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Imagination and Catharsis (Read 4215 times)

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Imagination and Catharsis
February 06, 2019, 07:07:30 pm
So I had an interesting experience the other day and I wondered what others thought. I was trying a route which felt both improbable and beyond my physical limit (by far) I was feeling a bit deflated maybe and resigned to the fact that maybe this was to hard. There certainly wasn’t a positive vibe in my head but a ‘deep’ need to try.
After climbing the route my friend expressed suprise it had gone down and I described it to him as like ‘imagining’ my way up the route. So without trying to sound like to much of a pretentious tw@t, it wasn’t so much an experience of strength or technique but something that transcended into belief not that I could do it but just imagine it right at that moment. After I reached the top ( I’m normally a pretty subdued guy) it was like this sort of visceral catharsis - a kind of roar, pretty weird huh. It wasn’t so much a feeding the rat sensation but a definite contentment. If someone told me I could bottle that and sell it to willing punters I’d say no way man.

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#1 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 06, 2019, 07:36:47 pm
Dawes called and wants his brain back....

;)

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#2 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 06, 2019, 07:39:51 pm
It struck me that sounded a bit JD. no intention, but that man clearly has some greater insight into those kind of experiences.

sheavi

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#3 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 10:02:07 am
Can you elaborate on what you meant by 'imagining' your way up the route please?  Were you more focussed on just being immersed in the process of each move without too much effort, also without thinking about completing the route?

Is this relevant?
"From time to time, most of us become overwhelmed by negative thoughts such as judgments about ourselves or others, limiting beliefs, worries and obsessions. If we can break down the negative thought as it is happening
into the elements of clear talking, subtle talking, clear imaging and subtle imaging, we may find that we can
observe these individual elements without getting caught in them. The negative tapes then lose much of their
gripping power. They are experienced more as releases from the deep mind and less as a sufferings of the
surface mind. This is catharsis in the true sense of the original Greek, which literally means "cleaning out.""

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#4 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 10:58:39 am
I remember a piece in Rock and Ice (I think) ages ago on 'The Power of Negative Thinking' and that seems to have a thread of truth in it. Could it have felt so far out of reach that you were letting go of the thought of success and just seeing what unfolded? Just letting the body do it's thing without mind getting in the way?

I sometime find myself yawning a lot before an attempt at something. As if all the anti-adrenaline has kicked in and the body is just saying 'calm yourself down man'.

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#5 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 11:21:07 am
Maybe you need a powernap - worked for Ben Moon..

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#6 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 11:38:57 am

I sometime find myself yawning a lot before an attempt at something. As if all the anti-adrenaline has kicked in and the body is just saying 'calm yourself down man'.

I used to always spend a while yawning after dropping the first pill of the night and waiting to come up.

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#7 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 01:41:56 pm
Fantastic replies Sheavi / Steve, the yawning think haha I know exactly what you mean. I think this is a common physiological response to changes in carbon dioxide levels and increased respiratory rate / volume during stressful situations. Yeah the power of negative thinking vs will and imagination maybe that is the ‘cleaning out’ but in addition a kind of feeling whole associated with realising potential. On googling this I noticed Eric Hörst (who I usually find as dull as shit) had written a book including these ideas. He used a lynne hill quote which went something like ‘you have to be strong enough to do what you imagine but you have to be able to imagine doing it first’

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#8 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 01:47:27 pm
I think it was Todd Skinner who said something along similar lines - if you can't do it try pretending you can 'you feel like you're faking it but you don't fall'.

Your description sounds lot like one of the experiences I have subsequently filed under deep flow, where after a lot of mental anguish stood in a break I thought I'd given up only to find myself at the top. Your consciousness is preoccupied with negative babble, your subconscious and body just want to get on with it. Maybe you've solved the paradox?

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#9 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 05:47:50 pm
The curious thing about your description JB is it sounds like pretty much every intense climbing experience I’ve had, particularly when I was younger and more into onsight grit climbs with poor protection. Which led me to post the bit about ego vs risk a while ago.

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#10 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 07, 2019, 06:29:12 pm
Your consciousness is preoccupied with negative babble, your subconscious and body just want to get on with it.

I used to have similar feelings trying to jump on drop-rails when I was skating, my busy mind would stall me on the run-up with wooden legs. The next go, coming in a bit faster, I would catch myself in the air unsure of how I had set off but very aware that I now had. I get it too in climbing, but it's a slower process and much more intense because of it.

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#11 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 09:49:39 am
Your consciousness is preoccupied with negative babble, your subconscious and body just want to get on with it.

I used to have similar feelings trying to jump on drop-rails when I was skating, my busy mind would stall me on the run-up with wooden legs. The next go, coming in a bit faster, I would catch myself in the air unsure of how I had set off but very aware that I now had. I get it too in climbing, but it's a slower process and much more intense because of it.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that you dropped in before thinking! My skating was the opposite always held back by over thinking.

I don't feel like I can relate to this experience in climbing at all. I've definitely had breakdowns on trade routes before scary bit but always feel like I've collected my thoughts and calmed down when I get round to committing.

Perhaps a state of mind that I'm not very good at accessing?

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#12 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 12:03:05 pm
to me it sounds like a "flow" experience.

the funny thing is that i had relatively more of those during what i'd call an "intermediate" phase of my climbing career. For me the usual symptom would be to become completely unaware of what people were screaming to me, which sometimes led me to dangerous situations like skipping a bolt too close to the ground or going for the crux with the rope behind my leg.
I felt both fully absorbed by the experience of climbing the route, and a bit passive to it.

These days i feel like i have less of them, or less extreme. On a good attempt, it feels more as if the climbing part is so much in "autopilot" mode, that my conscious brain can still operate normally. A good analogy would be driving my car and talking to my passenger. I rarely get that feeling of being totally dominated by the experience.

I wonder if this is related to age or rather to how long you have being practicing a certain sport - maybe when you have been operating more or less at a similar level for years, the amount of novelty in the movement patterns and situations is so small that the task becomes less taxing for your brain, and it more rarely has the necessity to turn down/off other processes.

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#13 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 07:30:02 pm
Just putting it out there but I think the word ‘flow’ has become a catch all term for climbing experiences that seem different to the general prattle of consciousness. Every time I hear it I sort of groan a bit inside. Another good example of this is the word ‘dissociation’ which can be used to describe anything from a day dream like state to a disorder of personality and identity or a sense of unreality and reduced sense of self and others. The experience I was describing could be thought of as a controlled build up of pressure in a system with and intense release of that emotion. Oh hang on a minute  :lets_do_it_wild:

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#14 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 08:52:52 pm
Yeah Dan, we get it, if it all came under one catch all term you wouldn’t be able to start any more threads  ;D

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#15 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 09:12:55 pm
Ha, didn’t intend it to get back to flow. I’ll make sure I keep any new threads T Stubb approved. Do you have a PO Box? I’ll send em to you a few weeks in advance 🙄

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#16 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 09:21:28 pm
No need for a PO Box, I will feel your new thread vibes through the transcendental aether, and you will be able to know my assent by the distribution of gritstone crystals beneath your fingers.

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#17 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 08, 2019, 09:24:13 pm
Fantastic I can at last* communicate with an other worldly being such as yourself

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#18 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 09, 2019, 03:45:08 pm
Just putting it out there but I think the word ‘flow’ has become a catch all term for climbing experiences that seem different to the general prattle of consciousness. Every time I hear it I sort of groan a bit inside.

Yep

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#19 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 10, 2019, 03:57:41 pm
Coming back to what JB and JWI said about this a while ago and the original thread on The flow Paradox I did a bit more reading and found something referring to the 9 components of the flow experience one of which is called the ‘control paradox’. Ted put it very well a couple of years ago in a recorded chat I had with him where he said ‘you’ve got to want it but not want it at the same time’. The idea of establishing control by balancing your perception of the world is quite established in psychology and psychotherapy and links into things like interpretation of the unconscious and dream analysis as well as more modern therapy like Cbt and meta cognitive approaches like perceptual control theory (method of levels) which attempts to help people readjust their views and expectations of the world by encouraging insight into currently held ‘stuck’ views. How all that links to climbing god only knows. But I do think the 9 dimensions of flow described and the idea of flow it’s self is more ‘heuristic?’ In that it seems to over simplify a whole range of complex human experiences. I’m quite interested in states of consciousness and perception and how that links back to the deeper views we have of our selves, others and the world (internal working model). And the massive variability in this might explain why negative or pessimistic thinking works for one and positive vibes another. In relation to mastermind and Simon’s question about visualisation, I joked (sorry Simon) that he had formed some kind of ‘bad relationship’ with the route where there were more lows than highs but the promise of things getting better kept him or is coming back for more. I’d argue that this pattern of activity is visible in lots of climbers (me included) recurrently stuck in an endless loop particularly in ‘projecting’ things and there must be a point where this turns sour. At that time it strikes me it’s more about repairing our relationship with ‘the rock’ (being a metaphor for some internal stuck point) than it is about visualising our way to the send.

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#20 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 10, 2019, 04:16:42 pm


Wise words

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#21 Re: Imagination and Catharsis
February 10, 2019, 05:50:50 pm
Oh, I can just feel the giddyness of walking around the pass, that was a lovely video.

 

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