Step off the Court and Observe

How’s your endurance these days? I don’t mean your cardio or how intensive your workouts are. I mean your overall endurance. For life will certainly and is certainly giving you something to endure. Whether it’s waiting for the next paycheck, the instability of a relationship, the tricky behavior of a neighbor, the traffic on your morning commute, a virus working its way through your body, these are the marathons that life is asking you to endure. In order to do so, you need to be training. But how?

The training happens outside the heat of the moment. I get on my mat regularly to put down the burden of enduring for even just an hour. It’s my attempt to step outside the arena and into the coach’s corner or dugout. Here is where we can watch ourselves as though we’re still on the field and assess our technique. How are we weathering the punches, the storms, the wobbles that inevitably show their faces each and every day? Are we getting impatient? Are we resisting? Are we growing frustrated quicker? Ok then, now we know.

It can be a tricky practice to understand how to begin. What is it that we’re paying attention to and when? I may mention my yoga mat and for you this is your morning coffee or your jiu jitsu practice or the evening stroll. Regardless of the contents of your practice, it’s important that you have a practice, a space to step outside the playing field and observe as a witness. This is the starting point to better being able to endure the heat of the moment.

We can’t expect ourselves to endure the marathon of our lives well if we aren’t training for it well. As you get curious about how to train for this, the first question may be to ask yourself, “when, where and how am I stepping off the court so I may better observe the animated character of me?”

The drums are a great place to get acquainted with the seat of the observer. By actively taking ourselves out of our minds and into our bodies we can more easily tap into the experience of the witness -- the one who watches the thoughts of our minds rather than the one identifying as the thoughts themselves.