Open-Secrets

Tag: conditioning

  • Cowboy Up to Yoga

    Cowboy Up to Your Feminine Side

    Cowboy Up to YogaI used to work with a bunch of guys who were raised to believe that men were meant to be strong and unemotional – unless they were cussing and angry, which were acceptable expressions of male superiority. In fact, I was one of those guys. It’s hard not be with all of the conditioning thrown at us.

    I guess growing up in the 50’s & 60’s we had two choices depending on our sex – macho or Barbie. I never met a guy in my youth that wanted to grow up and be Ken. The thing with conditioning is that we rarely question it in a deep way. The deeper the conditioning, the more it feels like an unquestionable part of us. It can be hard to imagine a life outside of our norms. In fact, a large part of our mental activity is always being spent in maintaining the status quo.

    I started taking yoga classes this week as part of my new direction toward health & fitness. At 60, I decided I would commit myself to actualizing some goals I have been paying lip service to for too many years. One goal being more flexibility for this aging body.

    Yoga is interesting. There’s a constant reminder from the instructor for strength and relaxation at the same time – yin & yang. Unlike my conditioning which mostly emphasized the yang and diminished the yin.

    Of course, that created a lot of problems that are still being sorted out. As I watch young boys and girls interact, I see the conditioning is still as active as ever. I was observing some high school students interact the other day in a couple of different situations. The boys were being inconsiderate and callous towards the girls and the girls were all a giggle and accepting of it.

    All human beings are born with a range of emotional ground that far exceeds where most of us find ourselves as adults. We move, emotionally, in a very constricted range of experience – like a 60-year old body that hasn’t been stretched regularly through the years.

    Laying on the yoga mat and moving through the poses brings many opportunities to me:

    • Working on increasing flexibility
    • Developing focus and concentration
    • Attending to the moment and letting the daily mind go
    • Embodying strength and relaxation in the same moment
    • Allowing the superego to take a 90-minute break

    Men seem to be greatly outnumbered by women in yoga classes – which also seems to be the case in personal growth work. I think that says a lot about male conditioning.

    Cowboy Up Your Curiosity

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  • Slave to Theory

    All Thought & No Action or Prisoner of  Belief System

    Saw this tweet from @CoachDeb – Growing up under the Protestant Work Ethic, I thought “sweating” was pious & the key to success. Then I realized I was slave 2 theory.

    Prisoner of Belief System

    It seems to me that being a slave to theory can take a couple of forms:

    • A tendency to live more in the conceptual world where we have more “talk” and less “walk”
    • Living in a closed system – prisoner of our beliefs – little, if any, openness to outside influence or feedback

    The conditioning of our mind by our early environment is a hard thing to break free of. Our minds, bodies, and consciousness were “impressed” by these “beliefs” hundreds and thousands of times a day in blatant and subtle ways. As infants and very young children the parental and environmental demand to “see the world as we see it” is a survival issue – who’s going to feed and house us if we don’t accept the party line?

    The really difficult part is that much of this conditioning exists at a pre-verbal level in our consciousness – we don’t have the capacity for objective thinking until 5 to 7 years of age. That makes working with it, dealing with it and seeing through it very challenging.

    This pre-verbal conditioning exists in the body and mind as tension patterns which also exist as an energetic comfort range. Many people think they are in control of their lives, that they choose what they want to do when in fact most actions they take are simply reactions to others,events or incessant mind-chatter. These reactions manifest within the constraints of the conditioning. The conditioning is actually in control and making the decisions. The conscious mind is mostly under the influence of the conditioning.

    More could be said. Interesting to see the thoughts triggered by – Slave 2 Theory

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Open-Secrets