Strala Graduation Speech: Why listening to yourself is a huge risk you can’t live without

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I want to ask something of each one of you. I want to ask each of you to take a risk. I want you to take the risk of listening, to you.

Why is this a risk? That doesn’t sound risky at all! In fact it sounds completely normal. But it’s not normal, for most of us. And it’s a risk, because it means changing some pretty big beliefs we have about the world. And some even bigger beliefs we have about ourselves.

 

You can survive without taking this risk.
But you can’t live without taking it.

 

We’ve grown to believe that the world is a tough place. There is no victory without battle, no gain without pain. In fact, if I don’t feel like I’m suffering, it must mean I’m not really doing anything, and I’m certainly not going to achieve anything at all. Life is a struggle. You’re either in for it, or you’re out.

There’s a problem with this world view. Actually, there are many. But the first that comes to mind is, it doesn’t work.

I’ve seen some people achieve a few things through stress and struggle, working harder than needed at every step, never feeling good, never really feeling much at all. But the life we create – how we feel when we get where we’re going – comes 100% from how we feel along the way of getting there. When it’s all stress and struggle, we don’t really like where we end up, no matter what it looks like. We just know stress and struggle. We might know success in one place, and loss everywhere else. We know really well how to be stressed, and how to feel not good. It doesn’t work for our health. Our family. Or for anything. It doesn’t even get us anywhere near as far as our potential. Not even close.

We can change this. You can change it by changing what you believe. Believe that you can feel good every step along the way of getting where you want to go, and that you can achieve far more from feeling good. Sounds nuts, at first. But there’s good news. Your body – your biology – is a very strong supporter in this new path.

Your body is extremely smart. And it assumes that you are also very smart. You know what you need. So your body listens, very carefully, to what you do. All day, every day, it’s listening to you. And as it listens, your body is in each moment supporting you, to get where you need to go. This is happening every instant, in a very real way, on the level of your chemistry.

Let’s talk about endorphins – a group of hormones that mask pain and make us feel near-euphoric when we’re under stress. Imagine that both your ankles are shattered, with a herd of marauding elephants bearing down upon you. Your sprint to safety is possible, only because your body drops these wonderful chemicals into your system, just enough that you delight in the chase and manage a narrow escape. Ankles can heal later. So there’s your body, supporting you to get where you absolutely need to go, right now.

But there’s something our bodies didn’t plan. In all their incredible supportive design, our bodies never anticipated that we would choose to live this way. That we would become addicted to our own stress response. They never knew that we’d put stress and strain into our work, our exercise, the ways we pick to have fun, even our yoga. So we are living under attack. And our bodies keep supporting this – continually releasing a cocktail of stress hormones, all day, every day.

This takes us outside our design, and here, things begin to go wrong. It might be good for evading angry elephants, or rescuing babies from car accidents, but living under attack puts us on a declining performance curve. In this moment, we are chemically programmed to survive, but not to live. And rather than shake off the stress response, we keep stringing these chemical moments together, all day long. Our field of vision is narrowed – no need to see the daisies when running from an irate giraffe. We become less healthy – stress leads to 80% of hospital visits, and is a primary cause in obesity, diabetes, chronic illness and pain, sleep and sex disorders, heart disease, cancer, substance abuse, depression, and anxiety. We become less able to see and respond creatively to the world around us, and less able to feel good.

We are living under this enormous weight. We need to learn how to take the weight off. We need to learn how to go easy on ourselves, as the doorway to accomplishing so much more.

 

We are all already winners of the over-doing award.
We need to start winning the over-being award.

 

Luckily, our bodies are here to help. Change how we move, and our chemicals change completely. From here, our bodies support us to release stress and tension, and handle far more with less effort. Our bodies support us to see the world as what we create, in how we move through it. This changes everything.

There are worse risks than changing what we believe, about what it takes to get somewhere in this world. It’s not good for our health. We know that. It even limits our potential, all this no-pain-no-gain struggle. We kind of already feel that one, too – especially with some practice the other way. But here’s the really big one. The worst risk by far is that you wait your whole life to get something you can have right now. And this is a pretty important something.

Slow down, enough to feel. Believe that what you feel is worth responding to. And respond. It’s your path to feeling good. Where this path takes you is much bigger than the feeling stressed and bad path. And you’re going to really like it here, always.

-Mike

 

About Strala Yoga Training

Strala combines the movement and healing wisdom of tai chi with the form vocabularies of yoga, tai chi, qigong, and Traditional Chinese and Japanese Medicine, to help people release stress, move easily through challenge, and live radiantly inspiring lives.

It begins with a mindset, that says our best way to get where we’re going is to feel good along the way. It also works miracles for whole health, helping us to find ease in our bodies and minds, and create the right conditions both for healing and optimal performance.

In our Strala Training Courses, you learn to shape your destiny on every level that counts, from your psychology, chemistry and neurology, to your chromosomes and even gene expression. The unique set of skills you develop – for connecting with yourself and others, unblocking your energy, healing what needs healing and accomplishing challenge with ease – uncovers your ability to create the life you want, and be an inspiring leader to the people around you.

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