high level cringe...a great teacher?

what I learned in Japanese little league

Here’s something.

I’m 9 years old. Japan. I train after school with a baseball team my dad and I meet while playing catch in the park. He sees them drilling and says it looks like what he did in semi-pro ball.

Every weekday for the next two or three months I follow these kids from the school bus to the field.

On week 2 I find out what they’re buying every day from the little shop on the corner – gatorade gum shredded like chewing tobacco. I get some. It’s amazing.

Back home I’m one of the best. I held the town record for quickest game pitched. One weekend we go to a training facility. It’s a real professional set up. I’m not that good compared to these kids. It’s confusing.

Years later I find out that I was nine playing with eleven-year olds.

I struck out in my first and only in-game at bat.

I love my life. Every week feels better than the last (even though my knees are sore every morning). But that same shame still shows up.

What I’m calling shame felt exactly like a dream I had as a teenager.

Here it is:

I was in the woods with a vague understanding that a high school girlfriend was lost somewhere in this Appalachian-looking forest, and I was responsible but didn’t know how or why and couldn’t undo what was done.

I remember waking up from that dream, and the relief.

Feelings we don’t process become limitations we impose upon ourselves. Relief is recognizing that the mind doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and future, so imprints will be felt as urgent right now until you change how you relate to the feeling.

To change any relationship you have to be present.

To be present you have to feel. Everytime you feel without judgement or letting yourself try to explain it, you let go of the past a little bit by being here, now. It’s not complicated.

Feelings tell you how you are right now, not why. Solutions will come to you when you feel into a shift before strategizing a solution.

The past doesn’t disappear. You learn to be present.

One of my Investment banking groups has me working with the interns every Friday morning at 6am Montana time. I watch the sunrise, set up the computer at a makeshift desk that is a stack of two small outdoor side tables, and teach these college-age future barons to feel their fucking feelings.

Here’s how we did it this morning.

Close your eyes and pick one part of your body in which you are experiencing sensation. Spend two minutes observing the area you’ve selected. Your mind will fluctuate. Not a problem. Go back to the feelings in your body. Don’t explain or define. Stay with feeling.

That’s it.

A couple of the interns reported a reduction of tension, others noted wandering minds, one was sleepy, and one tracked the sensation from his foot to his knee. They were all right. The point of practice is practice, not flow state, not immediate relief - just practice.

The point is not to become someone who has to talk about your feelings all the time to anyone who will listen. The practice is to become your own best friend, the one who knows that you don’t want to fix it right now – you just want a friend.

That at bat in Japan wasn’t just a strikeout. It was worse.

My favorite movie back then was “Major League”, and my favorite character was Willie Mays Hayes, a cocky centerfielder who was the fastest guy in the game.

He gave himself the name because, “I hit like Mays but run like Hayes” – except he couldn’t hit – and he had a showboat routine in which he’d shake his butt back and forth when he stepped into the batter’s box.

This one weekend all the families from our team packed into cars and vans, and traveled a couple hours to a game. My Japanese little league coach put me in as a gesture, I shook my ass back and forth, and struck out on four pitches.

This in the context of reserved Japanese culture in 1989 is a level of cringe I’m not sure I can reasonably express.

If I don’t do the work I do with others. I cannot do the work with others. So my morning practice begins with the simplest (and maybe hardest) practice – pure observation, before I segue into generating the energy I want for the day.

That kid who embarrassed himself in Japan is part of my shadow. The shadow, as developed by Carl Jung, is the part of the unconscious mind that holds what we’ve repressed or denied — traits that don’t fit the image we (and our culture) consider acceptable – feelings we think we can’t face feeling.

Those unfelt feelings become the choices we keep making to avoid feeling them. It’s why our histories repeat themselves. Those choices are rarely empowered ones.

That shame feeling showed up yesterday morning and I remembered that baseball kid in Japan who needed to to feel lightness, accepted, and be cool during a very intense time.

Man, it was great to connect with that part of myself, offer a taste of forgiveness, and see many other moments of friction born of the same underlying desires.

That shadowy part of me that believes I’m not good enough because adult things were out of my control, leads me to act for validation in ways that are not in my best interest. If I don’t allow space for the feeling, I don’t make the realization.

If I don’t allow space for the feeling that comes after the realization, there’s just more shame and blame.

Fuck that. I love that nine-year old right now. Next week I might not. That’s what practice is.

Want to find a little more freedom and presence? All you need is your body, a little time, and patience – which you will develop as you practice.

We spend a lot of time changing and optimizing our bodies – how we want them to look and what skills or poses we want to learn. That’s all useful but it’s not the whole picture. The whole picture only comes clear when you stop fixing and allow feeling.

It is just as important that you lie on the floor and pay attention in a gentle way to the places you think need to be fixed as it is that you do your cardio, sun salutations, or weight training.

Attention is optimization, it just can’t be bought and sold.