Snowboarding, Tantric Sex And CBT.

One of the great thing about being a writer is that you can take off when the mood comes over you. Yesterday it came over me and we drove the two hours up to our nearest decent ski station, Les Angles in the French Pyrénées Orientales. Actually we both now snowboard rather than ski because it’s far, far easier off-piste. And the reason I like to get off-piste is that it’s just like Tantric sex. The aim is the same. An altered state of consciousness in which a spiritual experience is possible.

Sadly, there was no real off-piste yesterday. The weather has been too warm and the snow off-piste is rotten. So after a bit I changed tacks and headed for the snowpark. Much as I like the idea of out-of-this-world experiences I’ve always been intimidated by jumping. But I had a possible solution in cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT, which I’m writing a book about. If you’re not familiar with CBT, you could say that it’s a method of altering behaviour by eradicating negative ways of thinking. The behaviour I wanted to eradicate was my practice of boarding round the side of the jump rather than going over it.

I decided I would no longer label myself as a non-jumper, no longer focus on the negative aspects of my performance, no longer magnify the scale of the challenge, no longer jump to the negative conclusion that I would make a fool of myself and no longer see myself as a failure if the jump was much less than perfect. All these kinds of thoughts are errors in CBT.

Well, I did do the jumps. There were three in a row and I did them three times. I had a couple of falls and some of the moves were less than graceful. But so what! I had a good time, I improved and I’m looking forward to my next visit.

If you’d like to know how CBT might help you, drop me an email and I’ll send you details of the book as soon as it becomes available. Meanwhile, you’ll find plenty of useful advice in my already-published Be More Confident, Transform Your Life With NLP and How To Be Happier, all of which are in the Teach Yourself series.

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