Category — psychology

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately for…various reasons, we'll say.  For background, I myself am a smart person (we can define that later if you like, but if you care about definitions then you're probably smart enough to qualify ;), and I'm pretty sure I've had every single self-esteem problem in the book, or damn close.  I've crawled my way out of bad relationships, bad habits (including outright self-harm), and bad situations all caused by my lack of self-love/esteem/confidence more times than I really care to admit.  But you don't do things like that without learning something, and if it's ok with you, Internet, I'd love a chance to share what I've learned.  I'm calling this Part One because I see a potential for a lot to talk about here, and depending on Life, the Universe and Everything I may or may not write it all, but I at least want to have said some of this stuff — Ideally, I'd like to talk with some people about it, too, so feel free to chime in if this speaks to you.

Obviously I'm not a psychologist — you can take that as a detriment if you like, but personally I'm proud of it; and anyway if this advice doesn't stand on its own, then you should ignore it.  You're smart.

I.  Recognize what Self-Esteem is and Why It's Important.  Self-Esteem got a bad rap when people turned it into a bullet-point fix-all buzz-word bullshit answer to The Everything, but ignore all that and think about what it means:  It means not hating yourself.  Not experiencing your whole life through the filter of a constant buzz of negative thinking, the equivalent of having a whole roomful of people dissing and hating on you all day, every day, except that since it's you doing it to yourself, the dissing is amazingly pinpoint accurate and blisteringly hard to ignore by just gutsing your way through it.  Bad self-esteem is a handicap, a mental problem that not only prevents you from making the most out of your life, but that steers you inexorably into self-destructive behaviors and situations, and impairs your ability to make the kind of decisions you actually want to make probably worse than anything short of PCP.  (If that sounded overly dramatic, think about it again:  Would you rather be drunk and trying to make a long-term series of life-decisions in a positive way, or face the same decisions while possessed by demons that could trick you into thinking that you wanted and deserved what was worst for you?)

If you're smart, you are self-aware and therefore have a strong interest in fixing your self-esteem.  (Maybe you aren't convinced that you can fix it, but put that on hold for the moment; I'll prove it soon.)  If you're not sure whether you have a self-esteem problem, do this simple test:  Watch your thinking as closely as you can for a day, and note (with a mark on paper or something) how many times you think something negative about yourself, versus how many times you think something positive.  Doing this exercise will probably cause you to think extra positive things about yourself for that day, but that can be instructive too:  How hard is it?  How weird does it feel?  For me, for a long time even trying to honestly think something like, "because I'm awesome is why" was really, really hard, and I could tell I was faking it even while I did it.  You may not be (hopefully aren't) that bad off, but if you're not sure it's really worth watching and keeping track for a day.  This problem can be stealthy, since obviously it has a vested interest in hiding itself from your logical mind.  (And that's not an anthropomorphization or dramatization either:  It's a mental construct, and it's just as cagey as the rest of your mind can be.  Are you smart enough to lie not to get caught?  Then so is it.)

Self-esteem comes from two things:  Having accomplished things that you yourself are proud of, and having your basic needs met.  Think of this as the emotional side of the coin that "being physically fit" is the physical side of:  To be physically fit, you have to a) meet your basic health needs, and b) successfully accomplish some kind of physical exercise.  To have self-esteem, you have to a) meet your basic emotional needs, and b) successfully accomplish some kind of emotional growth.  

I'm going to start with basic needs, because as with the physical version, this often gets overlooked, and it's flat fucking stupid to overlook it.  You cannot be physically fit if you're fundamentally unhealthy:  Even if you manage to fake it for a while, it'll fall apart on you, guaranteed.  And being fit isn't about looking muscular; it's about strength, resiliency, and successfully being in the world in a positive way.  Same thing with self-esteem:  Faking it is not making it.  The basics are utterly essential.  

"OK," I can hear the DA in my head saying, "But it's a lot harder with emotional needs.  First you have to know what they are, and that's different for everybody, and and and…" –But I argue in return that it's not all that different, nor that much (if any) harder.  There are basic truths that apply in pretty much every case, and the process of finding out the specifics of what works for you is pretty much the same as it is with diet and exercise:  Try things that make sense, watch yourself to learn the results, keep what you're doing or change it based on the evidence, rinse repeat.  

However, we shouldn't overlook that we're talking about people doing this who already have bad self-esteem:  How do you figure out and meet your basic emotional needs when a part, maybe a large part, of your mind insists that you don't deserve to have them?  Well, you have some bad habits to get around in that case, but it's not impossible, and it's as worth doing as eating right and exercising is for the very physically unfit.  

This is long already, but I'll keep going for a bit, to discuss the first basic step in overcoming poor self-esteem enough to learn what your basic emotional needs are and how to get them met:

II.  First, recognize that your basic emotional needs are YOUR responsibility.  That's advice that most people like myself will find both easy and hard:  It's easy because it sounds unwhiny and self-reliant (or comfortingly self-punishing, depending on where you are on the scale of things); it's hard because it means that you have to admit that your own pain and suffering deserves your attention and effort to fix — and really fix, not just cover up well enough that you can function/behave for others.  

Funnily enough though, this easy/hard impression that you get from admitting that your low self-esteem is a problem that's your responsibility to fix is actually somewhat backwards from reality — and that's precisely because of the filters that low self-esteem puts over things like this.  In your mind, you're probably trying to "be tough" and "suck it up" and "not be dramatic" … but in reality, the effect of this is that you aren't getting your needs met, and this is causing you to lean on other people inappropriately, to "wait on" someone else to recognize what you need and make it a priority.  In essence, by absconding responsibility for identifying and prioritizing your needs, you wind up unfairly putting that burden on others — because the assumption you're making, that it's ok to just let yourself be trampled since you don't deserve better anyway, is a fallacious one; letting your own needs go unmet *isn't an option*.  You're a human being and you have needs, and your mind and body will seek to have them met even if you don't.  (That's why they're NEEDS.)  

It's easy to be ashamed of having needs, or to see them as weaknesses — I understand that urge, and I also don't think it comes from a bad place.  We want to be strong and independent.  But a strong person knows their limits and works with them:  We don't admire people who go hiking in the mountains with no food, water or gear and get themselves killed.  Some of your needs will turn out to be things you don't need all the time, or don't need very much of; and some of them will turn out to be like air.  That's ok; as long as you know which is which, you can make decisions accordingly.  And knowing that you need something and making decisions that respect that is a ton more responsible and "tough" than ignoring what you need and flailing all over the place because you're not able to breathe.

I won't lie:  You won't be happy about some of the things you need.  Especially if you have a life built, or partly built, already, you're likely to find that thanks to your lack of self-esteem, you didn't do a great job with some of the bits you built, and may have to make some uncomfortable decisions.  But remember that simply not having your needs met isn't an option:  Things you built that directly interfere with those basic needs will eventually fall apart anyway, so it's not like you're saving yourself any pain by not learning what you did wrong.  

Like your physical needs, your emotional needs will change over the course of your life.  Feeling bad about this is about as intelligent as apologizing because you no longer like to eat fistfuls of candy like you did when you were a kid.

So, let's recap:

1.  Self-esteem is important as hell, no matter how sick of the term we've all gotten.  It comes from the right kind of accomplishments, which we'll cover next time, and from having your basic emotional needs met, which we'll also talk about doing in more detail when my fingers uncramp.  ;)

2.  The first step towards getting your basic emotional needs met is to recognize that it's your responsibility to do so, and that if you don't do it, the problem won't simply go away.  (Think about people who think that they can just eat unhealthy food and sit on the couch all the time, and get away with it.  Same genius at work, there.)  Your emotional needs are needs, and if you don't take responsibility for identifying and meeting them, you will unconsciously ruin your life and probably all your relationships too, trying to get them met in other ways.  

Stay tuned for Part Two!

(No, that question wasn't meant to sound filthy, but bonus points to you if it did I guess.  ;)

I've been thinking a lot about that "last inch" lately — the immediate reference in my mind is to V for Vendetta, but it goes farther than that – and yes, times are crazy, as tend to be those that spur such thinking.  Here are some of those thoughts, and of course I'm interested in hearing yours, too.

• The last inch is maybe the first inch, in the sense that it's the first inch of power-cord after the place where you plug into the Source.  It's where the power is the most pure, and also the one remaining piece you need to have in order to say you ex-ist (literally, protrude out into the world of form).
• The last inch is where your mandates for living come from:  Think of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (and read it if you haven't!), where he asks the young poet to dive down to the part of himself that is essentially, irrevocably alone, and ask it:  Must I write?  (Or "Must I [whatever]?")  If the last inch says yes, then that's not an optional part of life for you; it's part of how your connection to Life (the force) is defined.  In my mind this is similar to asking the coupling on a fiber connection, "Must it be pulses of light?" For someone else — a Cat5-person perhaps — the answer to that wouldn't be "yes, it must"; but if your interface demands it, it must.
• Expanding on that, you can't give away your last inch unless your intent is to give away life, the Universe and everything; and to do that is suicide, so you'd generally better not!  …But if you don't recognize what your last inch is composed of, you may not recognize that you shouldn't offer it up, for someone else, or in exchange for something you really want.  The last inch is dangerous if it's unknown I think.
• Back to "fiber people" and "copper people"…Rilke says that there's a place inside each of us where we're totally alone, and I agree with that — we all go there in the moments before death, at least — but I think for some of us it's our last inch, and for others it isn't.  Some people are made to be bundled — most of them, actually.  But while communication is an essential part of life for almost all of us — what good is a totally isolated interface? — for some of us, a certain amount of insulation is necessary.  We are, perhaps, sensitive to interference, right in that most delicate of places; right where we plug in.

Your last inch can keep you alive, keep you going in the face of amazing adversity, if you know where it is.  And if you don't know where it is and what it requires to function, you can accidentally damage it, which is the spiritual equivalent of damaging your lungs.  

I have time to catch up on projects this weekend, and one that I'm spending a lot of time with is my last inch…when you next get the chance, I recommend this activity highly…while at the same time slapping an NC-17 on it, because good fracking oil-earthquakes is it scary!  ;)

SO yesterday was a lot of semi-sensible-sounding sleep-and-diet, writing-and-practice stuff…but don't let that fool you; I still highly value the *other* kind of planning too, the kind that just lets it all explode out and let's see what sticks.  Therefore, lest anyone think I’m not also doing good old-fashioned completely batshit planning in addition to the (for me) sane and well-considered planning of yesterday, I present…

JANUARY 2’s CONFESSIONS

The nice thing about a slow period — you've got to have them, and if I'm not careful I hate them, but — it IS nice that they give you lots of time to make crazy plans.  To make ALL the planz, and then gear yourself up to hit the tarmac at 200 knots and see what you can do.  When things are busy, you just grab the ropes as they swing by; it's when they're slow (like over a holiday) that you get to set things up and try to put some future ropes (mental or physical or financial) in the right places so you can make all those amazing leaps you're really hoping for.

Like… 

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This, I think, falls under "Blogging nobody wants to read" — Sometimes I wake up and I'm not sure what to think, what to do, and then I sit down and write for a while and EUREKA, I HAVE IT!.  That's what happened today, and though I'm sure no-one probably cares about the process, I can't just throw that writing away…that would be like painstakingly determining your exact favorite color and then forgetting the whole process so you could go back to wearing read.  (BLACK, my favorite color has been black since I first could recognize the shades of it, and my favorite shade of it is the one I can stare at a moment and lose all sense of surface; it's a color that conveys depth, that makes it seem as though everything you paint it with can dissolve into infinity at a moment's notice.  What's yours?)

Anyway, overt honesty below the cut.  Perhaps if you need some of your own, mine will rub off?  Or perhaps you'll waste ten minutes reading about someone else's insecurities and life-pathness.  Time will tell!  ;)

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Today's a day for titles pulled out of random things the TV is saying in the background.  Underneath that information-rich skin, though, it's just the three-week P90X update — sorry if that's disappointing.  ;)

So.  When I lost weight using the 6x 200-calorie meals / day "Polyphasic Diet", it took about 5 weeks to really start showing.  It was pretty easy to maintain by that point, but whew, I remember about three weeks in thinking, "This is just impossible."

And tomorrow will be the last day of week 3 of P90X.  Next week I'll be 1/3 through, but the chunks go [(3 identical weeks + 1 different week) x 3], so it does feel like the end of this week is accomplishing something. 

But of course, it's still week three.  I don't really see much difference*, and man, I'm missing the time and effort this is all costing.

Fortunately, many things have taught me not to quit at week three, probably most of all polyphasic sleep itself, which is really easy to quit at about week 3 if you're not careful…The early exhaustion can be gotten through with guts alone, but the following couple weeks of time and effort to work it into one's lifestyle fully are, I would argue, sometimes even more exhausting than zombie-mode.

*It's not that I see no difference — actually my arms and stomach are minimally, but noticeably, tighter, and my shoulders and legs are definitely on the muscliest side of normal for me.  But it's not really a motivating difference.

I had prepared a bit for this, though that preparation came in the form of just plugging along, in a sense.  But I've made sure to let my days of success (which has been all but a few of them) accumulate weight that lends more legitimacy to my fitness as an ongoing enterprise, deserving of effort and investment**.  As such, my awesome workout clothes (all sale items, thank goodness) should be here any day, and my giant box of awesome Builder's Bars got here yesterday.  I'm also perfecting chocolate milk — improvements include a few trials of protein powder and an upgrade (definitely upgrade) to soymilk.  These little advances function not just for making things easier as they go forward, but also as gifts — achievement rewards, to the MMO-acquainted — to help motivate me forward.

**I would like to make it less of an effort and investment than it is now, don't get me wrong.  But changing takes a lot of effort itself, and once you've gotten past that part, you can work on making things more efficient.  I'm still holding out hope that I can try getting my polyphasic schedule back during the remaining 9 weeks of P90X, but if not, I'll focus on finding a maintenance workout to follow P90X with that takes less time and isn't so intense that I can't go back to Everyman.  (Yeah, going back to Everyman is not optional; I miss it crazy bad.)

The diet goes well too, though hitting the protein/carb balance they want for the first three weeks (50%/20%) is haaaarrrd, and there've definitely been days that I was off by a bit.  Having too many carbs vs. protein will make the "slimming down" part go slower (or possibly just not work I guess, though I should be/probably am losing fat just from burning extra calories and building muscle too — and I had minimal extra fat anyway), but that's not my biggest worry.  I like being on the thin side, sure, but I'm also old enough now to not care so much — I've shaken off the ad industry's insistence that thin is (and only is) beautiful, thank goodness.  I do find health beautiful, but I can feel totally gorgeous with a little plump on me, no problem.  (And personally speaking, I dig curvy women — I'm too small to be a proper one myself, but healthily plump hourglassy women are my favorites to look at for sure.)

Also, slipping in a totally unrelated thing at the end…I've written some new verses to an old song, and am considering the rather typical YouTubeing of myself singing a song.  Interesting idea?  Or just stupid?  Your opinions matter, Internet, even if only to this one lowly IP address!

Peaceful yet Interesting Times,

PD

The I Ching says that to make a major change in your life, you spend three days thinking about it to make sure you understand what you're changing and why and how; then spend three days consciously doing things differently; then spend three more days watching yourself to make sure the change has stuck.

This hack is something I've found immensely useful for making major life-changes.  It doesn't require the 3/3/3 days structure proposed by the Book of Changes (yup, that's what I Ching means ;), but that structure offers a convenient way to talk about the three "phases" this hack works in, so I'll refer to it anyway.  You can do this no matter how long or deliberately-delineated your three "phases" are, though.

1. As part of your Pre-Change contemplating/planning days, you pick three words that signify what you want to do.  (It can be two, or four or five if needed, but you're going for short phrase / mantra-length.)  If you're quitting a substance, it can be "I Quit"; if you're changing your sleep-schedule, it can be "Get Up".  I like two-word phrases myself, because they can easily be said on an inhale/exhale, but obviously one can find a rhythm to any phrase if you work at it.  And you do — for three days (or your length of choice), you work on that phrase, repeating it often, meditating on it, writing about it, and letting it sink deep into you until it feels like a magic spell…or in my preferred analogy, a sudo command.  ;)
    
2. During your Days of Change, you lean hard on that phrase.  Don't just save it for "when you need it" — repeat it constantly; let it define your entire world during that time.  If your whole life seems to be about that phrase for three days, you won't have to struggle to change your behavior; the change will literally be in the air, all around you.  Think about going to a major event, like a conference or concert:  You don't have to work very hard to live like you're part of that event, because it's the environment, it's the atmosphere.  Use your phrase to make an atmosphere out of your change.
    
3. During the Days Following, you get back to "normal life", but you keep that phrase in your pocket for whenever you feel the urge to slip back into the old way of doing things.  (The I Ching's advice for this period of time is "Resoluteness" … having the sudo hack is like having a Resoluteness Pill you can take as needed.)  Whenever you feel weak or question your goals, you pull your phrase back out.  It will give you strength and remind you why you want to stick with what you've accomplished. 

I've used the sudo hack a bunch of times with varying degrees of deliberateness, but recently I used it very deliberately to kick a tough bad habit, and it worked so well — I'm on day 9 with no slip-ups as I write this — that I thought, "OK, time to write about that one!". 

All credit goes to the I Ching and to the Universe for being so considerate as to have a sudo command, of course.  ;)

OK, I've been using this giant analogy forever, because it just works so darn well.  Time to get it in writing … there's a lot more to it, but this is what I can pull out of RAM right now  ;) 

1. Hardware:  Body as a whole
2. Firmware:  Brain
3. Software:  The conscious and subconscious mind as well as the autonomous nervous system
4. OS (Operating System):  What I call the Psychology; the collection of constructs and "base software"
5. Processes:  Individual psychological constructs, issues, habits, reactions, etc.  Some are part of the OS and some are independent.  Can be installed by yourself, other people, or the system itself.  Some run on command or in reaction to another process; others run all the time or in the background; some are harder to shut off than others; some are necessary for you to function
6. Skins:  Mini-personalities you wear for other people; masks
7. Kills / Killalls:  Things you do to deliberately attempt to shut off a process (i.e. you light a cigarette to kill a stress-reaction; you race a car to kill intrusive memories; you open a window to kill claustrophobia)
8. Cron jobs:  Processes you run at a regular time.  Can be deliberately configured; many are not
9. Tuning, tweaks, optimizations, overclocking:  Different ways of attempting to make your system better (won't go into the differences here)
10. Clearing cache:  Meditating
11. Defragmenting:  Therapy
12. Race condition:  Anxiety attack
13. Packet loss:  A communication problem, either between yourself and another, or internally (i.e. a neurological problem)

Feel free to add any you know about that I've missed!  I'll probably update this in the future, just so I have something I can refer the Confused to.  ;)

OK, I think I accomplished what I needed to with this…for those of you who've seen some of my other Master Schedules, this one isn't quite as crazy as the tangliest of those; but nor is it as light on detail as I've tried at other times.  I feel like I'm narrowing down to the right level of moderation (for me)…awesome.  Here's some notes (because I can't imagine anybody giving a crap about the actual schedule, but I'll share it if you ask):

• Put two meals in at specific times, to make sure I get at least that many
• Set up a new calendar in Google and put all the events that are reminder-worthy in it; now my phone will go off every day with text-reminders, and if GMail is open (it usually is) I'll get a pop-up too.  Thanks (again) Google!
• Rather than have a different schedule for every day (which I've done) or for weekends and weekdays, I focused on the things that should be true EVERY day:  Naps, writing, meditation, fitness & forms practice, etc.  This gives me a base schedule that always applies (and that I can set reminders to go off for every single day, taking advantage of the brain's ability to form habits and react at repeatable times).
• For time that might be free depending on the day, I have lists of things I would like to do with it — Multiple pre-existing lists, for writing, projects, cleaning things and various studies — so in the schedule, I just specified which lists to look at if I have free time in those chunks.  (And really, any list will do; getting things done is getting things done!  ;) 

So, firm yet flexible.  Covers weekends and holidays and crazy work-days pretty much equally well.  Enough reminders to pull me back on-track if I get off, but not so many as to make me throw my phone in the Charles.  I'll have to tweak it if the E4.5 sleep schedule doesn't work out like I want it to, but such is live.

All told, I'm proud of this one!  If you have any scheduling tricks/tips of your own, by all means share them.

I had one of those tiny physical moments yesterday that explodes into a psychological OH YEAH DUH … that was a moment, literally an otherwise meaningless moment in the shower, of refocusing.

Life is powerfully, powerfully distracting, especially as you slam into full adulthood and all the filters that kept out various influences are removed.  This isn't oops-too-much-RSS-browsing distraction; this is full-on fight-or-flight-level hardcore psychological distraction.

Some examples:

• Faced with the insecurities of providing for yourself and others, of economic wibbly-wobbliness and the suddenly finite number of years before retirement, you throw yourself into working and saving money (easily 80h/wk, all told)
• Faced with the heady freedom of being allowed to do anything you can legally get away with, you wind up "trying on" hobby after hobby, filling your free-time and emptying your wallet on lessons, equipment, outings, and materials, all for things you'll probably hardly ever do again;
• Faced with the daunting task of raising a child "correctly", you throw yourself into planning activities, events, and lessons into every possible moment, as well as into cooking and cleaning things into an acceptably perfect childhood environment;
• Faced with the sudden relative lessening importance of social activities (what? I'm old enough to party all I want and now partying doesn't mean much anymore??) as well as, for some people, the sudden ease of actually pulling it off (wait, I used to find this scary? ha!), you grab any opportunity to go to a gathering, eating up your evenings and killing your attempts to wake up early and do stuff;
• Overwhelmed by the 80-hour work weeks, the pile of clamoring social engagements, the kids, the house, the classes and outings, you retreat into television for hours or days at a time, often finding yourself too exhausted to even get dressed if you don't absolutely have to.

…And welcome to adulthood.  ;) 

When I was young I thought, of course I'll be a writer, writing comes easy to me and I love it.  But then…was I going to write instead of working and saving money?  Hmm, no.  Write instead of parenting?  No way.  Write instead of going out and doing stuff?  Well, that one was easy when I was a bored and scaredy kid, but this weekend I can literally go to three parties and a SolidWorks design class and free-diving in the ocean if I want — all with people I like. 

When I found taiji I thought, oh, THIS is the thing; this is the perfect physical component to my philosophic life, the mental components of which are of course reading and writing.  I love taiji like I've loved few other things; I often think that if I had nothing else but a life of constant taiji, space to write about it, and some pretty trees to look at, that'd be great.

But when to practice?  At home, with the kid bouncing around and things begging to be cleaned?  At work, in the five minutes between meetings?  Making the time to get to class once a week is epic difficult, though I do it, doggedly, but far too often without having practiced at all in the in-between.

And when to write?  I get up around 4:30am, but the writing, it turns out, takes more than just getting up. 
More often than not I surf blearily, drinking coffee and trying to gather my thoughts and the day's plans, until it's time to head out for work.

I never wanted to admit that I couldn't do everything, that I was going to have to say no even if something sounded awesome, involved a really cool person, or I'd never done it before.  But you just can't have everything all at once; if you want that nice retirement plan and health insurance, it's going to cost you big-time, as is the perfect kids' lesson-plan and the clean house and oh yeah, the novel and the black-belt.  There are sacrifices, and some of them really suck.  Welcome to adulthood.

But the important thing is to make these decisions as consciously as possible, I think.

So this weekend, that's what I'm doing — I'm refocusing things.  I'm putting some recurring plans in place, for writing and practice, that will get absolute priority…even from work, and cleaning, and parenting.  (To clarify regarding a common misconception:  no, more parenting is not always better; kids need time and activities to themselves too.  It's just up to the parents to schedule that so that it gives us time as well — and that's no mean feat.)   

This weekend I re-remember what's most important, and I state clearly to myself what I'm willing to bend for (work emergencies?  Sudden opportunities?) and what I'm not.  This weekend I re-invent my Super Picky Schedule to be super picky about the things I want out of life too, not just the things I feel responsible for. 

And there's another element to Refocusing:  The Present.  By acting intentionally rather than responding to pressures (i.e. all the "faced with"s from the list above), you bring your focus into the moment more.  …Make no mistake, this is probably why a lot of people don't do it.  Swimming naked in the Now can be a lot less comfortable than a nice ride in a pre-built boat that just goes where the waves push it.

But this is life.  It's not about being comfortable.  We all get to sleep sooner or later…  ;)

ON is OFF.

Or rather, ON is a natural state; OFF is something getting in its way.  To get to ON, you drop the stuff that's holding you in OFF — you take the OFF off.

The secret to mastery is to part the curtain of your own thinking; to get your mind out of the way so that you can interact directly, swim without a wetsuit, use all that sensory equipment in your cranium (and body) without forty "safety" filters in the way.  Those filters may be making you feel safer, but that's an illusion, a sales pitch; you're built to plug straight in.  This is Reality and you're a child of it, and if staring it right in the face shatters your whole frail tangly Psychology, guess what?  You didn't need it anyway. 

Are you made in God's image or not?  Does God need a mental hazmat suit to live in the world?  Is there any reason Adam and Eve can't go naked besides their own fear?

Everyone who has ever done something perfectly — sung, skateboarded, wrote, or even just sat in a room — knows this; you don't do it perfectly by doing it a certain way — you do it perfectly by getting the hell out of the way and letting it be done.  (This is why you have to learn to do it first; until the mechanics of it are rote, second-nature, you can't fully shut off your mind and let it come naturally.  Ask any martial artist.)

You don't think about the results, you don't think about how you look or why you're doing it.  You don't think.  You do, but not in the sense we construct that sentence in English:  "you" don't "do"; more you arrange things so that you are done.  (You yin-do, I would say.)  The activity, whatever it is, happens in a pure unfiltered form; you put yourself between it and Reality as a conduit.  You are spoken through, by Tao, or God if you don't mind sloppy definitions.

But look:  If you've ever sung, or danced, or climbed a mountain this way, you're missing the point if you think it's about singing or climbing; this is how you should be all the time.  This is what mastery of existence is.  Get rid of all the filters…the illusions of control, the attempts at planning, the mental blast-shielding.  The world may look radioactive, but it won't hurt you; in fact, when you do get hurt it's because your hazmat suit gets buffeted, twisted or heated and that hurts you.  Without it, you're invincible.

Isn't this the point of every story, the lesson of every hero?  Strip!  Walk completely without fear and there will be nothing to fear!  Turn off the targeting computer, Luke; suspend your critical disbelief, Bastien; let go of your past and your shame, Vash.  None of it is really helping you…in fact, the opposite is true. 

Pascal said that the source of all our discontent can be found in our inability to sit quietly in a room.  I think he meant our inability to shut things off (turn the OFF off) to the point where we can just sit — or just do anything.  But that's not to make it sound easy (simple, yes; easy, no)…turning off the targeting computer before taking the shot of your life with worlds hanging in the balance is actually kind of a weeny pale description of the level of stress and fear involved, for most people. 

But the fear is just the alarm-system on the hazmat suit; it is meaningless beyond its own confines.  Extreme or life-threatening activities cause you to skip over the fear, to ignore the alarms, because you don't have time, and physical survival is an easy way to trump the insistence of psychology that you Not Go There.  It's not actually hard to be fully present while clinging to the side of a mountain; and this is probably largely why people do it, and similar things. 

This is  why the true test is being able to "sit in a room"…when you can do that, you've managed to drop the curtain on your own, without some kind of emergency to distract you from the discomfort of it, or even a rote task like singing or painting to smooth the transition.

I've never sat in a room, not without some major emotional crisis going on that functioned pretty much the same as clinging to the side of a mountain.

I did, however, walk across a floor today.

It was amazing.