Jerry offers his spiritual teachings sneakily, through a hard-to-object-to back door: he teaches centering and grounding via basic breathing exercises, and then takes that technique into the gym and starts you working with lifting weights. If you pay attention and really work with his techniques, the results can be pretty literally mind-blowing.
Oh, and you'll get stronger, too.
You have to understand: I started lifting weights during my first semester of college. I am now 40 years old, so I have been weight-training for literally more than half my life.
I went to do my first workout after Jerry taught me his techniques and I entered that space as I normally did, by putting my earphones in and putting some music on. I tried to do a simple bench press, and discovered I couldn't do what he'd taught me to do that way. I had to stop the music to really concentrate. Imagine my surprise. In that moment, I discovered that despite having been benching for over twenty years, I didn't know what a bench press felt like, I only knew what it looked like. I had positioned my hands and determined the range of motion entirely by sight. When I tried to use the cues Jerry taught me--center my energy, inhale on the exertion phase, let the breath determine range of motion--I found that I had never felt a bench press, not ever. And feeling the exercise was a radically new experience.
Let's see if I can adequately articulate what a mind-fuck that was. Maybe a reasonable analogy would be this: imagine going through your whole life seeing only in black and white and shades of grey. Imagine having someone point out that if you just breathe a little differently and pay attention to the breath just so, things will be different. What the hell, you say. I could use some different. So you try it and all the sudden you start to perceive, dimly at first but more vividly as days go on: color. And it never, ever occurred to you before that it could have been any other way. Shit, you even thought you were good at perceiving hues.
Pay particular attention to that last bit, because that bit is about identity. Something once seen cannot be unseen. There's no stepping off the path once it is truly revealed. And suddenly you might find yourself having a new relationship with the questions, "Who am I?" and "What the fuck is happening?"
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