Climbing as Spiritual

For those who know me well, you know that my am addicted to the drug/sport of rock climbing. It has consumed me and I doubt I will ever kick the habit. Climbing has even become a type of spiritual practice for me. I could say more, and I eventually will, but I don't have time now. So for now, I will let this paragraph from the climbing magazine Rock and Ice suffice in capturing a part of why climbing is so important in my life.

Boulderers know that the sport transcends mere amusement when you find a line of holds that you simply cannot climb unless you change in some meaningful way. You have to be better--physically, mentally, or even spiritually. Transformative problems like these are more than climbs. They are thresholds between existential planes. To borrow a term from anthropology, these complex problems are liminal states complete with the "ritual death" of repeated failure, the "strictly prescribed sequence," and the "post liminal rites" where you feel like a new being--if only for a moment.

--Jeff Jackson, editor of Rock and Ice