The Teachings / Internal Sports

Keeping Challenges Open

Back

The search for human excellence: responding to the challenge of living and bringing yourself to the highest level of development.

This internal sport concerns maintaining a continuous attitude of overcoming obstacles, of breaking barriers, of rising above difficulties, of broadening the horizon of our ability to do things.

The reason? The search for human excellence:  responding to the challenge of living and bringing yourself to the highest level of development.

The obstacles? Inertia, the weight of comfortableness, the instinctive tendency to make the least effort possible, the conditioning that blocks our abilities, the subliminal messages and beliefs about what is or is not possible, the fear of failure . . .

This internal sport requires:

• Having a path marked out with a concrete end-point:  the fullest development of all potentialities.
• A proactive attitude that does not wait for problems, but instead goes and seeks them out in order to smooth the path.

Keeping challenges open is an active struggle against:

• Giving up on achieving anything that seems difficult, or that may even be considered “impossible”.
• Getting comfortable, which swindles effort.
• Fooling ourselves into thinking that we are on an active path upward when it is not true.
• Self-indulgence, which excuses effort, justifies not keeping our word to ourselves, weakens the intentions we started with, and robs o challenge of meaning.

Doing this Internal Sport requires:

• Setting your sights high and holding on to the essential feeling of the CHALLENGE.
• Maintaining your motivation and staying connected to your own objectives.
• Developing creativity in order to overcome obstacles.
• Learning to deal with demoralization, routine and inertia.
• Refining your skills.
• Acquiring resources for confronting your own failings, your own errors, in a positive way so that they become lessons in life that will help you continue to advance.

Getting started:

»  Find your path to improvement:

• What is it that I think I don't know how to do?
• What is it that I think I can't do?
• What is it that I am afraid to do or to confront?

» Pick an objective to reach:

• What I want to achieve

» Lay out a course of action:

• What I must do to achieve it

» Accumulate energy (see the rest of the Internal Sports)

» Monitor your progress, asking yourself every day:

• Am I keeping my mind on my challenge?
• Are my actions, thoughts and emotions consistent with what I want to achieve?