I was supposed ‘we can do this’ shivering wreck
the game. The anxiety and the depression and the intensity of the panic and the sheer chaos – all those emotional reactions were a result of holding onto the shirt and refusing to let go of it.”
The tunnel-vision dedication which he believed at the time to be the secret of his success, he now sees as selfdestructive.
“During my rugby career I was incredibly fit but I wasn’t healthy.
“Doing more weights or three hours’ kicking or watching videos of the opposition every day was mostly stressing out of me. “I was gaining maybe half a per cent over a year but probably losing more than that through the stress,” he says. “The massive gain – the 10 or 20 per cent – came from realising that if you want to explore your true potential start learning to take the shirt off. “The idea of who you are gets in the way of everything. It’s the shirt versus the potential under it. You trap that potential with the idea you have of yourself.” It is from this perspective the hell yogic that Wilkinson now guides others, specifically the kickers in the England team, Owen Farrell and George Ford.
Both are rugby obsessives who dream of emulating Wilkinson at next year’s World Cup, but while they are reaching out towards that goal, he has left it behind for the sake of his sanity.
“Me picking up the World Cup is just a memory. I can use that memory to create an emotion I enjoy, or one I don’t. It’s up to me,” says Wilkinson.
“If I hold this story that I was once this successful rugby player and everyone knew my name then my journey away from that is going to get darker and darker.
“I have loads of memories and information but I’m not holding