I did do well – but only after putting in ten times as much effort as I thought I would need. Circus training is about taking all known physical limits and then radically blowing those limits out of proportion. When I entered the circus school, I thought that doing a handstand was a sizable achievement. I quickly learned that it was only a basic movement for the rest of my training, much like the letter “a” is to an entire paragraph. It was only the beginning.

Circus training is by far the most intense and effective exercise form I have ever encountered. It sculpts and shapes your body, drastically improves your ability to balance in any position, increases your power, flexibility and coordination – all without the use of weights, machines, or fancy equipment. Your movement becomes efficient and effective. You don’t develop extra muscles just to look good – you develop them because they help you achieve a specific move. Everything serves a purpose.

A few years ago, I was inspired by the idea of combining two complementary movement disciplines: acrobatics and yoga. In acrobatics, you develop power, speed, coordination and balance. In yoga, you develop flexibility, calmness, and awareness of breathing. The genesis of the two forms became “Acrofit Power” – a class that combines explosive plyometric exercises with the calming and meditative spirit of yoga. Since 2009, I’ve had multiple teacher certifications and hundreds of students experience Acrofit.

AWAKENING
The Acrofit Power class begins with a centering breathing exercise called “Ying Yang Centering”. Students empty their minds of daily distractions and focus on drawing in full, deep inhalations since the ability to control and expand breath capacity is key for any aerobic activity. The next few sequences warm up the arms, neck, shoulders, and legs in preparation for the first of the acrobatic movements.

SUNRISE
The first acrobatic exercise is called “Candle Series”. From a seated position, you roll backwards, extending legs vertically into the air, drop and roll forward, and hop into a mini-handstand. It’s a move that teaches you how to use existing momentum and gravity to facilitate the move. It’s a typical example of what Acrofit training is all about – using existing forces like body momentum, gravity, or counterbalances to make your movement more efficient and effortless. Acrofit is not about blindly pushing or muscling through a move. In advanced acrobatics, that generally results in injury, because coordination, body awareness and appropriate power, not ballistic power, is required. Correct power levels, timing, and speed are more valued attributes.

POWER
The Power sequence focus primarily on basic acrobatic moves and core strengthening exercises, like cartwheels, forward rolls, and a deceptively simple, but challenging core training routine called “Breakdance Basics”. It’s the piece de resistance of the class with five separate movements that combined, radically increase your aerobic and plyometric capacity.

We also practice a concept called “Active Resting”. Active resting is the practice of gaining maximum recovery while maintaining a posture of readiness. Typically, athletes will collapse in exhaustion after a demanding exercise. You’ll see the tired pose: hands on knees, body hunched over, heaving gasps for air. In active resting, you kneel, sit, stand, or even go into a headstand and manage your recovery in that position. You deny yourself the tendency to show fatigue and in doing so, strengthen your psychological will to continue. Acrofit, despite its unique physical demands, is a practice more for the mind, than for the body.

SUNSET
Headstands and child’s poses follow to bring down the pace of the class. Headstands allow you to develop balance, and internal awareness of core positioning – is your body straight, curved, piked? Highly oxygenated blood comes rushing to your head, rejuvenating, refreshing, and invigorating your brain. After another core training exercise, the class re-centers with a adapted deep breathing exercise and wrist and forearm strengthening sequence.

MEDITATION
Following in the structure of a yoga class, you return to a state of savasana or lying down position. By lying down after a workout and intentionally calming your mind and breath, you allow the accumulated lessons of the training to integrate into your body. It’s allowing your unconscious mind to assimilate the movements by relaxing the controlling aspect of the conscious mind, and removing it from the learning process. Ultimately, movement becomes natural, spontaneous and most efficient when it becomes unconscious and instinctive.

Meditation is one of the most overlooked components of a well-rounded, effective training routine. By relaxing your body and mind before completing your practice, you are associating relaxation with training. The state in which you leave your training is the state in which you’ll enter your next one. Maximum learning, progress and physiological efficiency is best achieved in relaxed states. Acrofit Power, which demands high levels of coordination, balance, and induces increased levels of stress because of the acrobatic exercises, is best approached from a calm, focused and relaxed mind and body.

***
Acrofit Power is a combination of the best acrobatic exercises I learned through the National Circus School of Canada, Cirque du Soleil and the many other tours, projects, and workshops I participated in throughout my career. It’s designed to be tough enough for the seasoned athlete, but accessible for the complete beginner. It’s also not a watered-down version of acrobatic training for the general public – they are exact exercises that I practiced amongst professional acrobats to prepare for our routines. With Acrofit Power, you can expect a fun, challenging, authentic and highly unique practice.

Many exercise forms focus on technique. Yoga focuses on postures, bootcamp runs you through circuit drills, and swimming makes you do laps. In most classes, you follow the instructor move for move, copying as closely as you can the form of the exercise. You imitate the placement of the toes, the fingers, the arch of the back, and depth of the squat. Unfortunately in many classes, it resembles a factory production line where student after student forces herself into a carbon copy of the instructor.

Learning technique is important but only if it is accompanied by principle training. Learning the principle of a movement frees your mind from training by rote and teaches you to develop self-awareness and creativity. Here are a few examples of the principles behind the technique:

Technique            Principle
Handstand            Placing your center of gravity over your foundation
Tree Pose (yoga)        Placing your center of gravity over your foundation
Warrior Pose            Placing your center of gravity over your foundation
Punch                Generating power by rotating your center of gravity
Kick                Generating power by rotating your center of gravity
Running            Off balancing your center of gravity
Squats                Compressing and expanding the body
Crunches            Compressing and expanding the body
Back flip            Compressing and expanding the body

There are thousands and thousands of movement techniques but only a few principles. Once you begin to understand how the body moves, you can begin to apply the principles across multiple exercise forms. For example, my two main movement specialty areas are acrobatics and martial arts. How do principles cross over between the two?

Martial arts is based on two primary principles: generating power by rotating your center of gravity and compressing and expanding the body. The speed and power behind any punch, kick, knee, or elbow comes from rapidly torquing your waist – your center of gravity – and extending a limb. As you extend your punch, kick, knee or elbow, you expand your body, then quickly compress it again.

Acrobatics is based on two primary principles: generating movement by off balancing your center of gravity and compressing and expanding your body. A back handspring requires you to fall off balance first, then rapidly expand your body backwards in an arch, while firing your legs. You expand to your maximum range and then return to a normal range, standing.

Other exercise forms may have only one main principle. Running is the act of constantly falling off balance and catching yourself.  You move your center of gravity, the waist, forward and wait for your feet to catch up. Then you repeat over and over again – and suddenly you’re running. Your speed is not determined by how quickly you move your feet, but by the degree to which you’re willing to be imbalanced.

Benefits of Principle Training

When you begin to actively seek to understand the principle behind all your movements, you increase your body awareness. Instead of being distracted by techniques, you become much more in tune with what you are doing and if you are overdoing a movement, or if you can go further with it. You learn faster because you see the similarities across multiple moves and you become more creative as an athlete because you can make up exercise routines instead of following rigid programs that lead to boredom and chronic injury.

Once you understand movement based on principle, you also learn faster. Instead of dissecting a technique, you seek automatically to understand the physics and dynamics of the movement. The technique happens to be the specific requirements of that sport or exercise form, so your learning accelerates because you already understand what 90% of your body has to do.

Spiritual Parallel
On a spiritual parallel, principle training is like having a clear set of values versus a rulebook to dictate your actions. For example, you might value kindness, courage, and community contribution. All your actions stem from these simple values. You’ll choose to help people instead of hindering them, encourage others in need, and volunteer your time, money, or expertise to your community.

On the other hand, if you haven’t identified your values, you’ll struggle with your daily choices because you won’t have an internal compass to guide your actions. You’ll rely instead on a rulebook, which by its very nature is inflexible and can’t adjust to new circumstances. For every new situation or variable, you’ll need a new rule. That’s why life gets laborious when you don’t have clear values – there are too many rules to remember and some of them will end up contradicting each other!

For example, I used to have a strict rule that I should never drink alcohol. It was a belief I inherited from my upbringing, and I applied it dogmatically to my life without question. I thought I valued health but I was really locked into a rule that I had never thought to ask it if served me.

My non-drinking rule probably saved me from a lot of heartache, nights of regret and an overtaxed liver. On the other hand I missed out on a lot of fun as well. If I had defined my value as enjoying life through healthy moderation, then I would have made choices that allowed me to drink when I wanted to, but not overdo it to cause long term damage. I finally replaced this rule with a value at the age of 33, when I finally had my first hangover.

So any rule, when not backed by a value you truly care about, results in rigid, robotic behavior. You end up enforcing your rule with aggression because you don’t really have options, unless you write more rules to accommodate a changing situation. Then you end up with a personal rule book thousands of metaphoric pages long, and, instead of aggression, you experience exhaustion.

***

Physical training is the same. When your mind is flooded with thousands of techniques without principles, you become overwhelmed with the choices and you simply shut down. Perhaps you stop training, or resort to the boring forms of training, like watching the same video over and over again because your entire program is dictated to you and no thinking is required. Without principle-based training, the attrition rate on an exercise program is high because you don’t have variations – you can’t slow down on a long day, or speed up on an energetic day. With principle-based training, you have the knowledge to show you how to make a movement easier or more challenging, apply it to another form of movement or another sport, and even create your own form of exercise.

A month and half ago, I decided to venture into the mindset of seeing the world through a subjective reality lens after being inspired by the experiments of a popular personal development blogger, Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com). Subjective reality is assuming that everything around you is a creation of your consciousness. There is no exception, not the good nor the bad. You create everything, everyone and every single interaction you have. Objective reality is seeing the world as separate from you: you are an independent being moving through a world of unrelated events, people, circumstances. You are a lone ranger-scientist manipulating a world of uncontrolled variables.

In my last blog to you I mentioned that I was approaching two problems with the subjective reality mindset: the vindictive neighbor and the invading ants (reread the article here). Here’s what happened:

THE VINDICTIVE NEIGHBOR

After an angry neighbor tore down our yoga class signs that we posted around our community, I decided to see her as an extension of my consciousness rather than through an objective lens: a conniving, separate-from-me, human being whose purpose was to make my life miserable by thwarting my yoga advertising efforts. Instead I focused on seeing what her actions represented in me, if she was indeed a part of me. I began to see that her pettiness was my pettiness, her vindictiveness was my vindictiveness, and her unruly self-righteousness was my unruly self-righteousness. None of this was flattering, but I decided to heal the situation, not by confronting her or by posting more signs, but by sending thoughts of “I love you” to her, which in a subjective world, is really me sending thoughts of love to myself.

The result was that I never saw her face again in the neighborhood until just last week, despite the fact that I walk the dog twice a day and I know that she gets out for her morning walk every day also. It was almost as if her existence simply vanished from my consciousness. There’s been no further conflict, and our yoga classes continue to fill up.

THE CASE OF THE INVADING ANTS

After waking one morning to discover that ants had taken over our kitchen counters and sinks, I decided to solve the invasion with a subjective reality approach, instead of with a can of Raid. My wife Jaime and I talked about how the ants represented our lack of accountability. The ants came supposedly because we didn’t always do the dishes right away, or put the food away on the counter, but they came also because we didn’t always pay the bills on time, or that we procrastinated with some of business efforts, like finding distributors for our instructional DVDs. We then created a concrete plan to make sure we were more accountable in all areas of our lives, like doing the dishes more frequently, and starting an application for a potential DVD distributor.

The result was amazing. I didn’t see another ant in our kitchen for three weeks. Previously, even if we had kept the counters and sink clean, there would always be one or two ants roaming about. We didn’t see any ants until one day we mistakenly left out the maple syrup. They came back in droves for a day or two and then disappeared again.

THE REBEL IN THE YOGA CLASS

I’ve had a few other epiphanies along the way. During the month of August I was taking quite a few hot yoga classes, the type of yoga you do in a heated room to increase your flexibility and sweat out toxins. It’s a greatly beneficial form of yoga and exercise but the one thing that I don’t like about it is the fact that the class is highly regimented and that there’s really no deviation allowed from the established routine or positions. Since I like to create movement and am an independent thinker, showing up at class became increasingly more difficult.

As I took more classes, I found myself becoming increasingly irritable with the rigid system. I would find myself resisting the teachers’ instructions or would feel rebellious. Imagine that – a rebel at a yoga class! How funny yet misplaced.

The part of the class that I didn’t like was the rigidity, the formality, the unbending systemized sequence of movements, speech, and breath. It was becoming a tight, unforgiving experience, where I would be lightly reprimanded for not straightening my knee enough, turning my head to the wrong side, or – God forbid – yawning. It was beginning to drive me bonkers.

That’s when my subjective reality filter kicked in. If the yoga class was really me, then what part of me did it represent?

It represented the part of me that was unyielding, unforgiving, systematic, and rigid. And though nobody likes to lay claim to undesirable attributes, my subjective reality filter was telling me that I was all of these characteristics and had probably subjected others to actions of non-forgiveness or rigidity in the past.

These realization lay the foundation for me to exercise flexibility, calmness, and patience for my next epiphany, and the ultimate realization in subjective reality: the birth of my son.

THE ULTIMATE REALIZATION: THE BIRTH OF OUR SON

Our son, Satori Tiger Tam, arrived on August 31, weighing in 6 pounds, 5 ounces. There’s no joy like seeing his face illuminate with satisfaction after a feeding, and there’s no anguish like hearing him cry at night because he has gas in his tummy. The range of emotion is off the charts. I am overwhelmed by the powerful instinct to love, protect and serve, and humbled by the miracle of birth and life. We posted pictures and videos for you and a section for you to leave a comment if you’d like at www.satoritam.com.

Through the days of pre-contraction labor and childbirth, my world became suspended in a bubble of doctors, baby, bottles, and diapers. Was it normal for the baby to spit up? Did we need the vitamin K shot for blood clotting? How do we breast feed? How often do we change his diaper? It was a learning curve like no other.

When the dust settled (somewhat) and we were back at home away from the blinking hospital lights, nurses, and exams, I finally asked myself the question: what part of me does Satori represent? I was astounded by the answer.

He doesn’t represent me. He is me. He is from both of his parents in every way – biologically, genetically, psychologically, spiritually. He is me… and I am him.

Suddenly, I had found an example where I could not deny its validity from either a subjective reality or an objective reality viewpoint. Objectively, he is me. He carries my DNA, adopts my behavioral patterns, and even looks like me. Subjectively, he doesn’t just represent a part of me anymore, he is me. When I see the frustration on his face from hunger, I see my own frustration. When I see his content eyes gaze up at me, I see  my eyes peering forth with love. He is a living, breathing mirror of me.

Objectively, from my wife’s standpoint, he is even more of her than me. She birthed him; he came from her physically. The lines between objective and subjective reality become blurred. Through both reality filters our son does not only represent a part of us, but is us.

So the final realization is that since we are all born of our mothers, and that, despite the fact that we are billions of human beings on the planet, we can trace our roots back to a small group of early ancestors. In that sense, we all come from the same common pool of genetic and biological material. From an objective standpoint, we are each other, and science and logic can prove it so.

From a subjective reality filter, we say that everything is a representation of our consciousness. But with my child in hand, I realize that representation is still a term too distant. It’s important to ask what part of me is this circumstance, person, or thing? My child is me, and I am him. There is no separation or symbolism. The liaison is concrete, factual, real.

I can begin to deepen my understanding now of living life through a filter of subjective reality by asking how everything around me is me, not how everything represents a part of me. It’s a subtle but important shift in mindset, a minor angle change of the paradigm, but so incredibly more accurate, rewarding, and eye-opening. There is greater power and depth in living in a world of “is” rather than a world of “represents”.

I don’t know if I’ll always be able to stay in a world of subjective viewpoint with Satori. In the middle of the night, when I’m changing his diaper for the third time, I find myself slipping into a world of me separated from him. How can you poo so many times in three hours? How can you be so hungry, we just fed you!? The test of mind shift comes not when there is joy, contentment, and relaxation in his face, for those are easy qualities to claim as parts of me. It’s when he’s fussy or frustrated that I need to ask myself how is he being me, and remind myself that he, like everything around me, is a creation of my consciousness.

Since the adventure of raising a child has only just begun for us, I am sure that I’ll be waffling back and forth between objective and subjective reality with him for a long time, until perhaps it will become a fully integrated behavior and I will stop living life in the objective world. It will be important for me to never forget the obvious truth – that he is me – and apply that simple maxim to trying times ahead, as well as of course the beautiful, loving, and rewarding moments also. He is me, I am him, you are me, and I am you. Simple, so challenging, and yet so ever rewarding.

- Alvin.

It’s a radical departure from the way most people see life and live life. We have a collective belief that the world is a fixed framework and we are beings born into this environment. We claw and fight our way through life because, in objective reality, you don’t really control anything. The ways and whims of the world are forces beyond your command, and you simply do your best to deal and keep up. In objective reality there are divisions of people, schools of different thought, and “the other side”. You are separate from the world, merely existing, sometimes observing, sometimes responding, but never becoming one with the environment around you. How could you? It was here before you, and will be here when you are gone.

In subjective reality, all this changes. There was no world before your consciousness illuminated since you are the creator of your world. There is no traffic jam or annoying co-worker – these are reflections of you. As Steve explains, seeing life as subjective reality is like having a dream. You are both the dreamer and the creator of the dream, and all the characters in the dream are creations of you.

Objective and subjective reality are two perspectives in which to see life. There’s no way to really ascertain if one is the truth and the other a falsity. But when you have a choice of perspectives, it’s key to be able to see and experience all of them, because it enriches your life in unexpected ways.

I’ve been inspired by Steve to do my own experiment into subjective reality and live my life for 30 days with the constant reminder that everything I encounter is a reflection of me. This includes people, circumstances, events large and small, and so on – everything. I’m going to report on my discoveries about once per week and share my revelations or frustrations with you. I’m not sure what to expect since I, like most people, have been living life as though I am not in full control of my world. So, here goes…

08/10/2010: COCONUT JUICE FOR RECYCLING MAN

I just heard the recycling truck pull up, and, instead of ignoring the man who’s working hard to pick up my junk every two weeks and save it from the landfill like I usually do, I decided to bring him a cold can of fresh coconut juice. I gave him the drink and thanked him for working so hard. Was it weird to applaud the recycling man? Maybe. But in the end, it was me that I sent gratitude to, since he’s just a creation of myself. And I do like a cold coconut juice on a hot day.

08/09/2010: VINDICTIVE NEIGHBORS SUCK

My wife and I started a weekly community yoga class at our neighborhood clubhouse a few weeks ago. We went to the homeowners meeting, proposed the project and got approval to post signs around the complex. After the second class, a horribly vindictive and crabby neighbor decided to tear down our signs. We got very upset over this.

I finally ran into the petty thief, a resident of the community who spouted claims that we were defacing the neighborhood and sullying its beauty with our adverts. I countered back that we intended only to bring a healthy weekly activity to the community. Outwardly I beamed diplomacy and good motives. Inwardly I wanted to wring her neck.

For the next few days I replayed various scenarios in my head of how I could scare her just enough to pack her bags and move out of the complex. Her vindictiveness became mine and the cycle of inner aggression began to play out its ugly dance.

I was living in the objective world where she, a dirt bag, was separate from me and doing something to hinder me, hurt me, put sticks in my spokes. But when I switched on the subjective reality filter, then I saw that she IS me and represents a part of me that is vindictive, disrespectful, and petty. I wish this filter was only rose colored, but as it is, it reveals the ugly truth very quickly.

Since she is me, I couldn’t remain angry at her or lay voodoo curses on her every time I walked passed her house. It would be like insulting myself or wishing harm done to myself so I stopped very quickly. Then my wife and I sent silent prayers to her by saying “I’m sorry, I love you.” Sorry for the pain and suffering in her (in me) that gives rise to vindictive aggression, and love to hasten the necessary healing that needs to take place in her (in me).

I haven’t seen her again, but I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of interaction we’ll have this time.

08/08/2010: ATTACK OF THE ANTS

I know it makes some sense to see reflections of you in other people (recall the various proverbs – the eyes are the mirrors of the soul?) but would you be able to see yourself in non-human life forms, like ants?

We’ve been having an ant infestation lately and I’ve been the crazy ant killer. I crush them with glee when they crawl on my kitchen sink and I stomp them with delight when they cross my front patio. It’s a killing party.

The other morning, when I woke up and saw them attacking a little chunk of watermelon in my kitchen, I nearly exploded into a fury of ant termination when I reminded myself of my experiment. I asked myself, what part of me do the ants represent? As ridiculous as that sounds, I discovered an answer.

My wife Jaime and I talked about how the ants came because we didn’t always do the dishes right away and left them in the sink overnight. I’m clean but not a tidiness freak, so I’ll let things get out of hand once in a while. I realized then that the ants represented parts of me that I let get out of hand.

I realized that I could pay my bills more promptly. I realized that I could update my finances more regularly. I realized that I could stay off my computer more and be more focused and productive when I’m on it. I realized that when I get in a rut and start doing things out of routine and not out of passion, I let things slide. I realized that I always need to focus on expressing my deepest passions and truest nature, so that things don’t start to slide.

Within an hour, we had come up for a game plan for the kitchen, and life. We decided to do a better job of cleaning the dishes, and to begin an active strategy to find someone or some organization to help us market and distribute our creative products – our instructional DVDs, music CDs, both of our books, and our fitness and developmental workshops. Yesterday Jaime called a few production agencies, and we’re starting to take steps towards aligning our passions and our finances.

All from a few ants. It’s only been 48 hours, but I haven’t seen them back yet. Coincidence – or just a remnant of my self that’s been heard and met with compassion and understanding?

****************
I’ll follow up with more observations into my 30-day experiment with subjective reality next week. If you’d rather receive my blogs (since I’ll be sending out the next few weekly) by RSS feed, sign up for a feed in the top right corner of this site. Then send me an email and let me know you’re set up with an RSS reader.

Or not.

Stopping the spread of fear happens in minute, small increments. Occasionally, you might be able to crack the glass ceiling by hurdling yourself upwards through adversity in one Herculean leap of faith – but more commonly, you’ll take it one step at a time. The changes will be small, barely noticeable, but will create long-lasting results.

The trick to stopping the spread of fear is to recognize the subtle masks that fear wears. Fear in our daily lives does not usually manifest itself as hooded terrorists with machine guns, rapists wielding machetes, or killer viruses that annihilate entire cities in a day. Fear makes its stealthy appearance through the back door with comments disguised as cynicism, sarcasm, and anger.
Perhaps you’ve been told on your birthday that “you’re only a few years from being over the hill.” Or the day after you were married, you were warned that “the honeymoon is now over.” Maybe you have kids now and recall your friends predicting the demise of your romantic life. The tone of cynicism and sarcasm is thick and pervading, and you probably waived off their nauseous comments with a polite smile or even a forced laugh.

Don’t let their heedless jeers sink in though. The moment you are bombarded with petty cynicism and sarcasm, you have a choice: accept the profanity or reject it. Societal standards make it permissable to be victims of thoughtless jokes without realizing that the actual force behind this low-level commentary is fear. It could be fear about growing old, losing physical capabilities, or never being able to experience again the glory days of youth. It could be fear about not being able to sustain a long term relationship, ending in divorce, or defiling your commitment with your wanderlust ways of bachelorhood. Regardless of what the fear is about, recognize that others may attempt to project their unspoken shadows unto you, subtlely taking you down with their sinking ship. Misery likes company.

You can stop fear when you are able to recognize the mask. Cynicism and sarcasm almost always reflect a deeper, hidden anxiety that spews out in random, uncontrolled bursts, like a scalding geyser blowing out  of a narrow fissure. The dramatic eruptions on the surface distract us from the mounting friction below.

Your course of action is non-action. To not react, respond, or partake in the game of cynicism and saracasm is to effectively reject it and reinforce your ability to safeguard your beliefs, your intentions, and your dreams. You become stronger, more confident, and courageous. These qualities do not call forth massive effort, but require you to develop greater awareness so that you can be non-reactive. Where do you encounter cynicism and sarcasm? Perhaps your workplace has a self-appointed comedian whose mission is to slay his colleagues with senseless verbal jabs. The media is also inundated with false alarms, phony pundits, and bogus claims. Look around you with your radar set for cynicism and sarcasm, and you’ll see that this seemingly benign and normal behavior is everywhere.

Anger is a step up in intensity from sarcasm and cynicism but still functions most of the time to hide a deeper fear. This is not the kind of anger that spontaneously erupts in self-preservation – a car swerving toward you, a threatening gesture made against your children, or a stalking figure following you in dark, deserted alley. This is the brewing, simmering kind, the type of anger that maliciously oozes out to incinerate happiness, optimism, and well-being.

Anger begets anger, and the angered becomes the perpetrator. The vengeful cycle is closed and the flames of battle spark while both parties completely miss the point. What is the point? Neither one has realized that the fuel for their anger is fear.

When you recognize that your anger, or another’s anger draws its strength from fear, you diminish the intensity of your rage. Sometimes your anger even  completely disappears. The key to transforming anger is understanding the underlying source of its fiery façade. Beneath the tantrum lies a smaller, frightened, and humbled inner kid, one who might have been picked last in gym class to be on the team, or saw the agonizing collapse of her parents’ marriage. Maybe it was the time she was told that she would amount to nothing, or her first kiss that ended in stony rejection.
Anger is a mask that fear wears. The next time you are faced with a belligerent imbecile, indignant and lewd, stop to wonder what he might be afraid of, not what he’s angry about. Wonder if he was hurt in some way, if his partner left him, if he just lost his job. Wonder if he had alcoholic parents, if he was abused as a child, if he grew up in a tough neighborhood. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong in your hunches; what matters is that you wonder. The more you wonder, the more you develop compassion. The more you embody compassion, the easier it is to accept fear. As you begin to accept fear, it transmutes all by itself and becomes courage. The transmutation of fear begins with understanding, and finishes with courage.

When you are able to do this with someone else, try it on yourself. While it is easy to point fingers, the conclusive test is whether or not you can see your own fear through your anger.
So stopping the spread of fear is not really about stopping anything. It’s about developing awareness of the different masks that fear wears, and then choosing non-action or compassion. Either way both paths are more efficient, use less energy, and transmute fear.

You wouldn’t think that spending an hour on your hands would be an enticing fitness offering, but it’s become quite popular. I’ve had people from all walks, none of them acrobats, come and learn the art of inversion and staying on your hands.

Perhaps the growing success of the class is due to the benefit of getting blood to your head, or the feeling of increasing strength in your shoulders and back but I think the real draw is because it teaches you the actual meaning of finding balance in your life.

Finding balance is a common goal for anyone who is too stressed, too overworked, too tired, and too busy. There are many books and speakers who talk about how to find balance in your life and offer a multitude of tools to do so. Some work and some don’t, but the one commonality of all these tools is that they are all metaphors. They are ideas that you apply to your life by using analogies, symbols, and concepts.

When you learn to do a handstand, however, you don’t deal in concepts or metaphors. You either achieve a balanced state or you don’t. And when you don’t, you fall over. The feedback loop is instantaneous.

When I begin teaching handstands to someone who has never tried it before, I explain that learning to do handstands is not about finding balance, which kind of surprises most people. Learning to do handstands is actually about creating proper alignment.

Think of your body as being divided into three blocks. Imagine that the first block runs from your fingers to your shoulders, the second from your shoulders to your hips, and the last block from your hips to your toes. When you’re inverted in a handstand, your job is to align the blocks on top of each other.

Pretend you are five again and you are playing with a set of Lego blocks. If you put one block on top of the other but put it on the corner, then set the third block on top, again skewed on the corner, your structure might hold only if you secure it with rubber bands and nails. In other words, you’re able to build a tower but it requires additional energy and resources to make it stay.

Another note about balance – you can balance anything, regardless of its shape. Finding balance is really about finding the center of gravity of an object and manoeuvering it so that you place its center of gravity directly over its contact point on the ground. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, try to recall images of acrobats at a circus balancing spinning plates, chairs, or even other people. They are able to balance the object even if it is shaped unusually. (I’ve balanced an unfolded six-foot step ladder, a bicycle, chairs, and people on my chin.)

The lesson is that you can find balance in anything, but that doesn’t mean you want to. What you want to do, especially in proper handstand technique, is to align the body so that balance comes naturally and almost without effort. Then you are using your structure and alignment to maintain your position while using very little energy. You are strong and efficient.

In other words, learning to do a proper handstand is about aligning the three blocks by making sure that your legs are directly over your hips, your hips directly over your chest, your chest directly over your shoulders and your shoulders directly over your hands. It sounds simplistic and it is. It’s simple, but not easy.

It’s not easy at first because aligning all these body parts requires subtle contractions of muscles that you rarely use and stretching of other ligaments that you hardly ever stretch. Most people come into the class with enough strength to hold themselves upside down, but lack the subtle strength and flexibility to position their body in a straight vertical line.

When you finally achieve proper alignment, then finding balance is not really an issue. Since gravity works only in one direction, and if your body blocks are directly on top of each other, then your handstand will be balanced. It can’t and won’t go anywhere. For example, try to balance three wooden blocks when they’re stacked exactly on top of each other. There’s nothing to balance because the alignment makes it balanced.

So, back to the metaphor of life and the issue of finding balance. My suggestion is to stop finding balance in your life and to begin creating alignment instead. Just like the crazy circus acrobats, you can find balance even if your life is a whirlwind with areas that are well over-extended and others that are completely ignored. You can find balance in an out-of-balance lifestyle – it’s just that you’re going to have a work a lot harder to keep it there.

When you create alignment in your life, you begin by identifying your values. Once you know what your values are, you line up three things, just like your body: your thoughts, your actions, and your words.

Having a set of defined values is like gravity to the handstand – you have to know how to position your body relative to the force of gravity. Once you have identified your values, you now also know how to think, act, and speak to align with those values.

Again, the process is simple, but not easy. If you have a life that is chaotic and out of control, then evaluate your ability to follow through with what you say, do, or think. Maybe you don’t fulfill commitments, which breaks your alignment, and forces you to be out of balance. Maybe you smile outwardly at people and cuss inwardly at their incompetence.

Perhaps you do act with integrity but your life is still out of balance. Then consider if your values are yours truly, and if they are reflective of who you are now. Contemplate whether or not you are still living a life based on borrowed values from parents, social circles, or religion.
For example, one of my values is to help people. I remember writing this down on a piece of paper in grade four when we were asked what we wanted to do when we grew up. Since this is one of my core values, I make sure that my thoughts, actions, and words reflect this mission, which is why we have a yoga-fitness studio and I write on personal growth.
So you might not ever come to my handstand class or even try one on your own. I do recommend that you meditate on your values and evaluate your follow through. If you are aligned, then you end up being able to take on more and more work without exhausting yourself or working inefficiently. You experience abundant energy, daily passion for your life – and a sense of balance.

You don’t have to be an acrobat in a dangerous circus show to recognize that trust is everywhere. Consider, and be amazed by, the many and varied acts of trust you perform when you drive to work. First, you trust that your car will start the way it was designed – you expect that the technology inside your vehicle will work correctly, and not detonate in a massive fireball on your driveway. You calmly turn the key despite the fact that you are sitting only a few feet from a bathtub full of gasoline, and that this highly explosive fuel is forcefully funneled through a super heated engine block and deliberately ignited with an electric spark.

As you drive down the road, listening to the radio, observing the weather, reading billboards, checking voicemail, and sipping your morning coffee, be astonished it is not a regular occurrence that no one has yet jumped the yellow line, careening wildly into you in a head-on collision. Be joyful that your fellow comrades on their way to work also acknowledge that they each command a multi-ton weapon of encased metal and rubber, capable of snuffing out the life of any pedestrian nonchalantly meandering across the street – but most of the time, don’t.

And speaking of pedestrians, rejoice in the knowledge that you can cross the street because we all made an implicit agreement that red means stop, and green means go. After all, they are just random colors of the rainbow and don’t have any real meaning, except for the ones we give them.

So your successful arrival at work, or wherever you are going, depends on two things: first, that we give meaning to meaningless things, and second, that we agree to continuously agree to the meaning. What greater daily demonstration of trust is there than to see millions of people consciously stopping their vehicles of mass destruction when they see the color red? Think of the millions of lives that are saved every year by this collective nod.

And this is only the drive to work. Now look inwards and consider what happens within your body on a second-to-second basis. The miracle of life is the miracle of total, complete, and binding trust. Your lungs are expanding and contracting, your heart is beating and pumping, and your eyes are absorbing light patterns while your brain is expeditiously processing trillions of bytes of information. These occurrences happen thousands, if not millions of times a day under the veil of the autonomic nervous system, completely unconscious to your waking thoughts, dutifully performing their life supporting functions without so much of a complaint or gripe. You trust that when you wake in the morning, your blood will still be flowing through your arteries, and your intestinal tract will have processed enough of the late night cheesecake to provide energy for the start of your day. It’s a miracle to think that, at any point, this intricate fabric of interdependent systems can be so easily interrupted, and life as we know it will end.

Living is trusting and is the greatest testament that the values of trust are alive and well. The next time you hear someone, or perhaps yourself say, “I can’t trust…”, contemplate the millions of examples that occur every moment that are life supporting and not life taking. Then contemplate how simple it is to cut the thinly attached chords of trust with a benign act, like driving down the wrong side of the road, or throwing bags of trash out the window of your 10th story apartment. And why wouldn’t you? It’s faster than bringing garbage down the stairs, but you don’t because we’ve all agreed to the value of life, which is the value of trust.

You might be silently screaming that mistrust does exist and that horrible trespasses against our collective agreements do occur. People do get run over by cars, murders and wars happen, and hearts cease their vital beating. There is no doubt that the execution of the trust act is not total and all-pervading. Not everyone, or every system functions perfectly.

You may have been lied to, manipulated by, or transgressed upon somehow in the past. The sensation of boundaries crossed and opportunities stolen is weighty and sobering. It is not helpful to simply say that the past is the past because your thoughts happen in the present.

What is helpful then is to remark that your present moment is replete with miraculous illustrations of trust. The question, how to trust again, is also the question of how to live again. And living by being, not thinking, strategizing, doing, or analyzing, is the answer to living again.

Living by being is a daily practice of conscious observation. What are you observing? You are rediscovering that ordinary events that normally occur without so much of a thought are in fact stupendous examples of trust. Begin observing simple, routine acts with an open and curious mind.

When I am on stage and a fellow artist is quick enough to catch me from an accidental fall, or remembers to correctly attach my safety line to my harness, I know that we live in a world of trust. When I drive through an intersection and see all the cars stopped at their red light, or get to work without trying to dodge an oncoming truck, I know that we live in a world of trust. And when I wake in the morning and open my eyes to the sunrise or take a deep breath in, I know that we live in a world of trust.

(Watch the video interview about my experience by the Las Vegas Weekly now.)

Last December, on a chilly winter day, I decided to challenge a deeply rooted fear I had by spending 24 hours on the street homeless. I carried no credit cards, cash, I.D., cell phone, house keys, extra jackets, tissue papers, chapstick, iPod (what else do you usually leave the house with?)

I set off in the direction of downtown, carried by my own two feet, dressed in a tattered sweats, to challenge a fear (read: belief) that my failure as a businessman would lead to me being homeless.

I believed the equation: financial failure = homelessness. Do you believe this too?

I did and I needed to confront it. I chose to experience homelessness for 24 hours. Here are the highlights:
•    you can’t thumb a ride in Las Vegas if you look like a bum
•    panhandling is one of the most difficult things to do
•    I’m not a good panhandler; I made $2 in 24 hours
•    nothing costs less than a dollar, except for bananas at 7-11
•    it gets cold at night, even in Las Vegas
•    misery likes company – I never realized how many homeless people there are
•    people look at you with hate in their eyes when you beg
I literally walked for 12 of the 24 hours because no one would pick me up and I had no money for the bus. I also got kicked out of a public library, so sitting down in a quiet, warm place was not an option.

I ended up walking to the worst part of Las Vegas, the hidden, swept-under-the-rug part called “Tent Village” because of all the bums living in tents on the side of the road.

(Watch the video interview about my experience by the Las Vegas Weekly now.)

There I encountered hundreds of homeless men milling about, exchanging words about where to get the next meal, who’s handing out free socks, how many nights the local shelter lets you stay, and the best places to bum for money.

When I bumped into another group of men, the conversation was the same. Another group, same conversation.

That’s when it struck me.

I can never be homeless.

I don’t say that with an arrogant or pretentious intention. I say it because I simply don’t talk like a homeless person which is to say I don’t think like a homeless person.

And that was the kernel of wisdom of my exploration into my fear of financial failure. I realized that though I could fail in business, I could never become homeless. I just don’t have the belief that I would end up on the streets.

I do speak like a professional acrobat. While others are scared about heights, rapidly moving vehicles, and fire, I get enthused and excited.

I do speak like a professional marketer. While others are lamenting about the economy, I talk about new online marketing techniques, social networking, blogging, and computer technology.

But…

I don’t speak like a millionaire entrepreneur. While millionaires are busy talking about their next deal, strategizing on new partnerships, and planning an investment, I talk about covering my mortgage, putting gas in my car, and the 3 for 1 special on avocados at the store. I spend too much time talking like an average income producer.

What do you talk about?

Here are the 3 things you can do to benefit from my experience on the streets:

1. Write down everything you say in 1 day.
2. Listen to the conversations or language of someone you want to emulate (a business person, a great athlete, a professional speaker)
3. Have a conversation with a homeless person and listen to his dialogue.

If you notice, all these activities are simply about building awareness, since awareness is the main catalyst for change.
(Watch the video interview about my experience by the Las Vegas Weekly now.)

***
I would love to hear from you. I always respond to every email I receive personally, so this is what I want to learn from you:

What is one fear you’ve overcome and HOW did you do it?

I’m not trying to be dramatic or sensational. I am emphasizing the fact that we all think about death probably more than we like to admit. Perhaps on the car ride home, going rock climbing, crossing the street, as we grow older, as we fight illness.

There’s an awful lot of false bravado in our culture that also limits our expression on death. The “brave ones” seem fearless and beyond the silly concerns of mortal life. We are bombarded with images of heroics in media and entertainment that show shirtless men racing into walls of fire and enemy bullets. There is the image – and then there is reality.

Two years ago, I felt nothing less than sheer terror as I realized I was falling to my potential death. It was as pure as fear could get. It also stuck with me until recently. What happened and how did I get over it?

I was performing in a very large, mechanically technical show. One of the pieces of equipment was a giant 90 ton moving stage that tilted, rotated, lifted, expanded, spun, and generally made for a heart-stopping, audience-thrilling acrobatic number. I was part of that act.

As we performed complex choreography on this massive apparatus, the artists would, on cue, dive off the stage into giant airbags below, disappearing from the audience’s view. It was breathtaking.

On this fateful day, I missed a handhold, and slid off the stage unexpected, falling over 20 feet into a crack between the airbags. My fall was absorbed partially by a net but my head squarely hit the concrete.

I didn’t hear a cracking noise so much as I felt a powerful, resounding thump echo through my skull. It’s the kind of moment that makes you realize that everything in your life will change forever.

I didn’t lose consciousness. Instead the moment of total helplessness and fear was replaced by a raging anger. What happened? Why hadn’t the airbags function as they were supposed to? Why am I being strapped to a body board and carried off?

In the months of recovery that followed, I remained resolutely angry. There were the politics of the accident to deal with, the rehabilitation, the drop in income, the stigma of being the injured one. All of these issues were plenty to keep me focused on being angry and forgetting the true source of unease underneath.

I’ve come to discover that beneath all anger lies a deeper fear. My fear happened to now be free falling from any height into a mat or airbag.

You might say that it is a reasonable fear to have – absolutely. If I never jumped off another ledge in my life, the world would not stop. The difference was that MY world was slowly stopping, as I unconsciously succumbed to the fear of heights. Like an insidious virus, it planted a seed of doubt within and began to grow over the months like a black cancer. Fear begets fear and I faintly became aware that my confidence as an acrobat – and as a person – was ebbing.

Truthfully I didn’t have a fear of heights or of falling. I had a fear of hitting the ground, which is to say I had a fear of hitting the ground AND dying. Which is to say, I now had a fear of dying.

Here is the first way to face the fear of dying: feel the fear. Fear of dying is such an intense emotion that it is quickly replaced by another state – rage, depression, denial, false joy. Learn to hone into your fear gently, like a bird gliding in circles, first sailing in wide arcs, then turning your awareness inward, ever tighter and more focused.

Which is exactly what happened to me. Many months after the accident, I was treated by my good friend Karen, an osteopath. Through her subtle cranial manipulations, I re-entered a state of deep relaxation that allowed me to “get in touch” with the hellish last 10-feet before I hit the concrete. I finally had a good cry.

You probably don’t need to have your skull re-adjusted to know fear. Just sit with it and ask yourself in what ways do you bypass this emotion? Is it working late, being angry, zoning out on TV? When you finally experience uninterrupted fear, you don’t do or say anything. It’s simply so awe-some that you sit in reverence of its potency. That’s a good place to be in.

Once you feel it, completely and utterly, then you can move on to step two, reclaiming your power. Usually that means doing something that scares the poop out of you.

Have you ever had an “oh shit” moment? This is the time to have it. Your barometer for doing something that will adequately reclaim your power is measured by how many times you feel like doing it and balking.

If you do it without any hesitation and get it on the first try, it probably wasn’t deep enough. Keep digging.

If, on the other hand, you have to work up your courage to even think about attempting it, you probably found it.

Considering I had a fear of falling, hitting the ground, splitting my brain open AND dying, suddenly anything to do with heights pushed my inner panic button like no tomorrow.

So when my friend and colleague Ted encouraged me to come up with a big trick to close the Kid’s Faculty Show at circus camp this July, I knew I had been handed an opportunity.

That opportunity was to create the biggest “oh shit” moment I could and reclaim my power.

For the grand finale, I committed myself to doing a back tuck off a 15-foot high wall. It’s not so high that it’s ludicrous. But it’s not so low that I couldn’t get hurt. It was definitely my moment to cringe – there was a forceful wave of doubt that nearly caused me to back out of that flip ten times that day.

I didn’t, and with the encouragement of Ted and my wife Jaime, I did my flip, which is to say, I DIDN’T hit the ground, split my brain open, and of course, die. Which is to say, I faced my fear, reclaimed my power, and stopped dead (pun intended) in its tracks the cancerous fear that had begun to spread.

***
I would love to hear from you. I always respond to every email I receive personally, so this is what I want to learn from you:

How do YOU deal with the fear of dying?

No Shoes For A Stranger

1996. I am in beautiful Brazil. 40 degrees Celsius. I am sweating my entire body weight. 20 kids. I am teaching circus to a group of underprivileged youth under a makeshift big top. I thought I was there to share my enlightened wisdom of a North American professional performer. Actually I was there to have one of the most humbling learning experiences of my life.

Round-off, back handspring, back tuck. Again. And again. This is the routine that the kids are practicing. There is a dilapidated stretch of foam, 15 feet long, 3 feet wide, that separates the thudding impact of the kids’ bare feet from the packed concrete floor. It is hardly worth calling a tumbling mat, but the kids don’t seem to mind. The environment is enthusiastic. They are laughing, joking with each other, challenging one another to flip a little higher, a little faster, with a little more style.

I am teaching with my whole heart. There is nothing more inspiring than watching youth absorb themselves in the passion of creating a world of athletic artistry, with nothing more than a round concrete slab for the circus ring and pieces of wood and tape for juggling clubs. Here, under the tarnished blue and white chapiteau, dreams gather momentum, hardships forgotten, and kinships tightened. We are the circus of no time, no place, with no cares in the world except to let our hearts sing with the challenge of pushing ourselves joyfully to the edge.

I am fully absorbed in spotting a teenager execute a back flip when the head coach tells us that he needs the space for a new class and that we have to vacate the big top. Where to, I ask? We had the choice between hard concrete (at least it was shaded) and the dusty, gravel-filled grounds of the surrounding park (not shaded). The head coach shrugs. I’m on my own.

We file out from the cool protection of the chapiteau into the blazing Brazilian sun. The ground is littered with tiny rocks, broken glass, and pointy acorns that have fallen from surrounding trees. This is no runway for acrobats, let alone kids without shoes.

No sooner do I complete a hopeless evaluation of the new training grounds when I see the kids catapulting themselves into flips and handsprings. Not glass, rocks, or dust could stop them. There was no lack of enthusiasm either. It was as if any place could be their kingdom, their empire.
One of the kids calls to me. He asks me to show them that flip I do, the one that everyone wants to learn. It’s my favorite move, maybe because it’s the one I learned without almost trying, and the one that I’ve done in every show. I do a cartwheel and spring up sideways, rotate grabbing my knees and land like a cat. They want me to show them. I say yes.

That’s when I realize that I am the only one with shoes on. Not just any kind of sneaker – I am wearing the specialized athletic shoe that you get in North America at elite training stores for eighty bucks a pop. They’re worn-in and dusty, but light as a feather with that cool, flighty bounce that fires me skyward. I look down at my sleek Asics. I look over at their bare feet. A wave of embarrassment washes over me.

I am lucky to be born in North America. I have had the best in every respect – never been homeless, never been without clothes on my back, never been faced with begging for my next meal. It is a precious reality that is fabricated like a delicate veil that covers our daily perceptions of life. It is also a veil that can be easily pierced to reveal the deep, wounded scars of humanity. And at that moment, the full pain of countless suppressed societies floods my senses and moves me in inexplicable ways. At that moment, I realize that my good fortune in life is not a treasure to be stowed away, but to be shared and given away at every opportunity.

The kids are calling on me still. They are relentless, the way teenagers are. I look down again at my comfortable trainers, then over to their hardened, bare soles. In a robotic, dreamy way, I reach down and remove my shoes. I don’t know how the rocks are going to feel against my tender, fleshy under-pads, spoiled by years of cushioned air shocks and lycra-enhanced athletic socks. All I can do is to save my dignity and hope that I land on my feet without showing too much pain.

I ready myself for the flip. I don’t think that even the pressure of performing in a show has ever made me this nervous for a routine. I take a breath. I look for patches without rocks, glass, or acorns. There aren’t any. It doesn’t matter – I am this far, naked without my classy Asics. I throw myself into my tumbling sequence.

Five seconds later it is over. The kids cheer, happy to see the cool side-flip. I look down a last time, wondering if I will need tetanus shots to counter the gaping wounds on the bottom of my feet. But there is no blood, no trail of red along the dirt. Only a few scratches grace my skin, with the sting of landing just a little too hard on the packed gravel. I am okay, but my concept of reality has taken a beating.

I learn that day that I am not there to teach them. That day I am there to learn from them. I learn that their passion is boundless and not restricted by a few rocks or broken beer bottles. Their love for life is not held back by the symbols of poverty – being shoeless and shirtless – but exists without consideration for what they have or what they do. They simply exude generosity, even when we might think they have nothing to be grateful for. That day I learn that gratitude has nothing to do with what you have, and everything to do with what you give.