I’d like to discuss what a Gym Movement mind is like.

First and foremost, the goal of Gym Movement training is not to “know” anything.  The real goal is to figure out your own shit so you can move forward at the best rate possible for you.  Once you start, your best will get better.  So, those who call me an arrogant know it all are only half correct.  I am an arrogant “question it all.”

Frankie talked about what the physical form looks like of a person who practices Gym Movement.

In my experience–and I would venture to guess many others who follow Gym Movement–one of the best mental aspects of it is the feeling of knowing that you can cure a lot of your movement based pain.  You will recall I was in a good deal of pain.  I don’t think I mentioned that sometimes a shotgun face lift seemed like an alternative to being in constant pain.  The important aspect of this was that I didn’t give up.  I was able to some things–lots of partial heavy movements–and get slowly better.  Fast forward to know, I can move my left leg freely, and all previous range of motion I had lost is returning.

Getting there was not easy.  Getting there involved asking myself lots of questions.  It involved me finding out the stuff of which I am truly made, and overcoming the limitations incorrect movements placed on me.  It’s kinda like mental toughness, only much more severe and beneficial than snatching a 53lb kettlebell for five minutes only to get corrected on that and two other movements for three days.

 Gym Movement and the Movement Mind

The take home point is that you start to feel like not much can stop you.  This isn’t being foolhardy.  At the same time, you learn what you should and shouldn’t do in your life, and you consider carefully the question of purpose vs. cost. In the end, you will make better decisions for yourself, and they will be the prime directive of the only one qualified to run you–that is, yourself.

As you progress down this road, you’ll find yourself answering questions you might have before you were going to ask them.  As I have gone through some of our educational courses, answers (and in turn, more questions) are becoming more and more self evident and making me think quicker, and in broader strokes.  This makes sentential logic easier to compute and formulate.

I have also noticed that guilt becomes less and less a factor in my life.  Guilt is a form of cognitive dissonance.  For instance, as a five year old, I had the propensity to grab my junk in the same manner Eddie Murphy describes Italians and Black people doing so in some of his stand up comedy.  As a blank slate, touching my junk was irrelevant.  To a quasi-Catholic grandmother, I was probably going to go to hell.  An authority figure that I was taught to trust said something contrary to how I felt.  This is how people get fucked up.  In this instance, I was OK, since my father told me his own mother was full of shit regarding the issue, so I managed to be relatively guiltless.

The overarching point of guilt is that it causes the individual to predicate their actions upon the opinion(s) of another.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out.  Many people hate their choices in school, work, families and so on.

Many people will fuck their lives up because of this guilt.  The Catholic church, Ted Haggard*, Jim Bakker* and many others are good examples of what it’s like to break your body in a way other than the physical.

At a young age, I was already on the right path to not giving much of a shit what people said as far as I was concerned.  I had a veritable milieu of authority figures talking about my “potential,” and how “smart” I was.  While not necessarily good for my ego, I figured I would be able to coast by in school and read books I wanted to read instead of do busy work in class, which was swell for an avid reader like me.  However, with the threat of authority always looming over, I lashed out negatively and wound up in trouble a lot of times when I was 11-13 years old.

These days, I know when to pick and choose things to worry about and not worry about, and the opinions of most others are worth even less than they once were.  Much like Frankie said in the first link regarding physical form, The Movement Mind will have many different end roads–I use “end roads” loosely, since it is not, in fact, an end but a continual, evolving, way of being.

* and ** I have certain degrees of respect for Jim and Ted.  Jim came out and said he finally read the bible when he was in prison, and realized the true message of it and admitted he was wrong, and moved on with Life.  Ted, while casting stones and banging male whores and doing meth, was pretty judgmental.  Even he came to admit where he erred and admitted who he was.  More poignant was that Ted didn’t bother asking to be let back in his previous church, he started a new one and hopefully found a more forgiving group.