We train too hard, transfixed by obsession. When too much is still too little, it drives a deep disassociation with self.
Fact is, personal merit cannot be derived from an external source.
Most athletes tend to misunderstand what dedication is made of.
Dedication is not made of obsession.
Obsession is made of the three D’s: dysregulation, dysfunction and disassociation.
They are a movement away from yourself.
Dysgregulation is the shot your own nervous system fires across your bow to try and get your attention.
You are out of homeostasis.
Dedication is an investigation, an inner inquiry and a deep listening to the embodied winds of your own soul. It’s the warriors' inner prayer that you make to yourself.
Athletes tend to think that if they just push hard enough, they can bully their way to success.
That movement away from yourself is your own weakness rising. There’s no strength in it.
We radically underestimate the strength of the heart and trust.
If you can connect your dedication to your own life force, you will understand the meaning of strength.
Life is bound by the instinct of survival. We are naturally imbued with that inner strength, you won’t find it through disassociation, concepts and ideas.
It lies at the unconscious level of each human being, the will to survive is a primary embodied instinct.
The athletic chase is a fluid, it is made of the momentary and the unstable.
You can’t come at it with your head. When we are tired and fatigued, we are attacked by ideas and concepts that were already conquered long ago.
That one fact causes many athletes to stall and recreate what they have already had to learn the hard way.
The obsession is bound by memory and imagination, it has no backbone.
Strength is made of the commitment that you make to yourself to allow the fluidity and changing nature of the process to be what it is and to stay right there in it, listening to the wind.
That’s what true backbone is made of.
Gilesy