Wholistic Fitness

Don’t we know, only too well, that protection from pain doesn’t work, and that when we try to defend ourselves from suffering, we only suffer more and don’t learn what we can from the experience? As Rilke wrote, the protected heart that is “never exposed to loss, innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness; only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free, through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.”
– Sogyal Rinpoche

this Teaching continues to decimate me. rolling back the clock fifteen years ago, ilg was happy as a pigeon in a hole; writing books on WF & sport performance, living, training, practicing, meditating in the high mountains of my Beloved Southwest. my life was on a roll and the inner and outer podiums just kept streaming along. i figured that if Enlightenment was not to happen this lifetime for me, i’d bridge the gap to reach that ultimate podium within one or two more lifetimes.

what a schmuck ilg is.

for, at that time, my Heaven-sent Guides assigned me my next Lesson along the Path of my Awakening. i was to pack up as few belongings as possible and move to a Big City of my choice (that was Their little morsel of comfort for me) and for ten years Serve anyone who was willing to see and feel the wisdom of NavanYoga (Wholistic Fitness). the story of that Mission and its trials and successes is documented in my latest book, PRANIC JUNKIE

i can still recall the deep potency of my final few mountain bike rides, runs, and climbs in New Mexico before i left into the great toxicity known as LA. phew. as i drove further west, out past the Navajo Land which i have come to know and love so deeply, tears. even chanting the Mantra was no emotional balm for the ilg which left behind the vast and haunting landscape of the Four Corners region. The sweat and stillness that i’ve lived each day here touches places within that i scarcely knew existed. I learned, from the decade spent in LA, how naive I can be. up until that drive into the unknown LA cauldron, i always thought that the spiritual journey was about cultivating fitness of body and mind strong enough to warrant the divinely guided amounts of kundalini ascension up sushumna (the spiritual spine). accustomed to practices and healing revolving upon the chakra system, nadic energy, and other forms of ‘invisible fitness,’ the degree to which my naivety about genuine chakra purifications never truly took root in my soul body until i watched each of my Sacred Peaks disappear into the long ripple of road behind me: my birth mountain; Dibé Ntsaa (Hesperus Peak, Colorado)…Tsoodzil (Mount Taylor, Arizona)…Dook’o’oosliid (San Francisco Peaks,Arizona).

These peaks had been the cathedrals of my spirituality, a spirituality of sweat and native spirit which feels that, “every place has a name, every place tells a story.”

i brought a book of Rilke quotes with me on that Big City Mission…and to this day, having weathered that Mission for Go(o)d, those words,
“the protected heart that is never exposed to loss, innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness; only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free, through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.”
now make me smile.
for ilg is a far wiser father,
athlete,
teacher,
and being
because of that Mission which tore off every possible egoic power plug that
i had plugged in for most of my life.

aye, Noble Ones,
to “Begin again, and again, and endlessly again…”
therein lies a key to our Awakening…

May your Practice be brave and riveted to that highest of all summits,
that grandest of all podiums; Enlightenment.

head bowed from the humble Helm back beneath Dook’o’oosliid,
ec

photos:
1) view from Santa Monica pier. i lived and taught HP Yoga and WF in several gyms/studios throughout this area during my Big City Mission.

2) training ride near Moab

3) monsoon squall; kachina spirits dancing upon Dook’o’oosliid.