What’s the greatest thing that I’ve learned about myself through all of my travels?
I have been on some wild adventures. I have gone through some serious discomfort and very trying situations, but through all of that, what has carried me through is that life is fun and should be enjoyed because you only get to do it once.
But back to the extreme discomfort part of life. The first time my brother and I went to Indonesia was in 2005. We were headed over there to do the official test in the traditional birthplace of Merpati Putih. We had heard so many things but never experienced it ourselves. I was so excited. I had been training so hard. I was so ready for this adventure.
I hadn’t slept in four days, but I was still so excited. We arrived in Indonesia, first in Jakarta, and then we went out to the traditional birthplace of Merpati Putih, Parangkusumo. It is the most magical place. It’s essentially the largest iron ore magnet in the world. It’s a beach that’s a hundred miles long and three miles deep. The sand has so much iron in it if you take a magnet, it’ll just stick to it.
We arrive at Parungkusumo around midnight or one o’clock in the morning, and we meet Mas Poeng, the older of the 11th generation heirs. He sits down and tells us a four-hour-long story of how his training went and what it was like and what it meant to be giving this sacred knowledge to the public. What an incredible honor it was to be able to receive that story directly from him with just only a few other people around.
After that, we walked down onto the beach, still in the middle of the night, I felt a tingle travel up my spine and all of the hair stood up on my body, stimulated from all the magnetism in the sand, and the journey ahead of me.
We began our tests the next day. They were broken up between three days. Some involved doing the movements and then fighting and Vibravision®, writing, going on a 19-mile run in the middle of the night (because it’s so hot in the day) over a volcano. We had to break big slabs of lava rock, concrete, and steel to pass the breaking test.
If you could pass the next day, you get to go through the initiation. The initiation involved a 10-mile walk and intense challenges happening all night long, with meditations and exercises in the morning. It was a wild adventure.
I had zero sleep for four days. A little detail they didn’t really warn us about was a side effect of the anti-malarial medications that we were on. This side effect was psychotic dreams.
I was having these crazy psychotic dreams when I was trying to sleep so I remained sleep-deprived and I was also experiencing vertigo as another side effect.
During the testing, I was sitting there doing my movement and looking at what appeared to be a fly strip, but it was actually a gecko strip. They call geckos “cicaks” in Indonesia. They’re those little teeny lizards that are running around all the walls, eating the bugs and doing whatever. They put the adhesive strip on the wall and the gecko walks across it and gets stuck. There was a dead one of cicaks that they hadn’t cleaned off the wall yet. All that was left was the skeleton, but I was sitting there, staring at it, and saying to myself
“Cicak, cicak, cicak, cicak!” At this point, I am falling all over myself, I can barely see, suffering from double vision due to the sleep deprivation and vertigo. In the middle of that test, I actually dislocated my fibula joint, which had happened for the first time to me about two weeks before we left for Indonesia. It was a preexisting injury and I was trying to take care of it, but boom. I dislocated my left knee in the middle of a movement test.
I’ll come back and I’ll tell you some more stories about how crazy this event ended up getting later. But at that moment where I could barely stand, barely see, and I was just trying to keep my eye on this gecko, gecko, gecko, trying to tell myself “don’t fall over!” and coming up next was running to the volcano and to do all of this crazy stuff with a dislocated leg.
I really came to a place of surrender and a place of inner knowing. Of really letting myself go into the hard experiences that can still become the greatest thing for us if we just go with the flow and pay attention no matter what our state is.
At that moment, I really found out a lot about myself because I was so far past normal, that there was this whole other side of me that I didn’t even know about.
The coolest part is once you find it, you can always go back and tap into it again and use it in whatever experience you’re going through at the moment. It becomes a part of you and you can carry it with you in your back pocket.
No one else sees it until you need it, and then you pull it out.
https://youtu.be/SS4bQmFwJnk