A Better Rainbow

Love doesn't need to be perfect - it just needs to be true. An ancient and wise saying, no doubt, yet how do we 'get there'?

A three part formula, I recommend and prescribe. As with everything we say or promote here, and as your actual results WILL vary, the true test is in the testing, or a touch less pithy, go and try for yourself, note the process and record the results. This is one of the reasons why we have emblazoned on our PowerBarn license play holders: Ride, race, test, train. Because training is testing - and vice versa.

Stop striving for perfection. Seek, instead to improve continuously each day. If you follow any type of discipline, from Akido to Zen, you know that it is further broken down, for advanced students, to each activity on a daily basis. Hourly for masters. This includes such seemingly mundane activities as breathing, eating, walking and talking. The goal being conscious flow with life. Here are the three ingredients for our perfect love practice:

• 1) Awareness and acceptance.
• 2) A relaxed focus.
• 3) Finding the joy.

Number one calls for your commitment to the now. Accept where you presently find yourself on the physical fitness (or other) timeline. Start from here with an open heart and open mind. The goal is to somehow or some way improve upon your previous self. Do it better this time.

Number two asks for something big. To find that powerful and blissful state of satori, where we become one with the activity. I find the bicycle to be a perfect vehicle for this art of seeking a relaxed state of hyper-awareness. It is the magic and mythic marriage of cosmic flow.

Number three, as soon as numbers one and two have been achieved, is easy. Find the inner peace and harmony that is the natural by-product of the effort. It can be a war, it can be struggle, it can utterly beat the crap out of you, until you get there - and then everything changes. You smile with respect of the power you have tapped into and see (at last) that it was there patiently waiting for you all this time. Or, again falling into the pity trap - You can have eternity today.

I wish I could end this without turning the next page, but I can't. Therefore please be advised that once this apex of magic and miracle is reached, you now have a deeper responsibility, what Dan Millman calls House Rules. You have to keep it going, pay it forward and assist others struggling on their path. In other words, it doesn't need to be perfect, one simply needs to strive for perfect effort along the way.

Kinda like love.