As I stared at the clock on the StairMaster I could feel the frustration building. My idiotic endeavors of the weekend cost me a sinus infection that could potentially conflict with a presentation I needed to give in a week’s time. On top of that this was my week to come up to Boston which is traditionally laden with even longer hours than my traditional 11 hour work-day. Keping that type of pace while my body fought off infection was no small task. However, I decided to continue to push through the discomfort and continue reading the book on my Kindle, The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno.
Sarno was detailing his belief that many chronic physical maladies such as back pain, skin disorders, and stomach issues were largely caused by repressed, “inappropriate” emotions our unconscious mind spared us that end up manifesting themselves through one of these chronic disorders. A “no shit” seemed like all that I could muster between my plugged nose an heavy panting as a I approached my 400 calorie goal of the workout.
I had been doing “this work” since the age of 22 when I decided to back-pack around Asia, explore yoga and become a certified Kriya Yoga instructor and this was something that I believed I had examined, delved into, experienced, and conquered in life. But then one sentence seemed to strike me, one that again I am sure that I’ve heard several times before, but struck me deeply nonetheless, “Mindbody symptoms exist to serve a purpose, if you thwart that purpose by taking away the symptom without dealing with its cause, the brain will simply find a substitute symptom or disorder.”
I began to feel sensations over different parts of my body, a hamstring injury that I’ve been nursing for years since competitive cycling, shoulder pain from lifting that has cropped up in the past several months, and a keen awareness of my lifelong annoyance with eczema. As I began thinking about these physical manifestations in my body, I also began to connect with my emotional body — attempting to peel back some of the unconscious layers to see if there were in fact any underlying tones I could detect that would corroborate Sarno’s posit.
Although it was a fairly straightforward and simple introspection, I felt like I was looking at a part of myself I had not gazed upon for nearly 5 years; the last time an intensive week-long Kriya Yoga workshop. A phrase came to my mind and I immediately knew that it was something that my body needed to hear. I intoned in my mind the phrase, “I love you for you… I love you for you.” I could feel the physical ailments that I was able to conjure up so rapidly dissipate as I continued to repeat the phrase to myself.
I looked down and my 400 calories were up, a whole 30 seconds before my estimated time of 35 minutes. I felt as though I had really touched upon something, but it didn’t seem to make sense because these were all battles I had already fought, so why were they coming up again? As I stretched I felt the familiar twang of my groin muscle I had pulled 2 weeks ago while doing squats, and just continued to repeat the phrase to myself, “I love you for you… I love you for you.”
On my way back to the locker room, I felt an ocean of revelation opening before my eyes as I began to gain a much, much deeper understanding of how to reconcile my conjectured past “breakthroughs” that needn’t happen again and what I was feeling. There is a clear distinction between human achievement as a species and as an individual. Bill Bryson in A Brief History of Everything speaks very clearly about humankind making advancements collectively, by standing on the other shoulders of people’s achievements. In this way, one person can have an insight that is built upon another’s and the two behold an achievement never before created and therefore two different single realizations can be combined and function as a single achievement in human thought.
My realization was that individual experience is very, very different. Individual experience is not based upon single realizations, in fact, single realizations are meaningful solely at the time of their achievement. Individual capacity for excellence, or greatness, or culmination (choose whichever word inadequately describes the concept of a person being “all that they can come to be in this life”) does not come in a single realization but rather persistence.
Take teen age heartthrob actors or athletes that are unable to ever reach the same level achievement experienced in their early to mid 20s and you will find that single acts of greatness rarely, if ever, propel someone’s state of mind and being into perpetual happiness that lasts the rest of their lives. So too with me, my deep 5 years of struggling to achieve self-acceptance and self-love were overshadowed by the past 5 years that were entirely dedicated to the creation of financial stability that could provide for a family.
In fact, when I looked even deeper, my conviction to pursue financial stability with such ardor led the way to deeply neglecting myself and feelings of adequacy around all areas of my life — I constantly feel like the most unintelligent person at work, I feel like I’m unable to sexually satisfy my wife, I continually worry that friends who want to spend time with me “aren’t given enough attention,” my family wants to see me more, and the list goes on. Once more the mantra came back into my head as I felt the water gently massaging the back of my head to trickle down my body.
Just then, I abruptly remembered that I had forgotten my razor in my gym bag as I was going to shave my forearms (something I was newly enjoying as my vascularity has increased after working out so much). What happened next was the lynchpin drawn from its bore: I chuckled. Only minutes ago, my reaction would have been to castigate myself or give myself a hard time for forgetting yet another thing… instead, without thinking I chuckled. A slow, calming melt came over my body as I began to cry, where had this man gone who used to love me so unconditionally? How had I done so much hard work and diligent cleansing of my unconscious mind and emotional body to only to relegate control of my internal process to this judgmental prick who never, ever thought I was good enough.
As my crying slowly stopped I felt the often “mirroring” of logical conclusion and emotional experience that was always something during my work as a Tantrica that ensured I got something “right.” I needed to conclude cognitively and viscerally and then I felt my emotional body open as simply as though it were a lock and key (this was only around things such as “knowing myself” and the unconscious patterns I perpetuated, and has never happened around a purely intellectual endeavor). I will culminate to my fullest potential as a human being, not because of realizations that I have at some point, but rather because of my ability to persistently incorporate these realizations into my experience and into my life. Welcome back my friend, it has been far too long… and I love you for you… too.