Living our strongest and truest lives requires us to take full ownership of our experiences. If we struggle with this it probably gets pointed out to us thousands of times but how do we actually develop this skill? There are probably many ways, but with proper attention to two basic principles we can make it an important focus of our athletic training. This is one of the ways that our work as athletes can transform our lives.
First, let’s explore the context of empowerment (I use this term to mean taking control of our own lives) so that we can deeply understand why it is important. I believe that the overwhelming majority of imagined transformations (both individual and social) fail before they truly begin and root issue is a failure of empowerment. If we are not living true to our values, pursuing meaningful activities and inspirations, expressing and sharing ourselves fully, pursuing our highest vision for our lives, operating within systems or under authorities that we don’t believe in, there is some type of underlying empowerment issue. If there’s something that really angers or saddens us about our society and we’re not doing meaningful things about it, there are multiple empowerment issues at play. Empowerment is the most transformational energy that exists in human civilization and in human life. The only way to make a change in our lives is to seize the reins. The only way to heal a status quo with massive inequalities, gross injustices, and an imbalance with nature will involve some attention to and cultivation of empowerment.
It is natural and understandable that in organized society we surrender empowerment as a general matter. We are highly social animals and this surrender is what makes groups, stable food sources, defense from violent threats, etc. possible. If we hadn’t done so our ancestors would have died alone fighting saber tooth cats and we would not exist right now. It’s more useful to think about empowerment in a more nuanced way because this force is the key to both living a meaningful and fulfilling life and to being a part of creating the world that each of us wants to live in.
We will of course never have complete control of our lives and some of us have larger external obstacles to face than others. That’s beside the point; the deepest form of empowerment is personal. The basic reality that we only have control over ourselves has never been any different for us or for any animal on planet Earth. We can’t know for sure, but I imagine that primitive humans didn’t cry about having to live in an environment with storms and saber tooth cats. Instead, they focused on their responses. In the same way, we can empower ourselves to take a stand for what we believe in and to do everything we can to pursue meaningful lives.
This is not easy. However, like all difficult things it’s something that we can train for. One effective training method that we can do as athletes involves two elements:
First, we adopt a mind-body discipline whereby we will both learn ourselves and strengthen ourselves. Without knowing ourselves deeply we can have all the wealth and positions of relative power in the world but we will never be truly empowered people. We can’t actually stand for what matters most to us if we don’t know what it is. Strengthening ourselves is essential; being true to ourselves sometimes involves living boldly and swimming against substantial currents so we’ll want to work on developing our mental strength and courage in particular.
Second, we work on finding a detached perspective from the troubles in our lives and in our world. By distancing ourselves from our lives and exploring new natural surroundings and different parts of ourselves we can reframe our thoughts about practically everything and we can connect with our higher inspirations. Once we feel more grounded in ourselves, we can reevaluate our lives and the world we operate in from a practical perspective. Some things we can change and some things we cannot. From our place of detachment, as we re-engage with our world we will be able to do it in a truer and more powerful way.
Athletic training and exploration is a viable path to empowerment that can satisfy both of these elements if done well. In Part 2 we’ll discuss in greater detail how this can be accomplished. Stay tuned!
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