Friday, December 14, 2007

accepting power

It's 6:30 a.m. My city is covered in snow. My son sleeps. I've been up since 4 a.m., standing since 5:30. Recently I've taken segmented sleep as an invitation to relax, instead of a symptom of insomnia. Ever since I read Jeff Warren's great The Head Trip, I've changed my mind about insomnia. Before the invention of electricity, humans generally went to sleep pretty early, woke up early, but also woke up for a while in the middle of the night. Nature intends for us to have this quiet solitary time, I'm convinced.

I've been waking up early, so I've been doing much of my Zhang Zhuan in the pre-dawn hours. One of the hardest challenges of this project, this six months of one hour standing, is to accept real relaxation into my body, into my mind. I rarely feel any real pain anymore, unless I try a truly challenging pose like, the double spiral, where I hold my arms out behind me. I may try some others. But right now my challenge is to just let myself feel the relaxed buzzing magnetic energy for an hour.

I know it sounds weird to say it's hard to accept pleasant relaxed energy. But when you're used to stress, emotional, physical, etc. the body actually resists a true release from this. It yearns for it, but it also flees from it.

For me the experience of Zhan Zhuang has been like forming a path. Watching it grow over, forming it again, leaving it go, forming it until it is now a permanent part of my brain, this path. I don't think it could ever grow over now. But that doesn't mean that I dont' occassionally abandon it.

Right now I'm trying to build something more like a road.