April 11, 2025
#86: Dancing the Tightrope: Chapter 6 & 7; The Decision-Sort of: Imbalance is a Good Thing
In this episode of the podcast, I’m reading Chapters 6 and 7, The Decision – Sort of, and Imbalance is a Good Thing. As you will hear, at this stage of the journey, I’m somewhat flailing. Looking back on it, I’m still surprised that I took the path I did. Some part of me saw the promise of taking the more difficult path – something that was typically not my norm.
It has been fascinating for me to go back and read these chapters several years later. I typically can’t remember what I wrote last week, much less four years ago. In that way, it’s fresh. It’s also a little bit like reading a personal journal. I’m reminded of what I went through.
I hope you enjoy these chapters – they will keep coming every week until we get through the book, and then my podcasts with guests will resume.
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Lynn, Welcome to Creative Spirits Unleashed, where we talk about the dilemmas of balancing work and life. And now here's your host. Lynn Carnes,
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welcome to the Creative Spirits Unleash Podcast. I'm Lynn Carnes, your host. In this episode of the podcast, I'm reading chapters six and seven, the decision sort of and imbalance is a good thing, as you will hear at this stage of the journey, I'm somewhat flailing. Looking back on it, I'm still surprised that I took the path I did. Some part of me must have seen the promise of taking the more difficult path, because it definitely was not my norm. It has been fascinating for me to go back and read these chapters several years later.
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You know, I typically can't remember what I wrote last week, much less four years ago, and that way, it makes this fresh.
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It's also a little bit like reading a personal journal. It gives me a way to be reminded of what I went through, which I think is one of the most useful things about journaling. I do think we forget what happens in our lives, and journaling is a great way to keep us in touch with how we're growing. So for these two chapters, I hope you enjoy them. They will keep coming every week until we get through the book, and then my podcasts with guests will resume. In the meantime, please like and share this so that the word can get out. I'm hearing lots of good feedback about this. Would love to hear yours as well. And with that, enjoy these chapters of dancing, the tightrope. Chapter Six, the decision sort of barely a baby step. As I learned more and more about horses safety and trail riding, it became clear to me that I would not be getting back on the horse mocha anytime soon.
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The truth was, I had been traumatized. The accident had shaken my confidence on two levels. First, it showed me my lack of riding skills and the true danger of the sport. More importantly, I lost confidence in my confidence. I had encountered a domain in which I could not bullshit my way through. I was now learning that horses are expert BS detectors.
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It was tempting to regain my confidence by leaving it untested by the experts, but my inner cowgirl, the one who begged her parents for a horse, kept whispering in my ear with sounds that could only be heard by my heart, something bigger was moving me towards a life affirming choice. Suddenly, horses were everywhere, even in places they had never been before, like down the road from me, the World Equestrian Games Game came to town 20 minutes from my house. It was like the Olympics for the horse world in the months leading up to the big event. Ironically, a year to the day after my accident, the nearby venue held qualifying events to see who would make the cut. The only Western discipline that showed was an event called raining even though I had grown up with rodeo and barrel racing and cow horse cutting connections, I had never heard of reining, curious as to what it was all about, I made a point to be at one of the preliminaries. The minute the horse and rider came out to perform, I was smitten. The riders and horses seem to move as one. This was the kind of riding I had dreamed about doing when I was growing up as a child, I had drawn 1000s of pictures of cowboys and horses galloping in raining not only do the horses run full speed, but they also do a dramatic sliding stop where the horse pushes his back legs underneath him in an extraordinary feat of athleticism. Imagine a horse sliding in a second base and you will get the picture. It's jaw dropping. Plus these were American quarter horses, and they were gorgeous. Many were palominos with long, flowing blond manes. They were unlike any horses I had seen in the other disciplines. This Texas girl had found her dream horses.
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Within a month, I would learn that long time friend Janice had gotten involved in reining, and all the time I knew her, she had never even mentioned horses.
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Now, I discovered that the Oklahoma barn where she trained her horses was very close to where my family lived in Texas.
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It had to be more than a coincidence. When she suggested I come visit her there, I jumped at the chance. She told me to bring my boots. I laughed. I had seen those horses in action. Not only were they extreme athletes, but they were highly sensitive to their rider. One of the interesting things I had noticed about reining horses was how many stallions were being ridden in every other discipline at the Games, the male horses were predominantly geldings, which, in dog terms, means neutering, removing his man parts make the horse much calmer and safer. Not so in raining stallions were the norm. All three of Janice's horses were stallions. When I walked into the barn with my boots, the same warm feeling I experienced as a child walking into the rodeo. Returned, the feeling was home. I almost choked up as I walked through the barn greeting each horse.
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Next to the barn was a huge practice arena. The arena was full of horses and professional trainers teaching the horses how to make their moves. Janice went out to ride a stallion, and I was so impressed as she did spins and ran at high speed around the arena, she got off and handed the reins to Trevor dare, who was training one of her horses. He looked my way and gestured for me to come over. My heart started pounding, facing the prospect of getting back in the saddle for the first time since my accident sent crazy sensations through my body. I started stretching, going through the routine I do before a big ski tournament to help calm my nerves. After getting myself as calm as I was going to get, I walked out into the arena. I looked at Trevor and said, just because I look like I know what I'm doing, don't believe it. Hold the reins, please. He walked me around the arena as I tried to find my seat in the saddle, he kept checking in, asking if I were ready to take the reins. No way was I going to let him give me the reins. I had just seen this horse, a stallion, no less, running full speed. I wanted the Safe Ride, the easy ride inside I was a kid on a pony ride. In truth, I was overreacting to my fear. I didn't yet have the mental tools to properly calibrate what I could and couldn't handle. As I got off the horse that day, I realized that I had broken through a barrier. It was barely a baby step, but it was enough to take the next step back in a saddle.
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Cedar Creek stables is about 20 minutes from my house. I had seen their signs for years. And a month after my accident, my daughter, Jen had taken her cousin to ride there. Upon returning, she said it was a good thing I couldn't go. Not only was the entire ride going either up or down steep hills, but they also walked the horses through the creek. She couldn't imagine me being okay with that after my accident, especially since going down a hill had played a part in my fall. After returning from my trip to Oklahoma, I simmered for a few more days in the afterglow of spending so much time with the reining horses, I wanted to do something more than a pony ride.
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The next frame in my picture would be to simply get back in the saddle again. I called my friend, Marla, and asked if she would join me on a trail ride at Cedar Creek. Notwithstanding the hills and creeks, I assumed this would be the safest place for me to practice getting back on a horse. When the owner, Howard, handed out our horse assignments, he had a twinkle in his eye as he told me I would be riding Ben Marla would be on Hidalgo The barn was a short bus ride away. On the ride, I did my best to calm my nerves. It was difficult to believe that something I had loved so much as a child now filled me with this level of fear as the bus bumped along the road, I called up my childhood excitement, remembering how it felt whenever we talked my mom into taking us out to the local stables. By the time the bus pulled in, I was ready to go. As we walked into the bar and they pointed me to Ben. Now I understood the twinkle in Howard's eye. There was just one problem, no way in hell was I getting on Ben. Ben's a draft horse. He was a foot taller than the next tallest horse. I'm tall, so Howard probably thought a tall horse would be fine with me. Nope, nope, nope, just no. Marla quickly volunteered to ride Ben before I walked the half mile back to the car, I would ride Hidalgo, a normal sized horse.
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Problem solved, at least for the moment. The ride took us over the creek and up a hill, up, up, up we went. I tried to remember the instructions. Was I supposed to lean forward or back on the way up and which way on the way down? Damn, for every up there would be a down based on how far we were going, this was going to be a long way down. When we got to the top of the hill, they stopped on flat ground to do a saddle check. Our job was simply to stand still and wait. My horse was antsy. His feet moving right and left. Looking back, I realized he was reflecting the state of the nervous woman on his back while they had given us a set of four simple moves to get the horse to go, stop, turn, right and left. It was abundantly clear to me that, once again, I had no control over this horse. My safety was in the herd, and being on a horse that did this every day with people of all skills and with a guide in the lead to handle the unexpected for my entire life, when someone asked me, Do you ride? The answer had always been Yes. Now I was beginning to understand the difference between being able to get on a horse and being able to ride like being able to clean a fish compared to doing brain surgery or launch a paper airplane, compared to flying a fighter jet sitting on an antsy horse during some. Battle check being told to relax, loosen the reins and to sink into my seat was like asking me to go from the miniature golf course to winning the masters. I was still a passenger, but now the fog was clearing. I was truly becoming aware of how much I had to learn that was just in the horsemanship domain since I started working with him 10 months before, Bruce had shared a whole different world in the humanship domain, maybe this ride would check a box in the simplest of terms, I had fallen off the horse. Now I had gotten back on. I even put my big girl britches on by holding the reins of my very own. Maybe I could just call it good. But first we had to make it back to the barn.
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I tried not to think about what was coming the hill where I had my fall was tiny compared to this one. We were at the top of a mountain and the barn was at the bottom. A potentially traumatizing downhill walk was in front of me, sure enough, as we started down, the guy told us to lean slightly back as the horse made his way down the hill. At this point, I truly began to understand what genuine anxiety feels like. Adrenaline started shooting through my body, and with every slight bump or misstep, I felt like I was going down. My mind catapulted 1000 thoughts a minute, most having the word shit in them, I tried to breathe deeply, but that seemed to just tell my brain that things were really bad. Somehow, someway, we finally made it to flat ground.
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I was so relieved. Then I remembered that we had to cross that creek again. This time we wouldn't just cross it. We would walk in the creek for quite a ways, my mind sent out more shitty thoughts, really, let's just check the box and tell everybody you got back on the horse. Anybody can ride these horses. Why are you making it so hard? As we splash through the creek, my body hurl sensations of impending death, and my mind believed every one of them. I marveled at how calm and normal everyone else seemed to be. I wondered how the horses knew where to step when they couldn't see the bottom of the creek. I waited for it to end by death or by walking to the barn. I really didn't care. It just needed to end. Finally, the ride was over when I got off. My knees hurt and I could barely walk. I had done it. I rode a horse by myself and went home in a car instead of to a hospital or in an ambulance, I could now officially check the box and say I got back on a horse. It was done, or was it by the time I got home, my knees were fine, but my mind wouldn't let it go.
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While standing outside the fire over the last 10 months watching others work with Bruce, I realized my passive engagement had shown me that horses had something to teach me. My internal conversation with something like this, I checked the box and my knees hurt, so that was a good excuse to never go back again. I'm pretty sure I already know what Bruce is teaching. Just do that. But if you know it so well, why were you so freaked out on a trail ride designed for beginners, learning to reach for my tools instead of my rules, sounded like an interesting possibility, but all the other people riding horses aren't doing this messy internal work. Why me? How will you feel if you walk away the next week? I called Marla. Want to go ride marinating. Big decisions, those moments in time put a stake in the ground, out of the blue declarations usually marinate with me for a long time. What looks like inactivity or tentativeness or even fear is often just the process of letting a pending change seep in. This awareness is in contrast with my machine thinking, where I want to push a button and everything is old as suddenly new, like laundry that goes in soiled and comes out fresh and clean. I crave the machine response, but change doesn't work that way, at least not deep change how you live every day. Change, while I can exactly pinpoint the moment I became a slalom water skiing addict, the good kind of addict, I can point to the moments that created tiny sparks that led eventually to a raging fire.
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During the time when I was traveling every week to Washington, DC and New York City, I got a message from my husband. We had been living on Lake Lure for a couple of years, and the ski boat was going largely unused. We were both too busy with work to really enjoy our home. He asked what size life jacket might fit me, having never had my own ski jacket, I guess, medium, and forgot about it. When I came home late Friday from that trip, I walked into my dining room where a beautiful vase of hydrangeas, a new wetsuit and life jacket waited for me. He had also left a note that read, can't wait to ski with you in the morning. I melted this hesitant skier would most certainly ski with him in the morning. Soon thereafter, I saw a friend and neighbor ina out skiing behind her deck boat with another local acquaintance, Lori. At that point, I knew enough about slalom skiing to know that the right boat is everything. Thing, the Wake produced by a ski boat is designed to be small, so you can zip through it at high speeds. A deck boat is not a ski boat, so I invited them out on my ski boat. Watching Lori zip back and forth across the Wake blew me away. She was positively glowing as she got back in the boat, and I knew I wanted to rush like that, but I had also taken some bad falls in the past. After marinating in Lori's Joy, I made an offhand comment to Bob Washburn, a long time, local resort owner, that I would love, love to learn to cut across the Wake like Lori, I just didn't want to fall. His response was quick, I can teach you how to cut without falling. So we booked some ski lessons. The next year, Russ and I found a random ski course on a lake where we took our boat on vacation. I drove the boat with him, zipping back and forth, terrified that I would run over the buoy strung together to guide the boat's path. The next year, we bought our own portable ski course and put it in the lake we were visiting. I couldn't get around a single buoy, but at the end of that trip, I told him I was going to find a ski school to teach me how to go around those elusive buoys. Many more ski mornings with Ina and Lori and ski school experiences transpired before the day I realized I was a true water skier. None of these moments were the moment. I honestly can't point to the exact moment, and that's the point. I guess I knew it was serious when I went along with my husband's crazy idea that we should build our own ski light talk about big change, a Saturday morning diversion turned us into owning a ski light, along with a Leadership Retreat Center farm and much more, all because of a series of tiny sparks cultivated over time the fall from the horse was a Saturday morning diversion between ski sets. On the morning of the accident, I skied, and as I left to go ride horses for a couple of hours, I said, I will be back to drive Austin able, who runs the ski school on our lake. Instead, I spent the afternoon in the emergency room, and the next three days in the hospital, still seeking the skill to stop a horse. Now that I was back on a horse a year and a half after the accident, I was done marinating, some part of me wanted to push the button and declare, I'm back on a horse.
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Now it's time to get back on the horse. Every time I pictured returning to the farm where I had the accident, the screen went blank. There were too many steps not yet taken between here and there. Rather than judge my paralysis, I listened. I stayed in touch with Babs, who took such good care of me after the fall. Then kept her apprised as I kept taking baby steps, my opportunities to ride covered two ends of a very large spectrum. On one end was Cedar Creek, which offered guest rides and confidence building experience. On the other end was my friend Janice's reining horses in Oklahoma, which showed me a world of possibility that both set my heart on fire and seemed very far out of reach.
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The difference was like driving a typical car on the road versus getting a chance to hang out with the pit crew at a NASCAR race. The next four months went by like a blur. I started going to Cedar Creek regularly. Marla joined me one more time, and then decided to start taking English writing lessons closer to her house. I didn't feel ready for lessons, and certainly not in a tiny English saddle. My flavor was definitely Western writing. My only goal over the four months was to make it down the hill without the adrenaline rushing, heart pounding sensations, yet some part of me wanted the thrill of the ride.
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After my first trip to Oklahoma, I knew I would be back. I wasn't dreaming of being a Reiner yet, but being on a farm with hundreds of horses and a chance to ride a real horse was alluring. Plus, my family was right down the road. My dad had been having some health challenges, and coming to Oklahoma was a way to check on him without seeming overly worried. The next time I went to Oklahoma, they put me on a beautiful blue eyed cremelo stallion, one of Janice's horses. This time I took the reins, already, the trainers in the barn were asking me if I was ready to trot or to canter or to spin. It was a good kind of pressure. Over a couple of visits to that arena, I managed to walk, trot and canter, plus I was able to do a few slow spins on the back of a very well trained horse in control conditions in both the trail rides and in the arena, I was still having adrenaline, rushing, heart pounding sensations, even though these were relatively control settings in Bruce's language, my negative pole was at a 10 on a scale of one to 10. That's a lot of energy. And there was no doubt the horses could feel that I thought something was wrong with me, and longed for someone to tell me I was good, that I could go back and ride the horse, but it would have been a lie. I wasn't good, and the answers were not coming from someone else, but I didn't know that yet. I still just wanted to learn to stop a horse, because every time I got on one, it felt like it was nanoseconds away from galloping off with me holding on for. Dear life.
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By this time, I had been bringing clients to Bruce for a year. We had a session soon after my experiences in Oklahoma, and I mentioned my excitement and continuing trepidation to him, we were finishing a porch session where Bruce and I were debriefing the work. Now that the client had left, I turned the subject to me, all this adrenaline was starting to take its toll, and he gave me the same spiel I'd been hearing him give my clients for the last past year. Yeah, Bruce, but I don't want messy.
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Option three, I want easy.
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Option two, I thought so, partly out of desperation to move away from the personal stuff and into the skill stuff, I asked him a question, do you give riding lessons? The answer was yes. I wasn't really thinking through the ramifications of taking riding lessons almost three hours from my house. I just knew Bruce could help me work out what was happening when I was on the back of a horse. I booked a session for a couple of weeks out excited to get on a horse under Bruce's tutelage. It turned out Bruce and I had very different definitions of quote, unquote, riding lessons, chapter seven. Imbalance is a good thing, the balancing act of a lifetime. When I signed up for riding lessons, I sought balance. My conscious self wanted balance on the horse.
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Losing my balance had cost me dearly. My deeper self sought more. The only tight rope I've ever walked was a slack line of foot off the ground. Yet the metaphor of walking a tightrope resonates with me. When I was leading major change initiatives in my banking career, it was always a balancing act of regulating the heat by acknowledging the emotional turmoil we were creating, while at the same time keeping the focus on deadlines and clients.
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When leading process improvement, I deeply learned the benefits of balancing speed and quality. Going slow to go fast almost always netted a better result. As a business leader, I find the balancing acts are constant, such as focusing on the short term versus the long term, on cost management, as well as customer service. As a lover of food, the balance is in the exchange of calories consumed with calories burned. One of the benefits, by the way, of slalom water skiing is the intense calorie burn. As a coach, I'm always balancing challenge and support. Every balancing act feels like walking a tightrope. To me, in my own self awareness work and in assisting others in theirs, I've come to realize that the biggest balancing act is the one between our two basic human needs, attachment and self expression.
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Dr Gabor Mate is an addiction researcher who frames addiction as an ill fated solution for an attachment problem. Our human needs are non negotiable. We need others, and we also need to be who we are. It's the balancing act of a lifetime.
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Unlike many trade offs, attachment and self expression do not offer an equal opportunity of choosing one over the other, because our basic survival needs favor the attachment side of the balancing act, we tend to choose getting those needs met above everything else. We need to meet our basic survival needs of food, water, shelter and safety. We need warm hugs. We need to know we are cared for. We need to know we belong. We need to believe we are enough. We know those needs are met by how we feel. No amount of talking to our brains is going to give it to us. A warm hug on paper and a real warm hug are very, very different when we don't get what we need, we do other things to make the empty feelings go away.
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We have a lot of strategies for satisfying our need for love, approval and caring, shopping, eating, working, exercise, gambling, sex and drugs. When attachment needs are not addressed, it's almost impossible to be true to ourselves. Authenticity and self expression go out the window. We lose touch with our inner guidance and awareness of who we truly are. We lose access to the healthy tools needed to take care of ourself. As mate says in his book, in the realm of hungry ghosts, I believe there is one addiction process, whether it's manifested in the lethal substance dependencies, the dependencies of my downtown Eastside patients, the frantic self soothing of overeaters or shopaholics, the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics and compulsive internet users, or the socially acceptable and even admired behaviors of the workaholic drug addicts are often dismissed and discounted as unworthy of empathy and respect in telling their stories, my intent is twofold to help their voices be heard and to shed light on the origins and nature of their ill fated struggle to overcome suffering through substance abuse, they have much in common with a society that ostracizes them if they seem to have chosen a path to Nowhere, they still. Have much to teach the rest of us in the dark mirror of their lives, we can trace outlines of our own end of his quote, my addictions fell in the socially acceptable realm of the workaholic. It has been a try harder, beat myself, prove I can do it, sort of strategy that works very well in the corporate world, until I began to see it for the losing game. It was the pattern made me susceptible to the siren song of more money, more status, more responsibility, in exchange for the warm hugs of belonging and the elusive feeling of being enough, everything was fine when the pressure was low, when the consequences raised, the pressure work became everything and life faded into the sunset.
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It was this realization that motivated me to leave the banking world and start my own firm. First writing lesson after leaving corporate America, I thought I had beat the pattern.
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My work life balance was exceptional, and I rarely caught myself looking for approval or beating myself up, but Bruce did over and over again. He caught me beating myself up in cagey ways. In those early sessions, he could see what I still didn't know that I didn't know. In my mind, I was moving away from fixing me and instead learning the skills to ride a horse. When I pulled into Bruce's farm for my first riding lesson, I opened the back of my car and pulled on my boots, my heart fluttered a bit as I anticipated getting to ride either Marley or Mac, a new gelding that had arrived recently. We started with a porch session, as we had with all the leadership sessions we had done since this session was labeled writing lesson, I was looking forward to hearing some new ideas from Bruce. When we began, things started feeling suspiciously like every other session we had done. Later, much later, I would understand that his repetition was intentional to balance out the repetition of my old patterns. On this day, I just wanted him to tell me how to ride a horse so I could learn to stop the horse. Then he asked me a riding question, what are you trying to accomplish with these lessons? I replied, I want to learn to ride safely. I've come to recognize the danger I put myself in on the trail. I could walk away, but I have several friends who would love for me to ride with them. I didn't mention the tearing sensation ripping me down the middle, back and forth. My thoughts were bouncing. Who would I be if I didn't get back on the horse? Why would I ever risk such an injury again? How can I walk away from this? How can I ever do this? Then he asked, Are you ever going to get back on the horse? I gulped and said, Yes, I would like to, if possible. Once I said it out loud, I saw it as a stretch goal and set about proving to him that I would be ready sooner rather than later. In fact, I thought he might give me a checklist of skills like stopping from a trot or making good circles. I should have known better. Good he said, now put that picture aside. The work we are going to do is not about that picture. It's about breaking the work down into the tiny frames that make up that picture. Dang it, his guidance was still sounding like the work we had done in the leadership realm. I hoped he understood that I was here to ride.
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However, by now, I knew better than to argue. Besides, he confirmed that I had my riding helmet as we walked down to the horse pasture, surely I would be riding today, please. Not so fast. He handed me the halter and the lead rope and asked me to pick a horse to quote, unquote, ride. My instructions were like the ones from the year before, bring the horse into the round pen, close the gate, take off the halter and wait for further instructions. At least, I could see that Bruce had brought a bridle and a saddle down to the arena. I wondered what the first step in a real writing lesson would be. He asked me if I remembered how to find the middle of the round pen. I thought, are you kidding me? Not this again. It would be several more lessons before I realized how finding the middle unlocked an essential part of me and turned everything I understood about balance on its head.
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The balance point is always moving. My awareness of dynamic alignment slowly opened from the back of a boat in my quest to run the slalom course, I kept running into the dilemma of having far less time to practice than my brain and body needed to coordinate the intense and fast movements over a mere 20 seconds, not only does it happen fast, but slalom skiing is also physically intense. Slalom skiing involves a boat going straight down the course while the skier swings from side to side in. The ski course, the skier goes through the first gate, around six buoys and out the end gate. The swing of a skier is like that on a swing set, except with far greater speed and done while moving down the lake, while the rope is fixed to the pylon in the center of the boat. It swings big, wide arcs as the skier banks the ski on edge to slingshot through the boat wake and then banks the ski on the other edge to cast the ski out and around the buoy.
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It's a constant game of beating the boat from one buoy to the next with each ski pass. For someone in my classification, lasting 20 seconds. There is not a lot of time to practice. A practice session behind the boat is typically six passes through the course, while some try to do more typically, the practice quits being productive because the skier is exhausted. This is even more true at the elite level, where the pass is 16 seconds for pro men and 17 seconds for pro women, whether it's 17 seconds or 20 seconds.
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Learning the intense moves while on the water is no easy task. I needed a way to practice off the water. Like many skiers, I tied a rope to a post and practiced leaning against it in a simulation of the body position at the apex of the turn on the water. The angle of that lean determines the speed of the skiers from buoy to buoy. The deeper the lean, the faster the ski moves. Practicing this Lean seemed like the answer to my dilemma. At every opportunity, I went to the old post and did my best imitation of my body position on the water. I wanted to build a muscle memory so that I could do this elusive move while behind the boat. It turned out to create more problems than it solved. My brilliant idea did not consider the much bigger problem as long slalom skiing and in most endeavors, whether business or sport, the balance point is always moving. When I leaned against a fixed post that was not moving down the lake like a boat does at 30 miles an hour, I created a form of static muscle memory with my hands on the handle, I would have my coach review my form. I would think and ask, were my arms relaxed and in the proper position? Were my hips in alignment with my shoulders to create a good stacked position?
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Were my shoulders where they needed to be relative to my feet and hips? It felt like such a productive exercise, and it was to a point. Unfortunately, it was a single point in a game with countless variables. In a way, it was like the analog clock with no battery, even a dead clock shows the correct time twice a day. Doing this practice gave me such confidence. It was like being able to hit a bucket of tennis balls or practicing 500 times from 100 times for my TEDx talk.
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Every time I took my practice to the ski course, I felt ready to apply that lane as I crossed the wake. And every time I ended up way out of balance on my way to the buoy, sometimes I could recover. More often than not, I could not get back into good skiing position to continue the pass, puzzling through what was going on took numerous conversations with my trainer in ski school, professional Austin Abel. He has a dual quest.
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First, he's always taking his game to the next level. Second, he's constantly working on how to coach others to ski at their next level. One day, he was in the boat and I was in the water resting between ski passes at the end of the lake, I both celebrated and complained about my leaning through the wake.
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Yes, I had achieved the position I had worked so hard to learn on land while leaning against the pole, but the pole on land is a fixed balance point. Skiing 37 feet on either side of the boat has almost infinite balance points, just like an analog clock, my lane against the boat was in the correct position one time on the ark, keeping that position for more than a split second threw me out of balance.
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As we were talking through this.
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He said, your lane was great.
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You just stayed in it too long.
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The boat is dynamic and the pole on land is static, what I needed more than the ability to balance from a static point was the ability to move incrementally as the conditions changed.
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Reorienting was more important than chasing something that was in the past. Never once in the ski course Am I at the same angle relative to the pylon where the rope attaches. I'm always moving either right or left. In addition, my body is never at the same angle relative to the vertical and horizontal axis. I'm either standing tall towards the sky or leaning ever more or less towards the water at varying degrees from start to finish. In other words, my body moves in dynamic alignment to the boat in 1000s of variations over those 20 seconds. The permutations of the two axes are incalculable. My lean drill only showed me the perfect alignment relative to the boat for a single point in time that lasts less than a second on the ski course, fixing. My mind on that single point of success set the conditions for multiple points of failure. With that insight, we started working on dynamic alignment. I would come to learn that not only did I need to reorient my body, my mind played an even bigger role. All too often, my mind and body were not in the same place. When things were going well, my mind tended to jump ahead that thought I'm about to run this pass guaranteed that I would not run the pass. When I had a bubble on the ski, my mind would take me to oops land, where I wished for a do over and punished myself for screwing up with whatever wrong move I had just made. If I had enough bubbles or falls, my mind would transform me all the way to childhood, while it reminded me of whatever rule I had made up for how to still look good while screwing up or deal with a mistake when it was time to explain myself, my mind would even jump into the boat and wonder what the driver was thinking if people were watching. The pressure was even greater with my mind all over the place, it was a wonder I could ever calibrate my body to stay in just dynamic alignment.
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The balance point is always moving. Imbalance is a good thing. It turns out, imbalance is more important than balance.
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Pay attention to the subtle moves of anyone doing any sort of balancing act, the tightrope is never completely still. The bicycle always moves from side to side. The rowing boat tips and corrects constantly. I once watched a trick golfer hit a golf ball 300 yards while standing on one of those big balance balls like you see in the gym. His legs never quit moving as they adjusted and corrected and reoriented to keep him stable as he stood on the wobbling ball. When we treat balance as the sole objective, we miss the point. Balance comes and goes and comes again so quickly. George Leonard, the author of the way of a Kido and mastery, said the student asks the master how he stays in balance. The master replies, I'm out of balance much more than you are. I've simply learned to regain my balance more quickly.
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The skill of returning to balance matters. Balance is a constant act of calibration and recalibration, more than the goal to be achieved. Not only is the balance point always moving, but we also only have movement by getting in balance when we are moving. It's a constant act of getting out of balance and then back into balance, rather than being like the top of the hill to be conquered. Balance is simply a reference point. Watch a young baby learned to walk.
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Recently, I watched a mom teaching her son. First mom helped him stand up, and he teetered tottered and swayed.
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When he swayed far enough forward, he took a step. Two steps later, his bottom half could not keep up with his top half, and he fell forward on his hands. Next try, his top half could not keep up with his bottom half, and he was suddenly sitting on the ground next try, he was able to take a few more steps slowly. He was learning to make the corrections, to string the actions together into a walk. Walking is an act of losing and then regaining balance. We just do the losing and regaining in such small increments that we no longer realize we are out of balance.
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To move things, we must get out of balance and then regain that balance, preferably in a way that keeps us aligned and safe.
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One of my artistic endeavors is to throw clay pottery on a wheel. Learning to center a lump of clay is a critical building block to creating a cup, a plate, a bowl or a tall vase.
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The initial lump starts out of balance, and then the act of centering, we bring the clay into balance. That centered lump is just that a centered lump. To make something on the pottery wheel, you must take the clay out of balance. Lifting a wall of clay is an act of disequilibrium, stacking one layer on top of another, in and out, over and over, the clay goes out of balance and then back into balance. The aren't is in the give and take. Push too much and the wall collapses.
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Push too little, and nothing happens. Some of my early mugs are super thick on the bottom.
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As a rookie Potter, I just couldn't get the bottom level of clay out of balance enough to move up the cylinder. The thick bottoms makes those mugs too heavy to drink from, but they are great pencil holders.
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There's a subtle problem with disequilibrium. It feels wrong.
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The physical sensations of being out of balance are uncomfortable. That's the point.
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However we interpret that discomfort incorrectly. We tell the story. Usually, I subconsciously that we are making a mistake. At some level, I wanted Bruce to show me how to ride a horse without feeling any disequilibrium while he was actually here to teach me would turn this way, equilibrium. Come into a gift, finding my center.
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On this day, all I knew was that, once again, we were doing Bruce's maddening exercise called Finding the middle. To me, it seemed like an unnecessary impediment keeping me away from the work I came to do. I thought, How was this silly exercise going to help me with anything involving the horse. Nonetheless, I went along, because apparently the only way I would be able to do what I wanted was to humor him by finding the middle of the damn round pen. His first step was to ask me to just go to the middle and find the closest approximation to the very center of the round pen. Once I did that. I just needed to make a mark in the dirt with my heel. I thought, Okay, this won't be so bad. Surely I can get close enough for him to let me move on. I walked into the middle, looked around a bit, made a tiny adjustment in my placement, and made the mark with my heel. As I was looking around, I had noticed one weird thing, the round pen didn't exactly seem round. Oh, well, this was close enough. I recall that we did this the prior year, and the whole process was rather elaborate. However, I had succeeded last year, so in my mind, that box was checked. I expected this time we would move through the finding the middle step very quickly. Bruce asked me if my heel Mark was on the middle thinking this would hurry things along, I gave him a smart ass answer along the lines of, it's as close as I can get without a measuring tape. When working with a horse in a round pen or round corral, the human typically stands in the center and does different things to encourage the horse to move in circles around him or her from the center and staying in a six to eight foot diameter, the human can get the horse to walk, trot, canter, and with the right moves, can get the horse to change direction. Knowing this, I was pretty sure a close approximation of the center was good enough to move to the next step. I was wrong. Well, he said, let's go through a process that will get you closer, dang it. He handed me four blue flags and said, Let's start at the beginning, step by step. He guided me to first divide the round pin in half and then half again. The clock in my head kept ticking, wondering if there was going to be any time left in our session to do what I came to do after going through the agonizing process of planting the four blue flags, we knew that if the division was accurate, we would be able to pull two strings from each point, and the intersection would be the middle of the round pin. At this point, I still thought we were trying to find the actual middle of the round pin. It would be many, many more sessions before I realized we were recalibrating me to find my center. So after, we found what we call the middle of the round pen, and after I was more than satisfied that we had the precise middle pin pointed enough for me to be able to move on, he gave me the orange flags.
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Now this was starting to seem like an even bigger waste of time. I thought we were finding the middle, and we had found the middle. My patience was wearing thin. I took the flags because I was pretty sure not taking them would make working with the horse take even longer than it already had. He had me go and stand next to one of the blue flags and look at the Blue Flag across from it to see if there was an equal area on both sides of the imaginary line. I'm not big on rework, and this exercise felt like we were just redoing perfectly good work we had already done. Still, I humored him. Then he asked me to do the unthinkable. He said, Take three steps to the right and evaluate the division of the round pen from my new vantage point. I thought, Why in the world would I do that? He reminded me of my negative positive poll. He said, I could also call it a spirit level, like the ones carpenter use that feeling of being off does not mean you have made a mistake. That feeling is your negative positive pole, sending you signals that there is something for you to pay attention to that is not beneficial to you. Again, I thought, but I don't want to feel disequilibrium. The feeling was exactly his point. He had to yell to raise the pressure enough to get me moving. He wanted me to move back and forth, forcing the internal bubble of my spirit level to move way out of center and then back again, now move back to center and then three steps to the left, he said, as I was standing three full steps from the Blue Flag, he asked me to feel my negative positive pole relative to whether there was half of the round pin on each side of me. Hell no, I thought.
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Watching my reluctance to move even an inch, you would have thought there was a pit of.
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Alligators there now he wanted me to feel it when every bone in my body was screaming to me to move back to the comfort zone.
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Clearly I was not going to die if I pushed my bubble that far off center. But tell that to my body where the sensations were screaming, danger, danger, my survival mode and reality could not have been further apart. His tone of voice intended to push my negative pole up was doing his job. Every bone in my body remembered getting into trouble with my parents, my teachers, my bosses, the past came flooding in, warning me that when I feel this way, I better get in line, because I'm making a big mistake here, unless I do what they say to do. Bruce was pushing my mistake button, not to drive me crazy, but to heal me. He was intentionally setting the conditions for me to go into my old stories and the uncomfortable emotions so that I could choose different actions than the one I had programmed myself or had been programmed to do. He said, give it a number on a scale of one to 10. How far off is it? With that distinction, the fog began to clear a little. I gave him a number, something like an eight or a nine. Now go back to the right, give me a number. This time, it was clearer that the blue flag across from me and my position did not represent a 5050, split of the round pen.
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Now my number was more like a five. The noise faded into the background and the inner electric charge became my primary focus. It was like a tuning fork telling me which way to move, move back and forth, paying no attention to the Blue Flag under your feet. Just keep moving back and forth until your poles are balanced, when your number is zero and the imaginary bubble within feels centered, plant the orange flags. As I followed his instructions, the external world dropped away. The only thing that mattered for a brief, exquisite moment was how I felt. Disequilibrium became my friend. Now my feelings were not telegraphing that I had made a mistake. Instead, they were providing the warm voice of guidance back and forth I walked, tuning into the little electric charge called my pole, giving it a number as I made smaller and smaller swings.
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Finally, my negative pole balance, the number was zero and I planted the orange flag. I mentally returned to the real world and noticed that my orange flag was a few inches from the blue flag. It would be yet another year before I truly understood the depths of what had just happened, even though Bruce, Bruce had given me the full lesson that day. The orange flag represents the you. He explained, not a you. The conditioning done by domestication. Domestication made you believe that's who you are. It's not it's so ingrained in you that every inch of your being believes it's you. This exercise helps lift that veil.
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It allows you to consciously see the difference between a you and the you. When you are tempted to beat yourself up over making the mistake of planting one of the flags in the wrong place, remember your inner guidance found the second place. Did you notice the voice in your head wondering what I was going to do with your mistake. Did you feel the urge to hit yourself with the two before for getting it wrong? Do you really want to give your power over to those voices from your past? Are you really going to look outside yourself for approval and acceptance when you have this power within you, when you learn to use your polls to guide you, it doesn't really matter what they say. When the chatter in your mind starts, all you have to do is listen to your polls.
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The chatter won't matter because it you will be tuning into one of the tools God gave to guide you. My ears heard his words, but it would take a lot more for me to grasp the wisdom and freedom in what he was teaching me the next five or six times we started a session in the round pen. We started with this exercise. Every time I had the same response. Why the hell am I doing this? It became clearer the day Bruce threw me yet another curveball.
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Thank you for listening to the creative spirits unleash podcast. I started this podcast because I was having these great conversations, and I wanted to share them with others. I'm always learning in these conversations, and I wanted to share that kind of learning with you. Now what I need to hear from you is what you want more of and what you want less of. I really want these podcasts to be of value for the listeners.
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Also, if you happen to know someone who you think might love them, please share the podcast and, of course, subscribe and rate it on the different apps that you're using, because that's how others will find it.
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Now, I hope you go and do something very fun today. You.
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