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Beware of Body Bullies Behaving Badly! — 6 Comments

  1. Struggling with this one.

    Don’t get me wrong – you’re absolutely right. Moving well and performing tasks well calls for ease. Patience. Listening to the body. Finding a “free” center. Bullying kills that.

    In sports, when I get the thinking right I can easily shoot a basketball from well beyond 3-point range (19+ feet), and hit the shot, comfortably. When I get the thinking wrong, I try to shoot from that range but can’t do it without terrible exertion and discomfort.

    But tapping into that freedom-sense takes extreme patience. And I can’t actually “control” the physical process. It’s like I have to relinquish my command of shooting the basket to something unconscious or intangible … or spiritual or mystical or something.

    Which feels great, don’t get me wrong. Especially when I get the mix right and the ball goes in the basket AND my body feels terrific, like it accomplished something challenging with almost zero effort. That’s an amazing feeling.

    But that takes patience. And I’m always in a hurry to make more baskets, dammit. 🙂

    Related to this, I play competitive volleyball a couple times a week. I’m to the place now where in the middle of a match I can decide to force it and smash the ball across the net and score a point just through brute power. It might temporarily feel like I’m “in control.” But boy, will I pay for it in the seconds and minutes and hours afterward. Immediate pain, tightness, fatigue, exhaustion … and just a general loss of Joy in the activity.

    So there seems to be this foggy Zone above and beyond my conscious awareness, where I can obey the principle of Freedom, but I can’t actually control it (or my body) per se. Yields great results. But it’s unpredictable. I can tap into it but then lose it just as easily. And that’s frustrating.

    But when I do it with patience, I start to sense that I’m honoring something greater than my conscious mind, and I feel vastly better. More grown-up, more Adult. Less tense. And more freely and naturally “athletic.”

    Growing and learning!

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