anxiety driven

Okay now I'm officially anxiety rather than consciousness driven. Can't seem to stand in the morning even for 20 minutes.

Fantasy conversations with the psychologist at Ben's school. Even though I know he's going to be allright. Even though I know he's not going to be kicked out of school. Even though all he needs is for them to get him a computer.

I can't even get through writing this post without drifting off into a conversation about that.

So what do I do?

Other responsibilities aren't being met as well and they weigh on my mind. Although there's no reason I can't meditate and meet my responsibilities as well. I'm meditating because I WANT to have the energy and motivation to meet my responsibilities. I'm meditating out of responsibility.

SUDDENLY I SEE THE SUN RISE. I GRAB MY SON AND WE HEAD OUT TO WATCH IT IN THE PARK

Wandering off the way

I'm in danger.

This is where I wandered off the path last time. Being driven by my work obsessions.

And then I forget about how good I feel when I stand. And then I start filling my anxious belly with things to numb it. And then I'm eating badly, and sleepng late. And before you know it I'm managing to remember only for 10 to 20 minutes to stand. Just enough to keep me from falling apart.

But I want more than not falling apart. And maybe that means letting certain other things fall apart.

I don't want to lose my way again. I want to plant myself right here and grow here.

But I don't know how to make that permanent.

Help.

How do I make this vision of what I really want, a consciousness driven life. How do I make this a permanent part of my life?

Distracted

A job opportunity has come up. Something I think I would be good at, but I'm not sure would be good for me. Or that doesn't quite fit in to the plan I had for myself.

It was a situation similar to this that seriously de-railed me last time I got serious about Chi Kung. I found myself obsessing about that job, which would bring me more money and more stuff. I didn't apply for it in the end. Possibly the right decision, but I never quite got back on track again.

I'm trying to stay centered as I consider this one. One I'm probably better suited for, but still, one that would derail other writing plans I have. And one that would suck me full in to the written dialogue of our culture, its obsession, which are not always healthy.

Just thinking about it de-rails me, I know.

So it sounds like I shouldn't apply or it. Or that at the very least I shouldn't let it distract me from the things I really need to do today.

I want to stay committed to my vision.

Maybe I need to ask that Jon Kabat Zinn question a few times of the universe today. What is my job?

Why I stand

I stand to develop a deeper reason for standing that merely having a repertoire of cool feelings.

I stand to have a profound connection to universal energy. To the energy we want to conserve in all our challenges right now as a species.

I stand so that I will have a deep well of resources, which will make it easier for me to risk being loving. And that will give me something to give to others.

I stand so that I will be driven by the primal joys of life, not the fears. I stand so that I will recognize real anxiety when I feel it and sift out all the deluded anxieties conditioned into me by a dysfunctional upbringing and society.

I stand because i want to change my body and my brain.

I stand to change my world and hopefully the world.

But I also stand to honour stability and conservation and slow careful change.

I stand so that I will better know what needs to be changed, and what needs to be conserved.

I stand to that I can participate in the world discussion of those things.

I stand to have a more profound, more rooted, more stable sense of being in the world. I stand to help to experience that and then to help others find it.

What drives us

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.

Storing stillness

Power, it is said in the zhan zhuang literature, is born in stillness. One of the greatest pleasure of zhan zhuang for me has been the occasional feeling of stillness in my brain. There are these wonderful moments when my thoughts stop and I connect entirely with this quiet still present moment.

But I'm brain driven. Head brain driven. In zz the source and storage place of energy is the tan tien. In the gut. It's a challenging process for me to make the decision to be more gut driven. For a while this weekend I was trying to keep my focus on my gut and my brain felt drained and disoriented. Maybe that's why I decided to punish my gut by overeating at my parents.

Woke up this morning feeling a food hangover. Energy just wasn't moving. Ben woke up with a nightmare that I had sent him to tap dance school (We watched the finale of So You Think You Can Dance Canada last night.)

Had green smoothie and morning practice went better.

One thing I became conscious of yesterday is how much tension I have stored in my gut. All kinds of unhealthy, anxious drives down there I'm sure. Drives to grieve, grumble. Memories of sadness and feelings of powerless. One of the goals of focusing on the Tan Tien is to open up some fresh space to create joy and relaxation.

And stillness. I'm trying today to feel, really feel in a solid concrete way, the stillness at that point. So that I can feel stillness throughout my entire body and, ultimately, psyche. Not just in my brain.

From this stillness, the very grounded mountain peak of stillness, I plan to reconstruct some new, healthier, kinder and more loving drives.

Dawn

It is a strange dawn today. The sky is blue but it is extremely windy. A strong, quite warm wind considering the time of year.

Ben woke up early too. His coughing and loud page turning and then insistence on wanting to talk about the things he was reading was pretty distracting. But we did spend a bit of time talking about dawn, the illusion that the sun rises, the immensity of the universe. And God, if God exists, how big that love would be.

If God exists. Do I have doubts? No, not since my concept of God has shifted to this power.

This power I feel now in my lower belly. It's hard to make the shift. Hard because I keep wanting to make it "permanent." Instead of having a goal of focusing on it in the present moment. But I feel the loss of energy in my brain. It feels weird not being as active up there.

But it's where I'm thinking from for now.

Tan Tien

The Tan Tien, more formally known as the lower Tan Tien, is this place in the belly which is the grounding point of Zhan Zhuang.

It took me years of practice before I felt it. I guess I must be really blocked there or something. Even now as I come back to it, I have at tendency to forget how important it is. It is THE most important focal point of practice.

What happens now when I stand is that I get feeling, almost like a carbonated vitality starting to flow through it. If I keep my focus on it, eventually a very strong warmth begins to grow. The best way to think about it, I've found, is as the major ball bearing in the body. Like a magnetic ball bearing.

But I have a tendency to feel it and then want to move on to other parts of the body. What I"m practicing today is feeling it and then explanding my feeling, but always keeping the Tan Tien in mind. This is a pretty exciting feeling. It hits me right at the point I felt of first sexual awakening, and it's no surprise that the Tan Tien is supposed to be the place where we store out sexual energy.

As westerners, of course, we tend to focus on our genital area, but the tan tien is actually more effective at sustaining the kind of ecstasy we associate with sexual release.

Of course, quasi-puritan that I am programmed to be, I end up focusing on everywhere but. Anything that feels that good can't be good for me, right?

Well, let's see....

Heart brain

Two things. Two things happening today. This morning a very strong feeling of groundedness. I felt as solid as a mountain in my lower body. Haven't felt that in a while. It's an extremely comforting feeling, the sense that strength is coming from something other than the outer circumstances of your life, or I guess I mean, the cultural or economic circumstances. It is coming from something external though. I'm pretty sure, even if it feels like my brain is creating it. It's coming from the "cosmos." I guess. As you can see I'm not quite comfortable with that term. I'm not a New Agey person and I'm self conscious about using that terminology. And yet even if I'm not comfortable saying it, I do believe in it. How can I not? There is a cosmos. There is space out there and it's pretty powerful. Okay scratch that. Very powerful. Powerful beyond our imagination. I feel myself in the magnetic force of that power. It grows every day and it will become more intense.

The second thing. I read in The Way of Power yesterday that the energy of the cosmos enters through the heart. So I made a conscious effort to feel it there. And it felt good. Really good. Like I had stable, constant access to a powerful source of love, and that I just had to develop the practice everyday and that gradually the self hatred that I know permeates my soul, will have a weaker and weaker grip on me.

It doesn't want to let go. I can hear it, I can feel it. It is still stronger than my practice or any lovely feeling of connection to the universe that I have developed today. Or at least it feels like it is stronger.

It's not. Of course my little self hatred synapses, or paths in my brain that I've cultivated, are puny tiny barely alive little things compared to the energy in the universe and that love. But because they run my brain they feel bigger for the time being. I wonder how often I have to choose the consciousness of the universe over the chatter of my self-contempt before it loses power permanently. I wonder if that's possible. I hope so.

consciousness driven

I want to be driven by consciousness, not anxiety.

Reading Eckhart Tolle last night, I finally got it. Living this way is a decision to be consciousness driven. Not ego drive. Not anxiety driven. Consciousness driven.

I suppose in a certain sense it is chi driven. But what's interesting to me this morning is that to be consciousness driven is not to be word driven. Or language driven.

I had a moment in this morning's practice where the words disappeared. I was trying to think in words as I am constantly doing, and they wouldn't come out as words anymore, just sort of silent grunty things. Mumbles I guess. Because of this I was able to have a few moments of pure silence.

Moments like these are exciting to a writer because I am so driven by ideas and the words that I put to these ideas. Deep, complete silence is always a brand new place to me. Certainly not my home.

But back when we did live without words, as pre-language man, or as babies, we learned thing quite fast and amazingly. I wonder what happens to my brain when I am able to return it to this pre language state. Does it re-find its baby smartness. Will I be able to put learning into super drive again?

This is not consciousness driven curiosity. It's no doubt ego driven as I imagine all the remarkable things I could be capable of if this were true.

Too bad I'm not living like that anymore.

Surrender

The most difficult thing about standing is not standing, but surrendering to the energy that would enable me to release all the effort that goes into standing.

So the most difficult thing is not standing but not-standing.

This is difficult on several levels. First psychological, or maybe more appropriately, cultural. Surrendering to something bigger than ourselves is kind of against our North American programming. Or so we think. Of course we surrender to things more powerful than ourselves all the time. When we allow the government to manage civic affairs. When we allow the television to hypnotize us. When we participate in our market and consumption based economy, we are surrendering to something we have accepted is bigger than ourselves.

Why so hard to surrender to a pleasant energy? I know this is an energy that increases my well-being, and increases my quality of life. I've experienced its benefits over and over. Still, it's so hard to surrender.

Why does pleasure and health make me so anxious? Or rather, why am I anxious about increased pleasure and health? Why would I be anxious about well-being?

A little story came to me this morning while I was doing the dishes. One of the last conversations I had with my grandfather before he died. It was on the phone. He sounded happy and I told how happy he sounded. "That's what everyone keeps telling me" he said. "But I'm not happy. It's these morphine pills. I've been eating them like beans. They make me sound happy. But I'm not. I'm dying."

Because our only experience with altered consciousness is usually drugs, we worry when we experience it drug free. Like somehow we'll lose touch with our anxiety and be unable to see or express reality.

I don't think I'm really in danger of this happening. Last night I was watching T.V. and I started to feel anxious about the things in my life I should feel anxious about: My lack of stable employment, my debt, etc. I started thinking, what should I do to get rid of this anxiety. And then I realized, no I don't have to do that. I'm strong enough to face this anxiety. I'm strong enough to feel it and not feel the urge to run away.

This is the advantage of authentic well being. Not an escape from anxiety, but the calm strength to face it squarely.

I believe that if I surrender to this growing energy, that is what I will have.

Hippocampus

Read yesterday that there is a new study which shows that meditators develop stronger bigger hippocampus. This is the part of the temporal lobe responsible for long term memory and attention. What this could mean is that meditation strengthens your long term memory.
It's also an exercise in facing long term memory. One thing I realized this morning is that depression, desperation and powerlessness is my default setting. When I meditate in the morning, I become more conscious of this because I'm forming a different setting. The quiet energy of early morning meditation is really the opposite of anxiety and depression. So it would be great if what I'm accomplishing is changing my memory to return me to quiet and stability and a sense of well being.
I felt a very strong energy rising in me again this morning. And I felt that weird sensation of lack of symmetry. Even though I could see that my arms were symetrical it felt that my body was twisted into a different position. I love this feeling. It tells me that my brain is really changing somehow. I think that it means more energy is flowing into my left brain, perhaps to heal all the extra energy in the right brain from my depression?
Don't know. But I know it's a good sign of progress.

temporal lobe

Finished The Midnight Disease, a book about writing and the brain. Alice Flaherty has an interesting theory. Creative drive is closely related to religious drive and originates in the temporal lobe. Or at least the temporal lobe is more important to it than what we normally think. When TMS stimulates the temporal lobe we feel a presence. Artists along with religious devotees, tend to be the people who feel, or strive to feel this presence in life without the aid of magnetic stimulation tools.
Meditators also build activity in the temporal lobe. Whether or not the sensed presence is an actual presence may be somewhat immaterial. The skill of sensing a presence, sensing an invisible self other than your own may be an important skill in developing creativity, integrating the brain, and having more control over our sense of well being. Maybe this makes us less prone to all the stuff people are trying to sell as well being.
It makes sense in terms of our cultural metaphor of "inner strength". Perhaps this inner strength is temporal lobe strength. Perhaps what I am doing with I do standing meditation is gently and slowly building all the good things that come from the temporal lobe, primal emotion like joy, primal drives. Maybe there is a way that we can bring all the secondary emotions, processes, etc. back under control of the temporal lobe, but in a healthy integrative way. Not with the usual things we associate with the temporal lobe, like anger and lust and other primary drives.
Something to think about.

mid afternoon mania

Ah...now I know why I don't actually devote four hours a day to meditation. It's not necessarily that I don't want to. But when I start cultivating that good feeling a little too fast, I find my brain getting a little manic. Visions of filling the world with inspiration and wellness. Writing the Eat, Pray, Love of Zhan Zhuang. All my career and financial anxiety disappearing and narcissistic dreams come true. Next thing you know I'm talking to Oprah while I do the dishes.

Better to take it slow. Keep the afternoon meditations down to twenty minutes. Just enough to boost the good feeling of the morning med....Med, meditation, interesting slip.

Belly ball of well being

this morning I watched Mathieu Ricard give a speech a google on how to change your brain by changing your mind.
I've seen him give a shorter version of this speech as a Ted Talk. In fact that Ted speech which I watched a few weeks ago is what has motivated me to come back to this practice. I do believe that well-being is something that we can and should cultivate. And once we've cultivated it we must help others cultivate it.
So after I watched the speech I took a half hour to cultivate the pleasant energy that is begining to tickle my tan tien again. The tan tien is of course that part of your gut that fills with chi as you practice any of the chi based martial arts. For now though I'm going to all it my belly ball. I need to give it something concrete so that I come back to it everyday and throughout the day.
Ricard's speech brought to my attention again, how much love really is a skill that we need to cultivate. Not just a feeling that we should allow to come and go as it pleases. I found myself starting to take the words of the traditional lovingkindness meditation and turning it towards my belly ball. Sort of like "may my belly ball fill with a sense of well being", may I have this sense of well being available to me at all times.
And as I started to imagine my life with a feeling, a conceret physical feeling of joy and well being, I started to think of all those people struggling through life without that (myself included). Of course I want that for everyone. If we could have free happiness for ourselves, how could we not want that for everyone. How could we want to hoard it?

silence between thoughts

I have done this before. And when I did I gradually got to the point where the silence imprinted itself on my brain well enough that it became a presence throughout the day that would interrupt my thoughts.

Today as I stand here, the silence greets me like an old lover. Something I've known for a long time. Something unconditional that I have turned my back on. I don't know why. Why would I want to live without this silence, so gentle, so nurturing, so strong.

It's strength will become my strength. And my strength, I hope, will be a source of strength for others.

The fragrance of scattered maple leaves

Hit by the first rays of Indian summer.

Just that. One of the most perfect smells in the world.

return to standing

Fifty minutes of standing. One of the things that's difficult is that I'm conscious of how much tension and stress I've allowed to build up in my body. I feel the first pings of chi in Tan tien, a kind of cool carbonated feeling for now. I hit stretches where my body feels suspended by magnetic energy and I know that this energy will grow and that my body will eventually surrender to it. I then I won't think of it as "the energy." I'll be the energy. I'll just be floating there in the energy.
But I'm not there yet because I got caught up in other things for a day, a month, a year.
I'm back now. This time I will religious record all the good.
But there is sacrifice in doing that. I can feel the writing going on in my brain. I can taste the anxiety of striving in my body. I really can literally taste it, a metalic buzzing feeling, kind of nauseating fear that wants the good feeling so desperately.
I need to be patient and stand and record and stand and record and just do that and see what happens.
But I feel more confident and strong than I have in a while. That's because I'm connected to the strength of the universe, I guess.

Writing to improve well being

Read something interesting this morning. Alice Brand did a psychological study in which there is evidence that writing accentuated positive emotions and blunted negative ones.

So if I'm writing every morning and recording my progress, my good feelings while I do this practice, am I solidifying them? And will this help others?

I feel in some ways that I'm collecting these feelings, kind of like an elixir.

What will that do to my brain?

Is standing a technology?

I read something yesterday that hit me hard. Writing is after all just another technology.

uh oh...my son is up. Will have to stop writing for a bit.

Socrates was worried about the effects on memory that writing would have. Plato disregarded those fears by writing down his teachers conversations. Writing was to the Greeks in some way, what video games are to our era.

And in the same way that video changes the brain, so does writing. It can slow down our thought. It can help us remember. But it can also lie in a way that oral culture couldn't, or couldn't accomplish as successfully.

So, just for the sake playing with this idea. Is standing a technology? I mean I am cultivating energy and electricity, the same way any conductor does. Maybe it's an ancient technology that we've lost. It is a technology that brings power to our body and to our brain. It is a technology of consciousness.

We look to technology to bring us wellbeing. This is another way of bringing us that wellbeing. The question is also, perhaps, is it a better technology for bringing us what we really want? If what we really want is peace, well being, freedom, creativity, health, then this may very well be a more successful technology, than anything we've ever invented.

the habit of solitude

Most of my practice today I spent trying to quell my obsession with change. I want to change. I am doing this to change, all I can think of is change. I am so focused on change and what I hope from that change that I lose touch with the moment. With the quiet, with the quality of quiet.

So I put down my arms and just tried instead to cultivate the habit of being in this moment. It occured to me near the end of my hour, as the light started to rise, that all the great writers that I know cultivate the habit of finding this hour at the edge of the day. Either morning, or late night. But you need this hour, to write, to contemplate to be. But it is your hour with the universe. It is your hour with timelessness.

I tried today to kill the writer in me, but she keeps coming back wondering how this timelessness can sink into your writing, so that you make some classic and useful for a long time. Something that could be read at any time.

primary

I read something yesterday about Freud's theory of primary and secondary process in creativity. Primary is the raw images, material. Secondary is the abstract thinking, editing. I think that what meditation is doing for me is training my primary process, not just in creativity, but in life. We all get so caught up in secondary living, thinking.

Early in the morning like this, I am far more aware of how my mind drifts off to plans and dreams and conversations. Of course this happens whenever i'm meditating. But when I meditate at other times of the day, I'm going against the grain. I should kind of be planning and talking, so it's harder to have any real authority over my mind.

In the stillness of the morning, quiet is right. I have the authority of dawn working for me.

early morning stillness

Everytime I come back to this I remember that I've done it before. I remember because I remember the stillness. And I remember what it feels like the rest of the day to have that stillness to go back to.
It's hard for me to maintain this stillness right now. My mind drifts off constantly to my financial anxieties, my future plans, my desires, whatever i happen to be writing on. I'm afraid and in the stillness there isn't much of an escape. But I hope that means that when it's time for me to sit down and make plans I will sit down and make a plan.
But at the very least the stillness I am with in the morning changes my day. Makes me a little more focused, makes me a little more aware of when my thoughts or actions are drifting off beyond the control of that part of my mind that would be better off in control.
That part of my mind, I guess is my primary process. I was reading about this yesterday. My primary process is the Freudian process of concrete thinking. Abstract is secondary. I know that I spend most of my time in abstract. I want to find a balance between the two.

the question

So here's the question I want to answer by the end of six months.

Is E.T. right? Will making consciousness the primary purpose of your life bring more power to the secondary purpose of your life?

Let's see.

I'm going to change

I've decided to take Ringo up on this challenge. With one small amendment. I'm not going outside everyday at dawn. But I will be getting up every morning at least an hour before dawn (right now 6:15) to do some standing meditation.

And I will write a little bit everyday about the changes, positive, and perhaps negative.

But first I need a reasonably good description of where I think I am in my life:

I'm scared. I've been downsized in my work as a freelancer/book critic to a commitment that is below what I need to make to pay my rent and bills. So unless I find work outside of that I'm going into worse debt than I already am.

But I am also scared that this anxiety will force me into work that I'm not really suited for. For the first time in my life I have the luxury of time. I have a couple of book ideas. If I rush into training for a new skill, let's say teaching. Am I giving up this chance to start the kettle boiling on these projects.

I'm lost. So the plan for the moment is to focus on my inner purpose, as E.T. calls it. Awareness. Awakening. Letting consciousness flow through me so that I can make the best decisions towards my secondary purpose as writer and, perhaps, teacher.

For now my goal is simple. Get up early every day for six months. Stand, and see where this takes me.

Simple, but of course difficult.

Right now, just the beginning of an adventure.

This is My Purpose

I agree with Eckhart Tolle that allowing consciousness to flow into us is our inner purpose.

So why is it so hard to maintain the practice that allows this?

Why is it so hard for me to get up early in the morning? Why is it so hard for me to stick to my hour? Why so impossible to do a bit in the afternoon when I need that energy boost? Why can't a I do a little before I go to bed?

Why would I rather do all the distracting things I end up doing? If I know, If I believe that this is my liberation?

What do I need to do to commit to my inner purpose?

Well it's easy to commit. But what do I need to do to maintain this commitment? How do I marry my Zhan Zhuang? Because I do believe this is the primary purpose of my life.

I'm going to brainstorm 10 ways.

1. I think the first thing is to do as much of it as I want and can. The more I do it. The more I want to do it.

2. Do it at dawn. Be prepared to hear a voice saying it's too hard, saying I don't feel like it. Be prepared to override that voice at all costs. This is the purpose of my life. My life's mission. No more sleeping in. Believe Ringo. Every day at dawn for six months and "you will change."

3. Make this commitment to the universe. Not to me, but to all sentient beings. Ask the question, repeatedly: Would I be walking away from this commitment if I made it to someone else? Know that I am doing this for the world.

4. Do it like my life depends on it. Because it does.

5. Let Ben know that I'm going to be meditating in the morning from now, and that he has to accept that.

6. When I hear that voice that tells me I can do it later, answer "should I do it later?"

7. Do it as though an audience were waiting for me.

8. Cheer myself as though I were an audience

9. When I'm tempted to go back to sleep, watch the news, avoid my meditation time, advise myself as though I were advising someone else.

10. Know my mission: Who I want to be, What I want to do, What I want to have.