How Far Can You Go by John Maclean & Mark Tabb

Author:John Maclean & Mark Tabb [Maclean, John & Tabb, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Three Small Steps

* * *

My forearms started shaking. The tremor spread up my arms and across my shoulders. My arms rocked back and forth in perfect rhythm with one another. I struggled to hold on to the handles of the chest-press machine. As the tremor grew in intensity, my hands whipped the handles back and forth. The main pulley that connected the handles to the weights banged against the metal frame of the machine. In spite of the loud clanging, I kept my eyes closed, cleared my mind, and allowed my body to accept the current that was flowing through it.

The spasm spread down my shoulders, causing my body to wobble from side to side as if an earthquake was rolling beneath me. I felt Ken Ware’s light touch on my back, keeping me in place. “Let it evolve,” he said. “Don’t try to resist it.” The shaking grew in intensity. Before I knew what was happening my legs began to jump and jerk in and out as I straddled the chest-press machine. The movement in my legs really caught me by surprise. As the tremor evolved, both the left and right leg mirrored one another, moving in and out, in and out in unison as the rest of my body rocked about like I’d been jolted with electricity. The machine clanged. My hands could barely hold on to the handles, much less keep the little bit of weight on the machine in place. “That’s good. That’s good,” Ken repeated.

My eyes closed, my entire body shaking, the tremor kept going and going. I’d never experienced anything like it, and I’d spent most of my adult life on weight machines in the gym. “Keep your eyes closed. I need you to try to stand outside yourself and just observe what is happening,” Ken Ware said. “Don’t react to it, or try and stop it. Just let it go.”

I nodded my head, although I’m not sure if Ken could tell that’s what I was trying to do. My head rocked with the tremor that had overtaken my body. I held my grip on the chest-press handles and tried to continue moving them slowly, methodically forward and back just as Ken had instructed me. By this point, slow and methodical looked more like a frog in a sock.

“Good. Good,” Ken said with a soft, reassuring tone. “Be the observer. Let it go and don’t attach yourself to the process of what’s happening right now.”

The velocity of the tremor increased. My body felt like it could slip off the machine at any moment. I strained to keep my eyes closed, to let the tremor sweep over me without reacting to it. My months of meditation paid off as I took control over my breathing and turned off the torrent of random thoughts running through my mind. Take it in. Observe. Listen to what your body is telling you, I told myself. I felt like an earthquake fault had opened up inside me.

Then, after what seemed like a very long time but was in truth just a few moments, the tremor began to subside.

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