It’s been 10 years.

This marks my 4th post about my learnings through the years about Contortion and most of all, about myself. I feel in life we grow in segments: you get better at certain things, usually the ones you put the most love, attention and dedication, meanwhile you remain at a “baby level” on other areas until you’re forced to address them too. I feel I have the wisdom of a 200 yo person about contortion now, but the knowledge and maturity of a 12 yo when it comes to business and marketing, for example. So that’s when you start paying attention to what needs some evolving and maturing. What you don’t address will be keep coming up hindering your overall growth and stand before the next, better version of yourself.

So I can tell you a few things about the body, mind, flexibility and contortion training now… and it’s bigger than you think.

With time, everything got more meaningful, more connected, more vast and broad. My training pervaded a lot of aspects of my life and my way of thinking, it became a form of identification with self. It’s never been nothing less that a lifestyle to begin with, I lived and breathed my Bendy Life, religiously, year after year. I never stopped. I never listened outside of the voice within myself -the good one!- that kept telling me to continue. I healed my injuries, I got stronger, I kept learning, I became more flexible and skilled than before. Age doesn’t exist in this game (unless you believe so!). What truly exist is this: the only thing that really matter is your mind.

From the beginning till now, I see it clearer than ever. It’s never the body that does what it does, it’s your mind, your body follows your mind. What you tell yourself, your dominant thoughts, what you believe in, where your attention is, that is your greatest power and driving force and it creates your reality. If you can stay consistently connected with the certainty and trust that what you want is possible, if you can keep that as your main state of mind, not worrying about time, obstacles, circumstances, people, if you can keep that vision regardless, you got it. I know it’s hard, but that’s how it works. Nothing will ever get in the way but yourself. It’s always been this way but now I can see it so transparently. It’s always been a game of mind, my world has been nothing but a reflection. And the times I forgot this, the times I beat myself up and fell off it was when I went ‘unconscious’, disconnected from my vision. I fell into self doubt, insecurities, fear, things I picked up along the way in life, but I wasn’t born with them. In reality you got it, you can achieve it all if you stay patient and consistent, get up from falling off track and pick back up; you can overcome the apparent obstacles, even in the dark times, you have to keep trusting that the positive will come. I’m talking about training but could be anything in life really. Whatever lights you up, you don’t need to explain it to nobody, they can just poison it with their judgment. Just silently nourish it, follow it, day by day, that is what you were meant to do. Expand, learn, grow, do what you love. That is the nature of the universe and this world, and it’s yours too. Follow it with trust.

So I think you get the picture. I thought I’d master my mind by mastering my body, but it’s been the other way around. Paradoxically, it had to go this way for me to figure it out.

I always liked a challenge and I’m glad this journey didn’t come on a silver plate. I made mistakes and still am and will. Growth is ongoing and isn’t linear but I’m up for it. After all, this is, as far as we know, our first time living life, so remember to take things easy sometimes.

The past year I dedicated it fully on learning mindset, self improvement and growth from sport psychology to quantum physics. I came to the conclusion that training wasn’t gonna fix EVERYTHING. And if I wanted to keep getting better, the body wasn’t gonna do it alone, my mindset was really the captain here. Training taught me discipline, dedication, consistency, patience and helped to manage my emotions. But I also needed to know I could experience all these things without moving my body. Why?

Sometimes I feel TIRED. I don’t wanna rely on a 3 hrs workout to feel good. Instead of using my body to feel good, could I do it with my mind alone? Could I change my emotional state, heal what I had to, turn my weaknesses into strengths and new ways to know myself better? I could…

So I started doing my ‘other work’, not the physical, but the purely mental one. I wanted to go address the “baby level” stuff, and I’m talking not business and marketing here, but the other BIG stuff: where did my anxiety came from? Why I kept creating certain patterns in my relationships, why sometimes it felt so hard to say no, why after all I proved myself of being capable to achieve, I still felt insecure and unworthy of what I wanted? And so the deeper journey of unmasking and healing started.

It’s been uncomfortable to say the least. So much holding onto the past and old conceptions of self, so many programs running wild and unsupervised in my brain, butting heads with what I wanted. Digging into the subconscious and rewiring beliefs, damn a can of worms was opened, a lot of unlearning and retraining to do. What a beautiful complex mess, but also with so much potential for more love and self reflexion, healing and growth.

So yeah… my 10 years contortion update’s conclusion is: I dug deeper in my mind, not necessarily in my body. It reflected to the outside and improved consequently my training and coaching. It keeps on giving and I feel mastering the mind will be a lifetime goal, which in turn will keep making me gain amazing insights for training and I’m excited to keep sharing with my students and whoever follows me… I appreciate you’re here.