Do you have passions or do they have you. Episode 57. Things I wish my dad taught me, bought to you by the first universal law of nature, nature seeks balance in all.

I don’t want to come across as a grumpy old man. But passion? Really? I have never seen passion stand the test of time. With Innerwealth technology we are not interested in being passionate today and dispassionate tomorrow. We are not interested in going up one minute and then down the other. We are not interested in starting something with great enthusiasm and then burning out after five minutes or a bit longer. Passion is of the emotions and drives so much good things but it also drives so much bad things. The same passion that drives a person to experience the highs of romance and sexual enjoyment is the same passion that drives a person to scream and shout and become quite violent. With Innerwealth technology we are not interested in this waste of good powerful spiritual human energy.

So on the one hand let’s celebrate passion because without it the population of the world would eventually ebb to 0. Most children are born out of passion, most children are not brought up with the same passion that caused their conception. Think about it. When people become passionate about something they become blind. Some people say love is blind. But love is not blind, passion is. And I hope, respectfully, that anybody reading this knows the difference between love and passion. If not it might be wise to give me a call.

When the passion goes out of something reality exists.

Which do you think is best to focus on? When I talk about marriage, in particular my first one where my three children were born, I often say, in theatre, that my marriage lasted a very short time but we stayed together a very long time. By the nature of interpretation most people think that what I am saying is that the passion lasted a short time. But that’s not true. We found ways to stimulate passion in our failing relationship for 10 years with very creative choices. So the passion was there for a very long time. That doesn’t mean that love was there. But that statement needs to be considered carefully as well. Because nothing is ever missing it just changes in FORM and our love must have been there in a different form than what we expected it to be. So the form of love that we expected it to be was grateful and attractive. But the form we had it in was in the structure of a family and a commitment to bringing up our children. It takes a lot of love to bring children into the world and to stay in a healthy place in a home with a partner while giving nearly 100% of your attention to the children to make sure they grow up healthy and happy and wise. So the love didn’t go away it just changed form. Due to our expectation and ignorance of this shift of love, we both thought the relationship was bad. And therefore we acted and created what we thought. It’s the power of suggestion.

But the only thing that was missing between us was that our love had shifted into a different form and therefore the expectation on each other had shifted also. Instead of relaxing that expectation and being grateful for what we had those expectations escalated. One would think that to people bringing up children would have less and less expectations of each other but it doesn’t work out that way. Because the relationship was built on the expectation that love would flow in the form of gratitude between us and we would be thankful for each other as we were at the start, which would mix love, passion and gratitude all in the same melting pot which felt great, love, passion, and gratitude all got separated into what we called our family. So it felt like something was missing. Something was missing not in the overall dynamic of the family but in the one on one intimate relationship between me and my partner at that time. When we think somethings missing we become highly focused on that missing thing and either go looking for it outside of that relationship or create enormous expectations on the other person to step up and meet us at our own expectation. The perception that something is missing is at the heart of this dysfunctional relationship situation. Because the other person is being challenged to meet our expectation it is understandable that they would feel not appreciated. With that lack of appreciation becomes less interest in meeting the expectations and more interest in self acceptance. As this vortex builds it becomes like a tornado that sucks everything that happens into it. Even putting the toothpaste back in the wrong place or leaving something on the kitchen bench can become a sign that the relationship is not healthy. Expectations become the mechanism of interpretation as to whether we are in the right place or not, and when they’re not met, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy that we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I am not alone in this experience of a relationship with a partner while bringing up children. The passion can be there but the things that make that passion something to celebrate, start to diminish, and then it’s a one-way street to divorce.

At work, when somebody is passionate about their work, they are a total pain in the arse. People who are passionate about their work are become attached to it. They start to demand that other people have the same passion, their expectations become fraudulent and they start to be isolated. We will not trust a person at work who is so passionate about their work that they can’t see that everybody else is doing their work in a good way. We will not trust the person whose passion is so over the moon that they can’t understand why everybody else isn’t over the moon. All domestic violence comes from passion where common ground is sexual, and the person throws all the other seven areas of life into the wind and cares about nothing else except controlling and being with the object of their passion. This compartmentalisation of life always leads to catastrophe.

And alcoholic is passion of all alcohol. A drug addict is passionate about drugs. And obese person is passionate about eating. But the interesting thing about passion is that it eventually becomes the norm. And passion exists for people because it heightens their sense of life. But if everything they are passionate about eventually becomes the default or normal, then they are addicted not to the substance but to increase levels of what some people think is the absolute mecca of life which is passion passion passion passion passion. Bad news.

A short story.

One-day, many moons ago, a man called Chris Walker decided to become a mountaineer. He went to New Zealand, went to the Macpac tracking shop, purchased over $2000 worth of tracking equipment and chose to have it all in the standard Macpac colour brand of purple. Purple boots, purple pants, purple jacket, purple gloves, purple beanie, purple sleeping bag, purple backpack and of course purple tent. To say that Chris Walker was the purple man would have been absolutely accurate. And as time went on I hired a mountain teaching guide to take me up into the mountains. The first expedition was up the side of a mountain called Mount aspiring. An ironic name given the story that follows. My mountain teaching guide met me at the base of the mountain and we started walking up a creek bed. The creek bed was black disgusting GUI slimy mud that is typical at the bottom of volcanic areas and so my purple started to turn a little motley. As we are sending through the creek bed, we still haven’t even touched any snow and now we were scrambling up rock faces slipping and sliding, me with my purple heavy, beautiful sexy purple backpack, and him, the professional guide with shorts and a T-shirt from Kmart. His backpack could have fitted into my backpack twice. After a full day of climbing we reached the camping spot in the snow where we were going to spend the night. I was exhausted and so I pitched my purple tent, fluffed up my purple sleeping bag, stripped of my disgusting mud soaked closed and went inside the tent. At this point, due to exhaustion and altitude, I went purple in the face and puked. I puked all over my new purple sleeping bag, all over my purple tent, and I got some even on my purple socks and my purple boots. With this I had to go outside in the cold with very little clothes on at which time my body started to become purple with the cold. I became angry which turned the purple a more red shade of purple than it was before. In the morning, when the sun came up over the purple horizon, I noticed a head a cliff edge that spanned around half a kilometre of vertical sheer wall on one side and a very steep slope on the other. My mountain teacher guide explained that he was going to teach me how to walk along the very steep side of that bridge and if you began to slip just throw your pic axe over the vertical side and you would stop falling to your death. At this point once again I became purple and elected to go back down the way we came with my tail between my legs, purple with shame.

of course, the male ego is purple. And mine was perfectly intact. Therefore, in order to deal with my absolute stupidity on this track experience, I blamed the mountain teacher guide for taking me to the wrong place. With this I decided to hire somebody else from the tracking company and go to a different place. After spending a couple of days at the laundromat with my disgraceful puked on clothes and sleeping bag, I returned ready for expedition number two.

with my ego intact, my purple gear dutifully repaired and presented glowing and shining and none the worse for the previous experience I decided to take matters a little bit into my own hands. Firstly I hired a helicopter to take us, my new mountain teacher guide, up to the snow line so that we didn’t have to walk in that black shitty stuff. In this way I would keep my purple gear clean. Such a princess I am. So we flew by helicopter to the snow line, the helicopter dropped us off, in a very bloody precarious place very high up on the side of this mountain called Mount Cook, and took off. I felt as if we were Robinson Crusoe abandoned for life. Or maybe even the Count of Monte Cristo left to die in a remote prison. We picked up our backpacks and put them on and I noticed a small heart nearby and asked my new mountain teacher guide what that hat was for and he explained that it was put there by the New Zealand mountaineering Association so that there was somewhere to stay if people needed to and I suggested that that might be a good starting point for our journey. We tracked over to the hut, which was relatively luxurious with a dining table and bunks and I looked at this and thought to myself, home sweet home. At this point the wind started to pick up. In fact the wind started to more than pick up. And I suggested, a great suggestion I thought, that we should stay here the night and just do some training outside the front door in the very steep vertical horrible disgusting crevasse written area. My mountain teacher God recognised fear from his past and agreed. The wind got stronger and the training got less and less attractive so we cooked our food on my new stove which unfortunately was not purple, and then climbed into our sleeping bags to spend the afternoon and evening waiting for the wind to die down and for us to climb to the top of Mount Cook.

snuggled and warm in my purple sleeping bag in this bunk in this cabin, things couldn’t be better for me. However there was one variable I had not counted on and that was I needed desperately to visit the toilet to do number two. When I asked the inevitable dumb dumb question of where is the toilet he pointed to a pathway outside of our safe little cabin with a chain link cable that you held onto as you walked in your crampons and full climbing gear due to the cold weather to the little box that was perched over a vertical drop and this is why they call it a dropbox. You drop your business through a wooden frame I need to send to help. To suggest that this was a heavenly shit would be to underestimate the fact that you’re a butt is pointing down 2000 feet of vertical ice wall. So, the bravest thing I had done so far in the past three weeks of mountaineering in New Zealand apart from spending a lot of money on purple gear was about to take place. I was about to take a dump over a vertical cliff supported by this wooden frame thing in a little box on the side of Mount Cook.

it was at this point that I understood more than ever before yoga. Yoga is the science of the body mind connection. Standing at the brink of the toilet bowl fully closed I was busting to get my gear off and unzip all the necessary windproof zips and disrobe out of my climbing overalls and release my burden. By the time I got everything off and sat perched over this vertical cliff my sphincter shut so tight, even the wind couldn’t blow it open. I sat in my bum, like my sleeping bag, became purple. I then stood up, got dressed again, put my gloves and everything back on, took two steps out the door and realised that if I didn’t hurry back I was about to change the colour of my purple clothes from the inside out. So desperately I stripped away these clothes and I did this act of disrobe and re-rope about 10 times before I achieved any level of success. I learnt that my mind and my sphincter were integrally connected. My first real yoga class.

this happened three or four more times during the course of our stay. And by the time the morning came I decided that I had had enough mountaineering for one adventure and my mountain teaching guide was sick to death of me opening and closing the door to the freezing cold and so we decided to track out and we decided to get a helicopter but there was no helicopter because the wind was too strong and so we had to walk . I don’t know if you’ve ever walked down a crevasse written snowfield, firstly it’s very steep and your crampons, boots with big spikes on them, have to take a really strong grip in order to prevent you slipping down the whole mountain side on your arse. The second part about it is you are roped together with the other perso and the reason for this is that the person in front can slip down one of these 2000 meter deep slots that are hidden beneath the snow cover and when they do slip down one of the slots the person behind has to flip over lie on their belly stick there axe in the snow and hope like hell that they don’t get dragged down the hole too.

Suffice to say this journey down the hill was for me a complete acknowledgement that whoever invented the sport of going up mountains and coming back down the must be an amazing fearless warrior of great huge courage and that I was not. We returned and I visited the pub and celebrated the fact that I had now achieved to great victories in attempting to be so Edmund Hillary and turning out to be the fairy godmother. With this I took my mountain bike which I brought with me to New Zealand and decided to ride, circumnavigate the South Island. After six hours I had blisters in places I’m not going to describe here but to suffice to say I was sitting on them. This two turned out to be an adventure of a Lifetime and I had ended up at a hippy folk festival where there was no food but there were lots of people smoking things that I couldn’t recognise. All of this of course just served to help me reinforce my ego at what an amazing adventure I was. My purple gear arrived at the train station at Christchurch on a separate train and my bike on another train and me on a different train also.

as a professional speaker there is a motto that says never let the truth get in the way of a good story. So it may be possible that I have embellished this story in telling it to you by disguising the fear and the cowardly way I approach this whole stupid exercise. Only the mountain teacher guides could tell the story the way it really was. They would describe my anger and excuses and the ridiculous nature of my expenditure on the most fancy tracking gear when I didn’t even know how to do a poo in the mountains. Anyway, such is life.

With Spirit

Chris