Sunday’s Focus

Speed and strength this week. Begin to assess your techniques and efficiencies in every area of your life. What feels easy and fluid? Identify where you are fast and strong by their degree of effortlessness and efficiency. Do this for each of your bodies, your relationships, activities, and obligations. Do it at home, work, and play. Get to know where you flow.

Sunday’s Concepts

Fourth in the list of components is Strength. Strength is the maximum amount of energy you muster against opposing forces. It is how powerfully you can hold or maintain your desired configuration, trajectory, or intention without submission. Strength overcomes resistance. It is the manifestation of your will. Strength is the liberation of your spirit from the bounds of complacency and stagnation. It is the magic ingredient in manifesting freedom and seizing opportunity. Strength is utilization and liberation. It is a measure of your ability to recruit and entrain all the forces at your disposal.

Physical strength requires leadership and collaboration (functionality and communication between structures and tissues). Your system must learn to recruit a higher and higher percentage of your tissues and get them to work together (entrain). As you gain strength, you gain capacity and capability. The stronger you are, the more you can do at one time without strain. Liberating your physical strength also requires that you reduce the isometric forces that are pulling you in other directions (resistance and distraction).

It doesn’t matter how strong you are if you exert just as much energy in an opposing direction. Strength works to overwhelm resistance, but the less resistance you have the more available and usable your strength is.

Monday’s Focus

What feels easy and fluid in your physical body? Where in your body does your strength and speed abide? At what activities do you excel? What physical movements feel graceful, elegant, strong, and swift? Highlight and appreciate your strengths. Celebrate your celerity like a celebrity with celestial celery.

Monday’s Concepts

Physical strength converts very easily to mental and emotional strength. When your body is strong, your mind can pull some of that capacity when needed. When your body is strong, your subconscious mind has less to fear and uses less energy looking for possible threats. Physical strength elevates your energetic strength. Your energy body grows in conjunction with your tissues and blood supplies.

If you aren’t already, add strength training to your daily schedule. Do things that are physically hard for you until you can’t do any more; your physical body will adapt … and then so will your other bodies.

If the physical movements in your everyday life exhaust you, you will have less motivation to think creatively and feel deeply. Physical fitness is one of the easiest ways you can empower yourself to do more, be more, and have a greater impact. Don’t let your excuses stop you. Move powerfully and use your increasing strength to fuel your creativity, passion, and resolve.

Winter is finally over where I am and I can run more on our local trails. It only took a couple of weeks for me to notice a difference in my energy levels. I raced a 10-Miler on Sunday and Monday my legs were super sore but I found myself working effectively late into the afternoon (I start at 4 am) and still had sufficient energy to get a dirt bike ride in before dark.

Tuesday’s Focus

Check in with your emotional and mental bodies. Where do you efficiently overpower your distractions. At what are you mentally and emotionally proficient. What are your mental strengths? Where do you think the most quickly and efficiently? What areas of your life are you the most emotionally strong? When do your emotions feel responsive and the most expressive?

Tuesday’s Concepts

Mental strength is the degree to which you can take conscious action without distraction, diffusion, or dysfunction. Mental strength is your degree of functionality and determination under pressure. How forcefully do you withstand your habits, patterns, beliefs, and fears?

Mental strength is internal leadership.

Mental strength is a measure of your capacity to think. Powerful thinkers think without limits. Want to be a powerful thinker; liberate your mind, remove beliefs that limit you, and maintain your intentions. Don’t submit to your subconscious mind. Leaders have strong minds. They are determined. They increase collaboration through functional suggestions and powerful encouragement

A strong mind is functional and has a high degree of utilization. It overcomes inertia. Strong minds are never stagnant. They are vital, driven, and logical.

Mental strength is the power of self-confidence. Mental strength is what you use to empower your focus. Mental strength is one of the master keys to physical endurance.

On a mountain bike, the Sisar Canyon Trail in Upper Ojai is a long, sustained climb with 3500’ of elevation gain. The payoff is a super fun single-track downhill. The climb follows an old fire road. The views are stellar but it is a chore. The difference for me between it being a 3-hour climb and a 4-hour climb is the frequency of stops taken. I realized that I was stopping not because I was physically exhausted but because I wasn’t mentally strong enough to overcome the desire to rest. The climb got easier as I increased my determination to climb without stopping. I was spending so much mental (and emotional) energy playing the should I stop or should I keep going game that when I decided to not stop, all that energy was available to pedal.

Mental strength is a habit you acquire by challenging yourself to constantly improve. You get mentally stronger by taxing your capabilities and overriding the fears of your subconscious mind. You decide to lead yourself in the most beneficial direction.

Wednesday’s Focus

Environmental strength and speed is where the rubber meets the road. Your life is determined by the choices you make and when you make them. Your life and relationships are the manifestation of your decisions. Spend the day thinking about the decisions you have made with strength and speed.

Wednesday’s Concepts

Emotional strength is how fully you can express your magnificence and display the power of your passions without bullying, coercion, manipulation, or seduction. Intimacy and transparency are powerful examples of emotional strength.

Emotional strength overcomes emotional resistance. It is the manifestation of your passion. Emotional strength is the magic potion against fear. It allows you to feel strongly and still act according to your intentions and trajectory.

Your capacity for intimacy is a function of emotional strength. The stronger, greater capacity, you have for intense, passionate, and extreme emotions, the more intimate you will be able to be.

Your capacity for intimacy is the limit of your personal expansion. You allow yourself to get bigger by decompressing your personal space. You are intimate to the degree you allow yourself to expand and to the degree you devalue your fears. Increasing intimacy requires tolerating uncomfortable levels of expansion and allowing a fluid vitality to exist between your emotions and your level of engagement.

Being emotionally engaged isn’t about getting in touch with your feminine side; it is about letting go of fear and touching your strength. Emotional strength equals intimacy.

Emotional strength, intimacy, is limited by your capacity to be vulnerable. You are vulnerable when you allow yourself to let go of the need to control, manipulate, or seduce. Intimacy is a lowering of your resistance to being yourself and a reduction in the demands you place on others.

Thursday’s Focus

Reflect on the decision you identified yesterday and contrast them to the decisions you make every day that are not born of strength and speed. Where are you diluting your strength? Where are you reducing your momentum? Which of your distractions weaken your resolve and slow you down?

Thursday’s Concepts

In October of 2005, I spent a month in the jungles of Costa Rica with the amazing and multi-talented Glenn Black. I learned more in that month than I had in the previous 20 years about yoga, the physical body, inner strength, and intimacy. Glenn is a gifted teacher and a loving and kind human.

One day, maybe two weeks into the training, we were working on the yoga shape, Tadasana, or standing pose. And like everything Glenn teaches, it wasn’t about the posture. The posture was an analogy. He was teaching about our inner stance, how we hold ourselves or uphold our souls.

He was challenging us with a supreme confidence in our capability. I could feel his intention, his desire that we blossom into that infinite space. I was trying hard to stand tall, struggling not only for his approval but to feel that realization of my true nature. He came up behind me, placed his thumbs in my palms and gently pulled my arms down an inch to lower my shoulders. It was a profoundly moving experience. He was telling me that I was already there, that I was emotionally strong enough to be myself without trying quite so hard.

Where are you trying too hard or trying to make things hard? Where can you relax into not only being yourself but into the feeling of being yourself?

Friday’s Focus

What is your general energy level. Your energy level can also be stated as your vibrational rate. The higher you are vibrating, the quicker the energy is moving. The quicker it is moving, the more available it is. Your level of energy availability is measured as strength. Go fast, be strong. When does it feel like you are at your highest vibrational levels? Don’t expect that they will always be positive or happy places.

Friday’s Concepts

Subtle body (energetic) strength is your total capacity and how available it is for use. Your total capacity would be the combined energy in all your bodies. If the energy in your battery isn’t available it is a weakness, an anchor you drag around. Imagine having a backpack full of Clif Bars that you never eat, you just lug them around … all the time. Are you like that or do you know someone who is? Do you have a ton of potential that you can’t access?

Your subtle body distributes energy to your other bodies. The energy in your subtle body is very susceptible to the fears of your subconscious mind. As your fears are triggered, your subtle body contracts and begins to limit or redirect the amount of energy it allocates to the bodies that correspond with the fear. Fear unbalances your subtle body which in turn drags your other bodies out of balance.

Do you have low back pain? There is a very good chance that you are fearful of being yourself. You limit, hold back, your energy and it compresses and eventually stagnates in your lower lumbar vertebrae. When it does, those tissues lose their ability to rehydrate, rejuvenate, and replenish. They wither, weaken, and degenerate until some strain overwhelms their ability to function and injury happens.

Healing is hampered by the continued energy flow dysfunction. An analogy would be the plants in your garden struggling without water and then being half eaten by deer. Those plants are going to have a tough time recuperating until the water supply increases. If you have low back pain, increase your self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-assuredness; your back will thank you. A low-back mobility program (which includes the psoas) would also be helpful. Consistently moving your physical body in a healthy way will increase healthy subtle body energy flows.

All injury and disease are caused by some imbalance and the poor circulation of your energy. Energy pools, compresses, and stagnates in tissues. Those tissues become inefficient and are subject to being compromised.

I just received a referral from a young woman I gave a healing to five or six years ago. She came in with severe back and abdominal pain. She had had an MRI and seen several doctors without relief or diagnosis. I realigned her energy field and helped her create a balanced energy configuration in all her bodies. When she arrived, it took her several minutes to get up on my massage table and recline. The slightest touch would cause her great pain. When she left, she was moving normally and had no pain. According to the person she referred, she said the problem never returned.

Get balanced and see what happens to your aches, pains, injuries, and disease.

Saturday’s Focus

When do you feel the most alive? Sometimes you will feel the most alive when you are completely dysfunctional. Think of the energy that moves when you are furious, terrified, jealous, or manic. The feelings of energy movement that are attached to non-beneficial states will have a different quality. They will feel frenetic. See if you can begin to discern the difference.

Saturday’s Concepts

Environmental strength is your ability to influence or resist forces (people, things, temptations, distractions) gathering around you. How strongly are you determined to succeed, be kind, make a change, or be happier? How easily are you frightened?

How powerfully can you resist the coercion of others? When do you mitigate your strengths to stay comfortable? When do you bully or submit? When do you demand that something or someone be different?

Environmental strength is the measure of your instantaneous ability to move in a functional and predetermined direction as you interact with the world.

If you use all the components of your strength, you will dramatically increase the degree and frequency of your fluid interactions.

Pay attention to how often you are distracted, what is most distracting, and what distractions you are strong enough to ignore. Bring the quality and configuration of your strength to ignore to the things that are not so easy to ignore.

Build beneficial habits and your habits will build benefits.

Squat Balance

Step 1 – Sit in a squat position with your heels elevated balancing on the front part of your feet.

Step 2 – Feel your compensations as you maintain your balance.

Step 3 – Begin to soften and relax as many areas of your body and bodies as you can.

Step 4 – Transition to a seated position with your feet extended and your hips on your heels.

Step 5 – Soften as many areas of your body and bodies as possible as you sit and relax.

Step 6 – Continue to transition from the squat balance to sitting every minute or so.

Step 7 – Try to reduce the amount of compensations you are making in your squat balance to match your seated posture.

Why it Matters – As you try to stay balanced you are constantly being pulled out of balance by the effects and results of your compensations. You feel yourself falling to the right so you shift your weight and body to the left. To counteract the momentum, you overcorrect and then you find yourself falling to the left. The same thing is happening front and back and between opposing muscle groups. You have an intention to stay balanced but your body and bodies are subconsciously working against you.

As you can identify your compensations, you can begin to minimize them. As you minimize your compensations, you will overcorrect less. The smaller amounts of overcorrection will lower the amount of compensations your subconscious mind is telling you to make.

Everyday Usability – Imagine taking the above concept and using it for your mental predispositions, emotional bias, and every aspect of every relationship you have.

As you limit and reduce your compensations, you are increasing your presence, intimacy, and personal power potential.

Progression – After you have felt a reduction in your physical compensations, focus on your mental balance as you transition. Then, check your emotional balance. Next, try something more physically challenging (one-legged squat, eyes-closed squat, longer time intervals, etc.). Lastly, explore how effortlessly you can transition between the two more complex movements.