That didn't go well

I told my dad I am moving to New York.

Spa day nine: departure

Sad.

The way you do one thing is the way you do everything

Miraval is all about mindfulness, being present in the moment (if you can achieve that - which is difficult), pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, and looking at what is working in your life and what isn't.  Yes it is a famous world class spa, but if all you do is go to the spa, I think you sort of miss the point.  Or at least you haven't taken advantage of what this place has to offer.  My favorite thing about this place is not the spa, it is the challenge course.

The challenge course works as a sort of metaphor for life.  And although the challenges are all different - some can be about letting go, some can be about how you work with others - they are all about how you face a challenge.  They are all based on this idea that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.  That makes sense to me.  So the way you face a challenge on the challenge course, is the way you face a challenge in life.  And of course there is the basic idea that if you don't push yourself outside your comfort zone, your comfort zone will shrink.  I know this from experience.  So if you pay attention to what the voice in your head says when you go to do the challenge, you might learn something about the way you move through the world.

Do you make assumptions about your abilities?  Does the voice say I can't do it, this will never work, I am going to fail, why am I bothering to try?  Do you define success only as finishing the task, or is there something in between?  Is the voice in your head a positive one, saying you can do anything?  It's really a fascinating way to look at how you live your life.  The voice in my head is generally a negative one yet I am nearly always successful if you define success as completing the challenge.  That is very true of how I am in life.  Rarely do I approach anything with a "can do" attitude.  And rarely, if ever, do I set out to challenge myself at all in life.  I tend to do what I know I can be successful at.  I like to know the outcome before I take on the task.  I have a definite fear of the unknown and so I try to avoid it.  But when I am forced to face it, despite the voice in my head, I rise to the occasion and generally overcome the fear.

I come here to Miraval and sign up for the challenges so that I have an opportunity to look at these things and to expand my comfort zone a bit in an environment that is safe with a bit of predictability.  To change my behavior.  To change my thinking.  To change my self-esteem.  I have done nearly all of the challenges here.  The challenge I did yesterday that I posted pictures from below is called Face to Face.  You are about 30 feet in the air.  You work with a partner.  You each stand on a cable and the cables get farther and farther apart.  You have to balance your weight against your partner's and move across the cables as a team.  As the gap becomes every wider it gets harder and harder to match weight with your partner.  Eventually it becomes impossible and you both fall.  Turns out it is impossible to complete the challenge.  It is purposely designed that way so that it is impossible to make it all the way to the end.

Anyway, it was one of the few challenges I hadn't done, so even though I was feeling like I didn't want to try (my very predictable reaction), my friend that I am here with forced me to do it anyway and of course I am glad I did.  There are two challenges left that I haven't done and one of them is being offered tomorrow so I signed up.

The hard thing for me is that I know what it's like to have my comfort zone shrink, to have my life get smaller as I fail to push myself in any way to the outer limits of my abilities and beyond.  Yet it really takes forcing myself to do so.  It takes an extraordinary amount of effort to push myself to do things that I don't think are possible or that I don't want to do or that I am afraid to do.  Despite the fact that the outcome is so rewarding, I just utterly fail to try.  My life has shrunken.  It's tiny right now.  But that is about to change... 

Spa day six: hiking

Views - amazing.  Didn't have my camera though.

Spa day five: face to face

Spa day five: a swing and a prayer

Spa day four: Wyatt

Enough said.

Spa day four: attacked by a hawk

So there are some hawks over here by the rooms my friend and are staying in.  And there are bins of umbrellas out with a warning that the hawks are dive bombing people when they walk by.  So unless you want to get kicked in the head by a hawk, you might want to take an umbrella.  I thought yeah whatever.  That's so unlikely to happen that I am not going to carry an umbrella around back and forth to my room because how silly is that.  And I thought, that probably only happens at night, right?  And even then, I am not going to worry about it.

Wrong.  I just went for a walk at 7:30 am up to the main building for a latte.  The hawk dive bombed me twice on the way back, kicking me in the back of the head.  I took off running.

Spa day three: not Wyatt

My friend and I signed up to do the Equine Experience fully expecting Wyatt to be the facilitator.  Wyatt is the reason we signed up.  Well it turned out that someone else was facilitating yesterday's session - someone in training to replace Wyatt when he eventually retires.  We felt bad ditching the session just because it wasn't Wyatt so we went anyway.  I can you tell you from experience, having spent time with Wyatt and now without Wyatt, that it simply isn't the same.  Wyatt has a way about him - that well, people who work at the spa say to prepare yourself because Wyatt makes everyone cry.

The first time I did the Equine Experience here at Miraval, Wyatt reduced me to tears in front of the whole group in a matter of seconds by asking a simple question which brought up the whole of my issues all at once - what lies at the core of my personality, how I feel, what I think, my fears, my behaviors, my sense of myself in the world.  I have this thing, that I can only describe as a thing, and it colors everything about everything.  And no he doesn't leave you sitting there crying.  We worked through the issue and it was painful, but in the aftermath, I realized a really profound kind of thing had happened - some of my beliefs about myself in the world had changed.  For one thing, I was no longer ashamed.

Today we are redoing the Equine Experience because we double checked to make sure that the session is being facilitated by Wyatt.  I have unanswered questions from yesterday's session.  As part of the session you do this thing in what they call the "round pen" where you direct the horse's movements with your body's energy and your intention.  It''s interesting for a couple of reasons, in particular, the reaction I had.  The facilitator said that most people feel more comfortable in the round pen exercise because there is a sense of distance with the horse.  And that this is lots of times true for people who like distance in their relationships.  The thing is, I had quite the opposite reaction.  I happen to like distance in my relationships.  With the exception of very few of my relationships, I maintain quite a good bit of distance.  However, I was terribly uncomfortable in the round pen where there was space between myself and the horse.

I don't understand why I have the opposite reaction so I want to ask Wyatt.  Also, the facilitator told me that we have less control over things in life than we think we do and obviously we have no control over other people.  Certainly there is some truth to that.  She said we have no more control over the horse than we have over anything.  And I am confused because isn't that what we were doing - controlling the horse with our energy?  I have to ask Wyatt, because if we weren't controlling the horse then what the hell were we doing?

Spa day two: by the pool

Spa day one: they recognize me

I am a little embarrassed to say that the hostess at lunch recognized me.  Last year one of the adventure guides recognized me.  I feel sort of silly for coming back here year after year.  What I really wonder is whether Wyatt will recognize me.  We'll see.  My friend and I are signed up for Wyatt's experience tomorrow morning.  Fun!

Spa day one: arrival

Perfect.

Spa extravaganza - take 4

Tomorrow I leave for my annual trip to the spa.  I guess it has become an annual trip since it is the 4th year in a row that I've gone.  Although every year I go I tell myself I will take a year off and then six months later I decide I simply have to go again.  It feels like just yesterday that I was there.  I can't believe an entire year has gone by.

So tomorrow I am off to Miraval resort spa and I can't wait.  The past three years I have gone alone and this year a close friend is coming with me.  It's going to be fantastic.

I need this vacation really badly.  Hot weather, sunshine, blue skies, mountains, and the spa - amazing.

2:30 am

And I just got home from work.