Learning to Climb

After my second morning of working out with my new Insanity crew, I took a long shower, made some oatmeal, put on my favorite Radiohead mix on my iPod, and started to meditate on affirmations for the day.  “Today will be a great day.”  … I repeated this over and over again as I opened the pages to a book I read to refresh my ever evolving mentality.

“I am willing to release all resistance” I recited. 

As I looked into my own eyes, standing in the mirror, I felt myself enter into the present moment of the day and it was then that I knew I was getting closer to creating a new experience.

In camp training today, we learned how to tie ropes, assemble harnesses, and how to use a belay device, which are a few skills we learned to rock climb.  The awesome thing about this is I’ve always wanted to learn how to rock climb! 

Now, this process was very intense and eventually became quite frustrating because we had coaches telling us everything we were doing right and everything we were doing wrong.  When it was my turn to be in charge of the belay, I wasn’t catching on to the correct hand movements as fast as I wanted to, so of course, in the middle of someone hanging off a rope 50 feet in the air, I’m beating myself up and I became very impatient with myself.

 “Why can’t you just get it right stupid?”  That’s pretty much the way I felt.  

As honest as this is, it was the perfect example of how I should NOT be speaking to myself. This was the very resistance I needed to willing release.  So, I decided to calm down, put on a new thought process and continue on in a better mentality. 

“Don’t criticize yourself, Prisci. You’re doing a great job,” I corrected myself.

Soon enough, I started to hear the voice of the coach say, “There you go Prisci. You’re doing great.”

I successfully guided two colleagues up the practice rock wall with no accidents.  It’s been a minute since I’ve been able to pat myself on the back and feel the essence of deserving it!  Finally, I'm comfortable enough to be easy on myself… encouragement never comes from a negative mentality and it never will.   I’m definitely going to aim to change the pace of my thought patterns more often, especially because it changed the tone of my first rock climbing experience in seconds! I bet if I were to continue to call myself “stupid” I would’ve made an even bigger mistake and endangered someone’s life.

Yikes. That was a close one.