Goals are an extremely important part of progress. You need them to motivate action. They help you define your practice and to guide each decision during the process. A goal also aids you in knowing when you’re done.

Your passion before a goal is vapid and cannot take it’s true form. If it takes form at all it is directionless and risks being unimportant work.

Your goals are based on your desires, your desires are attachments and attachment is the root of suffering. It’s important to have goals because without them there is no motion. It’s also important to reduce and eliminate suffering. How do we reconcile the two?

We come to terms with this dichotomy by understanding that the goal is not the practice. The practice is the path you take to get there, your daily activities. The goal guides you in deciding which path to take, deciding when, what and how to practice. Sometimes you are walking on a path someone else has already built, sometimes you are building your own. You never know how long the path is, which direction it travels next, how many pointless loops the path has, or if you’ll have to climb the highest mountain along the way.

There is no map and you may never arrive. Realize only that you are on your way somewhere. You may have chosen your path well, and you may arrive. You may also have chosen poorly according to your goals and never reach them. If you treat every step along the way as beautiful and important in its own right, you create the potential of reaching the end, but also release yourself of the attachment of ever arriving. In this way you will arrive exactly where you are supposed to be, and you'll be at that perfect place every day.

What does this mean for you every day? Trust in your practice. If you have a particularly challenging training session where it seems like nothing is going right, you have to believe in your heart that progress was made. You took a step on the path. You might not be able to measure the progress, but it has been made.

In the first few sessions of slackline, this is apparent. Everyone’s foot wobbles on the line under the pressure of that first step. There is likely not a person ever who has been completely steady on their first step. Normally the earth doesn’t move under your feet so you haven’t yet needed the muscles it takes to stabilize. However, if you step on the line enough, practice through the wobble and trust that it will get better, then one day the wobble seems to magically go away.

This takes place in less obvious ways too. I recently fell onto a longline and had a great deal of pain as a result. I didn't have to go through any healing, so I was back up on the line the next weekend. The session after my injury was absolutely the worst. I could barely stand on the line, and when I did the fear of being hurt again permeated every step. The tension in my body would not leave despite meditation, breath and attempted focus. I left the session feeling defeated, like nothing had been done and I started questioning whether my goals were reasonable.

I came back and thought seriously about my goals. In reflection I realized that it was my attachment to my goals that made things hard for me. My body and mind needed to work through the fear of pain, but I was making my goals the practice. I needed to be completely in the practice, to trust in my body’s ability to understand its needs and trust that just being on the line would create the space for that progress.

I trust that progress was made. I can’t see the progress, and I definitely don’t feel it. Slackline is the path I've chosen to reach my goals of peace, strength and balance. In slack I trust.

Fear is an important part of our construction as living beings. We need fear to tell us when to behave differently for our survival. Slackline requires us to rewire parts of our brain. This rewiring often includes a redefinition of fear. The fear may be anything from the fear of embarrassing yourself in front of your peers to a legitimate fear of death. How deeply you are participating in slackline and in what capacity largely determines the kind of fear you will be facing. But have no doubt that you will face fear on a slackline.

I have developed a method for overcoming fear through practice. It's a four step process that may take you years: Feel, Test, Control and Conquer.

You will know that you need to start the process of overcoming a fear because you are inexplicably drawn to the situation that elicits it and the fear itself is slowing down your progress. For example you walk up to the edge of that tall building and look at the highline despite the discomfort, but you keep backing off and can't step on. It's time to start managing your fear.

Feeling fear is a good thing. Put yourself into the scary situation. Feel the fear, but listen to your body and back off when you feel you need to. Repetition is the key. When you are finished recognize that you are still alive, you are still breathing, and take special note of how the fear affected you in a physical way.

Each time you'll come away feeling a little uncomfortable, but each time you'll feel a little bit more like it really wasn't so bad. This exposure causes you to understand that your reaction to the fear is physical and you have control over how much you want to feel.

The testing step is the simplest, but takes the longest. Build your abilities and test them to get closer to the source of your fear. Create skill that allows you to come closer and closer to the source of your fear. As you're practicing you'll get a little closer to the edge and work through feeling the fear again. It will be stronger now because the source is real and still affects you physically. Continue to build your skill become more sure of yourself and test your abilities.

Eventually you'll understand your physical limits. You'll have a skill that brings you close to the source of your fear but keeps you safe. Instead of being in danger when you're close to your source of fear, you're in control.

In this step you will stand face to face with your fear for an hour one day, three hours the next; feeling the fear, but working on controlling your physical response to it. The feeling of fear will still affect you physically the same way it did in the beginning, but you are now able to practice reducing this reaction.

Some people will never move past this stage and that's perfectly normal. Controlling your physical response to fear is all that is necessary to be successful. If you end up here, redefine the meaning of success for you. There are some fears that we can't eliminate, they're too deeply engrained in our psyche.

One day you'll wake up and realize that you have felt the fear enough and it's no longer necessary to your survial. You can predict and eliminate your physical reaction. You are confident in your abilities and have tested them thoroughly. This is the point where the fear vanishes and you are awesome for having conquered it.