Acrofit Power

When I first began training in the circus, I thought I had a strong physical background. I was 18 years old, had already run a marathon, practiced martial arts for 9 years, lifted weights, ate well, and was flexible. I thought that I would adapt easily to the circus training and excel.

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.

Principle Training Versus Technique Training

When I train my students, my number one goal is not to help them lose weight, show them different exercises, or improve their endurance. My main goal is to cultivate in them a mindset of principle based training. Training from principle is understanding how the body works, versus how to physically copy and execute a movement.

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.

My Subjective Reality Experiment: The Ultimate Realization

It’s been nearly 6 weeks since I began my subjective reality experiment. To be honest, I haven’t been fully submersing myself in the moment to moment question of “if everyone and everything around me is a reflection of me, what does it say about me?”. It’s a hard shift for my mind to make and to keep there, but I have come up with quite a few interesting reality checks, the most interesting of all is the last life changing event to occur in my life: the birth of my wife’s and my first child, a baby son!

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.

My Subjective Reality Experiment

I’ve been reading the latest blogs by Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com), a very popular personal development blogger. He’s talking about his 30-day trial into Subjective Reality. You have objective reality, where the universe exists and your consciousness arises within it, and then you have subjective reality, where your consciousness exists and that’s all. You create everything around you: the coffee that you buy at Starbucks, the annoying co-worker, the traffic jam, and even the ants crawling on the sidewalk. They are all creations of your consciousness.

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?

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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.

How to Overcome Fear

Fear grows like an insidious virus, first scratching the surface of the polished veneer of your confidence like an innocent itch, then nestling deeper and deeper into your well of courage, until finally, it violently throttles your entire being, restlessly taunting you with nightmares of trainwrecks, snakes, and ghosts.

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.

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