700 Weight Resistance Movements 75% Bodyweight 25% Iron and an Adaptive Training Cure

Yesterday was a sound strength training day, and I found myself reflecting on this thought stream from a recent hike, simplified below:

Truth is so effectual, it needs no anger, pride, fear, or weaponized delivery to be heard. It only needs the telling absent those things, and if possible in love and humility, to resound, reverberate, be received, taken to heart, and possibly passed down for generations.”

As I reflected on this, I realized it has great potential for adaptive training, that is, slipping the punches to self and others that come with anger and fear attached to:

(1) the avoidance of some truth about self, or

(2) fearful or vengeful anger at those who are a source of injustices toward others, self, and worst of all, those we love.

How often does truth go untold or told to shut-ears because the mixture of fear and anger allowed to crowd out the simple, powerful, healing, even nucleus-changing truth?

The truth in matters of all sizes may be scorched, burned, or concealed in the fire and smoke of passions that crowd it, from fear to anger to pride to disgust.

And yet, the simple truth, said, in love and humility, will free the teller as much as those who can hear that truth told. And each one of us will be able to hear it when this untarnished, nourishing truth arrives.

Imagine what energy comes from a body, mind, and spirit un-fettered by fear of the truth, embracing the truth, and working truth through the whole being with every footstep, movement, and every labor.

Look at how truth-to-self was able to do the unexpectedly unthinkably powerful:

By writing this post, I am not claiming I could do what these two women did in their grace and forgiveness, in part imparted through many, in both cases from higher places spacious enough to deliver freedom from the intrinsic assault of traumatic injustice.

I don’t claim any foresight in the field of forgiveness, but I do see a simple truth  grasped personally by these two women which makes me wonder…

If much simpler truths about self, or what we witness in the misuse of power were not sources of fear, were unburdened by anger, and unpolluted by pride; if simple truth were told in love however love would wisely tell the simple truths, how much harm, hurt, suffering, and injustice could be extinguished, prevented, and instead nourishing relationships  and virtues grown instead?

personal genesis

There is a place deep inside you can go, and through a window is a book, the book of life. There you will see the truth about you and why you are here. When all seems lost, when all appears hopeless and confused, go there to your personal desiderata without words and be renewed. There is no time or entropy there, and no corruption. The center of choice, of freedom is there. Energy beyond all energies, is there. Not destructive, but the Genesis. When the seed coat falls as a gift returned, there the ever future becomes present.

In the lyrics of this piece, I see translated in a few words what the above says.

Inner Runner, Inner Forgiver

There are reasons to run, and there is running for a reason. This breezy summer night the air was fresh of mountain and field, bracing and pure under the smile of a half moon’s glow. This was running for a reason.

The running surface was mostly asphalt, some road bed rock at the side, an occasional weedy dodge of a car, and a couple of rigid sidewalks. All in all 7.6 miles.

Running and allowing the gravity and other forces of the planet, solar system, galaxy, universe, the cosmos, and beyond, to act on me, to breathe in from the greatest wonders of all that is interrelated to the tiniest cellular worlds inside reminded me of a truth.

Running like this on country roads at night allows me to find peace enough to watch my thoughts emanate outward and reveal themselves, my memories, and my legends of others and self. My hubris under the glory of starlight is laughable. I turn and see the Big Dipper is a sign that I can be the biggest dip in the road.

What do I see? I see the truth, the truth that I am a sinner and that this truth, told honestly brings forgiveness from within my heart, tapping internally the light from the Beginning, the creative light that creates love and life from forgiveness. If I forgive concealing my wrongs, I stand in the yard of my being, shutting the inner light inside, squelching true light within closed doors. Worse, perhaps I then judge others to keep the diversion externally directed away from me and call it forgiveness, adding lie to lie.

Forgiveness from the front yard brings nothing from inside the home. Internal forgiveness brings truth and goodness from within as a gift and sacrifice, as a pearl to give to the forgiven one from the heart, or maybe a song of light, heard by the heart of the forgiven.

As I ran tonight, I realized that repentant heartbeats, sighs, and breathing are given to all of us to use to join the light within with the lights up on high, the warming around us, and the grand, glorious eternity of now, as universal gifts of forgiveness to all and to one. I would say it strongly: the purpose of repentance is to lead us to a greater forgiveness of others, to open the door opening the heart’s inner chamber for Light to become an endless river of peace.

For how is it we can fear one whom we love with the love of forgiveness from a heart that has known the gift of being forgiven that began with truthfulness about self?

Today, Now…

As the night cools the path of the spartan sun, a hot day’s light drifts into space as I contemplate sleep.

Now is the best time to reach beyond the solar system of my small life and share a few observations from this week.

Health, wellness, and functional strength are like a land grant to each person to farm.

There is no guarantee the farm will not be beset by pests, drought, or fire, yet we farm what we have.

And yet a farm is a foundation for living. What is the purpose of living?

The good purpose of our lives is so simple, so central, so much who we are, it is easiest to miss for being right in front of us.

Today, now, I simplify, letting go of my ambition, letting go of the wants I have dressed as needs, and I want to gaze wordlessly into my own heart to weed this given field; to make it fertile; and to grow all I can to hold with soft hands and distribute whatever I may be given to give. Truth told to self is a calmer of all faculties before sleep.

As I descend, I trust sleep. Sleep is rain, dew, cool, and recovery. Sleep is part of training. The heat and pace of the day will return tomorrow in which I will work my field. Peace.

Weight Shifting Is a Shooting and Spending War, Not a Matter of Health Care Alone (Revised)

Defining Terms to Get Results

“Weight-loss” or “weight-gain” are too abstract to help us perceive what is involved in the overweight casualties of the New Millennium.

Truer terms are “Weight-shifting” and “Mind-Body War.” For-profit, the Weight-Shifters strategically bomb us with ill-messaging about food, good-times, and ourselves. We are taught that we are significant because we are brand-supporters. Tactically, we are disarmed by bright lights, warm colors, and enticing photos of food and drink.

Crazily, the image of ourselves as fit can even make us indulge, thinking we can “take it” at the drive-through, or that “fit people eat here.” We are guerrilla stricken during commutes, when we are tired, rushed, feeling deprived, getting in late, and grappling with daily problems. We are “too tired to fix dinner.”

Yet there is hope. There are natural and organic grocers, and grocery sections. There are often free samples of healthy fare at the grocery stores to ease the urgency of hunger. Or just buy a small green juice first, and sip while shopping.

Our Appetites

Our appetites are the most vulnerable, non-critical, and primitive pressure points in this weight-shifting war. Each assault exploits the tensions of the busy-life schema that put us in urgently hungry states of the primitive brain.

Each attack, and each battle lost, takes a permanent toll. The hit-and-run nature of the anti-health raids impels us to hit-and-run ourselves with the false notion that it will only be “this time.”

Mind and Emotions

A sober, stoic war-footing toward these messaging phenomena would help galvanize and unify our minds and emotions against these false-comfort attacks. Think about who you want to be when attacked, not what you want right then.

False comfort is fizzy, melted, hot, salty, sweet, fatty, calming, and ultimately, a Dopamine-dumping chemical frenzy to ease our tension, cull our cognitive dissonance, and crush our health. It also drains our wallets.

True comfort is being truly free and under control of our life direction. Shopping and preparation burns calories, and deepens our relationship to fresher, purer food.

Body

When we eat the refined, processed, sodium-filled, grease-bombs that explode in our tummies and calm our nerves, we are descending into sickness. Thinking the situation through is not so easy.

Thinking outside of our bodily frenzies is the beginning of freedom. Detaching a part of our higher minds to float above our animal-drives can help us become self-aware of our total beings, not just our Pavlovian-Lowest Common Denominator. We can trump our immediate appetites.

Conclusion

Adaptive fitness assumes that eating, drinking, and sleeping are self-trainable behaviors every bit as much as exercise and sport are trainable. We can eat, drink, and sleep in accord with who and how we want to be.

You Deserve a Rewrite: Sustainable Fitness During Super Storms

This campaign season as pols postured for position during their power-tries we had a chance to see them forced to adapt to the circumstances of real life despite their target-fixation on self-empowerment.

When hurricane Sandy hammered NY, the red hats of political infighting came off and the blue hats of First- Responding went on.

What made them credible at the scene? Here they were locked in a power-seeking campaign, self-aggrandizing, framing facts to fit them, and suddenly they must confront real life and real people by flying into a disaster area. Every move they made was under scrutiny. How could anyone believe they were genuine?

Eastern Seaboard folks were largely into a collective vibe dealing with the storm confronting them. Flooding them. In come the pols. “Yeeeah, Right,” the person on the street may have thought, trudging through water and hearing news of the pols coming to town.

There is a contrast in perceived importance of dealing with real life versus dealing with personal ambition about real life. For the people hit by the storm, the pols were reduced in importance, unless they rolled up sleeves or used their power to help.

Similarly, for our children, our elders, our friends, coworkers, vexed supervisors or anyone we undertook to serve, were we to take an hour to train during their hour of need, they would probably take a dim view of it. No one cares how well trained we are until they know how much we care.

On the flip side, for the pols sold on the importance of their respective campaigns, when they heard of the disastrous super storm, they probably each said internally, “What? You have got to be kidding me. At the last minute, a Super Storm?” Yet there it was. Reality hit and they had to adapt.

They had to drop campaigning and help in some way. And they had to be sincere. People can sense the opposite.

That is how it is for us in our training lives. We have plans, have ambitions, and the desire to do more and be more in the big picture of our training lives. Then life happens. And we must ask ourselves, what were we preparing for with all of that training? Will it help others in their hours of need?

The sooner we drop our plans and embrace our service to others, the more meaningful our missed training time becomes. Yet we are not swooping in for a sound byte to face the needs of those we serve in our daily lives, we are going in with conviction, commitment, and the other qualities that training has kindled in us.

Engaging the life that happens to interrupt our training with decisiveness and commitment will improve what training we can work in by exponents, and will brace our mental attitude for future progress beyond measure. It will also clear our consciences to plumb quality out of short intervals.

Until we tell ourselves the truth about the priorities of our duties, what we train for, the degree of training we will allow ourselves and accept, we have not adapted fully to our circumstances. Until we adapt, we harbor an incompleteness inside about both our training and what we were training for, ultimately.

Politicians probably feel something similar in their temptation to not fully adapt, to fake it, and fake a response to a crisis in the middle of a campaign. But they can’t afford it. When they get to the impact zone and see the laboring faces, suddenly, they have to get honest very quickly with the people they meet.

Adaptive fitness recognizes our convergence of needs and honestly says, this isn’t ideal but I own it. I’m going to admit it, accept it, and see how I may make a shorter training evolution work well in the circumstances. It is good because it is responsible. It is good because it makes us better at handling the onslaught.

When we think and train adaptively while serving others it can be focused and high quality because there is no internal guilt associated with it. We’ve accepted an underdog training situation. Expectations are off. We are free to surprise ourselves. We can hit our stepping stones out of the onslaught.

By so doing we can improve our mental and bodily constitution to see through the onslaught, and when our training life gets back to normal, we will be happy that we considered even the small training opportunities as genuine. We weren’t training snobs. We were citizen-family people-volunteer-worker-athletes.

There will come the windfalls later, the fair weather, and spacious times.

More specifics on how-to, and the benefits of doing this will be available in the M7 Adaptive Fitness Guidebook around mid-December.

Thank you for spending a few minutes reading the adaptive essay. (O:

adapt for the fun of it

tears in motion: link to IRunWithIt

Falling stars of liquid truth
Listen to their lighted stories
Live and love by these forever

Click on the verse above to link to the post that inspired it.