As we are approaching the two-month mark of lockdown, this past weekend I have just embraced how how lucky it is to be in Africa during this time. I’m currently located on the island of Seychelles where being on this beautiful island resort, I get to coach and train anyone and everyone that rolls through. This position was intended to be short and sweet to alleviate a bit of the winter season in Canada and return back in spring.
Boom! Global crisis.
Some countries have experienced lockdown and isolation in much worst and in more horrifying conditions; this is clear. And it just took me back a moment, that meanwhile we have access to our beaches, and we are operated rather normally, we have really forgotten that the pandemic is still in full force elsewhere in the world. Economically, we are hit all the same.
There is this one book that has sparked a rather interesting note on the inside that I believe with all our space and time at this moment, can be an interesting read and process of work. This book was on the New York Times bestseller’s list, written by Sadhguru, Inner Engineering, A Yogi’s Guide to Joy.
No need to consider yourself a ”yogi” to be able to read this book. This is all about how you control the internal dialogue to produce the results you want on the outside. How, when untrained, we are very much influenced by our outside world that determines how we feel on the inside.
As a player in competition, or even a parent, being able to control the uncontrollable is not easy. Say in tennis for instance, your opponent makes a bad call, you get mad, pissed off, and call for a referee. You lose your cool, lose your momentum, lose the next 2 games thinking you should have won them from that point, and suddenly you find yourself fighting from being up in the set. I can’t tell you the number of times this has happened to me near the end of a set and match (positively and negatively), but I can tell you, once you have an idea of what your emotions are doing to you in the grand scheme of things, perhaps you may change your ways and only let it effect you for one point and one point only. The ball may not be on your side of the court, but your emotions and how you react are.
We can not let our emotions get the best of us when we had no control over our opponent in making the call. That was his choice, and he got rewarded 2 games for it instead of one point. This is where collecting yourself, breathing into the diaphragm, and really releasing the tension in your body at that very moment of the call to not progress negatively, but however powerfully. Anger can and may arise, which is a very powerful emotion and can be very useful tool on the court when utilized and channeled accordingly. It will always come back to awareness.
So as we move forward in this pandemic for however much longer, as we are all staying inside, we can all go one more level deeper inside the self and observe what we can inner engineer to grow into stronger and better players without the court… for now.
