A couple months ago I saw a video on one of the thrice-damned social media sites.
It was a short clip of what appeared to be some kind of exercise class. A group of maybe 15 or 20 people were strapped up in a horse-themed harness and attached to rubber bands hanging from the ceiling.
They were jumping around like happy fools. I assume there was goofy mainstream pop music playing, I don’t know. When I see these things I don’t watch with sound on.
The elastic horse-dance exercise class is but one of the latest blooms in the trend of trying to make fitness “fun” and “interesting”.
Every waking moment of every day must be entertaining, you see. If you are not entertained, heaven forbid if you are focused on a goal, Lord help you if you spend even 30 seconds alone with your own thoughts and (gasp) bored….
If it ain’t fun then why bother right?
You can’t see it through text, but right then there was a weighty sigh and a bowed head of disappointment in human beings.
I understand the rationale, I do truly. If you want people to do things they don’t want to do, you have to tempt them with the carrot as well as the stick.
Part of the human condition is that nobody actually wants to change anything about their lives. Once the average person locks into a routine, inertia becomes a powerful enemy of change.
People want to have changed. In the past tense and passive voice, so the hard work lies in the past, and ideally, done by someone or something else besides lil’ ol’ me.
I have a dissenting opinion.
I believe change can be easy.
But you have to let it.
Most folks are so hung up on false expectations and incorrect assumptions that they won’t allow any change that comes easy.
The error lies in the gap between truth and feeling.
The phrase “How you feel is a lie”, which I took as a mantra years ago, remains a central piece of my philosophy and perspective on training and life-transformation.
Most of us are not in tune with our feelings and emotions or our own bodies. This is not hippy frou-frou woo-woo talk. Emotions, feelings, appetites, passions, desires, and all forms of experienced motivations are integral and essential parts of being a living, breathing, conscious human animal.
If you don’t have them, or they don’t work right, you lose your sense of reality and direction.
Our culture doesn’t know how to handle feeling.
The “positive thinkers” are just as deluded in the realm of feeling as the schizoid over-thinkers who claim to feel nothing. Both of them have unhealthy, distorted relationships to emotion and their bodies.
This is how you get the horse-dance people, who want “fun and interesting”.
It’s also how you get the cardio-psychos who believe they need to spend 25 hours a week destroying their bodies and souls to get a result.
Two errors, caused by one mistaken idea.
We have come to see feeling and emotion as forces independent of our rational, thinking selves.
Feelings “just happen” like an act of God, and yet we attach to those feelings and identify with them. Feeling either rules over you, reason be damned, or else you retreat to the castle of the intellect and pretend feelings aren’t real.
That’s a recipe for fireworks.
We leave no space for healthy integration of the heart and the mind.
I suspect this is a major cause of the constant string of meltdowns that have become part of daily life now.
What does all this mean?
Years ago I taught (warned) that you must learn to tune in to your body and its experiences and feelings. In training your body, this is essential. Bodybuilders call this the “mind-muscle connection” and other athletes have their own way of talking about it.
Tuning in to feeling is necessary for achieving any long-term goals, because life will screw with you with many ups and downs.
It’s great to want to “have fun”. It’s nice that you think “those workouts are really hard”.
But I always caution the few people who listen to me to be on guard against your own endless capacity for self-deception and delusion.
Is this moving you toward what you want, or are you allowing an unwanted feeling to derail you?
That is the only question that matters.
Your emotions will serve you as reliable guides… but only IF you train yourself to recognize them as YOURS and own them. Owning your feelings and motivations means that you are not attached to what you feel.
You experience what you feel. You are not identical with what you feel.
Truth is, working out and dieting don’t have to “feel hard”. Feeling hard is a terrible indicator of anything. Being up on a roof in Alabama in August feels hard, but it doesn’t do much for making you feel better, look better, or perform better.
Lots of things feel hard.
Few things are effective at causing changes you want.
Ditto for “having fun”. Fun isn’t something that just happens to you because it has crazy props and goofy music.
Some of the best fun I have in my life is when I’m killing myself on bike sprints or working up to a daily max squat.
These aren’t intrinsically fun or interesting activities. NOTHING is intrinsically fun or interesting!
Fun and interesting are responses that you bring to the table.
Anyway, this is already long enough.
Here’s what I want to leave you with.
Accurate, honest, truthful feeling is possible with disciplined practice.
In fact, this may be the “secret” to creating changes, or inspiring it in others, if there is any such thing.
Getting right with the body and the non-rational parts of your life is not a distraction. This is the foundation that makes the process work.
And more to the point, what makes the process fail.
I’ve come to believe that the most important thing we can do is get out of our own way, appreciate the truth of our situation, and let things work as they work.
The above is a hint at the ideas I’m playing with over at the Vital Beyond 40 community.
If you’re stuck, I recommend you join us.
Matt Perryman