Book Review:  The Way of the Rock Warrior" by Arno Ilgner

  Subtitled "Mental Training for Climbers"  Ilgner's book "The Way of the Rock Warrior" seeks to apply the ancient philosophies of Zen warriorship to the sport of modern     climbing.  The mental aspects of sports training is not new.  Sport literature is filled with many good works on the subject.  However, mental training has been neglected in the sport of climbing.  Climbers are traditionally non-conformists.  Climbing is seen as a purer experience than common sports.  However, climbing is maturing.  The physical and mechanical challenges have been overcome and now the limits faced by climbers are mental barriers.  Ilgner takes this challenge head on providing the reader with both the philosophy of mental training and its practical application.

Key among the book's tenets is the need to clear one's mind of distractions and negative thoughts.  According to Ilgner, the ego, with its need to protect our self image, constrains our ability to realize our potential.  Power is defined as "our ability to act effectively, to venture into unknown facets of the world, to explore, and to hunt for meaning. Power manifests itself as clarity of thought and decisiveness in action. It is the totality of the resources you bring to a given situation with special emphasis on the mental aspect. Power is your level of experiential knowledge, and you increase it by expanding your comfort zone. Essentially, a warrior is an impeccable hunter of personal power. He gains power by taking forays into the unknown where he focuses his attention, grapples with chaos, and learns from the experience."

Ilgner sets out 7 processes in three phases in the journey to gain personal power and improve our climbing.  These are:

"The preparation phase includes Processes 1 through 4 below. The transition phase, Process 5, is short: it's the moment of truth, of choice. Your goal will be to make this transition powerful, abrupt, and complete. In the action phase, Processes 6 and 7, your goal is to live fully within the challenge rather than try to escape it. You'll avoid the "fight-or-flight" mentality and embrace the effort as an opportunity for learning. You will keep your conscious mind quiet, thereby allowing your intuitive abilities to come forward. You'll keep your focus on the journey, not on the destination.

Outline of the program: the Seven Processes

1. Becoming Conscious. In the first process, you improve observation skills to become more self-aware. You direct awareness onto your inner dialogue. You examine the grounds of your self-worth. You detect gross attention leaks.
2. Life Is Subtle. Attention is collected and centered. You direct awareness onto sensations in the body (breathing, posture, etc). You speak to yourself deliberately, rather than listening to the regular chatter of the inner dialogue.
3. Accepting Responsibility. Here, you focus on being responsible for the situation, rather than assigning blame, wishing that the situation was otherwise, or hoping for magical deliverance. Blaming, wishing, and hoping take power out of your hands. Accepting responsibility comes to terms with the objective information you gather about the risk.
4. Giving. Here you adopt an attitude of power: you ask what you can give to the performance, rather than what you might receive if you "succeed." You focus your attention on options and possibilities. This process collects the subjective information about the risk and comes to terms with it.
5. Choices. This is the transition phase, the moment of truth. You choose either to direct attention away from the risk or into the risk. Declining to take the risk is not failure. Many, many risks are foolish and taking them could kill you. The key to the warrior Choices process is to be absolutely decisive. If you're going to back off, you do it without misgiving. If you go forward, you do so with your full being, without looking back. You set an intention to act with unbending intent which produces 100-percent commitment.
6. Listening. This process guides you as you act out the risk. It helps you stay on course, in the risk, rather than falling into a control mentality that will divert attention and rob you of power. You are in action now, in the unknown; you need to learn something. "Listening" to the situation and the route facilitates the learning process. This is a very intuitive process. In Choices, you accepted the possible outcomes of your effort and made the leap; now you must trust in the process.
7. The Journey. Once in the chaos of risk, you focus on the journey, not the destination. When you're stressed, you are tempted to rush through the stress. Yet, if you have prepared well, this stressful situation is exactly why you came here in the first place. It holds the rhyme and reason for your climbing. When you're stressed, you are in prime territory for learning. A journey mentality helps you align your attention forward into the climbing process instead of letting attention wander to the destination, or to self-limiting thoughts that won't help you solve the problem and learn."

I found Ilgner's discussion of how our inner voice works, to either hold us back or propel us up new challenges, to be very useful.  As the stress of the situation increases, the inner voice becomes louder and more restraining.  It is the ego yelling at us to protect our self image.  Ilgner's advice, recognize what is talking (the ego) and quieting this voice by letting go the need to achieve.  By not tying ourselves to achievement, Ilgner writes, we can concentrate on the immediate climb in front of use.  As the negative ego is quieted, we can see and do moves that our mind previously would not allow.  Applying this, I experienced a significant jump in my climbing ability.  I also enjoyed the climbs more.

The books does come up short when it discusses the ideas of intuition and approaching climbing from a love-based motivation.  While I believe the concepts are good, the explanation of them was hard to follow.  They seemed too steeped in "new age" philosophy. 

The book ends on a sobering note.  Ilgner reminds us that:  "Death is our 'advisor'.  In other words, awareness of our mortality is a helpful reality check.  It reminds us that every action matters, and thus directs our actions  toward what's really important, valuable, and purposeful in our lives.  Death reminds us that we have no time to waste."

Adventurers and explorers, even us of the weekend variety, face challenging situations.  Preparation is a key to success and safety.  Preparation is more than gear lists and physical conditioning.  We must be mentally prepared as well.  We rely on our wits and experience honed on hard experience to get us safely to and from our destinations.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone who ventures out to explore the wilder and unusual places of our planet.  Arno Ilgner, "good on you, mate."

To learn more about Ilgner and his book, go to his website at www.warriorsway.com.

by Michael Reinhart

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