TRAINING TAUGHT ME TO HATE MYSELF
High school football, combatives training, and USMC PT all taught me that exercise should be hateful.
Football taught me how to punish with exercise. I learned how to turn something that’s good for the body into something that’s toxic for the mind. All the physical benefits of conditioning were completely negated by the mental correlation I made between cardio and punishment for a lost game or weak practice.
As a kid I used to box with my younger brother. We had one set of boxing gloves, each one of us would take one glove and do our best to pummel the other with one hand behind our back. Once one of us left a mark on the other it was time to switch gloves. We only trained like this, there was always a winner and there was never any other purpose than inflicting damage. It taught me that exercise is highly competitive and losers get hurt.
In the Marine Corps I learned that “Pain is weakness leaving the body”. My first 6 years under the Marine Corps thumb taught me how to train hard. Those years showed me what my body is truly capable of, but only when I practiced total disregard for my long term well-being. I learned that I’m a tough son-of-a-bitch, and I learned that all I needed to fuel my high intensity training is a blood-lust, hate, and complete disregard for secondary or tertiary effects on my body.
These are lessons we’re all taught about fitness in some form or another: that fitness should be painful, violent, and fueled by hatred or disgust for your own body.
While stationed in Japan I learned to meditate, and started reversing some of these negative mindsets about exercise. In the beginning I couldn’t concentrate for 5 seconds while meditating. Once I realized this, my lack of concentration started highlighting itself everywhere in my life. I had space for improvement in everything, even in things I had previously thought I mastered.
I realized that I could apply everything I learned through meditation to my training. Meditation taught me empathy, for myself and for others. It also taught me that I can have a much deeper connection with my body, that all feelings are impermanent, and that there is peace in the present moment.
EMPATHY
There was a point in my life when I was sure I was a sociopath. I thought emotions were a weakness. I placed all value in rationality and tried to paint every situation with a binary framework. Meditation taught me empathy. I’ve literally learned to put myself in someone else’s shoes. But more important than that, I learned to forgive MYSELF. When you train with empathy you can forgive yourself for missing a rep or time goal before it even happens. To know it’s okay either way is enough to keep you coming back tomorrow and to push even harder than you would have if fueled by premeditated guilt.
DEEPER MIND-BODY CONNECTION
When you focus on what you’re doing, you perform better at it. If you’re worried about the next set, what’s for lunch, or what the person next to you thinks of you, well, you aren’t concentrating on the exercise at hand or the muscles that are supposed to be doing the work. Meditation teaches the ability to point our attention at exactly what we intend to focus on, which gives us the ability to train harder and more efficiently.
PEACE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT: IT’S ABOUT THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION
When many people exercise they are concentrating on one thing…when it’s going to be over. They desire for the hardship to end instead of learning to live in the moment. The concentration of what’s going on in the body right now with the breath, with the various contractions and relaxations of muscles, and with the force of gravity are all things we should be noticing as they are. Knowing it’ll be over when it’s over and not rushing to get there is one of the greatest life lessons anyone can hope to learn.
UNDERSTANDING IMPERMANENCE
The world is impermanent. The weather, political climate, elevation of our highest mountains, common vocabulary spoken, even accepted behavior by our species is all in constant fluctuation. Wisdom is the knowledge that everything is always changing. You are constantly changing. No aspect of your body is the same today as it was yesterday. Sensations like the muscle pump, lactic acid burn, and general total-body discomfort are also impermanent. Meditation teaches us to observe what’s currently going on in our bodies without judgement or fear-based emotional reactions. The ability to observe without desire is something that applies to not only a difficult workout but any difficult situation that life throws our way.
CONCLUSION
The problem with meditation for many people is that it’s not enjoyable. It’s boring and it’s hard. Most of us barely have time for a solid workout every day, let alone another 20 minutes to sit and “do nothing”.
Exercise, on the other hand, is a peak experience with more noticeable immediate benefits. Unfortunately, we too often use it to reinforce negative character traits like hate, unfruitful competition, and punishment.
I suggest that a new style of exercise makes its way into the spotlight. One that takes the benefits and practices of meditation and combines them with the peak nature and physical necessity of training.
