I was first introduced to the Bear when I was fifteen years old. It was my sophomore year of high school and I was trying out for the cross-country team. It could have been baseball or football but the year before I had fractured my knee and was encouraged to run as a way of building strength and confidence in the injured leg. I wasn’t particularly talented at long distance running nor did I particularly like the sport, but I did enjoy the camaraderie of being with the fellows again. Nobody said anything about the Bear.
My first race was two miles over hilly terrain. I remember being nervous and swamped with my own excitement. Lineament, nausea, last minute instructions, and brightly colored jerseys paraded through a fall day still hot enough to draw a quick sweat. We were ready, on our marks, the starting gun . . . and off! One huge animal threading its way through the canyons and hills of Southern California. Pounding away on the baked clay course, the grip of adrenalin pushed me forward. I was innocence on the move.
Just past the mile and a half mark a dim but clearly perceptible tug began nagging at my hamstrings. Over the next half mile that tug grew into a huge squeeze that began to affect my breathing, hearing, vision, orientation in space, and, of course, my forward momentum. I was being pushed into an entirely new and unfamiliar world. It hurt and I thought it would never end. The last hundred yards seemed an eternity of runners streaming by, heart hammering in my throat, distorted faces guiding me to the finish gate, and a weight on my back that felt like I was carrying well . . . a Bear . . . and he was dragging his heels. After the race I collapsed on the ground and the world whirled around me while I wondered, “What was that?” A short time later someone answered that question saying, “The Bear sure got you boy.”
This first meeting with the Bear was a turning point in my life. At a fundamental level it woke me up. Before this experience I had no idea of such sensation, such breath, such pain. Taking the advice of my grandmother I started reading The Power of Positive Thinking. I was fascinated and I was scared. At fifteen I discovered that there was an invisible beast out there (or was it in here?) that was ready to ambush me when I began to stretch my limits.
When I review my history as a track athlete it is my experiences with the Bear that stand out, even more than the races won or lost or the many places that the sport took me. I believe this is so because the Bear was instrumental at a certain period in my life in literally bringing me to my senses. It was central in that it taught me something about pushing a limit and how to work with my fear. The Bear ushered me into an acknowledgement of something larger than my personality, or my training methods, or my idea about how it should be. With this awakening came the conscious recognition of a greater force, an unknown, something out of my control that made me feel both terrified and immensely relieved. My world had suddenly grown and with it came a sense of vulnerability. I discovered that this Bear didn’t care what I knew nor was he about to be reasoned with; he set the time, place, and conditions, it was for me to learn a strategy of nerves — my own.
After a while, because we had sat at the same table so often, I began flirting with the boundaries of Bear’s territory. In a crude way I began a movement towards him. There was a longing to know more about him and his power. My interest was starting to outweigh the fear. What is this thing and how far does it go, was my wonder. In one particular incident I remember actually offering the Bear an invitation to appear. Running against a long time nemesis I set a pace I knew would invoke his presence.
I had lost to Ron Stiles in as many quarter miles that I had run against him, sometimes by inches, sometimes by yards. I could beat him in the 100 and 220 but was never able to win in the 440. In the regional meet that selected finalists for the state meet we were seeded in the same heat. My race strategy was to run hard from the beginning and hope to hold him off in the stretch. It was a staggered start with me in lane two and Stiles in three. At the gun I went out like it was a hundred yard dash. I quickly made up the stagger and moved steadily past the other competitors. He stayed with me. Our 220 time was actually faster than the regular 220 was run that day. The spectators were off their seats, we were moving towards a new record. I was half a stride ahead moving into the 300 yard mark when I could feel a hot dark breath lacing up the hairs on my neck. Oh Lord, I knew at this pace there would be three of us running. I could feel him stroking my legs and I tried not to think of his angry teeth and arrogant strength. There was a hundred yards to go and I still had my half stride when his shadow fell on us like a huge lead curtain. I stiffened straight up and the muscles in my thighs began to clench into solid little fists. Eyes rolling I was a rubber-legged man in quicksand when the first of the runners began moving past us. That’s the worst of it — as they go by you try harder and the Bear uses that against you. Two paws on your shoulders he digs his back feet into the track and you start to lean back, jaw munching away at nothing, head wagging like a rabid dog. They were moving by in bunches but I still had my half stride. The last ten yards was like moving into the face of gale force wind. Spittle flying, totally distorted and ugly, I was a creature from outer space as I went through the finish line.
I finished sixth, Stiles finished seventh. The Bear stayed with me into the night on that one. Headache, muscle cramps, and parched throat until I fell into a welcome sleep. I had beaten my man, lost the race, and understood somewhat deeper that the Bear is me and that is with whom, in the long run, I am really running.
It wasn’t until a few years later that I was introduced to the possibility of an entirely new relationship with the Bear. The Bear not necessarily as a friend, but no longer as an enemy either. The arena was once again on the track field.
We were running a workout that we called the whistle training. A difficult and arduous practice that honed us for the late season national competition. All the sprinters and hurdlers would begin jogging around the track in a loosely formed group, ten to twelve thoroughbreds, high strung and in keen competition with each other. The assistant coach would blow a whistle and we would break into a full blown sprint, running as hard and as fast as we could until the second whistle, at which time we would jog until the next whistle to then repeat the procedure. The rub was that we never knew how long we would be running. There might be as little as ten seconds between whistles or as much as forty. The openness of the practice chafed against our commitment to go all out without knowing if that meant a dozen momentous strides or 500 yards of raking breath and burnt out nerve endings. After a series of these all out sprints we would walk to the showers with that thousand mile stare, spent in a way that would take at least a day and a night to come back fresh.
These afternoons were all variations on a theme — the Bear Returns, Bear Brings Home the Bacon, The Son of Bear, the Bride of Bear; a ritual designed to reflect the ratio between copping out and gutting it out. His appearance would take many forms: A layer of apprehension that continually tried to outguess the whistle, the breath that never seemed to find its rhythm, the streams of fire in the hamstrings and calves. Even reading the workout sheet for the day and seeing it was the whistle work would invoke the Bear — a rumbling and churning in the gut that made you want to turn around and go home.
On this particular afternoon it somehow occurred to me, maybe out of frustration, maybe out of pain, or even boredom that when the Bear began to appear I didn’t necessarily have to be his eternal victim. He had swallowed me so many times what would I have to lose anyway? With a little arrogance of my own I began to look out the other eye. What I noticed was that when he began to come onto me I would try to outrun him. This would disrupt my rhythm and then my stride would break and I would then collapse into some tortured parody of a wrestling match with me losing to myself.
The alternative presented to me was to meet and relate to the Bear and not try to run away from him. Kind of like getting out of the combat zone and into the game room. When I would first feel his tightening grip I would practice keeping my body alive to his presence without being swallowed by him. It was more like relaxing into him and not reacting off of him. It was an exciting edge and one of the earliest times that I remember clearly working with my fear. It definitely put me into a more straightforward relationship with this Bear and taught me even more about the value of facing and working with a difficult situation.
At this time, even without the structure of a clear and precise language in which to translate my understanding, I was able to see the Bear and my relationship with him as a metaphor for other areas of my life. Soon after I saw that if I struggled against or ran from the demons that were released from my unconscious they would swallow me and delight in the most intricate forms of torture. If I turned to them however, met them head on, they would take on a totally different character, either changing or dissipating entirely. At the most obvious level I was deeply thrilled for a way to work with a nemesis that plagued my ability as a runner. On a different level, one that seemed more distant yet more inspiring, a change was taking place that, though still unformed, was vital in my development. I was beginning to understand that there was an actual possibility of relating to my fear face to face and not just trying to outdistance it. At that time I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way but at some basic level there was a seed that was beginning to break ground and I was being touched by its luminosity.
In Aikido we sometimes say that the solution may lie at the heart of the problem; or the energy of the attack may be its own resolution. We say this because there is an Aikido movement that epitomizes this quality of turning towards or facing. It is called irimi and translates “entering.” When an irimi technique is called for we train ourselves to move directly into the heart of the attack or situation. This entering movement is non-aggressive in the sense that it is done in order to blend with the problem of the attack and not to oppose or strike back at it. We move towards this incoming energy, whether it be a physical attacker or a verbal tirade, in order to experience it at its most essential place and from there work with it freshly and creatively.
I was beginning to understand that there was an actual possibility of relating to my fear face to face and not just trying to outdistance it.
In our program at Lomi School irimi is a basic principle that is taught. We teach people irimi so they can recognize their Bear and then begin to work with it. First we observe ourselves, then we look at our fear and resistance, and from there we begin to work directly with the situation as it is. This is not a process of over-exciting ourselves or creating a needless problem, but a way of being with ourselves in an open and intelligent way. We have found that when we begin to turn towards or face our neurosis and unpleasant situations we become involved in working with ourselves and our conflicts in a meaningful way. When we no longer run from that which we are afraid there becomes the possibility of being responsible for our projections of aggression, ignorance, and fear.
Because irimi has to do with the awareness of ourselves, our environment, and others, the practices we teach at Lomi School are varied, but all designed for contacting this awareness. How do we use ourselves to form our many characters? How do we relate to our life energy? The practices we do answer the how of these questions. We sit and observe our minds, our sensations, our breath. We move and pay attention to the quality of our movement. We watch, in our interpersonal lives, how we shape ourselves with images, feelings and emotions. We participate in a relationship with a larger more universal self. We bring light to our Bears and let their bones rattle.
These are all the different ways of talking about the human ability of awareness. It is recognizing that irimi, essentially the act of paying attention, creates an environment in which we may be touched by a quality of awakening and not just the usual dreams of prosperity and romance. Cultivating this awareness enriches our lives because it tells us who we are and how we are in the world. Just as this capacity for awareness provides the orientation for our lives, the Bear becomes our inspiration. It means that our confusions and fears are pivotal in finding our bearings; that there is a very real possibility of working with the energy of our upsets. Knowing this relieves us of our assumptions and expectations about how our life should be and allows us to form a more genuine interest in how it is.
The Bear has many guises and plays on many fields. His shadow can be seen as easily in the circles of international politics as it can in the physical and emotional realms. Where he has not been dealt with you can see his marks: unseeing eyes, shoulders hunched from a life of burdens, faces frozen into terrified smiles, stomachs held in cosmetic tautness. It’s not that he spares some and goes after others. We are all prone to the dilemma of how to lead sane, balanced lives; the difference is in how we relate to him, our Bear, our fear, our confusions. What is clear in my experience so far is that the Bear never seems to really go away. As one Bear is dealt with another rises to challenge us. It’s foolish to think that once we deal with “our” problem everything will come to rest in snug harbor. This type of thinking makes our life much less than it is.
A long time ago someone pointed out that “the bear sure got you.” Well, he still does and sometimes he even brings me to my knees. But now there is a relationship I have with him that is not based on fear or aggressiveness. He is a worthy opponent, as we say in Aikido, and I recognize him as an inspiration for developing my spirit. I still run with the Bear but now we take turns chasing each other.
This article originally appeared in the Lomi School Bulletin, a wonderful new magazine published by the Lomi School in Mill Valley, California. The Lomi School offers workshops in mind/body awareness. For information write the Lomi School at 1211 Lattie Lane, Mill Valley, California 94941. Our thanks to Richard K. Heckler, a founding member of the school.
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