Cross Posted from www.RobMcNamara.com

 

The central inquiry we must all return to again and again is the perennial inquiry of selfhood, Who am I? 

 

This inquiry is central to those of us who are interested in investigating our Excellence as we make our way through life. When you stop asking yourself this core question you are intrinsically wedded to a fundamental misconception: you know who it is that you are. This seemingly innocent presumption to know yourself actually inhibits and stunts your overall development and thus caps your capacity to enact and articulate the Greatness that your life is demanding of you right now.

 

Your most fluid, efficient and effective self development depends upon your capacity to remain open. Falling into the assumption that you know yourself stagnates your self-system into a closed system. When you assume to know yourself you fall into your habituated conditioning and loop again and again playing out your central assumptions as to who you are and thus what you do in the world. While your conditioning is an important part of yourself, left to its own ends your conditioning will never step into the Excellence that your life requires.

 

Keeping the inquiry Who am I? alive connects you with your essential curiosity. By stepping into this fundamental question you step into your recognition that you fundamentally do not know who you are. Not-knowing connects you with the dimension of yourself that is open, unconditioned and deeply creative. The more frequently you ask yourself this question, the more deeply you can hold this inquiry alive in your heart the more open your self-system becomes. What results is the setting down of your presumptions and the picking up and inhabiting of your vital creative openness. 

 

Your life is demanding your Excellence or Greatness regardless of your awareness of this call. If you look around in your life you will see a life that is calling for more of you. Picking up this fundamental question as a part of your daily practice provides you with a simple yet highly effective strategy to cut through your assumptions and your habituated way of living your life. Feeling into the uncertainty and not-knowingness opens you to an alive seat of creative openness. 

 

Step into the creative novelty that your life and heart is calling for.

 

 

Cross Posted from www.RobMcNamara.com

 

Cross posted from www.RobMcNamara.com

 

Many people whom are unconsciously caught in their conditioning make the mistake of pushing harder in the attempt to get more done in their life. While the initial effort may yield some short term benefit, as an enduring strategy for productivity and performance this approach is severely misguided. Getting stuck in this modality of functioning is the equivalent of being in first gear and pressing the peddle down harder and harder to go faster. Sure you’re going to go a little bit faster initially however you’re going to top out at 25 miles an hour and if you keep doing this day in and day out you’re going to do tremendous damage to your engine. 

 

The most efficient and effective way to enhance your performance is to refine your recovery. Wether you are trying to grow a company 7% above and beyond your annual organic growth or make an NFL roster by cutting your 40 time down by two hundredths of a second while refining your understanding of defensive assignments the formula remains the same: Relax! 

 

Any integral approach to performance must include efficient and densely effective forms of accelerated recovery. Relaxation cuts stress levels and its associated biochemicals cortisol, ACTH, lactate and adrenaline. A potent dose of recovery also reduces muscular tension, heart rate and oxygen consumption. Relaxation increases the sensitivity of your brain and nervous system, increases your capacity for memory formation, quickens your reaction times by refining neuro-efficiency and facilitates brain growth and plasticity. When we look at individuals who have a consistent strategy for relaxation and efficient recovery we find individuals who are operating in life with much more adaptive skills and capacities for execution than individuals who fail to relax. 

 

Just as when you go from first to second gear and from second to third, forth and fifth gear you must put the clutch down. Before you can ramp up your productivity to the next level, you must relax, you must put your clutch down and allow your conditioned RPMs to drop. When you set your physiological and psychological faculties to be more responsive, adaptive and refined you’ll start to explore performance from a new perspective and territory. 

 

Performance as you will come to see is dependent not upon more contracted habituated effort to push through, but rather your ability to relax, open and thus generate true force in your life and in the world. 

 

Cross posted from  www.RobMcNamara.com

I just wrote a short piece on the heart of Strength Training, Love, Intention and Wellness... 

Tears are my friend of late. 

 

I can't help but allow them to flow gently down my cheeks. I've gotten to the point where I don't even bother wiping them away. I love the feeling of their soft paths drying on their own time. 

 

There's something beautiful about walking along a side walk with tears rolling down my face, about the softest of tears cooling my cheeks as I check my mail box. There's something precious about tears rolling out from my eyes as I press hundreds of pounds from my heart or as I cycle on a stationary bicycle. Sometimes the tears land just perfectly on my knee. 

 

Life is so utterly heart breaking right now. To breathe in my life right now is shatteringly painful. This very breath wells tears into my eyes. Why? 

 

This is all just too precious, this beautiful radiant moment is so precious. I seemingly can't stand how much I love life. On one hand there's no "thing" about life that stands out right now, it's just this beautiful field of life that breaks my heart. On the other hand, it's seemingly just about anything that can pierce through my heart. Sometimes its someone's eyes, an heart felt invitation, someone protecting themselves, a song dancing within my heart...  

 

Part of me wants to possess, to hold on to this dancing immediacy. Part of me knows I can't hold any of this. To do so would close me down to the very love and vitality that hurts with such beauty. I think this dives into the heart of what is so shatteringly penetrating. My heart loves this moment with a gasping unconditioned embrace, and there's the part of me that wants to hold on, to possess something when ultimately there's nothing to have here. 

 

The impermanence of this life is just so penetrating, so uncompromising. I can feel just how fast and fleeting this life is. I'm 30 now. I'm utterly shocked by this fact. I never thought  my life would last this long. And yet I can still feel the time of the transcendent in my bones, this is all going to be over in just a few moments, just a few blinks of the Kosmic eye. Rob will soon be gone. I take form, I change, I dissolve and pass away. 

 

In the meantime, the only thing that matters is to Love. To articulate my Love's Kindness in every gesture that animates this body-mind.

 

Kindness, Kindness, Kindness. 

 

Kindness not born of convention, but a Kindness that knows only the beauty of this moment and the precious opportunity to dance from Love's timeless unconditioned source. 

 

Does anything else really matter? Does anything else truly hold this depth? 

The center of your heart does not make distinctions. 

The heart at it's core simply is open, radically vulnerable, intimately receptive. 

 

There's no, "I'll take this, but not that."

There's no conflicted stance, no I'll be "sort of" open...but only to the things I want. 

 

Openness as it quietly rests at the center of your heart is in many ways an either or phenomena. Either your heart is Open and Alive in the moment or it's not. Your heart either feels intimately this very moment or it severs itself from the very life that animates it's vitality. 

 

When Open, the heart knows no obstacle. The heart feels obstacles, but unconditionally remains open, receptive, spacious and intimate with every subtle nuance of this moment's presence, this moment's configuration, this moment's articulation of itself. 

 

The problem is the part of you that does make distinctions, does take sides, does stake claims in preferences. When you do this, the basic nature of the heart is severed from how you function in the world. The alive unmediated lovingness of your heart is severed and your life becomes a rote expression of your slavery to the preferences, opinions, likes and dislikes of your conditioned history. 

 

When the cool open spaciousness of the heart is lost within your direct moment to moment experience, you stop feeling with the fullness of your being. As a result, you live your life in accordance to your conditioning. Contracted into your preferences, distinctions and sides you guide your life from a lesser place. You feel less because you're less alive. You are less skillful because you lead your life from a more self-centered perspective. You're less kind in the world because you don't feel deeply into this radiant moment. 

 

As days slip by you continue onward semi-consciously amidst your life. Days turn into weeks and weeks to months. Suddenly years start slipping by as you slumber through each moment contracted around "you." As each moment beautifully flowers into an exquisite dance and dissolves away but your heart's truest most authentic articulation of life remains largely dormant as long as you live a life enslaved to your small self and it's conditioned preferences.

 

The heart remains ever present, waiting, the authentic articulation of yourself is brought into its fullest life as you release your attachments. As you stop contracting around you, your heart's immense sensitivity and delicate responsive aliveness comes to life. You die,  your little box of a self dissolves and something much more precious than you can possibly image takes life right here, right now. 

 

Here's a bow to the Heart. 

I am amidst what I call a push workout. I'm training my shoulders and core on this particular occasion, performing a cycle of lateral dumbbell raises, abdominal crunches on a bench and a practice of release in which I'm working on core and spinal flexibility. 

 

Everything is *normal* perhaps too normal which proved to be the breakthrough. In my training I effortlessly fell into a Complete Surrender.

 

I'm not talking about the kind of surrender where you stop doing everything, allow your breath to naturally rise and fall as you drop all inner motion as you would on your meditation cushion or as I will at times practice between my sets. 

 

In this emergence of Complete Surrender I was in the midst of an intense set of dumbbell lateral raises. I was exerting, pushing, flowing into each movement when shockingly everything changed, Surrender enveloped my conventional way of being-in-the-world. 

 

From this Great Shift my eyes caught themselves in the mirror. As I stared deeply into my soft brown eyes everything was completely the same yet utterly different. The "I" that I conventionally understood was still there, same thoughts, same motions, same engagement with the intensity, yet for some reason my gaze fixed deep into my still eyes.

 

Amidst a contracting face and an intense extension of energy out into the world the subject from which I experienced life was all of the objects arising around me. 

 

My Witness was no longer confined to feeling life from within my particular body-mind. Instead I was feeling life through the dumbbells in my hands, I could feel the mirrors from their own interior.  

 

As my set continued onward, I felt the stair case behind me, the railing, the rack of weights, the wall wrapping around into the locker room.  Perhaps most odd and profound was the space from which all of these things arouse. I could feel this cool expansive space from it's own interior just as I could feel the growing burning radiance in my shoulders as I raised the dumbbells again and again. 

 

Awareness, liberated in it's essential nature, was awake and my witness (the witnessing faculty typically identified with my individual body-mind) had realized itself (the transcendent ever-present all-witnessing-witness). The subject and object had become one. As Wilber so eloquently says, "What you are looking out of is what you are looking at." 

 

As we approach the new year I offer you this one instruction. Give yourself to your discipline. It doesn't matter what discipline you've chosen, what does matter is how completely you've given yourself to it. This year, practice surrendering to what animates you. Practice it until Surrender practices you, until the Great Shift holds you anew with grace and beauty.

 

Peace in Stillness, 

~Rob 

Right now you've got one chance, one life, one opportunity. Manifestation has but one occasion to know who you are, experience your fullness and feel your love. You've got one body-mind and one life from which to share and serve.

One shot, that's it.

Now I'm not talking about one life as in a certain number of years before you meet your body-mind's relative eventuality (that's a sophisticated way of saying "you say hello to death"). I'm talking about life as this moment.

This is all you really have, or rather all that has you. If you think you've got years, got more than what's right here right now you're fooling yourself. You're painting a fantasy. The fact is you don't, nor will you ever, fully know where this moment is going to take you. Cancer, a car accident, an allergic reaction, a stroke, a heart attack, terrorism in any of its faces, an asthma attack...

Your body-mind may indeed shine into it's full brilliance beyond your next exhale, but there's no guarantee of this. As your chest rises with this inhale and falls away there's no guarantee aside from what's here right now.

This is perhaps Mortality's core message to you. You get one shot, one chance and this is it. "This" is the present moment, not your fantasy of what you'd like to have in terms of days, weeks, months and or years.

This message from Mortality isn't coming to you from the outside, letting you know that death is going to come for you. While you may be reading this blog, reading these words, check in and see if they resonate with truth from within. They will. Ultimately you'll find the message from within your own body-mind is no different from what is being shared here in these words.

While it often appears at first that death is something that comes to you and happens to you, something more profound is happening. Death is a part of yourself that, chances are, you have yet to own, embrace and guide your life from. Death doesn't happen to you, it is who you are. Thus Mortality's core message actually comes from within. Mortality's message resonates from a deeper sense of self that holds more authenticity, more beauty, more brilliance and ironically more life and vitality.

Regardless of whether or not you want to accept it or not you will come face to face with the crossroads of life and death. You will cross the bridge.

You can pretend as though this bridge resides off in the distant future, something for you to worry about "later." If you do choose this you're stunting your life, building your life around fantasy and avoiding your deepest calling and strength.

If you look closely, you can see that the bridge for you to cross is ever-present. The crossroads to the Unknowns are right here. Mortality stands within you as an invitation to enact and embrace more life, more of what's good, true and beautiful.

Are you going to paint a fantasy attempting to build a wall around your heart? Are you going to internally dismiss death's call for your ultimate freedom and fullness? Are you going to settle down, sit with your anxiety and face death eye to eye? Are you going to open your heart to death's grace? Are you really going to let death settle in and radiate throughout your body-mind as more vibrant life?

Death awaits. You know its message, its power, and its purpose. Deep down you know it. Now is the time to stop running, avoiding and escaping from your own greater freedom and fullness. You are simply too precious, to profoundly beautiful to cut yourself from your truest core. Embrace death now, allow yourself to breath out your last. Expect only your freedom and your fullness in this moment. Leave the rest to grace. This is Morality's chief concern.

~R

Invariably life brings it's beautiful partner death to the dance.

 

You're invited.

 

Sorry but there's no turning down this dance, nor is it a dance you want to turn down. Anyone in their "right" mind would be a fool to resist. Yet how often do we spend our precious time playing out the fools dreams, pretending that the fool in us knows best?

 

Without death's grace life's glory slips away into a fleeting void. Does it not? So why resist, avoid, deny, run and pretend that you know not what resides beyond your conventional grasp of life?

 

For those who've made it here to this web page for one reason or another here's a glimpse of the dance between life, death and this guy who happens to respond to the name Rob.

 

~~~~~~~

 

My asthma strolled into my life like an old friend that you just know shouldn't be there. Familiar yes, somewhat known yet I know in my gut something's "off." This friend shouldn't be here right now. He wasn't invited. The look on his face confirms, something isn't quite right but I pretend not to know what.

 

I knew from the moment the subtle tightness set into my chest that something different was happening. Everything was the same, same old tightness, same old medicines, same old precautions, same old everything except for a nearly intangible felt sense that everything was different this time.

 

I immediately threw everything I had in my arsenal to continue the illusion that I was "OK." I chalked it up as I told myself and other's that I "just didn't want to spend my vacation struggling with my asthma." Looking back, I think I just wanted to avoid this subtle sensation, this fine shift in my being knew something else was going on here.

 

This fine subtle shift knew death had just cut in on the dance. I avoided it with more medicine, more treatments, more pills, more puffs, more struggle, more "fresh air" and more avoidance.

 

What was locked in my more conventional mind was that nothing was going on. "It's no big deal, don't worry, I'm fine. I've been here before. There's nothing to be worried about... just enjoy the vacation" I rehearsed to myself.

 

Over the next few days I got worse every day. Every few hours seemed to bring a step backward. Less of the normal life I wanted to have and more the constricted suffering I wanted to avoid. The more I treated my asthma the further I slipped towards death's powerful pull to dance.

 

My conventional mind constricted tightly around a belief that I was fine. I kept my back to death as I starred into life's eyes. Let's dance some more I demanded, gripped onto life's hands as the now odd dance continued.

 

New years eve arrived, the snow softly fell from the emptiness of the dark sky and we headed up into the mountains. My incessant drive to dance with life suddenly shifted into an exquisite play of vibrant moments. It was a clearing in the most unlikely of places. A taste of the "normal life" was mine to enjoy. I breathed in ease for the first time in days as I coasted long gentle ski slopes.

 

The soft silent snow, the breeze across my face and the immense stillness and contentment in my heart was exquisite. While the mountains were breathtaking, the surrounding lakes in the distance beautiful and the company warm and loving the most appreciated element was a cool effortless washing breath flowing in and out, in and out. No hit of tightness, no hit of the storm that had been brewing.

 

I knew from when I was a little child that my asthma would "take me." Something in me knew I would die from this. It wasn't a guess or a hunch, it was a knowing stemming from some unknown and unseen part of myself. This intuition was an unshakable certainty, I just didn't know when. But here it was knocking on the door and all I could do was deny. This isn't it. let's all pretend that this really isn't going to happen.

 

My day in the mountains came to a close and as it did my break from the downward spiral ended. My condition worsened and new years day brought with it life's all too common frantic avoidance of death. Panic flashed through my bodymind as I started to awaken to my condition.

 

It was a brief cutting full bodied flash. In this flash I heard myself saying "take me to the hospital."

 

I dulled it with relaxation, release and an intense focus on my breathing as my machine steamed medicine into my lungs. My subconscious mind rehearsed it's persistent argument: "Maybe, just maybe I'll turn this around after this treatment. Maybe something will change soon."

 

I completed my treatment and watched myself worsen by the minute. Left with no other course of action aside from acceptance I tried one more treatment. As I huddled over my machine wrenching air in and out of my lungs with heroic effort life's colorful vibrations faded away as I fell into death's arms. I reached out for help in desperation in my last moments, tears flowing freely until the I that I assumed to be me passed out.

 

Amidst the intense turmoil as I suffocated and fought for life's hand I found myself enveloped my the heaviest, deepest sense of emptiness and peace. A plunge into a relaxation that makes the best relaxation you've probably ever known seem stressful.

 

There was no energy expended, I mean that quite literally. When your body stops, your mind stops, your heart stops and an indescribable peace slowly settles in with a fullness, a richness and a completeness that's breath taking - literally. It's embrace is stunning as it fights nothing, accepts all and holds all of you all the same. The desperation of life's impulse to continue, the inevitability of cessation, the love of those around you and your resistance to leave. It's all OK.

 

As my lifeless body laid on the carpet, my pale oxygen deprived skin turned blue, then to a dull lifeless grey. The heavy dense, infinitely thick emptiness enveloping me was sliced through for a brief sliver of a moment. The sound of sirens sliced through this deepening peace to reach my awareness.

 

"ah, good they're here" was the very last thought belonging to my more conventional sense of self. After this my body, my awareness, my mind, my heart, nothing touched this known world of form - at least not from the vehicle of my more conventional sense of self.

 

The transcendent self can be defined as that which perceives yet its perception is no longer identified with nor grounded exclusively in the conventional body-mind.

 

As the paramedics furiously fought to save a young lifeless body with no vitals I'm in the process of remember my Self. I Recognize my Self, the one who came prior to the "Rob" who was born on October 30th 1977. I remember who I AM prior to this "life" that has just passed. I feel as though I've returned home, I realize I'm returning to something that's never been left.

 

Decades appear as short brief minutes amidst the Kosmic clock as life and death's dance continues; however, with a radical clarity I realize my "life" in the more conventional sense has been more of a "death" and this, yes this embrace of death shines forth as life, genuine vitality.

 

I remember Death is the plunge into a depth of life unfathomable to the conventional self.

 

My arms begin to extend, stretching outwards. My awareness follows as my arms continue to extend and dissolve into a radical embrace of manifestation. I sweep across mountains, forests and their brilliantly confident trees. In an instant become one with a loved one. I'm not their body, nor their mind in this moment. I hear their thoughts, I know their intentions, but I am their emotions coursing through their bodymind. I am their emotion - their basic energy-in-motion.

 

Here's to the emergent tree of life from which we all are fumbling towards the divine and to those who embrace the dance of life and death.