Wholistic Fitness

“So don’t be in a hurry and try to push or rush your Practice. Do your meditation gently and gradually step by step. In regard to peacefulness, if you become peaceful, then accept it; if you don’t become peaceful, then accept that also. That’s the nature of the mind. We must find our own Practice and persistently keep at it.”
– Ajahn Chah

“The mind is Buddha!” – Hui-Neng

Hey, it’s just the Way we roll here beneath the Sacred Peak…Mountain Biking as a Spiritual Path; what’s not to love? The Way to Heaven is unpaved, inDeed, i am pretty sure it’s gonna be a Secret Mountain Biking Trail that will Test our fitness, Scare the BeJesus outta us, Lift Us, and Make Us (en)Light(ened)!

i took these shots the day before yesterday up on one of the “Secret Trails” beneath the Sacred Peak. Gary, my Teammate on Red Rock Racing, floated this gnarly, high-consequence section like he was a Kachina Spirit. maybe he is. me? i ain’t no Kachina Spirit. i walked this section. glady. note the Aspen trees at least 40′ higher then him; this is a BIG drop in without an escape route. note also the broken tree like a dagger on Gary’s left, just waiting to skewer a less skilled rider than he. this is Yoga. this is Meditation; absorbed in the object of your concentration. you know, i’ve sat with the ‘best’ Meditation Teachers in the nation. i don’t trust anybody’s Meditation skills until there are high risk consequences to you losing your focus. to me, a Mountain Bike saddle is a most precious and greatly underestimated Zafu Cushion. enjoy the following Teaching and pics…i had a ton of focused fun and a little spilt blood bringin’ em to your Practice….

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Living in Flag without a mountain bike is like, well i dunno, a little like a Valley Girl without a cell phone or something. it just would not make sense.

i’ve long used mountain biking as a spiritual metaphor for inherent to mastering mountain bike fitness brings along with it the required tools for success in the Spiritual Journey; there MUST be ceaseless attention flow yet a commitment to dropping into the emptiness of nonDualistic perception. there MUST be an ongoing dance between brutally tough yang moments to power up steep uphills followed by linked yin sequences of descending through razor sharp rocks and rutted out tree roots. once, after Ananda had ridden her toughest trail – the 3.5 miles of serpent like singletrack known as Rocky Ridge – she was exhausted. physically,sure, but even moreso mentality. she gasped, “Oh my GAWD…that was like the hardest i have ever concentrated in my LIFE!”

dat’s right, baby…dat’s why everyone should get out and challenge themselves, regularly, on a mountain bike each morning if possible. Confucius says (love saying that); “If a man understand the Tao in the morning, it is well with him even when he dies in the evening.”

“Entering the forest without moving the grass,
Entering the water without raising a ripple.”
– Zen saying

Gary, like myself, is an Expert racer in mountain biking. Unlike me, however, he can actually ride the shit around here without killing himself. I’ve seen him bunny hop his bike up and unto a fallen Ponderosa spanning a ravine, ride on top of it 9 feet higher then the ground for over 30 feet, and somehow dive with his bike off the tree and back onto the singletrack as if, well, the obstacle was not even there.

Gary is Judo player. he told me that in Judo, falling is such a common part of it all, that he feels like he could fall off anything on his mountain bike and not get hurt.

sound familiar Oh Noble WF Sangha?

recall now one of my foundational sport performance maxims:
“The Way To Win, Is To Make It Okay To Lose.”

you hear what i am saying? think about it.
expand this notion beyond mountain biking.
expand it into your children, your lover, your material possessions…
and finally,
your life.

The Way to win is to make it okay to lose.

do that,
and you will find the Dance of immeasurable gratitude and endless fun
and indelible, Divine Motivation to become Enlightened…

Hey, it’s just the Way (Tao) we roll here beneath the Sacred Peak…Mountain Biking as a Spiritual Path; what’s not to love? The Way to Heaven is unpaved, inDeed, i am pretty sure it’s gonna be a Secret Mountain Biking Trail that will Test us, Lift Us, and Make Us (en)Light(ened)!

May Your Practice Today Be A Light Unto Others…

om so ti
and keep the rubber side down,

the mountain yogi