Call Me The SuperFly

       In college, my buddies gave me the nickname “SuperFly”, after my favorite professional wrestler, Jimmy "SuperFly" Snuka. His patented move, “The SuperFly”, was a flying leap off the top ropes, smashing down onto a prostrate opponent. I was known for doing my own version of the move, careening off of couches, chairs, cars, diving boards, you name it. Especially when alcohol was involved.       
       One of the workshops I took here at The Omega Institute was called The Flying Trapeze. It involved literally getting up on a real trapeze and doing shit thirty feet off the ground over a net. Here, I earned the nickname “SuperFly” all over again. And let me tell you. It was one wild ride.  
       The scariest moments were always between the time I started climbing the ladder and the time I actually took off. By the time I’m waiting on the platform chalking up, my heart and mind were racing like a Formula One car. Grabbing the bar as I leaned out over nothing but air and waiting for my cue to take that leap of faith, I felt like everything inside of me was about to explode outwards in a violent mess of brains, blood, and thoughts. But once I jumped into the void, I wasn’t frightened at all.
       It’s not as simple, however, as “I didn’t have time to be scared”. That is a part of it. Things are indeed happening fast once you start flying. Real fast. But remember, the mind only needs a second to go from serene to clamorous . Granted, when things are happening that fast, my mind has no time to idle, which is when it gets me in the most trouble. Climbing the ladder and waiting for the bar do not take a lot of concentration, so my mind fills itself with all the things that could go wrong up there, and all the other completely irrational fears that one experiences climbing thirty feet in the air preparing to swing off of a bar into mid air.
       Once I take off, though, an entirely new paradigm takes over. It’s as though the way I lived my life just a moment ago, The Operating System For Clint In Life, has been usurped by something all together different. I am suddenly fully and completely engaged in flying. I’m totally focused, paying attention, and bringing all I have to this endeavor. It’s like there is no room for anything else. The situation forces me to fill myself up with what I’m doing. I’m moving trough the air (maybe not with the greatest of ease, as the song goes, but I’m moving). I’m not directly attached to Mother Earth. My only tether to terra firma is a metal bar attached to a couple of nylon lines, attached to a massive apparatus of poles, stakes, and ropes. It doesn’t feel like I’m on earth anymore. And that changes everything.
       Flying through the air, not experiencing any attachment to the ground, well, it’s something I’m sort of used to. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, I have much more trouble being grounded than I do soaring through the metaphysical stratosphere of my own mind, of my own heart, of my own spirit. But this is different. Way different. This is physical soaring. Not just mental. Not just emotional. Not just spiritual. This isn’t just a mind thing. It’s a body thing. It’s a whole being thing.
       And while the body soars, my mind stays grounded, focused, engaged, and present. It’s almost a complete role reversal. Usually it’s my body that’s physically grounded, and my mind that’s soaring someplace else. Now it’s my body that’s no longer touching anything but air, and my mind that’s rooting me to the moment.
      It’s a mind/body role reversal, but on a different level, on a new playing field, a whole new continuum. Life is happening and I’m in it, one-hundred-fucking-percent. For those precious fifteen seconds, I’m free. Free of the mental chatter that sometimes derails me. Free of the ground that sometimes makes me feel trapped. I’m grounded, but it’s got nothing to do with the ground. I’m grounded in what I’m doing. My full engagement in life at that moment is what’s responsible. Paradoxically, my total commitment to flying is actually what grounds me.
       Fly with me into Part Two on Monday.


©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

I Hate Yoga

       I hate yoga. It’s uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Which is exactly why I’m doing more of it.
       It can be difficult, sometimes, to know the difference between doing something we don’t like because it’s good for us (like in this case, yoga), and doing something we don’t like because it’s bad for us (like driving sixteen-penny nails through our eyeballs). When do we just suck it up, and when is sucking it up just getting us in more trouble? That’s not always clear. But some things are becoming more vivid as I draw parallels between my fledgling yoga practice and the rest of my life.
       First and foremost, I have to show up. For yoga and for life. That means I get my ass into the game, even if that sometimes means just hopping out of bed, or showing up for a class. Whether I want to or not. And sometimes, I don’t. Not so much in life, but certainly for yoga. And, although such days are very few and far between, even getting out of bed some days wouldn’t be my first choice. And I’m not talking about those days when I wake up next to a beautiful woman and all I want to do is explore the Karma Sutra. I’m talking about the rare “I just don’t want to get up” days, when just showing up at all is a victory.
       But showing up is rudimentary. Now it’s time to actually do stuff. Yoga has shown me just how resistant I can be. My body fights the poses. Part of this is because I’m physically tight. As in “not flexible”. My body is used to resistance. My workout history is primarily weight training, which is all about putting up a fight. Thirty-five years of pumping iron, without enough stretching or other flexibility based modalities, will tend to make one tight.
       Working with weights since I was fifteen has made me comfortable with resistance. I’m at home with it. On a cellular level. It’s the world I’ve trained myself to be in. I know how to resist a weight and then force that weight through to completion. In the world of barbells and dumbbells, that’s how it works. In the world of yoga, not so much. My body is so used to resistance, to fighting and forcing my way through it, that it does so automatically. Instead of flowing and breathing into a yoga pose, I fight it. I’m physically unconscious about it. Only when I remind myself, physically and mentally, that “I’m not supposed to resist this” do I gain the ability to move with the motion, with the pose, instead of against it.
       This is the way it is with my body, as I’ve become acutely aware of after doing two and a half weeks of yoga classes. There is a saying that goes “The way you do yoga is the way you do life”. So I started asking myself how often in my life do I engage in resistance? How often do I just muscle through something, attempting to essentially force it (like during a bicep curl), instead of allowing it to unfold (like during a yoga pose)? How often do I act from force in an attempt to control, instead of acting from intentional effort and allowing things to flow? Put another way, how often do I create space in my life for things to happen?
       Forcing things is a learned behavior. So it can be unlearned. And I’m not talking about doing nothing at all and just waiting to see what happens. I’m not talking about passivity. I’m talking about allowing. I’m talking about creating space within the spheres of my life where space is as much a requirement as action. Which is basically all spheres. Even in pumping iron, you have to let the weight down. You have to allow the muscles to rest; in between reps, in between sets, and then for days at a time. Space is part of the equation. You have to give your body the space it needs to grow and change. I sometimes forget that. In the gym and in my life. I more naturally focus on the force. But the space has to be there. It’s an integral, vital, indispensable part of the overall process; of growth, of change, of development, of transformation. Of life itself.
       That’s why yoga is so hard for me. It feels like I should be forcing the pose. But when I do, it just feels like shit. That’s the opposite of pumping iron. In the act of lifting, when I force the weight up, it feels good. So in a way, it’s flipping what I know, what I’m comfortable with, on it’s head.
       On the other side of this is the realization that, in the rest of my life, as in yoga, I have great capacity for flow. I have great capacity to allow, and to create space. I just don’t always see it. And I don't always do it. Especially when I’m cursing my way through Warrior One, or some variation of Twisted Pretzel Position Twelve. When I get out of my own way, I naturally create space for many beautiful and wonderful things in my life to happen. For many wonderful and beautiful things to unfold.  
       But I have to be mindful of this. I have to bring a conscious awareness to it. I have to practice it. My over arching paradigm can not be one of force. My over arching paradigm can, instead, be one of conscious effort with clear intent, followed by letting go. I can engage in appropriate action and simultaneously practice allowance. I can create both the inspired acts and the space needed for those acts to take whatever wing will be.
       I’m discovering that my yoga, like my life, is more of a dance. And less of a bench press.

©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.