Edit Overcoming-Pain.md — RSI Wiki

---
title: Overcoming Pain, Motivating Yourself to Stretch, Focus, and Exercise
visibility: public-edit
---

# Overcoming Pain, Motivating Yourself to Stretch, Focus, and Exercise

## Topics to discuss

The motivation to relax into and overcome pain, stress, fear, fatigue, and difficulty physical and emotional.

### Philosophical Tools

- It is not pain, but fear of pain that I'm afraid of
- Only now exists, and I could live like this forever
- I am only the summation of my actions. Make them good
- The only way out is through doing this action. "The only way out is through me"
- Asking myself the question: what would it be like to just do everything right for once? Attain perfect posture
- In every direction there will be pain
- The thought progression: why should I do this? It is difficult, maybe I should stop. But then why should I do anything? Because there is something there, something redeeming, something positive about these actions, and I will walk through walls to achieve it.
- Death is inevitable but mediocrity is not -- some risk, even of death, is okay
- I must not fear, fear is the mind killer, fear is the little death that brings total obliteration
- "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come -- the readiness is all. **Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be.**" -- Shakespeare, *Hamlet*
- Do not trouble yourself with those who are failing, but instead figure out how those who are succeeding do it.

## Why

### What I'm Running Away from

- Just because other people are getting by without doing this thing does not mean it is okay -- do I want to end up like them?
- Consumerism -- blinding and single-minded focus on the procurement of means coupled with a fear and lack of skill at searching for ends. I do not want to become Tim Ferris's "fat man in the red BMW"

### What I'm Running Towards

- For the sense of Chi
- For memory -- pain in the present makes it easier to return to earlier places in your memories, because suddenly doing so, dwelling fully in your past, is the path of least resistance
- For the nascent will power centers in my mind
- For the sense of lightness that comes the next time I will try the same action
- For a person
- For myself, my own health