As humans, we are easily able to change our minds.
Think about how painless it is to lose your train of thought or forget what you said in conversation only moments earlier. This is because our thoughts are a superficial form of consciousness.
Our thinking patterns, including our core beliefs, are reinforced and sustained by repetition and emotional self-identification.
Going deeper within, our emotions are the next level of consciousness. Emotions form a bridge between mind and body; they are somewhat more dense and complex, and we have less control over them than we do our thoughts. Emotions are challenging to modify because emotions aren't in the mind only; they have a strong limbic system and vagus nervous system origin, which is much harder to exert conscious power over.
In short, emotions aren't merely in the mind, making them difficult to shift through thought or volition alone.
To be able to stay present with your emotions and transmute them consciously is an esoteric art form. It is something that takes sustained practice and coaching to accomplish.
It's a lot like learning to golf.
Mastering emotional turbulence in moments of intense physical stimulation
If you've ever golfed before, you know it can be easy to think of swinging your club at a ball. Mentally, you can understand what it takes. You can picture it – you can list the steps to set up the swing and imagine the follow-through.
Go to the golf range, though; the first bucket of balls you work through is humbling. To a certain extent, your body is unpredictable. No matter your skill or your intentions, your results won't always match what you intend. This can cause a swell of emotions, often agitation or frustration, over your inability to achieve a simple, precise motion at that moment. We struggle to understand why our bodies won't listen to what our brains know and can conceptualize. There's a disconnect that we don't know how to process.
To learn from a practice session, rather than just reactivating the feelings of frustration, requires the skill of learning through your body, below the level of mind. You need to learn how to practice in an embodied way that integrates with the intelligence within belly, heart, and emotions—not just your physical motion. The body knows things that the mind does not.
Much of one's success in golf comes down to the precision of movement and the clear collaboration between the mind and body. In the face of immense pressure, great golfers manage to keep their cool because they can feel the intensity of that pressure in a way that they can metabolize it.
A lot is going on in these moments. Mastering one's emotions is about using all the information around you, the chaos and mental murmurings, all the heightened pressure of competition, and turning it into emotional fuel that enables you to support the connection between your thinking mind, the power of heart and emotion, and your body. You have to surrender to, and trust something that you cannot understand through thinking.
Engaging in physical control at the spiritual level
The art of consciously modulating your emotional responses is complicated, but even deeper and more challenging to voluntarily shift is your relationship to spirit or the felt essence of being.
There is a spiritual aspect to golf when everything lines up and falls into place. It’s not luck, as the feeling is one of awe and wonder when it all comes together. There is no you — just spacious awareness and peace.
This is the quietude that our modern world seems almost terrified of. We are always plugged in, listening to inner soundtracks of our thoughts and emotions, attempting to keep the chaos around us at bay.
You can't jump from thinking about golf to being Tiger Woods; in the same way, you can't just imagine that you'll make a shift in your life and then witness it happen then and there. If it were that easy, you would have done it by now. We face obstacles we can't see clearly past.
Much like learning to hit a golf ball for the first time, sometimes we face situations without clear escape routes or paths forward, and we don't know where to start.
Anything in life you desire to master is best approached by bringing your mental attention and emotional force of being and combining it with the wisdom of the body and heart. And it must be brought into physical manifestation if it's going to have any meaning. If it’s only in your head, it isn’t shared—and its existence is only accessible to you.
A phenomenal amount of body conditioning is required to master any physical activity that requires precise, attuned awareness of everything around you. Whether it's a sport like golf, or something more spiritual like meditation or intimacy with a partner, total bodily control requires spiritual mastery and a deep capacity for acceptance of things as they are—not as you imagine them to be.
This is where I can help.
Living Tantra: Embodied practices
I have a new program launching this summer called Living Tantra for Men, to support and coach actual practitioners in real-life spiritual/emotional/physical/mental mixed martial arts. It's for those who desire to apply these spiritual truths in their lives. This program is an advanced course in practical living using these yogic concepts.
Areas of stress and avoidance can be transcended, liberating you from the underlying patterns that hold unconscious control over you.
As a coach, I can assist you in observing and analyzing your habits and patterns. There are progressive, nuanced perspectives that you may not have recognized within yourself. Just as there are ways to improve your putting and drives off the tee with a good coach, there are ways to shift patterns in your life and optimize your actions to produce intended results. This begins deep within at the level of body and emotion. It doesn’t matter much what you think, it’s the doing and experience that matters.
So if you've jumped into the deep end of life and are working to live to the best of your ability with freedom, life mastery, and integrity, this may be for you.