Every day, with very few exceptions, we do our Daily Magic walk. This is an hour and fifteen minutes of a very cool audio session by Tony Robbins. It is incredibly centering and energizing as it takes you through a focus on gratitude, autosuggestion and lots of other great stuff. Now it is important to note that the way Lori does it is no “walk”. She asserts that the pace must be such that it breaks down or through your consciousness in order to really lock it in. OK, “I’m an athlete, I can do that” I say to myself, “No problem”. What I have come to learn doing this is that walking at an advanced pace up and down hills for an hour and fifteen minutes can be really hard! Especially when I have to walk with a half human/half gazelle like Lori! I have definitely seen the change in my body in the three weeks we’ve been doing it. After running for years I’ve found that this is such a better workout for me.
Here’s the point – we’re sitting together yesterday evening working on this site and our Ownthe24 facebook page and I mentioned that if we’re going to take our walk we’d better do it now. I told her I really didn’t want to. She said she would be ok with missing today if I wanted to. Then it hit me how psychotic I am with this stuff. I told her that now we had to because if we missed because I didn’t want to go I would feel like a crap about it…unless she was injured or something (trying to get her to ‘own’ missing the walk). “Nope” she replied. “Shit”, I breathed to myself, knowing we had to go now. We got our gear on and made ready the ipod with the splitter so we can both listen to it. We hold hands the entire walk and she is plugged into my ipod (isn’t that cute?)
We have both spent years running and working out and have the same compulsion to track our time and performance on a fixed course, so we know where our “marks” are, including our finish point, based on where the audio we are listening to is. For example, for years I listened to Rage Against the Machine’s first CD every time I ran. I knew exactly where I was supposed to be at the beginning of each track and where I should be on the CD when I finished.
Back to the story – as we hit the play button and started the walk I immediately decided that we were going to hit it aggressively this time and that I was going to “Rage Walk!” (I love the dichotomy of that term). Yep, I believe that there is real strength and power sometimes in channeling our anger and frustration, etc (we all have it) and using it to our benefit. Here’s the picture: stay with me on this, I channel my “rage” toward all of the negative emotions and/or tendencies – laziness, guilt, shame, self-doubt, etc., the “demons” that exist in all of us. I set them all up in my mind, create blurry little images of me as the embodiment of each of these emotions and imagine them spewing their negativity at me.
And then (here’s the best part), I curse them as I jam through my workout! I love that! I mantra over and over (mostly to myself) “F-you, shut up”. It’s awesome! Over and over and over I beat them down as I found new levels of energy; sweat pouring from me, muscles stressing, entire body energized and empowered!!
I’m telling you, by the time we finished I was high! I had beaten those bastards down firmly, we overcame our temptation to not go at all…and we had absolutely CRUSHED our previous personal best time! It was euphoric!
So that’s a lot of words this morning to convey the suggestion that sometimes you gotta Rage against the demons! The next time you just don’t want to do it, whatever ‘it’ is – your workout, or some task you would like to avoid, try it! You WILL find it very useful, empowering, and you will have the satisfaction of knowing you got it done!!
