘this is what makes me tick…..just do more of this’.
We just need to learn to train ourselves to stop and be present inside of those moments when we are totally absorbed and perfectly content. Its being aware of these encounters which gives us what others are so keen to sell us despite never knowing us – our very own happiness blueprint!
We already know what makes us happy, but we are so busy looking for it, that we can miss it.
Its often so subtle and unassuming that happiness goes by without us ever having really acknowledged it or ever consciously witnessing its presence so we know where to look in order to find it again.
As I have said before, the problem with the best days of our lives is that we often do not know we are having them until we are looking back in time when its to late.
If you are not happy or feel you could be happier change your focus from trying to find it to simply being present to it when it comes to you….then do more of that and really stop to savour it!
What I found for myself was that, once I was present to the fact that this simple action of running around on the rocks was something that made me happy it became a thing of amazement. No longer was it simple. I paid attention to the amazing complexity of what was involved in jumping from one rock to the other.
I watched over and over again in slow motion, a film I had casually taken on my phone of my rock hopping antics and marvelled at the amount of movement I had needed to do in order to make a jump, that was completely oblivious to me (prior to watching it back) and yet took seconds in real time to implement.
And anyone who has any concepts of neurology will also appreciated the massive amount of communication the brain needs to processes just to put one foot in front of the other never mind leaping from one uneven surface to another whilst gauging distances is just mind blowing!
And I was capable of all of this! If that doesn’t make me smile nothing will!
Its often inside of the most simple things that we find happiness that we take for granted and therefore miss it. Its only when its gone that we can see it.
Don’t wait until then because its to late.
Get present, notice when you feel good and take a moment to gather the ingredients of that moment so you can be both aware of them in the future but also how you can make more of those times in the future.
John Gray reflects on the controversial “safe spaces” policy being pursued by some universities.
It may have been devised to ensure that people of all identities are entitled to a tolerant environment …but John Gray argues that the policy not only threatens a fundamental liberal value but represents a demand to be sheltered from human reality.
He says the point of education used to be to learn how to live well in full awareness of the disorder of life. “A lack of realism …was considered not just an intellectual failing but also a moral flaw”.
He says we ignore this lesson of history at our peril.
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