Non-striving On the Rocks

In recent years, rock climbing has become an important part of my health routine. During my peak, I was at the climbing gym four or five times a week for a few hours at a time, working through bouldering problems and engaging with my body. This routine answered a lot of my needs — for community, activity, achievement.

In January, I lost my ability to maintain that routine.

While working through a tough problem, I started to feel a stinging sensation in my right shoulder. I’ve always been hard on my own body, and after having spent a few hours on this problem I wasn’t about to break character for a bit of shoulder pain.

That day, I left the wall successful, but with what I would later be told was a severe rotator cuff tear.

It took me a few weeks to accept my injury. Initially, I recognized that something was off, but I didn’t quit the climbing wall entirely. With some creative taping and targeted warm-up, I was able to fight through the pain at the gym. I finally slowed down in early February when the pain signals started becoming stronger, but the damage didn’t seem to be healing. So, I decided to see a doctor.

Consulting a doctor made me confront my body’s fragility. I was subjected to a battery of strength and flexibility tests, and my right arm failed one after the next. One test in particular, in which the doctor instructed me to lay down with my right arm above my head then rested his weight on the large muscles below my armpit, nearly made me fold.

After all the tests were concluded, the doctor recommended a three-month course of physical therapy and ordered me to stop climbing until I completed it.

I was crushed, naturally, but taking a break from climbing and committing to physical therapy gave me an opportunity to work on myself in a way I hadn’t for awhile. I found some guidance in Jon Kabat Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, a book about mindfulness techniques for dealing with different kinds of trauma. One of Zinn’s seven “attitudinal factors” for mindfulness practice, in particular, spoke to my specific recovery needs — non-striving.

Non-striving is based on the principle that “in the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are,” Zinn writes.

Non-striving for my physical self meant taking time to meditate on my shoulder pain, observe how my injury was manifesting locally and influencing my well-being in more distant parts of my body. Besides specific muscle training exercises I was instructed to perform, I generally accepted my injury without trying to change it. After demanding constant and continuous improvement in my physical performance for so long, it was liberating to focus instead on one very specific exercise regimen.

For my thinking self, I paid attention to the ways my injury was manifesting in my state of mind. Breaking my physical routine frustrated me, and that frustration surfaced sometimes as irritability, other times as explosive energy. I had become accustomed to channeling my various moods and mental states into climbing in one way or another. Lacking that outlet, I decided to dedicate to my thinking self the same mindfulness I was giving to my shoulder. I would sit in my frustrated or energetic mind and turn my thinking toward how those states were exhibiting in my physical self — changes in heart rhythm or breath, shakiness, and so on.

After 5 weeks of once-a-week physical therapy, my therapist and doctor concluded that progress on rehabilitating my rotator cuff was sufficient enough for me to discontinue weekly sessions. I was told I could start climbing again, but that I should “take it easy” to start.

Non-striving to heal my shoulder taught me to be more considerate about how I engage my body. I expect this lesson will help me be a better climber, of course, but also a better me.