Training Notes #6

What grief wrecked and grace wrought

Training notes is my on-going series about my strength and fitness practices, both their inner and outer dimensions. This edition is more journal entry than rep-log, giving substance to the unseen parts of my physical praxis. I’m compelled by the way our personal stories, dramas and feelings show up in our physical experiences, both in emotional texture, and how they drive (or conflict) with whatever our aim is. This entry emerges from my experience of training as a place of the transmutation of suffering into meaning.

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There is so much dirt under the edges of my soul; not a piece of me is unmarred by the crawling and fighting it took for me to land where I am. What triumph.

It has taken a great labor to make myself into something that can withstand this world; it has been a great labor to forge myself into a type of awareness that can remain in contact with what is good and beautiful and true without being ground into pulp, without being burned down to fuel for other people’s machines.

I do not have any pity to give. I do not have any milk to offer the ones who insist that they are feeble as babes.

I have been through too much. The secret lining of my life experience is intense pain - emotional, and at times physical. I do not hold myself unique in this, but I cherish what this reality has done for me.

Pain has showed me another path, one that runs through shadowed hearts and blooming deserts and into the sublime that exists in the membrane between pain and pleasure, and between discomfort and ecstasy.

I have no patience for excuses, not now. What we do matters. How we treat each other matters. How and what we allow ourselves to experience matters.

We are choking on nothing, otherwise.

I forget myself sometimes. Sometimes that is good. I need to forget myself, to forget my pain, to forget my own edges. The world is too beautiful for me to remain locked inside myself all the time.

And it is these practices of pain that have somehow rescued me from the types of pleasure and numbness that have trampled too many. Or drowned them.

It’s a type of grace, whatever this is that has shepherded me from near calamity to grief to loss but always back to myself. Back to my heart and what I love. I give it names; my angels and ancestors among those I call out to, to thank, to invoke. There are old Gods and older powers in this world willing to help us if we are genuinely trying to live.

My pain saved me by showing up in something beautiful that won my heart, something that told me honor and self respect could be claimed; taken back and snatched from annihilation’s jaws.

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My left shoulder has been hurting recently. Something has been mildly irritated off and on since the spring. It has been telling me that at some point, I was in extremity, and at some point, it lost some tolerance. I asked more of than it could give. And/or, it has simply become the place where I have pushed back against the intensity of existence, it has been the dam, and guardian. The brace for impact. Many say that the left shoulder is something like a threshold where emotions - grief, love, dampened self-expression - often transit. The energy body, or, the emotional field that is woven through out our bodies, can speak loudly at the force junctions of our joints. I subscribe to his view, and so when things hurt, I know there are multiple conversations to be had with my body: training, and inner tending as well.

But I don’t stop training. I listen to my body, and it tells me things. It tells me it’s tired. I know. It tells me it would like to lie down. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I don’t. I squeeze my own arm and promise it I will do my best to give it what it needs, but right now, something in me needs this discomfort more than it needs rest.

I need a place of power.

I do not usually make a habit of changing my plan because something hurts. If I had made this a habit, I would have stopped trying years ago. Maybe this is reckless, maybe this is wisdom. I don’t know, I just know that when I set my heart, my body will follow, most of the time.

Sometimes not. I have spent too many days in the dark with a migraine, praying the prayers of the desperate, to believe that I can muscle my way through everything. There are limits, and there are other signs I try to listen to, to temper my exertions and balance burning with cooling. I have gotten much better at resting in recent years. But most of the time, I tell the pain that it’s in the right place, and that together, we will do great things. And I look for the place.

I need a place where no matter what is happening, I can bring myself to a clear, darkly bright center and work. A place where the mind surrenders to the task and there is nothing but the barbell moving through the air, or the weight on my back.

I need this. I sometimes think I need it like some people need substances and some people need drama, and so I claim no righteousness, and no “willpower.” It takes no will to do that which I must do, that which I love. It’s grace. It’s grace that it is something that gives me tenfold what it takes.

I have hewn myself, I have done work that I respect myself for. But the reason I am able to be what I am in regard to physical expression, or film and art, is a result of whatever grace flows through my life. It’s not my willpower or some sort of hyper agency that makes me exceptional. I have been given the gift of being able to love certain things and in turn I try to share that love.

That’s it.

The love I have for my crafts is what allows me to see deeply into them and at times extract things of potency. And that love comes from a hunger and need that has no name and no way of expressing itself but through the violence and play of the body’s movement, of its striving, demanding, seeking and failure.

To be spent is to be loved.

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I have been taking CrossFit group class at the gym where I coach and train, and letting the sturdy vessel of the gym’s program aim my efforts. That brought Olympic lifting back into my rotation. In December and January, I had become freshly enthralled with those lifts and their dramatic history of sport and suffering (a documentary about the Bulgarian weightlifting team spurred my hunger and emotional curiosity).

Then Mom died, and I lost interest in most things. I moved out of habit, and I couldn’t really tell you, without looking at what meager notes I took, what I did in training from April through recently. But I moved out of the default posture I had welded into myself: train. Go to the place of power. That was a mercy. But there was no guiding ethos beyond “keep going.” There was no clear sense of creative agency and stultifying vision of outcome. I moved because it’s just what I do.

But these past weeks, I started cleaning and snatching again. And there was a rightness there; a clear, stark line between passivity and desire. You have to want to put that weight over your head, or it simply won’t end up there.

I haven’t wanted anything recently, beyond the perfunctory. My desire took a dirt nap when I got that phonecall from my brother. The animating flame that shaped my entire life seemed snuffed. I am greatly driven by my desires; their names and gods are chiseled into the pillars that hold up my world. But suddenly, the only thing I wanted was for my mom to not be dead. To hear her voice, to hug her and tell her I’m sorry for what we missed and what could no longe be. To tell her what we could look forward to, together. Any attempt I made to enter the forge of my desire was met with a burning that could not be channeled; a desire that could not be wrought. And so I became numb, and sometimes I still am. I have never felt such a powerful desire that simply could not and cannot be. But the barbell, and the place of power, keep reminding me, keep tending me, and the part of me that wants has been slowly finding a familiar trellis to anchor itself around.

To actually want something from my lifting again was grace, erupting again, for the countless time, through cold steel and heavy metal.

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Annihilation will have its way with me one day. And until then, I will lift.