Peeling Back Layers of Ourselves
“Develop mental toughness”
“Mind over matter”
“You can do anything that you put your mind to do”
“You just have to mentally tough it out”
I could go on, but you get the point…
Have you ever stopped to think about the meaning of these phrases?
Maybe we should say: We need to lead with our head!
Why don’t we ever hear that phrase? Rather, it is always… lead with your heart.
Well, one word… PASSION! It is more romantic, sexier, or gripping to hear something that tugs at our hearts.
But, let’s contemplate passion for a minute. To continue with the message of this blog, we must agree that pain like hunger are constructs experienced in the mind… if so, we must then also agree that passion is experienced in the mind.
Passion is a construct of the mind and felt throughout the body.
But, to keep it real… We revere someone who overcame the odds. Sure, passion was a part of their drive; yet, more importantly, we understand that they mentally toughed while enduring any pain and suffering. They saw the reward at the end as a greater cause over their own suffering. And, more likely, they came out of it as a better person.
Truly though, in the end, the mind and the heart are like the wings of a bird.
OK, let us agree that the physical embodiment of emotional suffering is an enduring symbol. The aim now is to assert that we can make a mental embodiment of physical suffering an enlightening experience, one that helps us better understand what and who we could be.
Just for the record, unlike those we revere in the description above, the rest of this post does not include the idea of unwelcomed suffering.
Stay with me – this is gonna get good!
The implication of this conversation should be coming into focus…
Yes, the Mind <—> Body Connection, full embodiment
A deeper implication is that to understand what drives us, our purpose, we must examine what and who we are.
The what = body (i.e., mammal) / The who = the mind (i.e., human being)
What makes us what we are is our body. What makes us who we are is in our mind
The concept of our reality is experienced through the body, either by environmental input or mental output. The interpretations of environmental inputs (aka, sensations) are defined by the constructs of the mind. The brain (the what) constructs mental states as emotions and body states (the who) from situational conceptualizations. Our cognitive interpretations reinforce the sensations and garner reactivity and or response. A way to investigate this connection is by contemplating the contents of the mind, our cognition, and how we react to them. Further, the mental contents of our mind can be investigated through a breakdown of our body. We find out who we are as we put our body to the test. This occurs in one of two ways, meditation or physical activity. We will focus on the physicality.
Lets summarize … The world is taken into our ‘self’ through the body, and the body carries the ‘self’ into the world.
How we see ourselves is what matters as our brain explains to us how our bodies are another part of the world around us. This can is also considered a part of the ego. This is where it gets fun… that sinister ego! The ego loves the status quo. It has worked hard to establish this particular and complacent point of being, the almighty status quo where everything is comfortable – until is not. Further, there is hell to pay if you try to change the status quo! Our ego fights back like an army of well-trained ninjas.
Here in lies the rub!
We need to breakdown the ego to breakthrough understanding the body. I refer to this process as peeling back the layers. We morph the conceptualizations of ourselves by overcoming our physical limitations. Essentially, we breakdown the constructs of the body and rebuild our mental image while rebuilding our bodies…
There is no enlightenment without suffering. In other words, pushing through the boundaries of our physical being peels back layers of our ego.
This breach in one’s comfort zone is a clear disruption of the ego’s coherence and dissolves the established boundaries of the self. The boundaries of our ego fade away as we experience the physical ability beyond preconceived notions. We come to understand a deeper layer of ourselves. A breach in the ego occurs through physical challenges. This is exemplified by ironmen and ironwomen whom suggest they found no pleasure in their participation; rather, they found pleasure in the challenge of overcoming ‘limits.’ It’s the perspective of reconceptualization of what we are capable of doing within our world when we break barriers. Remember, those self-imposed limits were established by our mind.
To be sure, we are not bound by the constructs of nature and nurture. We are bound by the constraints of our own mind that was established by nature and nurture. A way to eradicate these constraints is by breaking physical boundaries, which allows transformation associated through improvements in self-understanding and self-regulation.
The bottom line is,