Be careful what you wish for!

A friend reminded me today of a kind of wisdom which is only evident when someone reminds you of it!  Over the last couple of months I have suffered with some health problems, and I have been thinking about it a lot and wondering, why me? why am I ill? and generally bemoaning the time I have spent ill when I wanted to be climbing or mountaineering.

My friend reminded me that whatever you focus your time and energy on will grow, whether its something positive or negative, something we want or not, something that is beneficial to us or harmful.  I realised that I had been focusing on my illness and not on getting well, and had expended a lot of negative energy on that.  Zen aside, my own early psychological research told me how much the mind affects the immune system - the study I conducted looked at the role of guilt in influencing minor illness, and found that the more guilt you feel, the more likely you are to suffer coughs, colds and other bugs.  The light that dawned on me today was that I needed to focus more on promoting my wellbeing rather than my illness, a subtle yet crucial difference.

Why is this on a climbing blog I hear you ask? I think it has relevance to injury recovery, but also a broader message about focusing on what we want to grow.  So focusing on our technique rather than worrying about our fear should help our climbing ability to grow.  but if we spend a lot of time beating ourselves up about what we dont do so well, or for being afraid, then those things will also grow as we direct our energy to them.

So, today, think about what it is that you want to grow in your climbing, and your life, and direct your time, energies and thoughts to that, rather than the things you dont want.