by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Blog
We are a comfortable people, on the whole. I speak of those of use with the time to glance upon this article, or perhaps those who have the time to spend slouched on sofas in the evening eating food from cupboards plentiful, or those who can wake without the binding strain of debt weighing down on their shoulders.
I am not a wealthy person, not in a monetary sense, but I am wealthy in other ways. I live in comfort, the comfort of having a roof, a warm blanket, a stove to cook upon, and money enough to eat fairly well. I am wealthy in knowledge; I have been gifted the time in my life to dedicate to pure study, pure experience, and purest love. I am, indeed, wealthy in love; I grew up loved without condition, and continue to be. So perhaps I am the wealthiest of all, despite my bedraggled bank account.
I speak of comfort because it has become a way of life to us. I admit that I have spoken on this before, on the ease of modern life (that is for those to which this ease is accessible). We have thermostats so our bodies never need attempt to regulate themselves; we have the internet and all the glories of it – entertainment, mindless or otherwise, social media, with all its faults and joys, swathes of pages upon pages on any topics that might please us at any moment. We have shops near to us containing anything our bellies could possibly wish for. We live in 15-minute cities, where all can be accessed in an instant, and, wherever we happen to be, we can have hot meals delivered at the press of a button. This life is so sincerely, throttlingly comfortable that we often forget what it is to NOT be comfortable, and, so, when we experience a lack of comfort, we immediately recoil back into our dens of safety and refuge. We are consistently told what is possible, and what is not; limitations seem to be a way of life.
When I was in training to become an actor, one of my teachers said to the class:
‘Look – you’re never going to be the next Brad Pitt or Daniel Craig.’
I was outraged. Here was a man teaching us to follow the most fickle, the most painstaking of dreams, and he was already placing limitations on how far he believed we could go. He was encouraging us to be comfortable, comfortable with a particular rung of success, comfortable to believe that that rung was all that we could possibly achieve.
As an example of limitations, this is perhaps not especially applicable to you, particularly if you are not an artist. But we have been taught our limits as humans for hundreds of years. Consider the 4-minute mile. In 1954, Roger Bannister, an English medical student, broke the 4-minute mile for the first time, a feat which was previously believed by experts to be life-threatening to the human body, as the heart would simply ‘explode’. Sub-4-minute miles are now a regular occurrence amongst athletes, even a benchmark. But if Bannister hadn’t fixed his eyes on the feat, then who knows how long it would have been until we realised that this arbitrary ‘rule’ of the biomechanics of the human body was utterly false?
The thing is, we are content to live within such limitations, for they are insidious and deeply woven throughout our brains from childhood. I have often been told, when getting into cold water in the depths of winter, that I am ‘crazy’, and that the person speaking ‘could never do that.’ But, my dear, you could! What I do is not ‘crazy’. To me, it is a necessity, for it teaches me that seemingly impossible things are not so impossible after all. When I get into cold water, when I am about half-way in, my mind tells me to run away, to get out, to go back to my clothes and my warm bed and hot food, but, when I push through these thoughts, and finally get in, I am reminded of what it means to push through comfort in order to achieve contentment, and joy in life. Despite having swum through the entire year for around 5 years to date, I am still terrified by it, still daunted, and I still feel cold when I get in and get out. That has not changed. But what has changed is my mentality towards other areas of my life. If I can get into water that is almost entirely iced over, when the air temperature is -3 degrees Celsius, then every other goal or dream in my life feels a little easier, a little more attainable, because, surely, it cannot be so hard as this.
I have been actively trying to become less comfortable, or to challenge myself to negate comfort in order to chase a personal feat. I do not do this for a post on Instagram, or Facebook, or otherwise, though, of course, it is nice to receive validation from such places. I do this for intrinsic reasons, reasons inexplicable, but perhaps pertaining to something more spiritual in nature. For some reason or another, I have a body, a body that is healthy and full of vitality, and I would like to see all that it can do, to prove to myself that it can indeed achieve feats that seem impossible, feats which might somehow bring me closer to what this gift of life really means.
Northeast of Kyoto (京都市), Japan, lies Mount Hiei (比叡山), where reside the Yamabushi monks, who practice Shugendō (修験道). The term ‘Shugendō’ is defined by Tim Bunting (who self-describes as a ‘Kiwi Yamabushi’), who explains it as ‘the way (do) of attaining divine natural powers (gen) through ascetic practices (shu)’; David, from the website randomwire.com, similarly describes Shugendō as ‘the path of training and testing’. Bunting goes on to explain that ‘the word yamabushi comes from Yama (山) meaning mountain, and fushi or fuseru (伏せる), meaning to promulgate, or to be on all fours.’ This is because, during the ascetic training of the Yamabushi, they can be seen crawling on all fours over the mountain.
This spiritual training is called the kaihōgyō (回峰行) which can be tentatively translated as “circling the mountain”. The duration of this pilgrimage is 7 years, during which the monks must complete 1000 days of traveling on foot over a variety of distances. If they fail, these must commit honorable suicide, or Hara-Kiri. Note: to become a serving priest at the Mount Hiei temple, a monk must at least complete the first hundred days of kaihōgyō. To date, only 46 monks have completed the 1000-day practice. During the full kaihōgyō, the monk, or gyoja, must not stop for breaks of refreshment or rest (except for the required stops to pray, chant, and give service to shrines, which must be performed to the highest of standards), must not drink alcohol or smoke, must keep their hat and robe on them as they walk/run, and must not deviate from the course they have been prescribed. The latter rule is also likely safer than the alternative; the routes have been specifically carved out, and to stray from them is often treacherous, if not deadly.
Yamabushi Monks. Photo: BBC.
The initial three years of kaihōgyō entail travelling over 100 uninterrupted days a distance of 30km. Years four and five entail journeying 30km a day for 200 days, and upon finishing these initial 700 days, the monks must take part in doiri, which is a trial of nine days without water, food, and rest or sleep of any sort, throughout which the monk must chant continuously. They are observed during these 9 days by two other monks. The penultimate sixth-year entails walking or running 60 km daily for 100 days, and, during the final year, year seven, the gyoja must complete 84 km a day for 100 days, after which he must complete another 100 days of 30km a day.
These Yamabushi monks, of the Tendai sect, subsist off of miso, rice, and green tea, and their days follow a routine something like this: awake at 12:00am, complete an hour of prayer, then begin walking from 1:30am. After the day’s pilgrimage is completed, the monks must tend to chores including praying, cleaning the temple where they are staying, and other menial tasks until they go to rest at between 8:00 and 9:00pm. The paths they walk throughout the night are littered with the graves of those unable to complete their kaihōgyō (details here extracted from ‘A Variety of Ascetic Practices’ compiled by kirpalsingh.org).
I bring up the great trial of the Yamabushi monks not because I think it essential to contrast the extremes of our aforementioned way of ‘comfort’ with the unfathomable mental and physical resilience of these monks, but because I think we tell ourselves that we are incapable of such feats in our own lives. The path to any achievement is long, and arduous, and it is easy to forget such wisdom as that of Yusai Sakai, who, from the ages of 41 to 61, finished the kaihōgyō two times, and who tells us that we must ‘live each day as if it is your entire life. If you start something today, finish it today- tomorrow is another world’ (quote told by Maria Andrews at marathonhandbook.com). We forget that motivation, enthusiasm, and sense of purpose are all fickle things, and that it is a sincerely painstaking process to try and reprogram our minds to embrace adversity in order to reach our goals.
Our minds are not so far, evolutionarily speaking, from those of our ancestors, who had to run from predators, and for whom seeking out shelter, warmth, and food was a daily necessity, while for us, most of the time, we can come home and have all three of these comforts at the flick of a switch to turn on the heating, or at the push of a button on the microwave to heat up a meal. But when placed in a situation of hardship, whether that be on a long run, or lifting a heavy weight, or walking up a steep hill, or even simply venturing out at night in the depths of winter, our minds tell us we must retreat back to safety and comfort, despite us consciously knowing that we will soon return to it anyway. We can explain this tendency using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which asserts that our base human needs (at the bottom of his hierarchy pyramid) are entirely physiological; these necessities are air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, and reproduction. Thus, when we are lacking one or more of these, we naturally, and subconsciously, make sacrifices to have it, or them, once again, whether that be by sleeping or staying in bed a little longer in the morning so we stay warm and/or sleep more, or pushing a run forward another day because we tell ourselves we need more rest, or stopping a run short because we feel hungry or thirsty. Of course, these reactions to perceived hardships are only natural; of course, our minds wish to keep us safe, and so fight to ensure that we reserve our energy for the purpose of survival. But all the while, we consciously understand that we ARE safe, and that we have sufficient food, water, and rest to be able to survive, even if, say, we walked 30km a day for a week.
But how do we battle the rationale of the base human brain? How do we begin to push through physical, or even psychological, discomfort in order to achieve our dreams and our goals? Maria Andrews, on marathonhandbook.com, quotes a monk as saying ‘you must think positively. Thinking positively, I believe I can continue until the end. I cannot allow myself to think ‘what if?’. The Yamabushi monks are INTRINSICALLY motivated, which athlete Ross Edgley (who completed the World’s Longest Staged Sea Swim in 2018, when he became the first person in history to swim 1,780 miles all the way around Great Britain in 157 days – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Edgley) asserts as the most reliable way to conquer our goals (in all fields, including fitness, personal growth, and job-oriented goals). The Yamabushi monks go through unimaginable physical hardship for the purpose of enlightenment, to adjoin the human with Buddha. According to Tendai Buddhism, enlightenment is possible to achieve for the human through ‘selfless service and devotion’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaihōgyō) and the ‘kaihōgyō is seen as the ultimate expression of this desire’ (Ibidem). Thus, ‘by the end of the practice the monks have achieved a form of identification with the emanation of Buddha known as Fudō Myōō (Acala)’ (Ibidem). These monks do not pursue the kaihōgyō so they can tell everyone they know about it at dinner parties, nor do they only appreciate the end of the kaihōgyō for its title and celebrity; the path is the thing, and they must not rush it, rather, it is essential that throughout the pilgrimage, they ground themselves through meditation and other spiritual practices. It is essential for the monk to maintain a state of positivity and acknowledgment of the present, rather than focusing on the end goal, or the next day of walking, or even what lies a few kilometres away from them on their path. Perhaps it would be a wonderful thing to implement such a mindset into our own lives; an acknowledgement and gratitude for the present moment, for all that we have and all that is concrete, rather than wavering for fear of what might come, and for what challenges might present themselves to us on our way to achieving our dreams.
It would be good to ask oneself ‘what intrinsically motivates me?’, not ‘what will my parents/friends/colleagues approve of’, nor ‘what will impress people’, nor ‘what would be a good thing to be able to post about on Instagram’, nor ‘how can I get as good a body as ‘them’’. If our motivations are spiritually aligned with our innermost selves so that their attainment can feed us emotionally and psychologically, then our outer selves will perhaps ameliorate as a result. As such, this is the motivation that will allow us to break our cycle of comfort, because it does not rely on external factors, which themselves can be capricious and oftentimes less satisfying or gratifying than we may initially believe them to be. Even if you do not ascribe to a certain religion, or faith, and so do not experience spirituality in that way, then you can still consider intrinsic motivation as something of a different spiritual kind; something that brings you inner contentment so that each day you might wake with a little more positivity, a little more joy for this brief thing we call life. If we push ourselves out of our comfort zones, we might more greatly appreciate the comfort we have when we return to it, and so we might be more inclined to readily and deliberately push ourselves to attain our dreams. To do so, we must ignore the limitations that society places on us, and we must reject the inclination to do things to impress others, or to become better than them, for we cannot achieve contentment and joy if we rely on comparison as our purpose for movement towards our goals.
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Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include the New York Marine Rescue Center, Tempelhofer Feld, and What I Have Learned About Running.
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