Thursday, December 27, 2007

Fitness - Your Inner Song

Fitness is a great communicator, a charismatic force that puts you in touch with your inner self. It builds bridges within you that heal and seal the yawning emptiness mentioned earlier in this chapter. And it follows that when you feel great about yourself, complete in yourself, can you relate better to other people that you are in touch with.

Fitness is a three-way process. Firstly, it sparks off a communicative current within you. In turn, you - in an entirely natural manner - transfer this spark to the people you deal with. And here comes the interesting part. So irresistible is this special spark that the people you deal with respond in kind. There is an explanation for this phenomenon.

By being fit you are in your natural element. Which means you have awakened the inner you a special entity. When you feel that specialness, you communicate it unconsciously to the next person. And equally unconsciously, the next person responds to your specialness.

Look at the other side of the coin. If you are not fit, you are not confident, you slouch a little, perhaps you mumble. Unconsciously, you are beaming out a negative message to the other person. A message that murmurs timidly, "I am not confident, I am not special" And, likewise, the other person responds - turning your opinion about yourself back on you.

But fitness makes you stand upright with your spine straight and firm. Your eyes are clear, there is a glow about you. You may not say much, but your bearing, the way you hold yourself says, "I am special" And the other person absorbs this and gives a mental appreciative nod.

In short, fitness restructures the grammar of your body language. It infuses it with positive adjectives and beams them out to everybody. Fitness enhances your solo performance on the stage of life.

If you have watched - even as you have listened to - a solo performance of an artiste singing, you may have observed a few things. At first, the singer may look as ordinary as the boy or girl next door. But as the notes spiral upwards and the night deepens, there's a flush on his face. The features seem transformed by an inner emotion giving him a strange glow, an extraordinary beauty. The audience feels not only the magic of the music but also vibrates to the personality of the performer.

Why is it that we come away from a musical performance feeling uplifted? The genius of the singer is undisputed. But has it ever struck you that there is also something special inside you that responds so wholeheartedly to the magic?

If you examine yourself in this new light, you will get a fresh perspective on yourself. That you, too, are no run-of-the-mill individual, but a tremendous entity in yourself. For some reason our culture does not teach us anything positive about our individual selves. It's sad because we lose so much by going through life feeling inferior. Yet, if every one of us were to be analysed objectively, we'd find greatness residing in every single being.

You may feel that those who've reached the top of the corporate ladder, for example, must be feeling they're the greatest - the achievers. Surprisingly, it is not sp. We've met a few who don't. They still feel they lack something. Which is why they set out to impress you by dropping names, informing you directly or indirectly about their assets. They even go to extreme lengths to prove they are creative, broad-minded, have a vision.

In all probability, if you too are tuned only to your negative self, you come away feeling patronized, abused, put down. This is where we mourn the loss of communication. Two warm, lovely people can vibe poorly due to a total lack of communication within themselves.

But suppose you are positive about yourself, know deep within you that your existence in this world is as justified as the next person's, that though you are only a small part of the dynamic human race there is nobody like you, that you may not be a top dog in a corporation but are an extremely important member of the world, you would react differently. You would recognise the fact that the other guy is only trying to impress you by trotting out his acquaintances and assets. That he wants you to feel he is as intelligent as you, as creative as you. In other words, he feels he is only , as important as the people he knows, the things he possesses.

The problem with the person you've met is that he is not in harmony with himself. But you needn't feel pulled down to his level if you believe and know that you are a physical phenomenon created by Nature with a mind, a spirit, suffused by something special- the inner song.

It is the inner song - that great harmonious element within you - that has responded to the almost divine spell cast by the singer'. You feel uplifted because during those precious hours all the components inside you were in harmony, a state of equilibrium -like a perfectly composed song.

In this condition, you can be quietly content or joyously vibrant. And for days afterwards, the memory of that wonderful experience tingles within you. This is so because of a simple law of nature. The singer has communicated through his art and you have absorbed it and responded to it. And you have been able to react so 'positively because it has touched the positive self inside you. It means you have the ability to be positive. Just like say, a piano when played gives off music. When the keys inside you were 'pressed' by the singer's melody, you too vibrated and 'gave off music.'

But, you may ask, how do I keep those keys pressed constantly, how do I hold on to that special tingle? The answer is simple. Keep fit. Fitness opens the doors to self-belief. It keeps you in a perpetual state of inner harmony. Wasn't it William Shakespeare, that great literary king, who wrote, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." To that, we'd add, "and no man can be false to you," because with your inner confidence, with the inner song humming through you, you need never feel that somebody is putting you down or patronizing you - because you are an extraordinary creation of nature, a gift to humankind. In simple words: because you are you.

Author: Mike Hussey

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