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This is the "being
yourself for a living" newsletter, coming to you from Robin
Wheeler in Johannesburg, to keep in touch and,
in this
issue, share some insights and suggestions on:
T H E S T U F
F I N T H E B A S E M E N T
I recently did something I haven't done much for years, I went to a
movie. I did it at noon on a Monday, when the need and opportunity
presented themselves. I went to see Rocky Balboa, the final round in
the Rocky series.
Call me what you will, but I have always related to the mythology that
Stallone conveys so intensely and well through the Rocky character. He
is the loner who has to face himself, the fighter who has to fight, the
nice guy who gets pushed. The later Rocky movies lost some of the feel
and impact for me, but this last one really hit home.
It is written and made by a man of sixty (Stallone) about a character
in his late fifties (Rocky) facing his life, how he feels about
himself, how he is relating to the people close to him, and how he is
dealing with success and loss.
His main challenge is that he still has something inside him needing to
get out. In one scene he calls it "The stuff in the basement". It is
what takes him back into the ring. Of course, as he has done in every
movie, Rocky must dig deeper and deeper to do what he is driven to do
from within and from without.
People laugh at him, discourage him, mock him and voice all his deepest
fears. In fact, his biggest fight is in actually getting into the ring.
Just before he does, a close companion tells him he is going to be
alright. "How do you know?" he asks. "The stuff in the basement," is
the answer.
Perhaps the theme in Rocky I relate to most is one that runs through
every installment. Rocky always gets knocked down before he finds his
inner strength and fights back. He gets into the ring and takes a
pounding. He gets beaten badly and then gets beaten some more.
Then, suddenly, he breaks through the barrier of his self limiting
beliefs and the stuff in the basement comes bursting out. In
every movie, he needs, first, to be broken before his real strength
comes through.
This is the way with us all. We live in a shell of assumption built up
through conversations with the world and our own self doubt. The
dissonance within gets bigger and bigger, yet we avoid the
confrontation. Eventually, the stakes get too high and we have to
"fight".
We take our knocks as the false beats us down. We fight on but feel
ourselves slipping, losing. Then, we bottom out and the stuff in the
basement takes over, which it can do only once we have got past the
noise, the doubt.
Sometimes we need to be pushed past our limits to find our true selves.
It is not in our comfort zone that we live our potential but in the
extremes of life.
In Rocky Balboa, the humble hero wins much more than a title. He
wins the truth, a sense of inner peace. He achieves the ultimate: to be
himself and be happy with that.
On the path to real knowing, this is what we all face.
B
A N D N E W S
The
Black Hotels now have a page on MySpace.com, so I am simply
going to refer you to that. There you will find:
- a band biography and news, including
that we have signed to Sovereign Entretainment;
- four of our songs, recorded live at
The Bohemian on 13 December 2006; and
- up-and-coming live dates, including
the approximatley 15 shows we will be playing around South Africa in
March 2006.
G
O O
D B Y E
F O R N O W
Hope to
see you on tour or in a workshop sometime soon!
Robin
"It is much easier for warriors to fare
well under conditions of maximum
stress
than to be impeccable under normal circumstances."
Don Juan to Carlos
Castaneda
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