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Could climbing be a new kind of yoga? Interview with Juan Marbarro

In this article you will find the translation of the Rock&Joy podcast episode in which Migue Sancho (host) and Juan Marbarro (guest) talk about the possibilities of applying the precepts of yoga (as a philosophy) to climbing. You can listen to it (in spanish) at https://rockandjoy.com/185-2/ or on the main podcast platforms.

Contents
Climbing and Philosophy
Climbing and Yoga
Yamas and Niyamas
Recap Yama and Niyama
Climbing and mastering the mind
Asana
Pranayama
Pratyahara
Dharana and Dhyana
Kleshas
Get the book

MS -Welcome back Juan, welcome home, how are you?

JM -Thanks, everything is fine. Thanks for inviting me.

MS -I wanted to ask you about this new book you have published, “Climbing is the new yoga”, which we are going to talk about for the next hour and a half or two hours, before we start, I would like to know what is your motivation to dedicate so much energy, so much passion to self-knowledge through climbing, because you started with stoicism, you have gone through Taoism, now a book on climbing through yoga, and in fact they are just different channels, different ways of understanding the philosophical or spiritual development through this beautiful medium such as climbing. What has led you to that?

JM -Yes, in the end it is a search, like all searches, but in the end they all lead to the same place and climbing also leads to that place. All philosophies and all quests lead to happiness. And happiness is nothing other than the mastery of the mind, which is the one that creates suffering and discomfort for us. So, all philosophies lead, stoicism, Taoism, yoga… lead to the mastery of the mind, and through climbing we can exercise this mastery of the mind as anyone who has climbed a wall and has seen how the mind begins to throw everything at them, when really all that the mind was telling them at that moment was not so real and were more projections and learned limits, some conditioning that could be dismantled to gain a little peace, let’s say, to gain mastery over the mind.

Climbing and Philosophy

MS -And what was before, out of curiosity, how does this come about? Do you start climbing and you realize that questions arise, things arise, a lot of conditioning as you say, and you explore different ways to give reins to that curiosity, or you were already a person who had studied, had read, had been interested in different philosophies and you find a fit there in climbing?

JM -Yes, I had already studied a lot, I was interested in the subject, and I have been climbing for quite some time. Maybe like everyone else, there are periods with more continuity and periods with less, but it is not always easy to see the connection, it is not always easy to find the way to apply what you already know, what you have read in many books, in many philosophies, so there was a moment when I thought, well, as an exercise, almost like a game, I am going to try that the next time this happens to me on the rock I will try to put into practice this thing that I have read in this philosophy, in this book. That’s how I put that intention into climbing. It’s a matter of intention. The intention with which you approach what you’re doing. If you go to the rock and you want to be stronger than your partner, do grade X or just spend an afternoon outdoors, well, totally legitimate and that’s fine but, if you go to the rock and you say well now I want to go a little bit beyond my limit, I want to explore a little bit my reactions, my conditioning, I want to see where I fail, where I trust myself… Well it’s the intention that you put into the practice, and yoga is the same, it’s all intention.

-Here I find it very curious because, as far as it is possible, we both -and many- reach these same depths, but, in our case, in a very parallel way but from the opposite approach, isn’t it? In my quest to climb better, to better explain how to enjoy climbing more, how to get more out of it, I’ve run into this, I’ve run into my mind, I’ve run into my conditioning, I’ve run into “the Paco” as I call him and we’ve already mentioned it in this podcast a few times, and then, there I’ve pulled resources that I already had and I’ve looked for new resources. My goal was not “I’m going to work on a path of self-knowledge through climbing” but “I’m going to climb better”, well, if I want to climb better, suddenly I have to overcome certain things and I have worked on them. And you directly said, I want self-knowledge, well, climbing is a fantastic vehicle to achieve it and in the end, they are two different but complementary intentions.

Yes, it’s not really that different. The point is that climbing serves as the playing field, then, it’s like the purpose you set for yourself and through that purpose to climb better or to climb this route or to climb whatever, you realize, that’s where you project the lights and shadows let’s say, there you see where you are strong, where your limitations are, there you see what you have to work on. Without climbing or without whatever you do, yoga, a career or study, or whatever, without something that gives you the framework you could not see where your limits are, you could not see what your weaknesses are, so to speak, then that serves as a goal that makes you look for how to overcome those limits, how to overcome those barriers that you find and this makes you grow, then this already becomes a path of growth. The question is also not to focus too much on the result, to seek all the time to feed the ego more and be stronger and be greater than anyone else, but, in the end, you can seek that and run into the other without wanting to, then, that is the question. To have a purpose. Whoever sets this goal, whether the ego sets it, whether you set it as an athlete because you want to have a greater sporting development or whether you set it as a Sunday climber, whatever, but the important thing is to have a goal from which to develop the tools.

-Of course, as you rightly say, I can’t think of any other framework that has such a capacity to suddenly take you out of all your preconceived mental schemes and show you your mental reality as it is. And also in such a fast way and in such a riskless way, in quotation marks, if we are talking about sport climbing. Well Juan, before getting into the subject. You have already written three books, where did you find the time to suddenly publish three books on climbing philosophy in two years and a bit, which was something that, of course, is a micro niche. If climbing is already a niche, this is something really tiny?

Yes, more than the time, it has been more the energy that has been put into it, hasn’t it? So, when you have the motivation, you make the time if you have to. If you have to get up earlier or if you have to stop doing other things when there is something that motivates you. For example climbing, where do you find the time to go all day to a mountain to climb and descend walls? Because it motivates you. That is the question and in the end, well, they are things that I had already studied and it has been a little bit of connecting, and as I said, they all coincide in many things and maybe the trick is that they all tend to the same thing, the mastery of the mind and, said with different wrappings, they all say almost the same thing. So it has been to look for the common elements of each thing and weave it, so that at the end whoever reads the books can find those different wrappings making sense in the climbing, so at that point it saves a lot of work, I mean it’s not that it saves work but they are not like three different things, they are three things that are the same thing explained in different ways.

-You put on different glasses for each attempt you make (laughs).

Well, in the end you make a synthesis too, when you read the three books, you take what works best for you at each moment, they are different approaches and each one can have its moment, you can start with one and then you can see that if you evolve you can apply other things that you couldn’t before. Yes, the game is very interesting.

-Well, undoubtedly after writing three books on the subject we can say that you are creating a professional profile about this. How are you orienting it? Because as you say, you have had to put energy into it, you have had to dedicate time to it, time that you don’t dedicate to other things, do you think this activity can be sustained, are you going to continue publishing books and could you make a living out of it?

As all philosophies teach, as we were talking about, the question is to focus on the process. Surely the only thing I can say is that I am enjoying it. The work I’m doing writing them, the feedback I’m receiving, the contacts I’m making, not at a professional level but with people who like them and like to talk about the subject and, well, in general, to live I don’t know, it depends on the standard of living you have but I think I would have to write a few more, but well, at the moment I have no plans of continuing writing about climbing, I think that the cycle has been closed with this book, it is quite rounded, let’s say, so maybe when I rest and so on I can find another philosophy to adapt or or maybe write something that has less to do with climbing, even though I like the subject that much.

Climbing and Yoga

-Well, let’s go to the subject, why yoga?

As I said before, the steps have led to the subject, towards it, we already know the complementarity that the asanas, which are the yoga postures, have with climbing, at a physical, muscular, flexibility, strength level… and well, that was the most obvious part, but focused on the philosophy they are also quite close. In the end the goal of yoga is concentration and meditation, so, I think climbing as a form of meditation is also a theme that is there latent in anyone’s mind, yet that concentration is an important part of climbing is also quite obvious.

-You still lack zen climbing…

Sure, yes (laughs) that could be a possibility. In the end they are all the same thing, they talk about the same thing in different ways. Well, Taoism is also quite close to Zen.

-Juan, beyond the joke, we are talking about the yoga book but this yoga that you are talking about is probably quite far from the picture that the people who are listening to us have in their minds, from the image of what most of the climbers who are listening to us have practiced as yoga in the West, because this Western yoga is just a small part of what you talk about as yoga, as the philosophy of yoga, can you go a little deeper there and put a framework, a context about what we are going to talk about?

Yes, the yoga in this book is about mastering the mind, which is a way back, the way back to one’s nature, which is basically peace of mind, what we were saying. Why is it a way back? Because what robs us of peace of mind is basically the conditionings that we have. Conditionings are something learned, layers that have been covering the mind throughout life and, to go into the subject of climbing, let’s say that a person approaches climbing for the first time and climbs and starts to have a fear of heights, a fear that maybe is a memory of the fears of his grandfather who when he climbed a curb was telling him that he was going to fall and get hurt. These are the conditionings that we have learned throughout our lives and we need to get rid of them. Some are conditionings that serve us to progress but others do not, others limit us or are not adapted to our time. So, going back to what you were saying, maybe this confronts a little bit the idea that we have of yoga and climbing, because we have a very sporty vision of both things. Yoga, even if you have entered through the physical or sporty way, when you practice it you realize that it is much more but from the outside it is seen as people doing stretches or getting strong doing impossible postures, and the same with climbing. You see on instagram people climbing some impressive walls, doing some aesthetic movements… and that calls, you think: I want to do that, I’m in shape and I could do that too. And then you get closer and you realize that it’s much more, that in the end it’s a mental game more than something physical. That is the idea then, to transcend a little bit the physical aspect of both things and take it to this philosophical plane of development, of the mastery of the mind. 

-To translate a little bit what you just told me, we see that yoga understood as philosophy seeks to free the mind from these conditionings, from these scripts, from these patterns that we have learned, from these obstacles that we have in the mind that do not allow us to see and experience reality as it is, without being conditioned to those filters, and within this philosophy of yoga, the asanas as it is called in Sanskrit are a small part, the physical practice is a small part and yoga as philosophy is much bigger. Here the metaphor that you were giving is that yoga is a big tree full of fruits and if you sit under that tree and say, oh, how nice it is, it gives a great shade, then that would be the physical practice, but if you are then able to realize that this tree also gives incredible fruits that you can eat, that also has a huge biodiversity, that has birds, that has animals, then you can experience it in a deeper way, right?

In the end, physical practice is important but only a part of it. You can’t think of yoga as just postures. The physical practice has its moment but it is more of an almost introductory step to the rest.

Yamas and Niyamas

-Well, we are going to continue delving into this book. We see that in the philosophy of yoga there are eight steps, and the first two are the moral codes, the yamas and niyamas, which for the person like me who is far from this context and are concepts of a few thousand years ago, a simple translation can be complex and far from reality. How would you translate these starting points, these moral codes, to the world of climbing, to our world?

Let’s say they are the ethical codes, the commandments, the gateway to any conscious practice, let’s say. I called it metaphorically like the approach shoes, like what you have to wear to start doing the work. We can say, for example, if you go climbing and you don’t respect the nesting regulations or the bar wrapper flies away and you don’t bother to pick it up, or you’re all the time comparing yourself to others and trying to do other people’s projects or mislead them about what they’re doing or what you’re doing, inflating your ego, all of that, then that would be breaking the ethical codes of climbing or anything else. So, if you are already failing in the basics, you are hardly going to be able to progress. Maybe climbing, the rock, makes you humble and puts you in your place, but if you do not contemplate these ethical codes, which, without going into great depth, speak of contentment, non-violence, not damaging the space, not coveting what is not yours, etc. If you do not contemplate the basics, you could hardly do a superior job. You don’t have the right approach to do growth work. It may be that little by little the rock will be shaping you and putting you in the place to be able to do it, or you can simply go four or five Sundays and then bounce and end up selling the harness online a year later. In the end climbing already has its own ethical codes all the time, which is what I elaborate in the book: the correspondence between the codes of climbing and the codes established by yoga. 

-Since we have time, let’s go if you want to delve into the niyamas, which I find very interesting. What are they and how can we translate them to our context?

To begin with, a little comment about the yamas is that they seem like restrictions, about not doing this or not doing that. They are limits and we were talking about we want to overcome the limits, so what is the point? In the end the question is who sets the limits? By what criteria are the limits set? There are times when you have to set limits. To set the limits with a criteria would be to rest when you need to after three days of climbing, this would be ahimsa, not to exercise violence on yourself. However, a limit set by the ego is when you feel lazy to climb and you stay at home, on the couch watching TV shows. That is the difference between a limit with criteria and a limit set by the lower mind or the ego. 

And well, the niyamas as you were saying are for purifying a little more our tendencies. They are very interesting. Saucha, which is cleansing, refers both to the cleansing of the body and the cleansing of the mind. Trying to counteract thoughts, not negative thoughts because they are inevitable, but thoughts that are not aligned with our goal. Why am I even going to think that this route is hard? Okay, but think of it as a challenge, give it a new approach. You can focus on purifying the mind of things that don’t take you where you want to go. Santosha, also very interesting: Contentment, the basis of happiness. Don’t covet what you don’t have. Don’t chase what you don’t have, and so on. To give an example about climbing, if you have your project and you are there attempting it and then someone comes and starts the one next to you and immediately you want to get into his project because you think it is better… If you were happy with what you have and with what you are doing, you would not need to chase after so many things. The next one is Tapas, one of my favorites and one of the most interesting, also from the climbing perspective. Because tapas has often been translated as austerity or discipline, plus a somewhat more metaphorical translation which is “purification by fire”. This would be where you burn your impurities, where you burn your limits. Addressing discomfort, as we talked about in the previous podcast. If you see that you have a limit, that something frightens you, you think you don’t know, this step is very hard for me… that’s your path, you would have to address that and have the discipline to work that. That way you would be burning your limit, directing yourself towards it, otherwise it will always be a limit, a conditioning. 

-This is a very stoic principle….

Yes, in the end they all talk about the same thing. Moreover, where they coincide, a greater truth can be glimpsed. That is the work I have tried to do in the books, not to remain so much in the form but to look for coincidences and contrasted truth, because truth is always subjective but if it is in several places, in several philosophies that differ thousands of years and thousands of kilometers… Well, there are people who argue that the Stoics knew a lot about yoga because of some influences they had received, but well, that is another argument in which I am not very well versed…

-(laughs) neither am I, but well, it is curious that they coincide in this way in such a fundamental principle. And something so applicable to climbing.

They all coincide and well, what I was saying that translates as austerity is perhaps because it was the way they had to take themselves to the limit. Being austere, eating less, having less comforts, and so on. That was their way of burning limits. What the Stoics did: I am afraid of being cold, therefore I wear shorts in winter. If we take this subject to climbing we have it easier, because it is very easy to find our limits and we do not have to fast or go cold but in climbing we find many ways to reach the limit, always with safety obviously, but always looking for that point where the mind tells you you can’t.

-As simple as going to the crag with people in front of you and getting into a type of climbing that you don’t do so well?

Of course, there you face many limits, because the people in front of you already put you against your limit of seeking external validation and then your limit that this type of climbing does not suit you well (in your mind)…. It is easy to find the limits and to work on them if we put the intention…

If we continue with the niyamas, the next one would be svadhyaya, the study of oneself. Or of the Self, the essence of each one. It would be to read a book of this type, of philosophy, of something that speaks of your true essence, of your mind, of how it works. You can do this study of yourself in the rock as we were saying, if you go to the route that is difficult for you and you put a little intention in doing this study, you can learn many things. There are times when you don’t, when you do things automatically and things happen in your mind, you react and you are not in the moment to observe them, so you are doomed to repeat them.

-One of the things I always tell the students is to have a clear intention in each hit and this will not always be the same and it will not always be aligned with an objective but you have to give work to the mind, because if not the mind works anyway but it works on whatever and normally it will not be productive, it is not for you to improve, it is not for you to enjoy. Well, it can be just a stupid distraction but it usually plays against you, it wants you to make as little effort as possible, right? So, give an intention to that attempt, whether it is a technical improvement, whether it is working on breathing or resting, whether it is the activation prior to a hard movement, whatever it is but you have to have an intention in the attempt, what do we want to learn, what do we want to improve and well, this is closely linked to this precept. It may be our intention to pay attention to our internal dialogue, to what is happening in my mind, you may not even need to interfere with that and just the mere fact of paying attention already happens as in the principles of quantum physics. Just paying attention already changes the outcome. 

The point is that, if you set the criteria with which you are going to do something, you will direct everything towards that. If you put your intention, as you were saying, I don’t know, in placing your feet better, then you no longer let your mind go to what is wrong with my feet, but you already have it focused on that and in the end that is the essence, to put your attention on what you are doing and in the end the sporting achievement will be a consequence of that. If you put the intention directly on sending, you will have many conditioning and many expectations that will make you wobble or get more nervous. However, if you put the intention in the process, in how to improve each step, each part of the route, then in the end the achievement will come almost as a consequence, let’s say.

-That’s precisely what I was talking about in the last podcast. I’m a bit far from here but I think it comes to the thread. It is clear what you just said and anyone who has tried it must have experienced it. If your only intention in a attempt is the result, to clip the last bolt, the most normal thing is that you have a lot of nerves and that you don’t climb in the most fluent way. If your intention is to pay attention to your movement and your climbing, you will probably do better. But by the same token, if we don’t have a prior intention to push our limits and reach that goal at a given moment, we won’t do it. I think the trick is where we set the intention at what point in time. Of course if you’re there and you’re under that route you want to send and you want to push yourself and that to me has a value and it’s fantastic, the question is what do we do with our mind while we’re climbing? 

Sure. You say this goes away from the point but it doesn’t go away at all, plus we could thread it with the last niyama, isvarapranidhana. Popularly it is known as surrender to god, surrender to something higher, to a higher purpose. For me, for my adaptation it is like surrender to action, surrender to activity, without expectations, with detachment from the result, what we were talking about just now. Doing what you have to do in each moment, without looking for anything in return, almost as a sacrifice to something higher. I do the route and I devote myself to it, to each step, to each experience, to each thing I have to learn, to each movement I have to learn how to do, to each technique, etc. Detach yourself from expectations, from the result and dedicate yourself to what you are doing, to the experience and to your growth, to your work on the rock.

-Here we return again to stoicism in terms of paying attention to what is in your hand. It’s how I live it, how I believe it. I come from the opposite perspective, I ask myself how can I take advantage of all these philosophies, the potential of my mind, to help me to my purpose? My goal in particular is not sending, my goal is mastery in climbing, and everyone will have their own, but I want to be able to climb better and better and understand my body better and be able to flow through more incredible and spectacular routes in one place or another, and for that, well, I use all these tools and I find myself with a wonderful playground to cultivate my mind. And in this case, when I get under my project, in which at this moment I made sixty-something attempts and I am very close to reaching the achievement and I tie the rope… I have in my head that I want to go up there, once again, because I want to reach this goal at some point. What happens is that this goal is not the end, I already told you that for me the end is mastery. If I don’t achieve it in this attempt, it will be because there are things I still need to do or because there has been bad luck. But I do have some expectations as to what I want to happen. The difference is that when I enter the route, grab the first hold and lift my feet off the ground, it is as this precept says… I have done what I had to do and now I give myself to “whatever God wants”, as this precept says. I have paid attention to the things that are in my hand, I have tried to sleep well, I have prepared myself, I have eaten what I thought I had to eat, I have done a good warm-up, I have given a lot of work to the route, and now I am going to try to get my maximum performance and for that what is in my hand is to pay attention to the movement, to pay attention to the breathing, to the rhythm in which I climb… Then I cannot pay attention to the result, to the chain, because otherwise I will not be able to do it. But there is always a duality, I believe that there must also be a result. It is not enough for me to give myself totally to that path. That path arrives somewhere and I want to get there. So, that is why I use these tools, that is why I try to improve my mental abilities.

Yes, it is clear that you have to have a purpose, an intention, and a tangible objective, right? That is quite useful for the mind above all, but you should not put too much focus on that because what is going to happen when you send your route, your project of the sixty attempts? That you are going to look for another one even harder and you are going to have to give it another seventy or eighty, then, all the time you are going to be in a process of trying, as you were saying, to gain mastery with the climb, so the question is that, not to generate expectations that create suffering…

-That’s the key…

You can head towards your route, but it’s not the same thing to head towards it thinking, when you’ve done thirty attempts, to say “fuck this sucks”, “I can’t do this”, and do the other thirty attempts suffering, it’s different than doing the attempts surrendering yourself to the experience and the process, and to what we were talking about, because in the end that’s the only thing there is. Then, when you send it, what will happen? You might go a week without climbing, because you’re exhausted and you feel a release, or you start climbing more routes of the same grade, you’re settling down, but afterwards you’re going to get into another one that’s a little bit more and you’re going to start the same process all over again. If you are going to be living all the time in that process, you better enjoy it and have the best possible attitude.

That is what I wanted to get to, in the process we are going to live if we like this. And this is a process in which what predominates is failure, seen from a western, capitalist perspective… Success in climbing does not predominate, in those sixty or seventy climbs, the ones I need to finish sending this route, the attempt in which I send is only one of those many others. The question is not that I do not have the intention of reaching that one, but that those seventy that come before are moments in which I enjoy, in which I learn, in which I am doing what I really want to do, I am doing the work. I don’t see a problem if there is an intention to say: hey, I want to get to this point and after this point I will want to get to another point. That’s great. The question is, on that path I am on, what am I doing? How am I living it? How am I taking advantage of that path? If I simply live projected at that point which is also ephemeral, you talk about a week but normally it is not a week (laughs) normally you get off, you celebrate with your buddies and in half an hour you are in something else and you say, wow, I could have been here for months. And all of a sudden the mind just goes, “wow, that’s it”. There are many moments of saying wow, I’m progressing, I’m getting to understand my body better, this movement that I couldn’t do before is now coming out. So when someone gets into something extraordinarily complex, what you have is an immense opportunity to make a lot of small improvements. When you get into something that requires very little, you have much less room for improvement.

Of course, as the stoics like Marcus Aurelius also said: the obstacle is the way. If you get into something hard and you fail, it is what is showing you where you have to go to improve. That path might indicate that you are not integrating a movement or that your mind is telling you that you are going to fall and you are afraid or that you are afraid to move away between the bolts, that’s the work at the end. 

Recap Yama and Niyama

Here in the book you have a small recap that puts in context these principles of which we have spoken, some we have mentioned, others less, if it is okay I will read it. We take a couple of minutes and then we continue with more stuff.

“A brief “practical recap” through the example of climbers who have these codes present in some way in their climbing.

These climbers go out to their favorite climbing sector with the intention of exercising their mind and body on the rock, to practice their ability to remain mentally calm in all situations. 

For this purpose, they have chosen a project that is slightly uncomfortable, somewhat beyond their capabilities, but which they believe will serve to discipline themselves and grow (tapas, self-discipline/challenging the ego). They will seek to send the route as the culmination of the path but will surrender to each of the experiences that the process brings them (ishvarapranidhana, surrender of action). In this way they will find joy in what the present brings them, without forming great expectations and focusing on the fullness of the experience (santosha, contentment). They will take good note of every lesson the rock can give them about themselves, their nature, their fears, their conditioning, their projections, etc. (svadhyaya, self-study). And, although situations will arise that may hurt their ego and provoke emotional reactions, they will try to keep their mind always clean of negative emotions that may taint their experience (saucha, cleanliness/purity). 

After all, they are there stroking rocks to do their inner work. They cannot allow themselves to disperse their energies by letting any outside influence sidetrack them. However strong the distractions or temptations to impress others may be, it is not always the time to fall for it (brahmacharya, self-control/moderation). They must keep the focus on themselves, within themselves, without comparing themselves to others or coveting the journey of others. What difference does it make whether you are doing your work on a path of higher or lower grade than someone else (aparigraha, not coveting)? Each one must accept what is given to them at any given moment, what is available to them. They must not spread themselves thin by trying to monopolize other people’s projects or deny the space that others need to do their work. Belay another person when it is their turn, respect the right to use a common space among peers and with all the other species (asteya, do not accumulate/hoard). 

Because the rock is such a great and wonderful thing that anyone should have access to do their “work” on it. Therefore, it is also part of our job to support every person who intends to grow by providing truthful and correct, useful and objective information.  For example, inform about the grades, without misleading others and ourselves (to inflate our ego) about the difficulty of the routes (satya, truthfulness/honesty). Everything must be based on mutual respect, respect for the natural environment and respect for oneself and the harmonious development of inner growth, without forcing anything or anyone, least of all ourselves (ahimsa, non-violence).”

Well, this would be the story of some climbers who go climbing following these principles, these yamas and niyamas. This is how we use climbing as a vehicle to cultivate our mind, however, what I find most interesting is that by using these principles, by cultivating our mind we also improve our climbing. This is the approach that I’m trying to give you from the beginning of the talk that, in a very simple way, we can reverse the equation, and say, well not only can we use climbing as a vehicle of personal and spiritual development but we can use this vehicle of personal and spiritual development to improve our climbing.

Climbing and Mastering the Mind

Sure, it’s totally reversible, you can focus on improving your climbing and by improving your climbing you can improve your mastery of the mind…. or you can enhance your mastery of the mind by using climbing. It’s two parts, everyone can approach it the way they want to approach it. As you were saying, you approach it because you want to improve your climbing and you discover that you need to improve your mental mastery and there are people who approach yoga or climbing because they want that development, that peace of mind that mastering the mind provides because, as we said also in the previous podcast, in the end mastering the mind is something that is always with you. You can learn to master the mind, to maintain serenity in a difficult section of the route, and that ability to manage that discomfort, to master your mind, you take it with you, you can apply it to anything else. Then later at work, in the street, with a person, with your partner or whatever, you can still manage the situation better. 

You carry it with you just as you carry your behavioral pattern or your negative conditioning in the face of a circumstance or a stress, in the same way everything is mirrored.

That’s also interesting, because climbing helps to detect those patterns. That is also the point of this, of svadhyaya and all that. It serves to realize that you have some patterns that you should improve. For example, if you climb a route, attempt it three times and leave angry and saying that it sucks, you may realize that you have a low tolerance for frustration. And you didn’t realize that before, but that happened to you as soon as someone changed your plans….

I hope you could realize that…

I hope you could realize it, of course, because that is something that happens to quite a few people, that we have a low tolerance to frustration and it is something that almost everybody has to work on, and well, if you realize that you have that low tolerance and you work on it, then maybe when one day you had a plan to go on a trip and the weather is bad or your car breaks down, then maybe you won’t make a mess, because you have already mastered that part of you, that behavior pattern, that you have discovered through climbing.

Great. I’m making a lot of emphasis on this because the people who are going to listen to us are going to come from my field, I mean, they are climbers who maybe listen to this podcast and are very interested in what I say or this escapes them completely and they closed this talk a while ago (laughs) but their main objective would be to improve in climbing, to enjoy climbing more, to get more out of it, right? And suddenly they find that this climbing, seen from another approach can bring them great benefits, both for themselves and for what they take with them in their daily life. And it’s going to be difficult to find someone in the context of this podcast who listens to us and says, “ah, fuck, what great benefits for spiritual and personal development climbing has, I’m going to start practicing it”. So, my intention with this is always to go along with the fact that this is a bidirectional path, as you said at the beginning. That’s why I’m giving you so much hassle (laughs).

It’s perfect because we complement the topic much better. This is what I have based all the “Wisdom from the Rock” books on, to show how these concepts can be applied to people who practice climbing. Maybe I, since I have read the book thirty or forty times because I had to edit it, I might lose a little bit the sport base of climbing, so your contributions are complementing the argument perfectly.

There are conditioning factors there already… because you have read the book forty times (laughs).

Yes, of course, there are new impressions, new conditioning.

Second part of the interview. Source (in spanish)

Asana

Well Juan, we have the first two steps and we are going to continue with the rest. Let’s go to the physical part, to the asanas. And here you bring out a series of parallelisms between what would be the yoga postures and the climbing postures that I found super interesting. How would we understand these asanas within the context of climbing?

Asana simply means posture, and what the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (on which the whole book is based on) say is that asana is the firm and comfortable posture, and then I have interpreted this as the ability to be comfortable in any situation. So, we exercise the body to be able to be comfortable. How could I explain this? In the book I develop it quite a lot and here it is something more difficult to explain and I want to say it well. Basically if you sit to meditate in a meditation posture with your legs crossed or even in a chair, after two minutes your whole body will start to ache, you will notice all the stiffness in your body, so that will make you feel hindered, you will not be able to concentrate. The yogis what they did was to develop a practice of asanas to be able to find a way to sit comfortably and firmly and to be able to continue doing the rest of the work; the attention, the meditation, the concentration. So how would this apply in climbing? When you are climbing you have to find a way to make the posture stable and comfortable in every moment, in every rest. A climbing rest could be considered an asana. In that asana you would have to improve your ability to make that posture comfortable. Once you are comfortable in that rest, you could continue with the next steps, either with yoga or with the next steps of the route, visualizing the next steps. If it is with the next steps of yoga, once you are comfortable in the posture, you could start to control your breathing a little bit better, to bring more attention to what you are doing if it has been a little bit dispersed by the previous steps… And if it’s in the next steps of the route, then by being comfortable and not being concerned about how much my arm is overloading or if my foot is slipping, you can start to think and visualize the next movements, locate the next bolt… It would be about transcending the discomfort, which is also where yoga postures are going, making the postures something that allows you to be flexible and fluid to be able to adapt to any situation. And the same goes for climbing. 

Here this has fascinated me Juan. In the trainings that I give, one of the big tools that I focus a lot of the training content on is what to do with your mind and your body when you’re climbing. And in this, the big tool is what to do with your mind and body when you come to a rest. What work do we give the mind when we come to a rest? And, when do I do the rests? This is something that most beginners have not come to understand. They climb and rest all the time, then they try to rest where the route asks you to flow and interrupt the climb wasting energy, and vice versa, they get to a place where they could rest and run away because they think they are not tired, and what I try to preach is the opposite; there are moments to climb fast, climb with rhythm and fluidity, and there are moments to rest, whether they are more or less uncomfortable. And in those moments of rest you have to give a work to your mind, and I explain the work as a script, or a series of neuro-associative patterns, that I want to work explicitly so that they come implicitly in which we practice breathing, relaxation, we have a wide look, we change the focus, we make a strategy of what we want to come and then we make a decision about whether to continue or not to continue, if we accept the risks that come or not, and finally, we start to flow. This you have called “asana”, that moment of rest is an asana, and really the moment of mental work that is done from the asana is the mental work that I am explaining, so I really liked that parallelism. And then, the flowing and climbing part between one rest and the next is the vinyasa, right? That’s fantastic. And these rests can be totally comfortable, it can be a fantastic posture, it can be standing or even sitting on a ledge, or it can be tremendously demanding and challenging like getting your heart rate down on an eighteen millimeter crimp when you have taken twenty-four steps and you are practically about to fall, but if you don’t do it you are unable to continue. The truth is that I found really nice this parallelism, this metaphor, this way of understanding the whole of climbing seen from the point of view of the practice of yoga, of the physical practice of yoga and the duality between that movement and that posture in which we do a job. What is the goal of the yogis with the asanas?

They simply wanted to find a way to cross your legs and not be bothered by every last muscle from minute one, and then be able to concentrate on what you really want, on your mind, on letting go of your thoughts. Let the body stop being an obstacle for you. I would not want to oversimplify the subject of yoga asanas because it is something I have a lot of respect for and of course, the asanas also have their physical benefits beyond that, they serve to enhance physiological processes, they have their mythology, and they have much more than what is being talked about here obviously. But I found this angle very interesting and I think it gave a new perspective to the subject both from climbing and from yoga and, well, in the end the point of this book was that, to make a climber understand yoga, so this parallelism between a yoga posture and a climbing rest seems appropriate. The yoga posture is one that takes you a little bit to the limit and you work to transcend these limits, like this is comfortable or uncomfortable, this crimp is good or bad… and then the vinyasa is the transition between asanas. In the end, climbing is a rest, then an action, let’s say a transition, to another rest. This can be longer or shorter, better or worse rest, longer or shorter… just like in yoga, the asanas have their times, their breaths, it depends on the type of asanas you are doing, and the transitions also have their times as well.

Of course, in a transition, balance doesn’t have to be static. If you want to stop in the middle of a transition or make a dyno in a static way, you are going to waste a lot of energy. Well Juan, here in this part of the physical practice you talk about a concept that is the pairs of opposites and the interferences they have, what are these concepts, what are these pairs of opposites?

The pairs of opposites come directly from the Yoga Sutras, which says that when you master the posture the pairs of opposites stop disturbing. So when you master the posture you are comfortable, at ease, firm, stable in the posture… the pairs of opposites are what I just said before: this is good, this is bad, this is good for me and this is not, I can/can’t… those dualities. So when you transcend that you are not thinking about it, you are not judging reality, you are simply resting or climbing, doing your work… but you are not thinking if this is good or this is bad, if this power strip is good or this is bad; you are simply taking it and you are using it for your purpose. Transcend that ego that tends to judge reality based on its conceptions. An example would be when you have a settled degree, let’s say you are climbing 5.11a (6b) and you get into a 5.8 (5b), and there you realize that you are not bothered by pairs of opposites, nothing is bad. At that level you have transcended that duality, any rest is good, no hold is bad… That would be a bit of an example, to put it in a climbing context again.

Yes, it is neither good nor bad, it is a rest and it is what it is. It’s like when we were talking in stoicism (previous interview) about trying to explain the route to a climber who is much stronger than you. You don’t talk to him about whether the rest is good or bad, whether the crimp is good or bad, you tell him a crimp and that’s it. In this case there is one thing that is interesting to me. You are talking about that when the posture, the asana, is stable these pairs of opposites are transcended and you have made the parallelism to a route that is below your grade but, and if it is a route that is in your grade, and if it is your project, this also has to do with how our mind learns, doesn’t it? It is much more difficult, it is very complicated when you have to pay all your attention to so many things, to the posture, to how to pull here or there, to how you hold… to be able to control those conditioning, as you say. However, when you work the route, when you start to feel comfortable in all those postures, it is much easier to control the mind, it is much easier not to be thinking if this is better or worse, therefore, well, this is another interesting work, the overlearning, the automation of the concepts, the automation of the movements and the route, it helps you to control the mind…

That is the work itself, that is why this step is one of the first. This first physical step, after the “ethical codes” yama and niyama, prepares you to be able to dominate the mind, to be able to start working with the mind. Then, as you were saying, if you get into a harder route, first you have to do the work of finding the way to adapt to the route, to feel comfortable in it. Anyway, this is an integral work, you don’t have to be perfect doing the route to later do the work of the mind, everything is a bit gradual and simultaneous, but that’s the point.

Here there is something that I find very interesting and that is that, in my personal experience, if you are dealing with small difficulties that you can solve very quickly, it is very difficult to pay attention to the subtleties, either the subtleties of the body or the subtleties of the mind, because everything happens very fast, there is no time, three or four attempts, you improve a little the tactic or the sequence and you have already passed. When you get into a big difficulty, something that is going to take time, something that is going to take energy and dedication, suddenly, if you want, you have the opportunity to start working with all these subtleties, you have the opportunity to really work with the mental aspect, you have the opportunity to observe what happens when you go walking to the sector for the fiftieth attempt. You have the opportunity to experience what happens when you change, what happens when a section costs you a lot and suddenly you have to start devoting entire sessions to unraveling movements one by one, so I find it very interesting and necessary for those who have the context and can afford it, to work with really difficult things, because those are the ones that give you the opportunity to discover what lies beyond, something that does not happen in the easy things. And, in line with what we were talking about before, that you really need to work on the posture and the refinement of these asanas to be able to go deeper, this also tells us why it is really so complicated mentally to climb well on sight. It is always much easier to do that mental work when one has learned the way, when the body part is on autopilot, than when there is so much interference from so many stimuli at the same time…

Of course, in the end, climbing on sight requires that you already have those “asanas” integrated. First that you find them, that you find the right holds, the right position and then that you can execute them well.

Yes, even if they’re not the right ones, that is the wonder of the on sight.

Yes, exactly, the most convenient ones, let’s say.

Being able to grab and hold from the things that are there and progress regardless of your mind knowing that it is not the optimal sequence, totally surrendering to that process of uncertainty.

As we were saying, make the uncomfortable comfortable. You go to a route, on sight, and you find a way to rest and make the discomfort comfortable so that you can continue to progress.

Pranayama

Well, let’s move on to the next point which is pranayama. As I understand it, it would be the control of the energy, of the activation through the breath, establishing a duality between your mental activity and the breath, and can be worked in a bidirectional way, how would you explain this?

That is a key concept developed there, the bidirectionality. Because if you learn to control the breath, to relax the breath, the mind relaxes. And this is something you can experience firsthand very easily. But it is much more difficult to relax the mind. You arrive after a hard sequence to a rest and the mind and the breath will be agitated; but you tell the mind to calm down and it will be like if you tell someone to calm down, someone other than you: “I am not calm, leave me alone! And of course, your mind tells you that, “look what is left until the next bolt and look that we are already pumped…” it will tell you all sorts of shit, it will almost insult you. However, breathing is easier to control, even though it is not easy either. But if you get to be stable in a rest, which is why this step comes after asana, and focus on your breathing, something simple, just make it slower, deeper, you will notice how your mind relaxes and therefore your energy is also amplified, because if you have a relaxed mind and your body relaxes, the energy budget you have for the route is greater than if you do not break those tensions that you have accumulated before the rest. That would be a sort of summary of this step.

And if we are interested in learning pranayama techniques that we can apply to climbing, where should we start?

That is a good question. I did not want to go into the techniques because, well, I have my own and I suggest some of them, as the most basic one, which is the one that I apply the most and it works well. It is simply breathe in four seconds, hold four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold four seconds, and repeat again. If anyone wants to try it, if you do that cycle three times you will notice that there is a difference in your mental state. In the end, both yoga and climbing are very experiential, everyone has to experiment for themselves. I can tell you a technique, or you can find some on the internet, or you can learn it from a teacher, a yogi, but in the end you have to try your own way and experience it to know which ones work best for you and to know which ones work best for you in each situation. You could really write a book on just this, but in the beginning I suggest that everyone should experiment with their own body, as far as it allows them, in a comfortable rest that is in a route that allows them to experiment.

Yes, I think it is even more interesting to do it in an uncomfortable rest. Because in a comfortable rest it’s easy. Well you have to start with a comfortable rest but then you have to experiment what can happen with your mind and your breathing in a place where you don’t feel completely well, right?

Yes, I have suggested doing it in a comfortable route to start noticing the benefits, to see what works for you, but obviously it will have more benefits when you are uncomfortable. The more agitation the more benefit it will have to relax the mind. If you’re not too agitated you’re not going to notice much of a subtle difference in mental state. If you do it in something uncomfortable, coming from a hard sequence, you will notice the difference more and you will work it better.

Great, nothing, let’s start with free solo on broken rock (laughs).

I’d rather not (laughs)

Pratyahara

Well Juan, the next step, Pratyahara, would be the senses, a little bit like talking about attention, to select which sensory stimuli are important and to base your mental activity, your psychological activity on them, to discern, to configure how you want your mind to filter. It seems to me something crucial, how do we see it from the point of view of yoga?

This is about mastering the senses, the control of the senses. The senses are like the gateways to our mind, to our perception. The point would be to align them with what we are doing. Within yoga it would be like withdrawing, if you are trying to meditate or read, if in the street there is noise from cars or there is a construction site next door, then you will have to withdraw from that and not let the senses get entangled with those sounds, let’s say. Or if in the house next door they are cooking something delicious and the smell reaches you, you will get hungry and you will want to get up from meditation. In climbing, as the purpose changes, because the purpose of climbing is to climb, and to send or to reach the top or whatever, this control of the senses would be that they only bring information of what is aligned with your purpose. Having your touch bringing information about the surface rugosity of the rock, having your sight visualizing the next steps, those kinds of things… rather than having the senses bringing you things that don’t align with the purpose, like it might be the conversation that the people below are having or how much your climbing shoes are squeezing you. The senses would have to be in service to the mind, not the mind in service to the senses.

And how do we train this? It seems to me crucial for climbing, this filtering of the senses, let’s call it attention, how do we train this attention to select and filter only the sensory stimuli that are interesting to us?

Well, in general in yoga I think that you do not train something specifically, it is more an intention, a constant vigilance of your mind in which, when you have already taken the previous steps that we have talked about, once your mind is clean and relaxed, you have the ability to do that work, to discriminate what you focus your attention on because in the end it is a matter of attention. Lack of attention is what makes us fail, generally. If, for example, I am climbing and all of a sudden my attention goes away towards the bolts and the distance between them, I am no longer so focused on the subtlety of the crack I am grabbing, then my attention is gone, my eyes have gone so that instead of visualizing the next step I am visualizing the next bolt that is two meters away and I am afraid of it. That makes me lose my focus.

If I understand you well, you tell me that there is no specific training but there are some previous steps, maybe the training or the previous thing to be able to put our attention on what we want is to have a solid base of movement and rest, to have a calm breathing and to be able to control that mind and then you will be able to control that attention, right? It would be something like this, if you enter without any intention, you are skipping the rests, your mind is agitated, your heart rate is at three thousand per hour, it will be very difficult for you to be able to filter your sensory stimuli. However, if you do all that groundwork you can put a layer of subtlety on top of it.

Of course, each step leads you to the next one, then as I was also saying before, all the steps integrate the previous one and all the steps are integrated in the current one, let’s say. So, concentration, attention, resting… They all integrate all the steps but it’s like one thing leads you to the other and little by little you have to experiment and explore. Start by saying, I’m going to not think so much about how cold the rock is or how hot it is, then that’s where you’re doing the conscious work. 

And can you do that? Can you try not to think about something? Or can you give the mind the work to focus on something else?

Good question, I think you have to fill the mind with what you want to fill it with so that it doesn’t get filled with what you don’t want. The idea is that all these steps tend to empty the mind, they are steps before the mind is empty and you are simply in connection with what you are doing, with the rock… But yes, maybe in this previous work it is convenient to focus on what you do want so that it is not filled with what you don’t want. To fill the mind with the steps you want to take so that it is not filled with the fears you have. Something like that.

Dharana and Dhyana

The next two steps, Dharana and Dhyana, can be assimilated to what we call “flow state” in climbing or sports psychology. It is the state in which the attention on what you are doing is full, the perception of effort is low because you are simply executing without interfering with your mental obstacles. However, it is not possible to access this state voluntarily. How do we put ourselves in the way to make it happen?

This is actually why there are these previous steps. These steps would lead you to the path to make this happen. The previous steps we have already said and the next ones. The one of sense control would lead you to the next one, dharana, concentration. Concentration would be the step prior to meditation, which is the step prior to samadhi, which would be the most complicated concept but yes, meditation and samadhi would be something like the state of flow that you were saying. Then, after the control of the senses would come concentration. What is concentration? It is the fixation of the mind on a single point or thing. And maybe it could be exercised as you were saying before, with the intention that you were saying, “Now I want to focus on the breath, now I want to focus on the feeling of the rock, now on the feet, now on the rests…” So you are concentrating on a few things along the way, but it’s still not a maximum concentration, it’s not a state of flow as you were saying. It is an intermittent concentration, you concentrate on several things, the attention comes and goes and lasts for some periods of time. But when you exercise the concentration, the capacity to maintain the attention for a longer time on the same thing or on several things at the same time, like breathing while exploring the rock…, you would reach meditation, dhyana, which would be when the concentration really becomes uninterrupted and you would be entering the emptiness of the mind and you are only performing things, integrating yourself with the rock, with what you are doing, with the flow that you were talking about. 

Kleshas

Well, this is fantastic. I don’t know if those who listen to us have experienced it on some occasion, surely yes, some on many occasions and others on a few, for me it is something that is not rare, but it does not happen every day and of course it is a wonderful feeling and I invite all those who listen to us to put into practice all these small steps that we can do to make this happen because it is certainly one of the most incredible things that can happen to us when climbing. Before concluding, and just before the end of the book, you talk about the five big obstacles that the mind throws to us in our life or while doing our work, which is this series of steps, this firm intention to pay attention to what is happening in our mind and to free ourselves from those conditionings, what are these five obstacles?

I put this at the end of the book, although actually in the Yoga Sutras it’s at the beginning, but I put it at the end because it’s a little more sort of philosophical. These would be the kleshas, something like the things that color the mind. These five kleshas color our perception and condition everything we do. The first, and the root of all, is avidya. It is translated in many ways, but the interpretation I find most interesting is that of “ignorance of causes,” the ignorance of why things happen. In climbing it can be when you’re trying a beta that doesn’t work out and you start complaining that it’s hard but you’re not really delving into the real cause of that limit. You just assume that you’re not getting the step and you take it as definitive, and maybe the cause is simply that you were taking the wrong edge or taking right-handed what you have to grab left-handed and then it comes out much easier if you do it the other way. This is something very common in our life. We ignore a lot about the causes of our life, each thing that happens to us, each thing that shapes our reality has a cause that we probably do not know. It is very difficult to know them all obviously, but that is what the work is done for, to start knowing as many causes as possible. In the end this is what generates karma as well. Karma is the action and its consequence. You do something and then a consequence comes later, but it comes so late that you forget that it is a consequence of the other. It’s like if you get on a route after you’ve gone to lunch and you’ve had a big sandwich and three beers and you say, “I feel heavy today. It would be a normal thing to feel heavy, but you have already forgotten that you have “created that karma”. 

Another of these things that color the mind would be attachment, having attachment to one thing or another, which modifies our perception. If I have an attachment to one type of climbing, when a step of another type of climbing comes along, it will cause me to dislike it and condition the whole experience. The point is, as we said before, to be above the pairs of opposites. You can’t do the work of spiritual development, growth or gaining mastery in climbing if you only do it on easy routes or routes that you like, without exposing yourself to the type of climbing you don’t like, for example. Yes, you can become a great climber of one thing but you would be missing a part, it would not be an integral work. Then, the other obstacle is aversion, which makes us avoid some parts that are probably necessary to our growth.

Asmita, identification with the ego. When we identify so much with what we do, with our movie. You think you’re a great climber on one type of rock or on a few routes at your local crag and then you go somewhere else and you’re not such a good climber.  But you’re so caught up in your own thing, you identify so much with what you think you are, that you don’t allow yourself to enjoy something different or to grow in another environment. 

Lastly, there is abhinivesha, the fear of death. Even the wise, the yogis, self-indulge a little in this because it is the most difficult. In the Hindu context, believing in reincarnation, they simply think of death as a change. In the end we come back to the same thing as before; it would be as if you were afraid to send your project becase the climb will be over. Let’s say that this life is interpreted as a process of growth and then with what you have grown you are sent to the next life, so it makes no sense to be afraid of this migration. This process of moving would be like when you send a project and then everything you have learned in the process you take it to the next project, to your next climb. It’s complex, but im trying to do what I can to make it accessible (laughs).

I think we have given a good overview of this book and this philosophy, and for my part I can only thank you for making this effort to bring us one more layer, one more subtlety, a different prism from which to understand climbing, from which to see our development as climbers or from which to work on our mental and spiritual development through climbing. I find it super interesting, I hope that those who listen to us, if they have come this far, almost certainly have found it interesting.

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