How to surrender but never let go...

Some days, I struggle to comprehend why I willingly subject myself to challenging and painful experiences. Why do I push myself to my comfort zone’s screaming edge?

Yet I know that I deeply know my whys. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding woman’s horizons.

To have a future, we must step outside our comfort zones. The safe path is often the most dangerous because it leads to complacency and stagnation. In reaching for our limits, we open ourselves up to inconceivable opportunities. We may even find ourselves jumping timelines, into a future more expanded than we ever imagined it could be.

I’ve committed over 25 years to my practice of rock climbing. Climbing has boldly shaped my body, my life, and my character. It’s endlessly challenging me physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

This is a story of my recent growth.

Trying a hard rock climb is an exercise in physical, emotional, and mental determination and endurance. Perseverance when it comes to something as optional as rock climbing can be closely connected to self-worth. “I am worthy of trying hard, I am worthy of mistakes, I am worthy of learning, I am worthy of whatever the process is”.

If I don’t feel that I am worthy, I am likely to give up.

I’ve done that for many years. I’ve given up on my goals, given my leads away to my partners, camping out on my not-worthy-to-even-try identity. As I write this now, I am still in recovery. I have done a lot of healing and identity upgrades. And I still backslide, mostly when close to the edge of my comfort zone.

This year July I decided I was ready to check my capacity. I picked a climbing goal in Rifle called Eulogy. Short and vicious, in the mere 80 feet of climbing offering only 2 decent handholds. The rest was to be figured out in body position, technique, ingenuity, core tension, levitation, and belief.

The beginning is daunting, but progress comes steadily. It is supposed to feel impossible (or else it’s going to end up being too easy). I know to celebrate every micro progress. As I climb, I meditate, visualize, and breathe. I am highly process-oriented. I try it 3 days a week and my progress is slow. There are many others. Some climb it differently from me, some struggle, some make short work of the difficulty, and some complete the process much faster than I. I stay in my lane. It’s only me and me.

And then one day… I magically put it together… well almost. On that day in August, I fall on the very last move. Huge progress… and new hope of success. I am starting to believe that I the impossible is possible.

Next time I try, I can’t even make it off the ground. I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. The following weeks I am eaten away by anxiety. My body shakes when I suit up to climb. The nerves are killing me. I am unable to do any of my mindful and helpful techniques. I cry in front of everyone.

I forget that it’s all about the process. I feel ashamed to be still trying it, while others have done it a long time ago. The pressure makes me climb poorly. I fall over and over.  I now wanna do this climb just to have done it. Just to be done with it and never have to feel any of what I’m feeling again. I am so conflicted: I want to do this as much as, I just want to quit.

Things get worse. I tear my calf muscle. The way I climb Eulogy with a unique sequence of 10 knee-bars (an advanced climbing technique where tension gets created between the toes and top of the thigh, and it keeps you on the wall) aggravates my calf even more and I have to take a break. As I’m taking a break I sulk and drown in my own stories of how “all I wanted to learn is perseverance, but I guess I can’t even do that because I’m injured”. Want it or not, I have to let go, at least temporarily. I am terrified that I will lose strength and form and all the work I put into it. I feel like I can’t win.

I step away: I mountain bike, go to a party where I dance on one leg and I run a retreat with a friend. My tunnel vision slowly recedes. I am again able to see shades of life, instead of just Black & Eulogy.

This story ends on a beautiful fall day, ripe with texture and color. I feel no pressure and no anxiety. I give it a go, not especially good go, but apparently good enough, because next thing I know, I am at the top.

When we try hard and succeed, it doesn’t feel as hard as when we tried hard and failed. To keep on giving our energy, our chi, our life force into something that seems like a void is taxing. It feels impossible to keep on giving while reality doesn’t reciprocate, we don’t get our attaboy, our reward, yet….

This is precisely where the biggest gains are. It’s where the springiest of timeline jumps manifest. The more you give, the more you have given.

The real prize is in experiencing how our limited self-concept has to surrender to something bigger. What we are left with is the knowingness that there is something bigger, deeper, and more meaningful than what we were conditioned to believe. We are not our limited self-concepts. We are not our projected boxed in identity. We are so much more than that.

What exactly, I actually don’t know.

Eulogy to Eulogy

"I’m here today to say a final thank you, Eulogy, for being a tremendous teacher, generously including anyone who wants to climb you to collect their lessons, me among many others. The season when I chose to challenge and expand myself by struggling with your difficulty, inspired and transformed a critical aspect of my self-relation.

So I thank you again, Eulogy, for not only helping me confront the part of me that wants to gain love and connection by performing, not only helping me see through my protective stories, not only for teaching me egoless perseverance but most of all for confronting the idea that deep identity change is not possible. I thank you for not moving, or making yourself any smaller or easier than you are. Thank you for being amazingly hard.”