Coach Ilg, on the summit ridge of Agassiz Peak last week, after a record 61 minute ascent (!) of the 12,250′ peak, wearing “Kahtoola’s” a type of running shoe ‘crampon’. Combined with the 27 minute, 3,000′ descent over technical steep terrain,
Coach uses WF and yogic internal techniques to transform the sheer pain of such ‘workouts’ into an “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.” Essentially, High Performance in any discipline requires an intimate liaison with the “breath inside the breath.” WF Students are taught that genuine yoga requires becoming a highly skilled Practitioner in all physiologic disciplines – strength, cardio, asana, meditation, and food mastery – before one can even begin speaking of spiritual mastery. WF remains the most grounded, balanced, and traditional transmitter of the Ancient Himalayan Yogis. {self photo of coach via camera phone in sub-zero temperatures. i bow to the technology of camera phones! if you squint, you might be able to see the reddish rim rock of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon near the crown of my head. }
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“I often think of the great masters and imagine beings who have their depth of realization as magnificent mountain eagles, who soar above both life and death and see them for what they are, in all their mysterious, intricate interrelation.
To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality as being �unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.�
What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly and with total understanding, is that flowing movement and that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call �life� and what we, in our ignorance, call �death� are merely different aspects of that wholeness and that movement.”
– Sogyal Rinpoche