Strength: Your Spiritual Pursuit

Posted on Mar 24th, 2006 by Rob Mcnamarra

Strength, What is it? What is it and how does it manifest in your life? Or, perhaps more importantly, how, when and where does it NOT show up in your life? Strength, from my vantage point it is simply the capacity to do and be. Simple yet profound...we'll get well into the profound here shortly. The doing part is fairly straight forward - kind of like a beer commercial.

Rob's inner dialogue: "wow, girls...attractive girls, not wearing too much, but acting like scientists at the south pole researching cosmic background radiation...maybe not... but look at all those people smiling, wow they look happy! Oh that was funny, gosh they all are drinking beer, my goodness that girl sure looked like she wanted me...I hope Em didn't see that and get all jealous and attack the TV again" But I digress... Strength in its more conventional sense is the ability to do - or not do as Yoda would say. This is fairly simple. What I'm really interested in is strength from a more "post conventional" perspective. And this runs us straight into the second half of the equation: being. Now we've got some interesting depth to play with. Yummy! Being is perhaps the most central pursuit of any authentic spiritual discipline (for you integral freaks out there we're not talking "legitimate" or "translative" spiritual practices, we're kicking back and chilling with their authentic transformative and sometimes hidden underbelly - you know the kick ass shit!). For those of you who don't classify yourself as an "integral freak," here's the rough and dirty.

I'm talking about spiritual practices that are primarily focused on transforming the practitioner. This is the Authentic thread of spiritual practice. Now not all spiritual practice is focused on transformation, this is where the Legitimate thread comes in. Not that there's anything wrong with non-transformative spiritual practice, it just serves a different function in society and for the individual who benefits from these elements. Follow? ... rock on ... So being, why is it of such importance? It is placed at the core of nearly all of the worlds authentic spiritual practices because this is the true seat of strength. "Go Rob! Go Rob! Your The Man! You brought this back to strength!! YEA!!! Keep rock'n it out..." Hey cheerleader beer chick, keep it down, I'm trying to dive into this And this true seat of strength intimately shows us our own face. Not the face we conventionally identify with but the one that we've always known.

Ask yourself this, what resides beyond the very act of your personal perception? I'm talking about your conventional self, your ego, and its moment to moment act of perceiving. What's beyond this? It's being. It's like a deep black velvet that envelops and holds everything. It's the very essence of peace, the truth of immense stillness in which all motion occurs. Tasting this, feeling this within your transcendent body-mind leaves you.... all Donk'd out? Perhaps that's not the right expression, but you get the point. Even if you don't think you do :-) But anyway, this being thing rocks the kosmic party - literally! This is where strength really comes from and itself is strength. Strength to BE. Being is strength. So let's talk strength as a spiritual pursuit. The authentic spiritual traditions and their rich array of practices all aim at going beyond the conventional self... its Rumi's field beyond thought. "Yo, Rumi, what's up dawg? Oops, Shit... there isn't any thought out here. Sorry God, I'll keep quiet. I know I know - detention again. Well fuck me..."

Anyway, all authentic spiritual practice is aimed at this strength, thus in some crazy sense - spiritual practice is "strength training." Now I'm not talking about just lifting weights - although I'm certainly not excluding it either. But literally, all authentic spiritual practice is aimed at expanding one's identity to embrace and include this transcendent seat of being. It's focused on training every day your capacity to first connect with and eventually be strength. Then once you identify with this transcendent "donkey" (yes donkey is a technical spiritual term that is presently undefinable) then the really really good teachers shatter this identification. Yea sounds shitty, but its much worse than any conventional imagination can come up with.

Which leads to what you really really don't want right now - liberation - freedom which you kind of sort of want some of it - but certainly not all of it - hell no! This is another story though... For now let's focus on getting beyond our conventional selves - let's talk about "hunting the ego" (thanks for the ego hunting term Diana), finding it and then killing it while preserving it's essential function and beauty as we shift beyond... Ego, your conventional self, is rooted around one particularly nasty little attachment - ok so a few, but let's look how they all stem from one. Your ego hates pain.

This part of you will do anything and I mean anything to avoid it. Look at planet earth and tell me, what's off limits? I'm not sure there's much if anything that's off limits... Anyway, because ego hates pain we tend to create 3 almost timeless habitual strategies. First, we try to reject pain. Second we try to grasp onto and perpetuate anything that's remotely pleasurable - which unfortunately backfires on us, biting us in the ass. Finally we just try to numb out and not feel anything. Crazy I know, but take a look at your conventional self - your ego - and I'm sure you'll see these beautifully rich and creative strategies expanding faster than Google's profits (and Microsoft wants to take them on? Hell you guys can't even get a new operating system out and you've been doing that for decade...sorry but I couldn't pass up the opp to rip on Microsoft)

What is even more crazy is being, just plain and simple being, resides beneath all of these strategies. Thus if we are unable to move beyond our aversion to pain and these basic strategies from which ego rests upon, that is if we can't find the strength to shift beyond ego we'll never really know the divine bliss resting right here in this very moment, and that my friend, that is crazy! So strength training, what is it? In its most basic essence its training our capacity to be and then do. It certainly doesn't happen the other way around. True strength training is any activity from which we are able to differentiate from our conditioned history - it's cultivating a new relationship with the present moment. True strength shifts our identity to ever expanding wholes - well beyond our little fragile egos, well beyond the tears of believing with all our known conventional selves and into the tears of radiance streaming from pure empty being. There's a sword with two very real edges right here in all our lives.

We simply must deal with this. We need to train. We need to practice. Yet the more we do something the greater our tendency is to fall into a pattern, a habit. When this happens we stop living. That's not really being alive - that's just kind of like being on auto pilot. Instead we trade in our vibrant vitality that can cook and burn your ego until you find the essence and radiance you've always been. We trade this in for the safety of some known "me." Sounds like a late night infomercial rip off...What do you think? I think we must collectively find a way to compassionately jolt one another from our fascination with the shadows in the cave. History tells us one thing in relationship to spiritual practice. Pain, yes pain, is one of the few paths that forces us to wake up to this ever present moment. In order to strength train, truly strength train, that is to genuinely shift our identity beyond ego and into the vast forest of being most of us need pain. My buddy Ken commonly cites a study involving meditators who were broken into two groups - one group just meditated, while the other meditated and did strength training (we're talking lifting weights right now). The results... Strength training and meditation produced far greater contemplative development than did just the meditation alone. Yes its a huge plug for cross training in general and certainly integral practices, but why weights?

Why this particular often seen 'superficial' practice? Here's my take. Weight training is the most potent form of integral practice when integrated with meditation and a serious intention for growth, development and transformation - and no we're not just talking about the body here...although we're not talking about leaving it out either. We're talking integral development. But let's get back to this pain attachment. I don't know of any other practice that enables you to confront your ego's conditioned history to pain as safely and consistently and as often as lifting weights. Ok, well there is one other vehicle - life - but let's take a look at some of the available options within "life" If each set is engaged fully, all sorts of strange things happen. For starters, you're ego is going to flair up, negotiate, create stories, employ deep seated beliefs and not to mention just generally "check out" for you to both avoid the flame of intensity and the vibrant moment burning to explode throughout your body-mind. In fact the ego might just resort to pulling on the strings of some early deep seated issues around the body to keep you from doing engaging. Just avoid - says the ego... we'll find wholeness some "other" way... You get to watch this incredible display flair up every few minuets.

I don't know about you but in terms of accelerated meditative development this is far more efficient than just conventional sitting practice alone - whatever tradition you might employ. Hell, most of us have years of training ourselves to keeping our sitting practice as comfortable as possible... years of training on how to manipulate our experience on the cushion. Strength training while lifting weights, If the intention to cultivate a new relationship with pain is held and maintained, you've got one potent vehicle to cut through and propel you beyond ego. In the intense vibrations within a set, you can cultivate a new body-mind relationship with pain. A new relationship with the moment. As you shift into the storm of the ego - instead of buying into the ego's persuasion - as the weights move up and down rhythmically, you can watch your habitual tendencies - your conditioning to close down from the life that's radiating in this very moment. If you stay with your intention - to continue to "go into" the immediacy of the moment, pain transforms itself into your greatest ally, your greatest teacher.

Pain turns into vibration, the body-mind dissolves into energy currents and vibrations. Pain turns into pleasure, radiance, joy and ecstasy. Suddenly there's an immense stillness within all of this dance. You're tasting strength - true strength. Peace, Rob