"The more I
train,
the more I realize I have more speed in me."
... Leroy Burrell,
worldrecord
Olympic sprinter
This essay,
Full Tilt,
is the companion piece to
24 / 7 / 365.
I am indebted to Carl Monroe "CMC" Cheney who inspired this
conversation.
"I promise: you won't recognize yourself. When you
gettransformation,
you ... won't ... recognize ... yourself.".
That's what he told me when he first shared
Werner's work
with me. He was a recent
graduate,
very excited, and yet calmly enthusiastic. I had a sense of what he was
talking about (which is to say I had as much of a sense of it as I
could
possiblyget,
given I was
screening
everything he was saying though my "I already know this" / "I
already know it all" filter). What perplexed me was even if
it were
true
I wouldn't recognize myself, how would I know? (it was
something I'd thank him for later).
I was
around him
on an almost daily basis. Hardly a day would go by when he didn't say
something about it, to which I would always respond essentially the
same
way:
that I already understood it (at least in my own
mind).
Then one day he innocently said something which interrupted my
erstwhile know it all knee-jerk
way
of responding to him, and changed all that. He shared that since he
became a
graduate
of
Werner's work,
patterned behavior in his life
began
to
break
up ie
disappear.
Patterned behavior? Say whut? I didn't have a
clue what he was talking about ie what he meant by
"patterned behavior". What I did know was at that
time,
I was in a
relationship
which was ending. And I noticed it was ending in a
way
which was similar to the
way
many of my other
relationships
had ended (in other
words,
there were what I can 'fess up to as repetitive
circumstancesplaying
out again, OK?). What's worse is I
got
I was powerless to shift the direction in which those repetitive
circumstances were careening. Were my repetitive circumstances the
result of so-called patterned behavior to which he was referring?
Was I, in some
way,
responsible for them? I didn't know. What I did know was
suddenly, whatever it was he was talking about, I wanted it. Within the
hour I had registered myself to
participate.
My patterned behavior as I
began
finding out (often to my own chagrin) consists of predictable,
automatic responses which appear to embody
choice
but which really have no inherent
choice
at all, and in which there's no inherent
possibility
either. My patterned behavior impels me to do
the same old same
old
things over and over and over with
little
likelihood of producing anything that's new. It's more than that
actually. It's it actively restricts and inhibits the
possibility
of doing anything new - which means almost everything I ever come up
with is actually
little
more than
no-choice
stimulus / response
reactionsmasquerading as
choice.
Confronting
this is arduous at best, withering at worst. Interimly,
dealing with it as a mature adult is an unavoidable process.
Ultimately there's
nothing
more fulfilling in
Life.
Nothing.
There's a certain
freedom
to living, a certain room to move that becomes
possible
with
transformation,
which is simply not
possible
prior to its onset (ie which in fact is simply not even
conceivable prior to its onset). And the more I avail
myself of it and
getused up
by it, the more it reveals itself to me, and so the more it becomes
available. It's the
freedom
inherent in
possibility
itself. It's never in short supply. It's the
freedom
of realchoice
(ie not merely selection). It's the
freedom
of
aliveness
not compromised by survival. It's the
freedom
which goeswith (as
Alan Watts
may have said) the
victory over the past.
It's the
freedom
which will
move you to tears.
To say
transformation
brings the
freedom
from allself-made
barriers?
is arguably naïve wishful thinking at best, and at worst simply
not
true.
What it does bring is the swift recognition of the
source
of
self-made
barriers,
and the
possibility
of quickly (very quickly)
completing
them and
getting over
them. It's the
freedom
of not being held back, of not holding back.
Imagine
the
freedom
of not being held back? of not holding back? You won't recognize
yourself. It's the
freedom
to live full tilt.