Always On Track
Author on The King Swing, El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California, USA.
In climbing, the general idea is to make upward progress. While constant vertical gain can sometimes be the case, at others, the terrain demands that we traverse horizontally instead of gaining altitude.
The King Swing on El Capitan is exactly this kind of situation. Pictured above, climbers must rig their ropes such that they can run horizontally across the sheer granite face in order to access the next section of climbable rock.
Sometimes in life, like climbing, we have to go sideways.
Feeling Stuck In Sideways Stories
As a coach, my job is to support people as they move through change. Often this means transformation of some type, a pivot, or conquering some challenge. I exist to remind people of their inner wisdom and strength.
When I’m responsible for championing others to show up as their best selves, sometimes I feel guilty or ashamed when I encounter setbacks or have difficulty tapping into my own higher wisdom. I get down on myself for being unable to self-activate and feel like a failure. This judgmental shadow showed up for me in a big way in the past two weeks. I found myself grappling with old depressive mental patterns. Limiting beliefs ran rampant and I had a hard time getting things accomplished.
When in the thick of an experience like this, it can be challenging to see the wider perspective. Inside the timespan of a day, a week, a month, or even years (hello pandemic), it can feel like shit is unceasingly hitting the fan, things are going off the rails, and our goals are just not obtainable. We’re “off track,” “falling off the path,” or it’s time to “start over at square zero.”
It certainly may feel like this.
That we’re stuck going sideways.
That we lost ground, or backslid.
Worse still, that there’s no way out.
It’s vital to remember, however, that our perspective determines our reality. This isn’t to dismiss tragedy, eliminate regret, or don rose colored glasses through which to see the world. Instead, it’s an invitation to embrace our lives as they are, yet train the ability to not getting overly identified with our current circumstances.
Rather than resist and push our challenging experiences away as if they’re something distasteful, I invite us to fully experience what it’s like when we’re feeling off track. By engaging 100% with the felt experience, uncomfortable and unpleasant as it might be, we can begin to understand exactly what’s out of alignment. Through each misfire, we can enter into deeper awareness of what we don’t want and have the opportunity to reconnect even more strongly to how we actually want to live. Our failures, regrets, and challenging experiences actually have the possibility to be instructive catalysts for growth. Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, writes: “Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.”
Instead of excoriating our regrettable life choices, we can integrate them with the spirit of continual learning. From here, we can remember that growth is by its very nature challenging, difficult, and uncomfortable. Indeed, pursuing growth inherently invites the possibility of failure into our lives! Adversity’s instructiveness, however, can’t be gleaned if we resist the experience of failure or jam it into the closet with our other skeletons. Bang-ups and hang-ups demand to be understood, integrated, and processed.
Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön shares: “Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” Her words remind us that the circumstances in our lives may seem like obstructions, but in reality it is our own resistance to our lives that trips us up. Rather than accelerate time to get to where we WANT life to be, (which is impossible anyway), we can see events in our lives, pleasant or unpleasant, as a teacher. Sometimes it feels inconvenient because life is a stalwart professor! Life won’t let us escape our curriculum!
What’s possible when we look at our lives as an invitation to learn from apogees, nadirs, and everything in-between?
As long as we’re still living, as long as we’re willing to listen to life, the invitation to learn remains open.
Some helpful questions when adrift on stormy seas:
What is the lesson I’m learning?
Regardless of how it feels, how am I growing?
What needs to be released?
What’s the invitation here?