KD Jones
02-12-2007, 12:17 AM
RMAX Challenge Finish Line Report: KD Jones
This is the 28th day of the Challenge, and whereas yesterday I would have sold my mama's shoes to have this be over for a while, now I'm not ready to be done.
I'm going to try to be as succinct as I can in answering the questions asked of us for this report. Not least because I do not currently have the juice to approximate a Russian novel on the subject. (EDIT: I just scanned this, and, you know, it looks like a Russian novel on the subject. Sorry.)
As I write this, I find I'm having trouble deciding on a single bit of acquired wisdom that shines above all others. My overall sense at this moment is that there's been so much, so many varied - yet seamlessly integrated - factors that it's difficult to sort them out at all.
---------- ON THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF THE CHALLENGE --------
I think the American style here would be to say "I just feel so great, I'm a new person, I'd like to thank all the little people..." And I bet that's bang-on for some, even many people who will go through this process.
But I think it's important to say that at least part of the merit of any meaningful process is it's malleability IN SPECIFIC EFFECT to any given person.
There are any number of self help, self actualizing, self inflating, watch-me-build-the-universe-from-scratch-with-my-pineal-gland persons out there who I could get some kind of off the shelf charge from. (Maybe. If I were a different person. Not that I'm invulnerable.)
But a lot of what I felt in this process - quite possibly in part because sleep didn't work out all that well overal - was angry. Frustrated. Depressed.
This is not to say that I did not notice the positive effects of what we were doing all along. I did, and I do. But the part of me that got hammered here and there NEEDED to be hammered. Oh... and I just remembered something Herr Doktor CSTschniffleheitzer Brian Bentz said to me when I was equivocating about getting involved early in the process (I paraphrase, because he mumbles. Ha.) "There's a thing inside you that doesn't want to play, because it's scared. And it should be, because it's going to die."
Maybe that's a little dramatic for some tastes, but I think it's a good metaphor. Any system that has anything important to offer is going to have some important things NOT to offer. Those things will either fall away, or continue on as stumbling blocks.
I think I (and all my friends who participated) lost a few of those. What were mine? Can't really say. It's probably too soon to even know there gone, still a little "phantom limb" going on most likely. But somethings different...
Wait. Here's something. I have a clearer picture of what it means to be physically disciplined. And I have a clearer picture of the fact that what I'd thought most of my life - that discipline and bashing one's head in are one and the same - is just not true. But it makes me angry and frustrated and depressed to talk about it right now and I'm all out of bullets so that's all I'm going to say.
-------- THE "Что это такое?" (what's this?) EFFECT OF THE INTUITIVE PROTOCOL--------
This is perhaps the most peculiar, the one I didn't expect. Probably as a result of the "in your face" nature of the intuitive training protocol (close and honest monitoring of internal state via RPD, RPT and RPE) during the challenge, there were lessons I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise - at least not so quickly.
There seems to be something about taking a willful, consistent effort and applying both emotional AND intellectual scrutiny to it that not only makes the work more efficient and comprehensible, but that also drives something about the work deeper into my gut, heart, mind... whatever. Not only that, but the process seems to drag other things that relate to the process to the surface with the work that starts out as the original goal.
In my case, in about the middle of the Challenge, I began to deal with some on-again, off-again irritation and sometimes even depression about slogging on. Now... that's seemed a little odd in itself, because by my old criteria I didn't really think I was working harder than I ever had - I've got a bit of a history of putting my own nose to the grindstone (though not necessarily in a predicatble way). Of course, in thinking this I was leaving off all thought of the different neurological nature of the work, and its overall throughness and relatedness; factors which make for some synergistic heat in and of themselves.
In order to deal with it, I began to pick up my current main instrument, the guitar, and practice like made, and then improvise and maybe work on writing a little in order to "right" my attitude before going on to challenge work.
The curious part was that the guitar work and the Challenge work seemed to get locked together somehow. It's not as if I was actually practicing using Intuitive Protocols (though they were creeping in), nor was I following any specific programmatic aspects in my musical practice (though I began to notice some simliarities in the "wavelike" nature of the peak-rest-compensate-build-peak 4x7 cycle in my past experiences with musical practice.
It was more like they both had to move, or neither would.
It was most profound on the last "high intensity" day of the challenge, when I'd had a LOT of trouble ramping up to doing the work that evening. It was the last cycle, I was probably thinking way to hard about it, and I'd gotten myself into a state of extreme irritation, complaisance and depression. So, I felt the need to sit down and practice "a bit." I ended up practicing for something like 6 hours, well into the morning, and making headway on some musical issues that had been bothering me for quite some time.
I should add here that the previous nights "moderate intensity" cycle had been a nearly unmitigated distaster in my mind. Terrible technique, no feel, missing things that I couldn't imagine missing.
But after a night of NO sleep, I went to do the "high" cycle feeling really centered because of the effect of the guitar work, but not expecting anything really great... just intending to give it the full force of my last night.
The strange thing was, with a horrid day previous and no sleep, I managed to have experience the best work of the program. Didn't feel it coming, it just happened.
Now, all I can figure is that somehow, by way of something in the nature of the work, and the accountability of it, both of these endeavors - the "musical" and the "physical" - seem to have burrrowed into the same lump somewhere under my skin, and gotten bound up with each other.
I've noticed it with some other things as well... I have a little less tolerance for hearing myself or anyone else say other than what they mean, probably because of the discipline of attempting to know what I mean by what I'm doing... and I have a greater desire to hone down my pursuits into what I'm going to chase down, REALLY. Things like that. But it's as though it all happens organically, without any sense of it coming. Odd.
The other way I've thought of this (with relation to the "other" works happening simultaneously) is that it is simple a result of the fact that ALL a person's cumulative works, taken together, make up the persons "state" or "headspace" at any given time. And when the "headspace" isn't there (as it would have been lacking without the seemingly ridiculous hours of practice before doing the work), or if one is fatigued THE WORK HAS TO CHANGE TO FIT THE STATE. Because the work IS about the state, and adaptation, and understanding, and a clearer intuition. (This is not a bad thing, always. There were times during the challenge when fatigue served me well... because it FORCED me to stand back, reassess my actual state rather than my hoped-for state, and do the work to suit.) In this respect, CST is not a stake to be driven through the heart of some monster of apathy or exhaustion. In CST I'm finding that the importance it first in seeing the monster as it really is... no more NOR less powerful than its reality - or ours - allows.
Oh.... and here's another wierd little thing. I hadn't thought I'd made any meaningful headway in terms of core activation during the challenge... I just felt like it had been left out, in pursuit of other needs. I still think is a gaping hole in my practice, but today there was a little sign of hope. I was signing with a group of people, and I noticed that my voice was a little clearer, a little more effortless, and my upper range was 'freer.' If I remember correctly, the diaphragm and its control are prime contributors in this area. So it was rather a nice little post-it out of the sky....
------- THE EFFECT OF THE PROGAM ON UNDERSTANDING OF CST PRINCIPLES -------
I think perhaps the most important thing in doing work like this is to come out the end with a clearer picture of what there is now to be done.
I feel like my grasp of some previous problem areas in CST methodology are much clearer now - shoulder pack and crown-to-coccyx alignment being two - but more important are those I need to move forward and internalize NOW - specifically core activation and hip drive.
Even given 28 days of thinking on "the same exercises" (which seemed to morph oddly as I went) there was so much to be mindful about, that some things were certain to fall through the cracks. This part is largely about trusting the process I think, and believing that what comes to mind will be either what NEEDS to come to mind at that point, or perhaps is just all I'm capable of working with at that point. It doesn't really matter which (which is another beauty of the Intuitive Training protocol)
So I know what's next, and I have a more solid foundation on which to put it. It's like a good map to an old-world sailor: gold.
-------- DIETARY INFLUENCES ------------
I honestly think it would have been difficult to get through this WITHOUT the change in diet. My stomach did rebel a few time in the course of things, but I suppose that's par for the course given a life long habit trail.
I did what I always do... ate as simply as I could while holding to the instructions. This probably wasn't the best way to go, the lack of variety in addition to the alien nature of the change probably made it a bit too much toward the end.
BUT. I do have to say that the system has been running very clean. The greater fluid intake, along with essentially eliminated caffeine and higher healthy food based protein helped a great deal, and I have no desire at this point to go back to my old habits. But I will have to learn to cook.
I should also add that the change in diet seems to have some tendency to lay bare whatever emotional issue may exist around food. And since the body doesn't seem suffer much confusion about what it's source of fuel is for the work being requested of it... those emotional issue seem to point right back at the work. Again.
--------- OBSTACLES -----------
The greatest obstacle I've had in the course of this work is - as is usual for me - balance. The work of making an endeavor sustainable is not something I'm known for. Working, yeah. Keeping coming back (after losing ground), yeah. Making interesting stuff up on the fly and solving problems, yeah. But sustainable. The thought shall make monkeys weep with laughter.
But, again, the whole nature of CST is sustainability. And 4x7 is a microcosm (Oooooh. I used that word.) of the sustainability of the system, in every detail. From the incremental approach to the exercises, building to the latter phases, to the reduction of rest phases, to the awareness of change in internal state and need for compensation based on that, to the structure of the cycle itself ... on and on. (A brief side note here... NOT ONCE during the program did I experience any DOMS, EXCEPT on a cycle in which I missed the Prasara component - which are Walking Seal and Side Sunset flows on the DVD. Could have been other causes, but it argues to sounds structure for me.)
So, that's been my irritation. Wanting always to move on the fly, finding the... OH WAIT.... THE MAGIC IN THE MUNDANE.... SOMEBODY ALREADY THOUGHT OF THIS....
Honestly. That just struck me right there. No kidding.
But I'm beginning to get some answers, and again, I think the core is in the Intuitive protocols. The landscape is a LOT more interesting when your looking at the actual landscape.... which, in reality, is NOT NOT NOT the exercise or the tool or whatever. It is the individual's internal response, recognizing it, honoring it, and learning to really work with it. I'm finding it's a much bigger bite than I thought it was, but also much more promising.
------- CHANGES IN GOALS AS A RESULT OF THE CHALLENGE -------
This one is blindingly simple. It has to do with the same thing I've talked to death already. Intuitive Training.
I came to CST wanting flow, because I had a very strong sense of a deficit. (Actually, anyone attempting to breath in the same room as me tended to have some sense of a deficit.) Now I have a much clearer understanding - or belief - that I'm only going to get that from a change in the nature of my internal awarenes.
I won't restate the rest...
------------------------------------------
Lastly, we're supposed to speak to "why winning this challenge is important to you now, how that has changed from the beginning, to the middle to the end; what it means to you as a person."
I'm going to do two things at once: sound really trite, and be really blunt. I'll leave ya'll to sort them out:
I WANT TO GO TO A CST SEMINAR SOON. BECAUSE I WANT TO. Or at least get one of those cool looking bats...
There. I said it and I'm glad.
And the question of why winning is important to me is... I don't know. I already got to be pulled forward and be allowed the blessing of attempting to help others pull themselves forward, for 28 days. And it's been really wonderful. So I feel like "why I want to win" is almost a slap. Like we haven't all, already. I want everyone to win. Everyone did win. These folks have been A HUGE BLESSING to work with. There are people in this wonderful little group who are going to be really great coaches, if they want to be, and I want them to get on with it now, if they want to. I want to put all the prizes in a pot and send the money to people living in boxes in the Phillippines. I want everyone over for dinner. I don't know the answer, I'm sorry.
I just feel so great, I'm a new person, I'd like to thank all the little people...
-------------------------
EDIT 2/12
There's something I feel it's necessary to add here.
To my knowledge, none of my friends in the Challenge missed a single day of the assigned work, and NOT because they felt fine and well the whole time. In contrast, I missed a total of 1 no intensity day and 2 low intensity days, one being the last. This may be overly granular, but it's only fair that it be known. People who manage to miss nothing deserve the honor of having done so.
This is the 28th day of the Challenge, and whereas yesterday I would have sold my mama's shoes to have this be over for a while, now I'm not ready to be done.
I'm going to try to be as succinct as I can in answering the questions asked of us for this report. Not least because I do not currently have the juice to approximate a Russian novel on the subject. (EDIT: I just scanned this, and, you know, it looks like a Russian novel on the subject. Sorry.)
As I write this, I find I'm having trouble deciding on a single bit of acquired wisdom that shines above all others. My overall sense at this moment is that there's been so much, so many varied - yet seamlessly integrated - factors that it's difficult to sort them out at all.
---------- ON THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF THE CHALLENGE --------
I think the American style here would be to say "I just feel so great, I'm a new person, I'd like to thank all the little people..." And I bet that's bang-on for some, even many people who will go through this process.
But I think it's important to say that at least part of the merit of any meaningful process is it's malleability IN SPECIFIC EFFECT to any given person.
There are any number of self help, self actualizing, self inflating, watch-me-build-the-universe-from-scratch-with-my-pineal-gland persons out there who I could get some kind of off the shelf charge from. (Maybe. If I were a different person. Not that I'm invulnerable.)
But a lot of what I felt in this process - quite possibly in part because sleep didn't work out all that well overal - was angry. Frustrated. Depressed.
This is not to say that I did not notice the positive effects of what we were doing all along. I did, and I do. But the part of me that got hammered here and there NEEDED to be hammered. Oh... and I just remembered something Herr Doktor CSTschniffleheitzer Brian Bentz said to me when I was equivocating about getting involved early in the process (I paraphrase, because he mumbles. Ha.) "There's a thing inside you that doesn't want to play, because it's scared. And it should be, because it's going to die."
Maybe that's a little dramatic for some tastes, but I think it's a good metaphor. Any system that has anything important to offer is going to have some important things NOT to offer. Those things will either fall away, or continue on as stumbling blocks.
I think I (and all my friends who participated) lost a few of those. What were mine? Can't really say. It's probably too soon to even know there gone, still a little "phantom limb" going on most likely. But somethings different...
Wait. Here's something. I have a clearer picture of what it means to be physically disciplined. And I have a clearer picture of the fact that what I'd thought most of my life - that discipline and bashing one's head in are one and the same - is just not true. But it makes me angry and frustrated and depressed to talk about it right now and I'm all out of bullets so that's all I'm going to say.
-------- THE "Что это такое?" (what's this?) EFFECT OF THE INTUITIVE PROTOCOL--------
This is perhaps the most peculiar, the one I didn't expect. Probably as a result of the "in your face" nature of the intuitive training protocol (close and honest monitoring of internal state via RPD, RPT and RPE) during the challenge, there were lessons I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise - at least not so quickly.
There seems to be something about taking a willful, consistent effort and applying both emotional AND intellectual scrutiny to it that not only makes the work more efficient and comprehensible, but that also drives something about the work deeper into my gut, heart, mind... whatever. Not only that, but the process seems to drag other things that relate to the process to the surface with the work that starts out as the original goal.
In my case, in about the middle of the Challenge, I began to deal with some on-again, off-again irritation and sometimes even depression about slogging on. Now... that's seemed a little odd in itself, because by my old criteria I didn't really think I was working harder than I ever had - I've got a bit of a history of putting my own nose to the grindstone (though not necessarily in a predicatble way). Of course, in thinking this I was leaving off all thought of the different neurological nature of the work, and its overall throughness and relatedness; factors which make for some synergistic heat in and of themselves.
In order to deal with it, I began to pick up my current main instrument, the guitar, and practice like made, and then improvise and maybe work on writing a little in order to "right" my attitude before going on to challenge work.
The curious part was that the guitar work and the Challenge work seemed to get locked together somehow. It's not as if I was actually practicing using Intuitive Protocols (though they were creeping in), nor was I following any specific programmatic aspects in my musical practice (though I began to notice some simliarities in the "wavelike" nature of the peak-rest-compensate-build-peak 4x7 cycle in my past experiences with musical practice.
It was more like they both had to move, or neither would.
It was most profound on the last "high intensity" day of the challenge, when I'd had a LOT of trouble ramping up to doing the work that evening. It was the last cycle, I was probably thinking way to hard about it, and I'd gotten myself into a state of extreme irritation, complaisance and depression. So, I felt the need to sit down and practice "a bit." I ended up practicing for something like 6 hours, well into the morning, and making headway on some musical issues that had been bothering me for quite some time.
I should add here that the previous nights "moderate intensity" cycle had been a nearly unmitigated distaster in my mind. Terrible technique, no feel, missing things that I couldn't imagine missing.
But after a night of NO sleep, I went to do the "high" cycle feeling really centered because of the effect of the guitar work, but not expecting anything really great... just intending to give it the full force of my last night.
The strange thing was, with a horrid day previous and no sleep, I managed to have experience the best work of the program. Didn't feel it coming, it just happened.
Now, all I can figure is that somehow, by way of something in the nature of the work, and the accountability of it, both of these endeavors - the "musical" and the "physical" - seem to have burrrowed into the same lump somewhere under my skin, and gotten bound up with each other.
I've noticed it with some other things as well... I have a little less tolerance for hearing myself or anyone else say other than what they mean, probably because of the discipline of attempting to know what I mean by what I'm doing... and I have a greater desire to hone down my pursuits into what I'm going to chase down, REALLY. Things like that. But it's as though it all happens organically, without any sense of it coming. Odd.
The other way I've thought of this (with relation to the "other" works happening simultaneously) is that it is simple a result of the fact that ALL a person's cumulative works, taken together, make up the persons "state" or "headspace" at any given time. And when the "headspace" isn't there (as it would have been lacking without the seemingly ridiculous hours of practice before doing the work), or if one is fatigued THE WORK HAS TO CHANGE TO FIT THE STATE. Because the work IS about the state, and adaptation, and understanding, and a clearer intuition. (This is not a bad thing, always. There were times during the challenge when fatigue served me well... because it FORCED me to stand back, reassess my actual state rather than my hoped-for state, and do the work to suit.) In this respect, CST is not a stake to be driven through the heart of some monster of apathy or exhaustion. In CST I'm finding that the importance it first in seeing the monster as it really is... no more NOR less powerful than its reality - or ours - allows.
Oh.... and here's another wierd little thing. I hadn't thought I'd made any meaningful headway in terms of core activation during the challenge... I just felt like it had been left out, in pursuit of other needs. I still think is a gaping hole in my practice, but today there was a little sign of hope. I was signing with a group of people, and I noticed that my voice was a little clearer, a little more effortless, and my upper range was 'freer.' If I remember correctly, the diaphragm and its control are prime contributors in this area. So it was rather a nice little post-it out of the sky....
------- THE EFFECT OF THE PROGAM ON UNDERSTANDING OF CST PRINCIPLES -------
I think perhaps the most important thing in doing work like this is to come out the end with a clearer picture of what there is now to be done.
I feel like my grasp of some previous problem areas in CST methodology are much clearer now - shoulder pack and crown-to-coccyx alignment being two - but more important are those I need to move forward and internalize NOW - specifically core activation and hip drive.
Even given 28 days of thinking on "the same exercises" (which seemed to morph oddly as I went) there was so much to be mindful about, that some things were certain to fall through the cracks. This part is largely about trusting the process I think, and believing that what comes to mind will be either what NEEDS to come to mind at that point, or perhaps is just all I'm capable of working with at that point. It doesn't really matter which (which is another beauty of the Intuitive Training protocol)
So I know what's next, and I have a more solid foundation on which to put it. It's like a good map to an old-world sailor: gold.
-------- DIETARY INFLUENCES ------------
I honestly think it would have been difficult to get through this WITHOUT the change in diet. My stomach did rebel a few time in the course of things, but I suppose that's par for the course given a life long habit trail.
I did what I always do... ate as simply as I could while holding to the instructions. This probably wasn't the best way to go, the lack of variety in addition to the alien nature of the change probably made it a bit too much toward the end.
BUT. I do have to say that the system has been running very clean. The greater fluid intake, along with essentially eliminated caffeine and higher healthy food based protein helped a great deal, and I have no desire at this point to go back to my old habits. But I will have to learn to cook.
I should also add that the change in diet seems to have some tendency to lay bare whatever emotional issue may exist around food. And since the body doesn't seem suffer much confusion about what it's source of fuel is for the work being requested of it... those emotional issue seem to point right back at the work. Again.
--------- OBSTACLES -----------
The greatest obstacle I've had in the course of this work is - as is usual for me - balance. The work of making an endeavor sustainable is not something I'm known for. Working, yeah. Keeping coming back (after losing ground), yeah. Making interesting stuff up on the fly and solving problems, yeah. But sustainable. The thought shall make monkeys weep with laughter.
But, again, the whole nature of CST is sustainability. And 4x7 is a microcosm (Oooooh. I used that word.) of the sustainability of the system, in every detail. From the incremental approach to the exercises, building to the latter phases, to the reduction of rest phases, to the awareness of change in internal state and need for compensation based on that, to the structure of the cycle itself ... on and on. (A brief side note here... NOT ONCE during the program did I experience any DOMS, EXCEPT on a cycle in which I missed the Prasara component - which are Walking Seal and Side Sunset flows on the DVD. Could have been other causes, but it argues to sounds structure for me.)
So, that's been my irritation. Wanting always to move on the fly, finding the... OH WAIT.... THE MAGIC IN THE MUNDANE.... SOMEBODY ALREADY THOUGHT OF THIS....
Honestly. That just struck me right there. No kidding.
But I'm beginning to get some answers, and again, I think the core is in the Intuitive protocols. The landscape is a LOT more interesting when your looking at the actual landscape.... which, in reality, is NOT NOT NOT the exercise or the tool or whatever. It is the individual's internal response, recognizing it, honoring it, and learning to really work with it. I'm finding it's a much bigger bite than I thought it was, but also much more promising.
------- CHANGES IN GOALS AS A RESULT OF THE CHALLENGE -------
This one is blindingly simple. It has to do with the same thing I've talked to death already. Intuitive Training.
I came to CST wanting flow, because I had a very strong sense of a deficit. (Actually, anyone attempting to breath in the same room as me tended to have some sense of a deficit.) Now I have a much clearer understanding - or belief - that I'm only going to get that from a change in the nature of my internal awarenes.
I won't restate the rest...
------------------------------------------
Lastly, we're supposed to speak to "why winning this challenge is important to you now, how that has changed from the beginning, to the middle to the end; what it means to you as a person."
I'm going to do two things at once: sound really trite, and be really blunt. I'll leave ya'll to sort them out:
I WANT TO GO TO A CST SEMINAR SOON. BECAUSE I WANT TO. Or at least get one of those cool looking bats...
There. I said it and I'm glad.
And the question of why winning is important to me is... I don't know. I already got to be pulled forward and be allowed the blessing of attempting to help others pull themselves forward, for 28 days. And it's been really wonderful. So I feel like "why I want to win" is almost a slap. Like we haven't all, already. I want everyone to win. Everyone did win. These folks have been A HUGE BLESSING to work with. There are people in this wonderful little group who are going to be really great coaches, if they want to be, and I want them to get on with it now, if they want to. I want to put all the prizes in a pot and send the money to people living in boxes in the Phillippines. I want everyone over for dinner. I don't know the answer, I'm sorry.
I just feel so great, I'm a new person, I'd like to thank all the little people...
-------------------------
EDIT 2/12
There's something I feel it's necessary to add here.
To my knowledge, none of my friends in the Challenge missed a single day of the assigned work, and NOT because they felt fine and well the whole time. In contrast, I missed a total of 1 no intensity day and 2 low intensity days, one being the last. This may be overly granular, but it's only fair that it be known. People who manage to miss nothing deserve the honor of having done so.