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...