Wholistic Fitness

above pic; about 23 minutes from my front door via the “Puggy Buggy” to Animas Overlook, my start point for today’s skate ski…here, overlooking the north Animas Valley, the Amherst Mountains on the right, Missionary Ridge in the middle, and to the left?  A score of Sacred San Juan Peaks…

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“People made mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little…”
– James Hilton – Lost Horizon

above pic; what can ilg say save for this is a killer shot of the Sacred Peaks which spurred everything that has positively affected thousands, hundreds of thousands – toward the rare, precious path of WF…my chi-ldhood range; the La Plata’s…my Beyul beyond a doubt…Peaks from L-R: Lewis, Snowstorm, Cumberland, Olga Little.   Kennebec Pass (running race) uses the Sliderock Trail which slices down between Cumberland and Olga Little.

My Tibetan spiritual teachers first taught me about “beyuls“…spiritual vortices which exist on Mother Earth but “can’t be found on maps.”…  Beyuls, you see, are not just imaginary lofty realms; they are earth chakras which reveal themselves to be a type of Shangra-La to those yogis whose Vibrational Fitness allows them to slip beneath the “Velvet Ropes” to access a secret, hidden land which ‘vibes’ at various Levels according to the meditative fitness of the yogi exploring them.   Well, today, this feeble mountain yogi known as ilg discovered another level of Beyul within my Sacred Chi-ldhood h(om)e peaks of the La Plata during a 3-mile uphill skate ski and a rather dangerous descent….c’mon,  i’ve got some great pics and teachings to share…

to access this beyul?   i had to be fit enough and skilled enough to take the Pilgrimage, which this morning meant a solo 3-mile uphill skate ski to 9,917′ on crazy, marginal conditions and on the high-speed 3-mile descent?  i had to be able to telemark stop on ice before the frozen dirt sections upon ski’s which have no edges and are only 3″ wide..

on the ski up my Heavenly Hamlet of Durango shimmers like gems several thousand feet below me…

uh,  did i say that conditions were – at times – ‘southwest marginal’?

….and, at other times, the conditions were Beyond Beyond…Paragaté, Paragaté, Parasamgaté, Bodhisattva…snowmobile tracks flattened the high center between the hunter’s tire tracks making for an exquisitely chronic v-1 for an hour uphill at high altitude..remember, this is just 20 minutes from my front door!   How Blessed Am is Ilg!?!?!

His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains the beyul as a bit like quantum physics; “which recognize parallel dimensions and multiple universes.”…. meaning, that the ilg that skate skis up this Treasured Road among my chi-ldhood peaks experiences a categorically different universe (one-poem) that does, say, the elk hunter from Texas, drunk on cheap beer and shooting up anything that moves.

the descent off of my high point of Rand’s Point into dense and deep snow filled ravines whereupon i spotted not only big mountain lion tracks, but also the glimmering flirtations of a dancing Grandfather Sun within and among the dense Spruce Beings…

Blessed be thy workout and work-within

your feeble teacher