This morning I felt that real warmth that happens when the Tan Tien is starting to fill with relaxed energy. I'm never sure if what I'm sensing is a change in the Tan Tien, or if the Tan Tien is already full of energy and all that's happened is an opening of some kind of neurocircuitry that allows me to sense the energy that is always flowing through it. At any rate I know that something has changed.
And what I want is to make this change permanent. This may be the root of the problem. Usually when I feel this warmth I get all excited. This is it. Everything's going to be great by now. I've felt my Tan Tien. And then I don't know what happens. Maybe life doesn't change significantly enough. Or the mere egoistic thoughts of how much smarter and stronger and more creative I am going to be is a sort of regression in itself. And then before you know it I've regressed back to my unconscious way of living. Basically I back to being in my brain.
Yesterday as I was walking around the neighborhood trying to locate a book that I left behind somewhere when I was Sherpaing Ben around, instead of panicking, I focused on my tan tien. I started to feel a very solid and profound sense of being. And I understood something. That cultivating this energy, or an awareness of this energy, is cultivating a strong and solid sense of being. You sense the ground. You sense the reality and present moment more vibrantly from that point, that you do from the brain. You sense the ground.
It's not that you stop using the brain, but you don't live inside your head. The head, basically, is not a very good place to locate your sense of balance. Or i guess your center of gravity. And gravity is where it's at.
Does this mean I would use my head brain less. I don't know. I would like to think that I use it for less useless things. That I use it for more concrete living and connection with the world around me.
So this morning I come up with a theory. That the Tan Tien drives us, no matter what our relationship with it. If what is in the Tan Tien is a tense, unconscious feeling of powerlesness, then we are driven in life by a tense, unconscious feeling of powerlessness. If what is in the Tan Tien is a relaxed profound sense of being and connection to the universe, then that is what we are driven by.
I would like to get the point where this warmth in my tan tien is not an unusual exciting event. I would like it to become daily and mundane and a drive towards authentically powerful living that I barely think about.
