Anyone can play good cards, but it’s really about playing bad cards well.
When the shit really hits the fan in an endurance event or, indeed, in your life, that’s where one becomes the metaphor for the other. It’s about how you react.
That is where the rubber really meets the road. It’s the place inside you where the emotions are coming at you full steam, but you have enough awareness not to allow them to overpower your deeper intelligence.
We think our intelligence is in our mind, bound by what we can remember and retain, but it’s not true. The safety of real intelligence is governed by the level of our awareness.
That requires that you allow yourself to fully feel those emotions without the weight of the stories that you think are causing them. The second you go into a story is the second you disconnect from your awareness and your true intellect.
Following that story is a slippery slope that can cause us to descend Into anarchy. Try to negotiate an intense time in either performance or life in a state of anarchy and see how you get on.
We are in more danger than we think when we follow the story. We follow the story because it moves us away from the pain that we are feeling inside us. It’s an old, outdated protection mechanism.
The pain is OK if it’s felt and acknowledged. It’s a safer option to stay with that, and it becomes a marvellous teacher.
Staying in the story kills some people when the anarchy behind that story causes the complete breakdown of the intellect that is grounded in what is here now. Take it from me, I’ve sailed close enough to that wind.
We all create a story about our painful experiences, to get away from it. The shadows in that story (not the pain) haunt our waking hours and our sleep, they divorce us from what is here now and disconnect us from our own instinctual power.
Nobody does it to us, we do it to ourselves.
Accept the pain. In the end, you really will have no other option.
Stop chasing shadows, just enjoy the ride.
Gilesy
