The Heroes Journey: Depart from the ordinary

Every day of your life should be an internal Heroes Journey. That is, every day should take you on an internal voyage towards greater self-discovery as you navigate and intertwine the meanings in the narrative of your life.

Life exists as individual moments and interactions and it is up to us to make them vast and deep and interconnected and awe-inspiring. This life is our masterpiece. It is our collected works of art laid out on a timeline and it’s up to us to be the orchestrators of a life so compelling and so engrossing that we would willingly live it again and again for all of eternity.

This is what we strive for. It’s the idea of aestheticizing our perspective lenses and experiences.

If you’re able to willingly turn your life into an endless stream of art, you can change your narrative into the narrative. You can become the author and the artist instead of just another observer. You become the hero going on the journey of endless transcendence.

Every Heroes Journey begins with a departure from the ordinary.

Life is hard. To exist is to suffer. This is an absolute truth of life. But suffering does not have to be without meaning. It is meaningless suffering that leads to despair. Despair has a way of seeping into our heart unnoticed until the point where it has seized control of our consciousness and in its grip, we continue to shrink.  We lose confidence in our ability to fight, to overcome, to resist and withstand, to have impact, to gain understanding, to share and to love and be loved. When we shrink we become more fixed in our way of thinking and that way of thinking reflects our perspective size of inability and fear and hopelessness. When we shrink we lose the capacity to understand the scope of fulfilling our purpose.

Our purpose is not to merely embrace what we are successful at or the natural tools that we are born with. It is to embrace the risk of losing our essence in pursuit of something bigger than ourselves.

In order to depart from the ordinary and begin our journey, we have to choose courage and detach from the things that we are familiar with. We have to detach from our beliefs and actions and get rid of all of our labels we have placed on our continuum of positive to negative, of self to other, of mine to yours, of right to wrong, of past to future and of “I am” to “I am not.” Detachment begins with the recognition that we identify our self with the illusions of love, support, safety, and success and ideal as much as we do with bitterness, resentment, anger and sadness.

Every moment is a chance to learn something new. It’s a chance to invite existential crisis into your being and rebuild and reconstruct in a way that was, prior to the moment of collapse, an impossible position of wisdom and meaning. It’s an opportunity to invite and leverage obstacles in new and unique ways and learn from them irreplaceable lessons of the vastness of meaning in human existence.

It’s a chance to learn something new from every person we meet as we navigate the internal and external landscapes of our consciousness. It’s treating your misery and despair and hardship as an opportunity to reinvent yourself. It’s to weaponize your depression and anxiety in a way that equips you with enough firepower to confidently face any enemy because you know you’re now offensively and defensively prepared to handle any surprise metaphysical strike the universe can try to throw at you. It’s taking every daily repetitive fundamental and rudimentary task and the ones that stretch our limits mentally and physically and using them as an opportunity to transcend your own limitations of performance and understanding and creativity and meaning and bliss.

Each of the choices in your life is a leverage point to creativity and relationship with meaning and purpose. We break away from the ordinary and steady beat of unconscious existence to the musical flow of our artistic expression of vocabulary in motion. This stems from the discipline of mind to choose our words with the awareness that words are not merely descriptive, but also generative. The words we use are authoring our reality.

If we cannot find the words to say what we mean we cannot ever mean what we say.

These moments are not only opportunities for growth but also gateways to alternative futures that we can simultaneous see and experience and reject and change course for as long as we can maintain awareness and handle the dissonance. It takes some courage to see the future through the choices in the moment and it’s weight on the portion of our destiny that we do control.

To begin the journey, we must all choose courage to depart from the ordinary and embark on the next phase: overcoming obstacles.

MICHAEL GAINES

Founder & Head Coach

My career started as a personal trainer at your typical “big box” gym franchise. Although it was a challenge from day 1, I was ready for it – clients at 5 am, clients at 9 pm; clients who aspired to be collegiate athletes; clients who had never exercised; clients who wanted a “quick fix” and crash diets; clients who were lost; and clients who were stepping into the gym for the first time.

It was a daily challenge working with a “one size fits all” program and platform created by executives focused on profit over people. Everyone is so different, so why is the program the same for each person?

I became continually frustrated – how was anyone supposed to hit their individual goals with a program created for an “average” person. How were my clients ever going to feel encouraged when their progress and success was based on impossible standards? It was wrong, and I was determined to do something better.

There needed to be a genuine collaboration of long-term strategies aligned with our member’s unique goals and lifestyles. Couple that with a safe place where they are heard, seen, and understood. Where programs for exercise, diet, lifestyle changes, conquering health battles, and gaining control are creatively designed, individually prepared, intelligently managed, and continually monitored. It took some time to get it right, but I finally curated a program in a place where each member is individually recognized, yet part of a like-minded community. A place we call The X…and a program that is Proudly Different.

My name is Michael Gaines, and I am the proud founder and head coach of The X. Before you ask…the answer is yes – I hold numerous certifications and have put in years of research that serves as the backbone of every individual program we curate. Our members are my family, and it’s hard to articulate the joy I get watching them triumph over their health, fitness, and diet battles. The results are real, long-term, and rewarding. Stop in and say hello. Tell us how you define success and we’ll help you get there!

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