Challenging

Week three of this four-week course.

Their Neapolitan scream cuts through the air like ice cream on sensitive teeth. The mix of three distinct flavours of emotions sketches across the palate of my ears, as I discern fear, thrill, and pain colouring its sound. The smile; part grimace, part delight framed in fury tells its own story that even though they’ve been in a sauna for twenty mins and by their own confessions are ready to cool down, that for them, getting into the plunge pool is way more of a challenge than I’d have found it to be. My own challenge can be found in conversations where I hold no thoughts and opinions, where no words arise in me, and I am left stuttering unintentionally like rappers delight, minus the style, confidence, whilst stammering though attempts to join in and sound intelligent.

We all find different things challenging, that’s why we work better in teams. After all, the success of ‘solo’ artists, athletes, and entrepreneurs often always rides on the circle of talent surrounding them. Others get the best out of us. Especially when we truly value what we do and who we find ourselves doing it with and for. Other people can help us with what we find challenging. That’s why we have teachers. That is why we are drawn to study, grow, learn. Or at least I find I am, and I feel you may well be too. Which is why challenging is good, as it encourages us to see there may be parts which are holding us back, and in taking a look, getting help, we can unshackle ourselves from their limitations.

However, asking for help can be challenging, and yet then doing the thing which we know may help can be even more challenging. Following a diet, programme or practice can be fun at first, as it always seems to help at first. But all too quickly it can become unexpectedly challenging. The moves which came so naturally feel awkward and stiff, the headspace which initially freed us from our unwanted thoughts is now heavily populated with feelings seemingly dredged from the surface the same unwanted thoughts initially grew from.

The key for me personally is to simply return to the simpler step. Knowing I find something challenging, the simpler step is to ask for help sooner, as opposed to fuss, dither and distress, wasting time which could be otherwise better spent. Knowing I am struggling for conversation, I simply demand on myself to be listening more intently, both to the conversation, along with the space within me. Finding my practice challenging, which it more often than not is, I simplify it by returning my priority to ‘the thing before the thing’, for if I can settle into this, I can inevitably meet the challenge of the thing I want to work on with less resistance. Let’s take a look at this in the context of this course:

You may well have found yourself at times feeling Neapolitan like in the opening story, internally screaming in frustration during your practice sessions, when the depth of your ability to soften nudges up against the more solid parts of you. These stuck parts of all of us hold together aspects of ourselves, which when combined leave parts of us frozen, and just like the aforementioned ice cream, digging into them whilst they are still hard can leave us with any response from sharp pain from our over-sensitivity, to brain freeze. This can look like a plastic spoon trying to dig out a scoop from the frozen tub, in that you, in this case the spoon in the story, are left bending as opposed to the stuck parts of you yielding like soft-scoop ice cream. This is where Tapas comes in, so look back to an essay in February I wrote on this, but suffice to say, staying present with the simple practice of softening is actually all you need to do. This will be challenging enough, as our impatience would rather break the plastic spoon than sit and wait…

… And yet, this is all we need to do. The biggest challenge is to simply do the practice. By this I refer back to another February essay titled “Going Rogue”, for it is way easier to make our practice too complex, slightly out of reach and therefore containing an inbuilt out for not doing it, but simply doing a simple practice is probably the greatest challenge you’ll ever have.

Which is why, in this third week of practice, we will firm up the basics, zipping and buttoning up our fabric so that when we do manage to soften, we can capture and contain all the goodness it holds. And just like the Neapolitan scream we began the essay with, irrespective of its emotional content, the fact is that just like ice cream, there was delight in that very scream. It may have come from a deep and true challenge, but the payoff of doing it is nothing short of a delightful warm glow.

My request has been that if you have been and still are following this course, and if it makes a difference (which I know it will if you actually do the work), you will do three things in return.

1. Continue for another two weeks.

2. Tell someone about your success.

3. Buy me a matcha or three, and maybe even pay me for my time by becoming a paid subscriber.

The accompanying video will be up soon. You’ll see me then.