The Skiing Piece
I was standing on a mountain, scared, cold , watching my breath fog and freeze, planting my poles firmly to keep from plummeting downhill to certain doom. I was 35, a newbie to downhill skiing and all I could think was “I paid a lot of money to be frozen, terrified and physically beaten by the simple act of sliding down a mountain”. To make matters worse every few minutes a class of 4 year olds would wiz by at breakneck speed, laughing, fearless and happy. I was in luck that day because my ski school class was small and getting smaller as other students had to leave. Eventually it was just my instructor and myself … and the mountain. We had bonded over lunch, both graduates of Western Michigan University, both interested in mental health issues. He had headed up the school ski team, had worked in developmental disabilities, he had even taught people with Down’s Syndrome to ski. Well, now he had me, another challenge.
Carl was patient, he was relaxed and he was an optimist. “Your problem”, he told me, “is you’re trying too hard and you are not having fun. I insist you smile down this next stretch.” Earlier he had us pick totem animals and imitate them as we skied down stretches of powder. That was fun, if a little silly. He was showing us how the 4 year old class was outdoing us through games and attitude and, he noted, “their center of gravity is 10 inches off the ground”. Then Carl said something that changed how I skied and saw life forever. He was quoting a popular book on the psychology of skiing and told me to imagine my fear on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). As I prepared to take the next drop down a chute he asked me to yell the number on my fear scale on every turn. So down the chute I skied, screaming “three, four, two, five, five, two, one, three” and so on. When he rejoined me at the bottom of that run he asked how I felt. I felt great! I had detached from fear just enough to rate and rant and it did not own me. My awareness of fear became an observation, not an obstacle, like noting I was cold or my feet hurt, but it did not matter very much. Then he told me to look back uphill at the chute I had mastered. “Congratulations”, he said, “that was your first black slope and you skied it well!” I was flabbergasted. He had taken me on a maze of trails to enter the chute where no trail signs would tell me that I was on a black (advanced, expert) slope. If I knew that I would not have tried, or I would fall and give up. This day I did neither. A little ignorance and a big helping of detachment through observation brought me a great experience. I skied it again later, quietly saying the numbers, rating my fear (This time I had company, fellow skiers who might wonder if I was screaming a phone number or ski lock combination). It worked wonders. Carl ended our lesson with a run across some manmade “whoop-de-do’s” by the lodge teaching me to enjoy the bumps and “getting air” as my skis left the ground briefly. This, he said was the secret to mastering moguls, enjoy the shift in your stomach, the gravity field of dropping, rising, falling and digging in at every turn.
Sixteen years later I still shiver thinking about that mountain and what I learned that day. At one rest break he saw me look in envy at skiers schussing downhill with tight linked turns and impeccable form. “They”, he said, “skied exactly like you do now once upon a time. The difference between you is that they live here and practice a lot. If you want to ski like that just keep taking lessons and keep practicing.”
Like many of you readers, I don’t ski now, physical trauma takes it’s toll and I’ve hung up my skis for awhile. I don’t know if I will do it again, I hope to introduce my children to that mountain someday if only to buckle their helmets and send them off to ski school while I read and drink hot chocolate by the fireplace . What I want to share from this experience is the magic of using observation to detach from intense sensation. The closest analogue to pain in the human body is fear. Both are called “feelings” although this descriptor is inexact. Fear is an emotion. Pain is a complex matrix of sensation, perception, understanding, reflex, patterns and behavior. Yet both, at first, in their most virulent form compel behavior. In extreme fear or pain, our behavior is automatic, unchosen, reflexive. At the milder levels we are heavily influenced to choose a behavior pattern to escape the intensity. And in both circumstances detachment is possible, even inevitable, if we practice observation. Like the meditation practice of “watching the breath”, we disconnect the link from “feel” to “do” by giving a name to the awareness of the feeling.
Try this exercise to master a pain episode (or fear, or panic or rage).. Start a diaphragmatic breathing (“belly breathing”) pattern, tummy going out on the in breath, down on the out breath. Every out breath rate & say the number of the feeling. Do it for 20 or more breath cycles. You will be amazed at the control this gives you. Congratulations. That was your first black slope. Thank you Carl.