The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

Pay attention to how your eyes direct your movements and trust them. (The level of balance and efficiency of this direction may depend on your level of climbing knowledge and experience.)
    Deepak Chopra, the author of many books on understanding your essence and contacting your spiritual self, calls intuition “heightened awareness.” It is always truth. You never have false intuitions. Falseness can only occur during interpretation of intuitive messages, as you relate to them from a perspective of phantom fear, wishing, or limited beliefs.
    We often think of normal perception as being very objective compared to intuition. It’s not. We don’t simply see or hear, passively and objectively. Rather, perception is the complex mental act of organizing sensory information through the lens of past experience. We hear a loud bang and we hear a gunshot, a car backfiring, or a screen door slamming. Which one we hear depends not so much on the sound as on our mindset and our context. In other words, we create a large portion of the perception. Three different climbers see a certain rock feature and variously perceive: a strenuous layback crack, a delicate stemming problem, a dangerous, unbolted trad route. These three perceptions are tainted by past difficulties, fears, expectations, and beliefs. All are limiting. The reality of the rock contains a far greater range of possibilities.
    The point is that our perception can’t be completely trusted, yet we must rely on it for information. The warrior seeks a heightened form of perception. He disciplines his mind so that his ordinary perceptions are more in line with a love of life and thirst for learning, and less inhibited or tainted by past experiences and fear.
    To access the truth and its possibilities we need to stop tainting it with preconceived notions and phantom fears that hold us prisoner in our comfort zones. The world is what it is. The truth is out there and accessible through an open-minded approach and intuition. We need to develop our intuition so that its whispers are familiar and frequent.
    Being in Control vs. Being Controlling
    In climbing, being out of control can be dangerous. It’s not a desired state for general climbing. There is a difference, however, between being in control and being controlling. Being in control is the state where you work efficiently and process yourself through the risk. You show mastery over your mind and body. Being controlling means that you try to control things that can’t be controlled. You try to create comfort in the risk zone by clinging excessively to the elements of security within the risk.
    Be aware of controlling aspects when you climb through a risk. Signs of being controlling include climbing slowly, climbing too statically, resisting or dreading falling even when it’s safe to fall, overgripping, holding your breath, grabbing pro, down climbing excessively, and placing more pro than needed. These behaviors waste energy and attention and reel you back into the comfort zone when you need to be moving forward into the climbing process. The Preparation and Choices processes allow you to create a situation where you can fully give yourself to the risk. Rather than clinging and backpedaling, enjoy the freedom your warrior preparation allows.
    Trust
    You move up a smooth, committing face to a possible protection crack. Upon arriving you find the crack is less useful than it looked from below. Don’t fight the facts. Go with them. Relish each new revelation. This is your incomplete, intellectual knowledge of the risk being corrected through experience. You are now in the process of achieving your highest goal—learning. Accept the situation as it is. Trust the process.
    Trust bridges the gap between your ability to assess the risk beforehand and your ability to rise to the actual challenge the risk presents. Keep a possibility mindset. Stay with your intent. Don’t, however, confuse possibility with hopefulness. You aren’t hoping for any specific outcome. Your goal is learning, and that’s being achieved. Simply trust in the process. You’ll climb through or fall, and either outcome will provide learning.
    When you are in the chaos of the risk zone, the conscious mind often will revolt. It is outside of its realm, the comfort zone, and if engaged in the thinking process, the conscious mind will create thoughts of comfort. When you are in the risk zone, your conscious mind will generate various thoughts to