Spiritual Adventures in the Snow , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Karen Foster , Marcia McFee

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104 pages

English

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Description

Turn your recreation in the snow into a spiritual high point!

Activities that are exhilarating and fun are not usually thought of as spiritual. But to the contrary, such ventures may well point us to our most profound spiritual connections. For when we are able to come fully into the present moment, turn off the noise in our minds, feel our true essence as complete union of body-mind-spirit, we enter into a kind of other worldly state of ecstasy that we can experience only as a spiritual dimension.from Chapter 1

Debunking the myth that your body has nothing to do with your spiritual life, avid winter sports enthusiasts Dr. Marcia McFee and Rev. Karen Foster demonstrate how spirituality is fed by play and challenge and how your snow-filled adventures can serve as a set of metaphors for seeing lifes ups and downs as part of a sacred rhythm.

Whether you have a need for speed or are drawn toward more lyrical motion, McFee and Foster offer poignant insights on how you can find your peak spiritual life in your favorite snow sport, no matter your skill level. Learn how to:

Reduce stress and embrace your need for fun
Achieve harmonious integration of mind, body, and spirit
Trust your bodys inherent wisdom
Appreciate the details in nature and everyday life
Clear your head and persevere in difficult times
Cultivate a sense of community

Sujets

Sports d'hiver

Sport d'hiver

Recreation

Sports

Winter Sports

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	13 avril 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781594734427
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0850€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Paul Arthur, backcountry pioneer and coach
Introduction
1. Woo-Hoo! Who Said Fun Isn t Spiritual? Adventures in the Snow -Thoughts from Marcia
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Anne Lamott, author and exuberant novice
2. Are You Out of Your Mind? The Physicality of Spirituality -Thoughts from Marcia
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Alex Heyman, ski instructor
3. I Could Kiss the Mountain: Getting Stoked on a Natural High -Thoughts from Karen
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Bill Seline, backcountry skier, mountain guide, and telemark ski instructor
4. Freezing Your Fanny Can Be Spiritual? Opportunities of the Winter Season -Thoughts from Karen
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Jamie Korngold, spiritual skiing guide
5. Zapped into the Zone: Finding Your Kinesthetic Groove -Thoughts from Marcia
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Neil Elliot, soulriding researcher
6. More Than Buckling Up: Tuning Awareness beyond the Technical -Thoughts from Marcia
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Kristen Ulmer, extreme skier and spiritual teacher
7. On My Butt Again: Life Lessons from the Mountain -Thoughts from Karen
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Evan Strong, adaptive snowboarder
8. Making a Difference: Putting Spirituality into Action for the Planet and Its Peoples -Thoughts from Karen
Conversation with an Adventurer:
Tina Basich, U.S. snowboarding champion
Epilogue
A Week of Meditations for Spiritual Adventures in the Snow
How to Talk Cool on the Mountain: A Guide to Slope Slang
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Word from the Authors
About the Authors
Copyright
Also Available
About SkyLight Paths
Acknowledgments
The writing of this book has itself been a spiritual adventure, and we are grateful for the support we ve had in putting it all together. We d like to thank the team at SkyLight Paths Publishing for giving us the opportunity to write about our favorite spiritual practice and for allowing us to call this entire skiing/riding season research ! It has afforded us the opportunity to expand our friendships to include some of the most adventurous and inspiring people in the world. We are amazed at their generosity. We are especially grateful for the skillful hand of Marcia Broucek, our editor, who has walked us through this process from start to finish. Marcia B., we will get you out on the slopes with us, and we will hear you say, Woo-hoo! And finally, to Sherrie, Sue, and Zachary, nothing is better than the joy of being in this oh-so-grand adventure with you.
Foreword
It was a great pleasure to participate by writing the foreword for this book, which celebrates spiritual adventures in the snow, and now to have the joy of sharing it with you. Skiing, snowboarding, and other snow sports offer some life-transforming experiences, and reading this book is a great place to start. Like adding color to a black-and-white film, it will take your ordinary snow adventures and make them extraordinary. The ideas that Marcia and Karen present will wind their way into your spirit and your psyche, and you will find yourself experiencing the outdoors, snow, your body-the whole adventure-on a much deeper level.
Karen, Marcia, and I attend worship in the beautiful Squaw Valley Chapel in Olympic Valley, California, which was built for the 1960 Olympics. We are in awe as we look out the sixteen-foot-high windows that face the mountain I have skied for fifty years. I know they agree with me: we also get to worship when we are skiing and riding that very mountain. Spirituality is not just for chapels made by human hands; it also thrives in what many call church of the trees. Our souls, our spirits, are renewed when we allow ourselves to have fun, push on in the face of the ups and downs of life, open ourselves to the mystery of the beauty of creation, and know ourselves deeply when we tune in to the wisdom inherent in physical challenges.
Much like the other adventurers you will meet in this book, I have had many momentous and varied spiritual adventures in the snow. Perhaps it was my experiences with skiing and spending time amid the breathtaking beauty of snowy mountains that taught me about living a spiritual life, a life in which I never cease to be amazed at the grand diversity and inspiring wonder of the natural world. In the midst of growing up, facing challenges, dealing with grief, and experiencing the exhilaration of coaching, I have been renewed by skiing time and again.
Skiing was an important part of my growing up. I first started skiing with the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. Since I did not have money to buy lift tickets, it was a long time before I went anywhere there was a lift. So I learned to ski in the backcountry. It was with the Boy Scouts that I first learned about climbing skins. Climbing skins are an amazing invention that, when placed on the bottom of downhill skis, allow the skier to hike uphill. We climbed and skied Mt. San Georgino near Los Angeles, a very beautiful and spiritual place. It was so daunting that a few of us thought we would die-talk about a spiritual experience-but it was actually quite fun.
My adventures experiencing the wonder and awe of snow began early in my life. Many years ago, Mammoth Mountain had only a couple of rope tows, and the road in was never plowed. Dave McCoy, who eventually developed Mammoth into what it is now, would take people in a truck with giant back wheels up to the ski area. It worked fine until the winter of 1952, when it snowed so much you couldn t get up there. I was staying there that weekend in Ol Mammoth Tavern. The only way to get out with all that snow was a third-story attic window. The snow was thirty-five feet deep. I was sixteen and helped lead fifty-three folks out from Mammoth to Bishop, a distance of twenty-six miles. We were traversing places where we were on top of forty feet of snow. I had to get out because I had to go to school!
As you ll hear throughout this book, adventures in the snow can offer life lessons-both through the exhilaration of a wonderful day and through facing our difficulties and fears on and off the slopes. I ve been in many treacherous situations while ski mountaineering. I was nineteen years old when I was the first to summit and ski down Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in California. We considered skiing the east side, but it was too narrow to make turns on skis-one turn could pop you off the side, and it s kind of a long fall! We were determined to make it, to stay on snow along the ridgeline. I probably never prayed to survive, but the spiritual feeling and the spiritual contact was definitely there in the focus. I don t think I ever prayed, God help me have strength to do this, but I thought about it afterward, praying, Thank you, God, for helping me do it!
We had U.S. Army-issue sleeping bags and canvas tents and U.S. Army-issue white skis with holes in the tips. With wind chill, it was minus thirty-five to forty degrees in our campout. The difficulty is in battling your mind and body against the weather, going to great lengths to stay alive and keep your spirit up. Challenges were many-little sleep, freezing cold with winds blowing your tent away, desperate to keep your boots warm by tucking them under your armpits or cradling them on your belly during the night, avalanche concerns. After all that, it was worth it. Once you get started skiing, you make it happen. It s like renewing your spirit with each run down a new mountain.
At times, the solace I found during my skiing adventures gave me the strength to endure some of life s greatest difficulties. When my first wife was very sick, I used to go off and ski. One time I skied from Boreal Ridge to Mammoth. I was in the snow for fifteen days, skiing some two hundred miles. Skiing was the only thing that could help me clear my head enough to get me through that difficult time. Another poignant experience involved a friend who died attempting to be the first to accomplish a winter climb of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps. I was supposed to be on that trip with him. A large chunk of ice or rock hit his rope, knocking it loose, and he perished. I was asked to go there and leave a memento of remembrance, which I did in May of 2007. Incredibly, I skied right up against the wall of the Eiger- it s twice as big as El Capitan in Yosemite.
I ve also been in three avalanches, and they are no fun. I was buried and thrown completely into the black and then thrown back out. The slide started on the west face of K2 at Squaw Valley, and I was taken down across the large flat expanse of Times Square, down into Squaw Creek, and back up the other side. Its roar was unbelievable; the back of it was going eighty to ninety miles an hour. All the while I was tumbling, I was thinking, Live! Stay on top! I lost a ski pole and had a sore right ankle. Found my life when I saw sky. Found the pole in June.
As many of the adventurers in this book would say, skiing has given me some of the greatest gifts in my life. One of the accomplishments of which I am most proud is coaching. Envision going to the Junior Olympics with fifty pairs of skis, a bunch of great little hyped-up kids, and a slew of parents, some of whom just get in the way. Imagine waxing all those skis at six in the morning. I found coaching to be personally gratifying, but more important, it was formative for the kids. They had no idea what they were going to achieve-and some of them would find the highest honors in skiing later in life. Their team spirit and their ability to help each other led them to bring home twelve of sixteen trophies at the 1979 Junior Olympics at Crystal Mountain, Washington, leaving only four for the balance of the country. I attribute much of our success to how fun we made it for the kids. We would finish our races and get out and play and have a raucous run down the hill. We would have fifty other kids followi