Working as a psychologist, the strangeness of the holiday season never escapes me. Parties abound, lights twinkle, the crowds in Sobey’s have a special quality of freneticism that goes beyond the materialism and posturing of any other season of the year.

Coincident with the frenetic sparkle and polish of the holidays, in the tough and intimate conversations inside my consultation room, I most often see in my clients a quality of human vulnerability, loneliness, broken-ness, immense love, and bravery.  The nobility of spirit in my clients’ work with me seems cast in high relief by the lights of the surrounding holidays.  Here, at the time of the year when the sun has all but disappeared, I often witness an immense wave of inner growth, that may be invisible to all but those with the most discerning eyes.  Why this time of year?  There is something irrational about immense personal growth coming at a time when the focus of most of the world is on the outer sparkle and glitter of a highly commercialized community event.  I am not aware of any science documenting a quantifiable increase in human consciousness correlated to a reduction in the angle of the sun in the northern hemisphere! However, after years of seeing a pattern of personal change happening in my clients in the depths of winter, I find treasure the month of December for unexpected reasons. I value the tiny changes in perceptions that portend the immense blooming of a client’s natural personality, or the transformation of a client’s subjective reality that often leads to healthy changes in objective realities (work, wellness, relationships, creativity) of their lives.

These changes are rarely experienced by clients as the immense victories over pathology that they are;  more often the changes are experienced as loss, separation, and the breaking up of the comfortable familiarities that are suddenly realized to be no longer true.  Much of what was once known by my clients to be true, is often left behind, as my brave clients move through darkness to reach for that something in their life that wants to be born.

Here is what this season is about to me: moving through the darkness to reach for a new dawning of awareness or a new way of living in the world, witnessing the early germination of a change that will only come to full blossoming in the coming months and years.

Whatever the story you tell about this season, consider it a season of change and look for the beginnings of transformation in your own life, here in the midst of bustle and darkness.

Madeleine L’Engle said “this is irrational season, where love blooms bright and wild.  Had Mary been filled with reason, there would have been no room for a child.”

May you begin to bloom bright and wild.

For more on vulnerability and growth, check out this new TED talk by Dr. Brene Brown.

Tis’ the season of Hallowe’en, so in the spirit of the season I thought I’d write on the topic of…Zombies!

First let’s define the term “Zombie”.  The Merriam Webster dictionary defines a Zombie as “1.  a will-less and speechless human…capable only of automatic movement who is held to have died and been supernaturally reanimated or 2. a person held to resemble the so-called walking dead; especially : automaton.”  Sound attractive?  A more interesting Zombie definition, and the one I prefer is: “3. a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice”. A Zombie cocktail may not be everyone’s end goal of personal development, but it does imply the qualities of spiciness, juiciness, and a little kick of life.

Now we all move in and out of differing levels of animation and flexibility, but I am sure that most of us have memories of a passing state of Zombiehood at some point in our lives. I can think of a philosophy class I took in my sophomore year of university which may have been Zombie Eden…but then again, it may have just been difficult to distinguish between those who had become Zombies and those who were still alive enough to recite syllogisms.  I can’t point fingers.  The truth is, at some point all of us may have temporarily entered a state of Zombiehood.  It is not necessary to avoid at all costs temporary states of zombielike behavior;  mentally numbing out in a boring meeting, or eyes glazing over at the thought of a particular person, may at times be healthy and adaptive!

Where temporary Zombie states turn into Zombiehood is where we become concerned about the potential loss of our precious life time and energy.  How do we enter Zombiehood? Perhaps the life we are living is not one of our choice, perhaps we are experiencing a strong resistance toward some unwanted experience, or perhaps we are caught in passivity, reacting to a situation rather than actively solving problems based on our deepest values.  These more enduring Zombiehood stances of living on autopilot, avoiding solving emotionally loaded problems, and fusion with rules that lead to rejection of our experience, all add up to what psychologists Kirk Strohsahl, Ph.D. and Patricia Robinson, Ph.D.(2008) refer to as the Depression Compression Experience (see p. 34 in their book Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression by New Harbinger Press) .  Depression Compression is an accurate professional term; I think  Zombiehood is an accurate first person description of the inner experience of a compressed life.

Strohsal and Robinson suggest that there are three pathways for movement from Zombiehood (or Depression Compression) into Vitality.

• Mindful actions based on your chosen lifestyle
• Active, value-based problem-solving, and
• Accepting stance toward unwanted, private experience.

These pathways suggest that Zombiehood does not have to be a permanent state.  Many of us are caught up in automatic rules on how to approach life.  Perhaps we’ve inherited them as teachings from important others, or perhaps we have developed our automatic rules for ourselves honestly based how we have learned to survive past experience. If our automatic rules are resulting in Zombiehood, then it is time to look for a way of being that brings more vitality.

According to Strohsahl and Robinson the pathways to vitality are as close as the present moment.

• Try being where you are in the moment, noticing whether the automatic rules you use actually work for you.
• Try to take an experimental, or playful, approach to your life, guided by the actual results of choices, rather than by automatic rules.
• Try taking an active stance in relation to a problem.
• Try welcoming in and accepting things that are difficult.

Strohsahl and Robinson note that people with an active stance toward their life will seek out a partner who has said something hurtful, and will try to talk through the problem, even though the conversation might be difficult, and even though there may be no guarantee that they will get the outcome that the relationship will be restored.  This willingness to engage in an experience, even without guarantees that you will get the outcome you want, is an important part of acceptance of your life as it is, in all of its glorious imperfection. The sum total of being mindful, being active, and accepting all of experience (even the unwanted bits) is flexible and vital Humanity. This is the antidote and the antithesis of Zombiehood

I hope that we all, no matter what our state of Zombiehood, begin to create moments of psychological flexibility and vital living, with every breath. Or, if we are going to be Zombies, let’s be the kind with the qualities of spiciness, juiciness, and a little kick of life.

What do you want to be for Hallowe’en?

Reference

Strohsahl, K. & Robinson, P. (2008). The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression.  Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.

I’m reading the book The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, MD.  The thing I like about Dr. Harris’ ideas on how to move us out of suffering into living is his emphasis on contact with the present moment.

Recently I had to spend a lot of time away from someone very dear to me.  When I felt the heart pang of missing them, and noticed my thinking starting to spin into webs of story-making about separateness and loneliness, I remembered Dr. Harris’ words about staying in the present moment. Dr. Harris describes contact with the present moment as dropping anchor in an emotional storm.

Rather than being caught on the wild winds of thinking, or buffeting tides of heart pain, I decided I’d try dropping anchor into the experiences of my senses in the present moment.  I “dropped anchor” into noticing my breath at first.  I was surprised that such a simple gesture seemed to slow everything down and give me some compassion for myself and others, while still feeling a heart pang.  I then entered the present moment by going walking with other people I loved, in the cool shade of a forest trail.  That (wow!) made me aware I was still deeply connected to people I love.  As a last experiment, I let my hands be my thoughts as I focused on cooking a deliciously rich sauce for a dinner. The steam from salted boiling water, the creamy aromas of garlic and cheese, the changing textures of fresh pasta struck me as miniature works of art that I’d never quite appreciated before, even with hundreds of meals behind me.

This kind of contact with the present moment is also called mindfulness.  We let our Mind be Full of the moments that are present here and now.  I have also heard another teacher describe this solitude and appreciation of the senses in the present moment as ‘feeding directly from the universe’.

You know what? It works.  Contact with the present moment was a kind way to come alive through separateness , turning it into solitude;  contact with the present moment was a kind way to come alive through loneliness, turning it into an opportunity to be present with my self and those around me, experiencing everything with fresh senses from moment to moment.

Are you suffering? Mindfulness is not a panacaea, but it is a kinder, gentler way to be alive than to suffer through endless webs of story.  Contact the moment.  You might be surprised by what you discover here and now.

Here’s my personal story on how my mind’s attempt at keeping me alive (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) MESSED with me in the present moment, and how changing my mind stories changed everything:

When I was seven years old I visited my grandmother in Texas and I became very ill.  As I lay ill on my bed, my grandmother covered me with a warm, richly coloured, maroon blanket and brought me some soup.  I ate the soup.  I promptly threw up the soup.  I lay on the bed moaning and looking at the maroon blanket covering me.

After 24 hours of moaning and illness, I felt better. I got up from my bed, and played all day outside in the beautiful Texas sun. Then I came inside my grandmother’s house, feeling ready for a nap.  I went into my bedroom.

The problem was, once I saw the maroon blanket on my bed, I again felt nauseous.  I couldn’t be in the same room as the maroon blanket without feeling nauseous. Months later, back home in Canada, my mother bought me some maroon clothes.  I couldn’t wear them because every time I looked at them they made me nauseous.

The colour maroon became my enemy: as an adult I avoided clothes, furniture, books, anything that was maroon because just a glimpse of the colour could bring on a wave of sickening nausea.  For years, my mind took the experience of the colour maroon, connected Maroon with nausea, decided Maroon was NOT SAFE, and put every later experience of the colour Maroon in the category NOT SAFE.  I learned to look out for Maroon, to actively avoid Maroon, and to actively avoid the experience of nausea that my mind told me meant that Maroon was making me sick.

I could have kept my avoidance of Maroon going for more than 35 years.  However, life has a way of curing avoidance.  I was cured of my repulsion for the colour maroon when I was accepted into graduate school at Texas A&M University.  The school colours of Texas A&M are – yes you guessed it – Maroon.

At Texas A&M everyone wears maroon, parties are “Maroon Out” events, and students boast that they actually “bleed Maroon.”  It was face Maroon or give up my chance to do a Ph.D..  I had to soak in Maroon for years to counter the one original experience that drove my mind’s persistent stories about the nausea-inducing qualities of Maroon.  To reverse my mind’s active story-making,  I had to change my story about the colour Maroon to a story where Maroon could mean opportunity, growth, and joy (Maroon = SAFE) rather than Maroon = NOT SAFE.

I went from a story about repulsion for the colour maroon to a story about celebrating victories surrounded by thousands of people wearing maroon.   The mind as the “don’t get eaten machine”  (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) makes a plethora of well-intended but inaccurate stories and judgments about what our experience means.  Unexamined mind stories can often override the reality of our senses.  In reality maroon was no more responsible for me getting ill at age 7 than my grandmother was.  Avoidance of new experiences based on unexamined mind stories can rob us from following our goals and dreams.  The good news is that the mind and its stories can change.  My stories changed. Your stories can change too.

What do you choose: stories that bring suffering and avoidance, or stories that help you embrace life and move you towards what you love?  Mind stories do “change everything” (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008).

Here is a fun sample of the whole culture of Maroon at my alma mater Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

References
Ciarrochi, J. & Bailey, A. (2008).  A CBT practitioner’s guide to ACT.  Oakland: New Harbinger.

You’ve been caught by mind stories.  I’ve been caught by mind stories, despite years of practicing mindfulness.

One can hardly blame the mind for using stories and words to help us process experiences.  The problem is that the mind’s stories create our experience.  Because it is the nature of the mind to try to keep us alive through telling stories, sometimes we repeat unhelpful stories to ourselves long after the event that started them is over.  The mind may originally intend to protect us from further suffering through these stories, but what often happens is that we use stories to try to avoid repeating anticipated difficulties, and consequently our stories snag us into an endless loop of avoiding potential pain and fruitless attempts to try to control our experience.  Our stories can create extra suffering and cause us to avoid challenges.

Where do you find your stories causing you to avoid or control your experience?  Check back here and I’ll tell you my story of the 35 years I spent actively avoiding the colour maroon.

(Teaser: I’m wearing an Aggie ring.  What would be the problem with avoiding maroon?)

I love the phrase the “Don’t-Get-Eaten Machine” used by my ACT colleagues and others to describe the mind (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008).  The mind is a terribly brilliant don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008).

As I look out my window into the forest surrounding my home, my mind processes green waving movements in less than 300 milliseconds.  In another 250 to 450 milliseconds my mind comprehends trees waving in the wind and says “forest”. My body is relaxed and I feel pleasure as I look out at the forest.  Total speed of the thought: between 550 and 750 milliseconds (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005).  Our minds are designed to take flashes of information from our five senses, process that information quickly, and judge what information is most important to survival, all in the space of less than 750 milliseconds (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005).

The mind has a challenge: in the space of 750 milliseconds (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005), the mind has to process sensory information, understand, and also has to keep us alive.  As humans we didn’t evolve with big teeth, or claws.  We didn’t grow to be the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex to fend off potential threats.  We grew a big and efficient brain which allows us to not get eaten, by using the cognitive prowess of our speedy mind.  This is a complicated job.  To stay fast and efficient the mind takes a lot of shortcuts (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005).

Our mind as don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) often uses shallow processing of new information, and tries to interpret new experience through the filter of old experience.  Our mind often skips over deep processing of new sensory experience and quickly connects present experience, past similar experiences, and the mind’s past judgments on the safety of past similar experiences to improve speed of processing.  This works to keep us safe.  By using past experience we learn to change our behavior: once we touch a hot stove we don’t tend to touch glowing red hot things again.

To stay speedy and efficient, the mind as don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) tries to put new information into simple categories; the mind often does a quick superficial scan and places a single new experience into an category of (pretty loosely) related experiences with their associated judgments and stories.  To keep us alive the mind tends to expand its connections between categories.  This is why a bad experience with one fruit, for example can expand to all fruits, or all fresh food, and so on.

To stay speedy and efficient, the mind as don’t-get-eaten-machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) often stores its information in the form of language or stories. By using language to connect our experience we can prepare ourselves to stay alive (by repeating stories to ourselves), and also help others to stay alive (by communicating our stories).  This is how we can greet a stranger in a friendly manner, but then experience fear if someone whispered to us “that person is violent” (for another example see the dog story in Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008).

The mind is brilliant to cut down processing time by using shallow processing based on past experience, simple expanding categories, and language (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005).  Using old associations from our past, over-categorizing new experiences based on minimal detail, and repeating stories to ourselves we can effectively stay alive.  The mind is a great don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008)!  Here is the rub: the mind trades accuracy off for efficiency.

In our contemporary age, the mind is still operating as if we are going to be eaten by a tiger at any moment.  The judgments our minds make about SAFE or NOT SAFE, and the stories our minds tell us about our experience, and the way our minds categorize new information from our senses, often become disconnected from facts.  In our contemporary age, instead of dealing with each new experience based on the facts from our senses, our mind as don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) continues to use shallow processing, simple expanding categories, and repetitive stories.  Because our mind continues to work as a don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008), our responses are often reactive, based on an original only loosely-related experience, and our stories persist even though they may no longer apply to our new present moment experiences (Solso, Maclin, & Maclin, 2005).

Can you see how the mind as a brilliant don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) might keep us reactive, inaccurate, and inefficient in how we think and respond?  Can you see how our mind as don’t-get-eaten machine (Ciarrochi & Bailey, 2008) might lead to present-day suffering (on top of the pain that reality will naturally give us!) (CiarrochI & Baily, 2008; Harris, 2008; Strohsal & Robinson, 2008; Walser & Westrup, 2009)  Keep watching, and we will continue our conversation about whether we should choose mind speed or mind accuracy, and about how our mind’s stories change everything.

References
Ciarrochi, J. & Bailey, A. (2008).  A CBT practitioner’s guide to ACT.  Oakland: New Harbinger.

Harris, R. (2008).  The happiness trap: How to stop struggling and start living.  Boston: Trumpeter.

Solso, R. L., Maclin, M. K., & Maclin, O. H. (2005). Cognitive psychology (7 ed.).
Toronto:  Allyn & Bacon.

Strohsal, K & Robinson, P. (2008).  The mindfulness and acceptance workbook for depression: Using acceptance and commitment therapy to move through depression and create a life worth living.  Oakland: New Harbinger.

Walser, R., & Westrup, D. (2009).  The mindful couple. Oakland: New Harbinger

*The statements in this blog are common ACT and cognitive psychology ideas and concepts.  To the best of this writer’s ability I attempt to give full value to the contributions of others and to credit colleagues for their ideas and work.  However, as I am a practitioner, I use these ideas on a daily basis and have integrated many ACT ideas into my thinking; I  have developed  variations and examples which are based on my own practices, teaching of cognitive psychology, and which are drawn from personal experience.  My variations on the core ACT ideas, my perspective on cognitive psychology concepts, and my interpretations of how ideas should be applied cannot be the responsibility of anyone else other than myself.  I refer you to a wonderful set of ACT publications put out by  http://www.newharbinger.com.

Are you like flowing water or like frozen ice?   One of the qualities of effective psychological work is that it cultivates in you the flexibility of flowing water.  Water as it flows towards its destination doesn’t demand that obstacles move out of its way;  water flows around or through obstacles.  (No need to point out that ice flattens obstacles but is glacially slow in doing so! Which would you rather be: flowing or glacial?!) Healthy individuals tend to have the flexible approach of flowing water in the face of changing demands.  They keep moving toward their destination, but simply respond to changing demands with fluidity.  Psychologically speaking, flexibility is the ability to persist with a behavior or change behavior in the service of what is most important to you.  Flexibility is your responsiveness to the changing demands around you;  it is the flowing, water-like qualities in your behavior that enable you to stay in contact with the present moment and work around powerful experiences that could take you closer to or farther from the values you hope to embody in your life.  Contrary to “mental toughness” approaches to improving performance, ACT promotes a flexibility approach to performance that is focused on values and emphasizes acting in ways that are responsive to changing demands. Let yourself flow now…

Are you interested in removing obstacles to the kind of life you want?  Sometimes if we are feeling frustrated or thwarted, it might be because we are acting in ways that are inconsistent with our deepest values.  When we get clear on our values, then what we need to do becomes more evident.  When we act on our values, we can find satisfaction regardless of changing circumstances.

To clarify your own values, try describing how you want to spend your limited time on this planet using verbs: if you are a performer, a value might be “giving the best of my ability on performance night”, if you are an athlete, a value might be “being consistent in my training intensity”.  Notice that these definitions fit what sport psychologists would call “process goals”.  Process goals are statements about HOW you want to do something rather than the outcomes or results of what you do.

Knowing your values helps you pursue your goals as a whole person.   It doesn’t demand that your goals make you into a whole person.  Define your values and watch the rest of your life follow.

You are an athlete, or you aspire to be one.  Moving your body gives you joy (or it did once).  There are books and coaches for training your strength, your endurance,  your flexibility, for timing your intensity with the scheduling of your event, for planning your diet.  There are guides for gear, clothing, shoes, nutrition supplements, training vacations, dating other athletes. There are inspiring stories from olympians, instructions on ways to apply your winning attitude to business, and star athletes’ confessionals.  All of these strategies are designed to do battle with external obstacles to your best performance as an athlete. A lot of sport psychology also treats the mind as an external obstacle to success.  Athletes are taught “mental toughness”, goal setting, visualization, and activation. These strategies are getting closer to those used at Sogge & Associates, but still aren’t quite the same as what we do.

The thing all the strategies for improving performance I’ve mentioned have in common is an assumption that you have to control or avoid obstacles to your success.  Many of them, even the sport psychology strategies that purport to teach you how to deal with your head, assume that the problem simply needs to be defined, then strategies need to be applied to do battle with the problem and make it go away.  The problems in thinking need to be targeted, then obliterated with another better “success code” thought.  At Sogge & Associates we take a different tack.  In our approach to overcoming performance barriers for athletes (and for anyone overcoming barriers, in fact) we apply mindfulness and acceptance to all problems in training, motivation, competition, and optimal performance.  Mindfulness and acceptance do not necessarily meant that one tries to make anything in their experience go away.  In an Acceptance and Commitment approach, we acknowledge that we all have internal barriers to performance and then we work on how to accept and then dissolve our own particular mind, emotion, or behavioural barriers with a willingness to deal with reality, converting the energy formerly locked into patterns that took us away from our deepest values and goals, into energy for forward momentum towards our deepest values and goals.

The problem with applying strategies to barriers to success to “make them go away” is that there is an assumption that a) you have to be in control and b) you have to avoid having problems.  Instead, in our practice we work with everything that you might experience as an athlete (or person striving to be their best), and teach you not how to do battle with barriers to optimal performance, but to literally digest all blocks with willingness, acceptance, and fierce commitment, so that you perform with effort and not struggle, moving mindfully towards your values and goals, without trying to eliminate any particular experience.  As one of my teachers once said: “reality is here anyway, why not have a full experience of it?” and I would add: “then let it go”.

If you are an athlete, assuming you have all the physical and technique training resources you need, then the biggest barrier to your optimal performance is you.  Dealing with your you in training for your sport is where things get tricky:  all the planning, control, and avoidance strategies (you’ve done all your workouts exactly according to the training plan, you’ve measured your diet scrupulously, you’ve got your pre-performance rituals down pat) just don’t work on the inner world that you conceive of as you. That’s right.  If  you’ve been rigourous about every extneral aspect of your training, you’ve done a great job.  Now you have to drop allthose strategies and do something else when it comes to the inner world.  You have to unlearn everything that works on external obstacles, to effectively deal with the biggest obstacle of all at the most elite levels of performance: that obstacle is you.

Imagine this:  what if your last obstacle is not subject to control or avoidance, and what if a lot of the strategies recommended by experts only make things worse?  What if you do everything right in terms of physical training and you still don’t get the results you want?  What if you have a perfect diet plan laid out for you but you can’t hit the right weight for your sport?  What if you have all the gear but aren’t motivated to use it?  What if your training ruins your relationships or your pleasure in life?  What if you think positively but still feel scared?  What if you get injured, can’t train, or don’t even like your sport anymore? What if you cry every time you have to do interval training, or you hate your coach and start avoiding practices just to not see him/her?  What to do then?

An Olympic athlete at a recent Olympic games trained for years and was expected to win gold.  He was celebrated in the media as his country’s big hope for an early medal.  He was prepared.  Then it happened: He bombed his heat and was eliminated before making the finals in the very event that was his specialty.  A reporter asked him how he was dealing with the setback.  He said “I can tell you what my sport psychologist wants me to say, or I can tell you what I really feel.”  He was caught in a struggle with himself.  This book is about removing that struggle. It isn’t about removing effort or pain.  Optimal performance as an athlete doesn’t come without effort and pain.  Sogge & Associates exists to help you move through that effort and pain, with minimal suffering and maximal movement towards  values and goals.  If enlightenment is continual waking up from habitual forms of thinking, doing, and being, then athletes (and professionals, and artists, and parents, and labourers) who bring willingness, acceptance, and commitment to their deepest values can be enlightened in the way they practice their sport.

Why me?

I’m a psychologist interested in the effects of stress on the body.  I’m interested in how the body responds to challenge, both acute and chronic.  And I’ve learned that the biggest stressor on the body is, (that’s right) the mind.

When I was in my late 20s I decided to apply to graduate school.  As a last taste of freedom before going into grad school a girlfriend and I planned a 6 week bike trip in Europe.  I had to work until the trip started so only had minimal preparation physically.  Early in the trip, we ambitiously launched into cycling the hills of the champagne region of France.  The first days were hard.  My quads were tight, my lungs were screaming, and it rained daily.  We camped in a tiny tent, so we hardly slept and when we did we woke to more cold and wet clothing.  We were tired, hungry, cold and hurting badly.  Then came the Hill of Death.   We were lost in champagne country, and realized that the fastest way to our destination was through a series of valleys.  The scenery is a blur to me now but all I remember is every muscle in my body screaming with pain.  I swore to myself for k after k cursing the pain, the hill, the lack of training, the weather, the lack of food, exhaustion, you name it.  Then a tiny voice inside me seemed to whisper “you have a lot of energy for resisting. What if you just went with it”  So I stopped.  I stopped resisting pain, exhaustion, hunger, cold, broken chains, headwinds, bad gear, screaming muscles.  A sort of dawn happened.  First I noticed I could move the pain around my body wherever I wanted.  Then I noticed I could pay attention to different sensations in the body just the way one paid attention to different brush strokes in a painting.  Then I noticed that a curve in the road that revealed more and steepler climbing only brought a blip of resistance and then gave way to curiosity.  Then I noticed joy. Then I noticed tiny surges of energy as I played with sensation instead of fighting.  It was like being caught in a storm of struggle, then suddenly sinking into the flow of effort.  The mind went quiet.  We hit the top of the hill at last, and soared down the other side with pleasure.  Effort, not struggle.  Mindfulness not control.  Forward movement to goals, not avoidance of obstacles. Presence of pain but no mind sufferingto go with the pain.  That is where this book was born.  No amount of training since then has successfully eliminated the experience of pain I had cycling that hill in France.  Even bearing children with no medication, I still rated my pain according to number of “Champagne hills” (my first baby was 2 champagne hills in case you are wondering). However I do know now that given that pain is inevitable in training for recreation or competition, suffering is optional.  Effort is required, but struggle is optional.  In my work I use the power of the revolution of acceptance and mindfulness therapies, which I’ve since studied for 15 years, to dissolve your internal barriers to your optimal performance, and to achieve this performance with effort not struggle.  If you are ready to dissolve internal barriers to optimal performance, then your work towards enlightenment as an athlete is ready to move forward.