Julie directed me to sit on the side of a massage table with the lower part of my legs hanging over the edge. The edge of the table felt snug against the back of my knees.
“Now, flex your foot at the ankle and lift your leg,” she said and then walked away.
I began the exercise by lifting one leg and then the other. Soon I was swinging my legs to enjoy the benefits of momentum.
“What are you doing!” Julie yelled from across the room. “This isn’t about momentum! It’s about building strength!”
But it wasn’t all about strength for me at the moment. My natural knee had been removed two weeks earlier, so momentum was sorely lacking in my life. It felt good to feel a “wind at my back” momentum once again. At the same time, I understood exactly what Julie was trying to teach me. She was giving voice to what life teaches constantly.
Momentum makes us feel good, almost invincible at times. If your experience is like mine, you’ve come to love “wind at my back” moments. They’re a welcome respite to life’s daily challenges. Still, such challenges always end momentum sooner than we’d like and often leave us feeling discouraged and leaden.
At this moment, my surgically challenged joint was feeling painfully leaden. I began to lift the leg slowly. Julie looked over and nodded.
“That’s it!” she said. “Concentrate on building strength. When you’ve restored the strength to your leg, the rest will come naturally. Strength is everything.”
Strength is everything. It’s true for the body, mind and the spirit. It is internal strength that enables us to respond with resilience when challenged. It allows us to do and become more than we ever thought we could. So how do we develop internal strength?
Here’s what Julie taught me:
First, put yourself in a frame of mind. One of the principal purposes of life is to create personal strength. Living your life with a focus on strength development will give you a decided advantage. It means you’re not facing the unexpected. When you live life expectantly, your confidence and ability to perform critical mechanics is immeasurably enhanced.
Second, complete the mechanics correctly. When you do the mechanics correctly, you expend all of your energy for the best possible outcome. Additionally, focusing on the mechanics creates duplicative patterning, which means you will get the same result over and over again. That’s momentum! It allows you to use momentum as a tool rather than as a disrupter. Reoccurring positive results comes from practiced repetition.
Third, repeat it over and over again. Doing a thing once is luck. The ability to reproduce desired results is perfect repetition. It means that no matter what tries to disrupt your life, mood or goals, you’re muscle memory allows you to respond appropriately without hesitation. Another way to label repetition is predictability. Strength created through repetition enables you to predict a positive life outcome.
I finished the last set of leg lift repetitions. I could feel two things while still sitting on the side of the table: fatigue and strength. My focus on creating strength was allowing me to feel a new kind of momentum. And, Julie made a prediction:
“Your strength to walk will return very soon,” she said. “Just remember to focus on creating strength. Do the mechanics correctly and repeat if over and over again.”
Lynn Butterfield lives in Erda and is a managing broker for a real estate company.