A few years back I started an experiment. I would stand an hour a day for six months and see it this would improve my life any significant way. Mostly, I was hoping, I think, it would yield some magic insight that would solve all my financial problems.
My life did improve. I wrote a lot. Made friends. Had fun. Had some success. My money situation didn't change. But I look back on it as a happy time.
I'm setting out on a new challenge now. Two hours a day, for as long as I can keep up a commitment to two hours a day. But I'm setting out with different expectations.
I just want to be happy now. And tomorrow.
I don't think Zhan Zhuang will solve my money problems because Zhan Zhuang is not a money making thing. At best Zhan Zhuang will allow me to be happy enough making whatever sacrifices I'm going to have to make to improve my financial situation.
If it comes to that. There's always a possibility that an increase in creativity and right brain activity will make me rich. Or at least solvent. But that's not my motivation for this two hours.
My motivation is to develop the ability to rest happily in happiness.
This is remarkably difficult for me to do. About as hard as sitting quietly on a tightrope.
At one point during my mediation today, I could feel the energy in my right brain begin to grow. I could feel it. I knew that it was going to lead to well being. And yet I struggled like a cat in water. At though, somehow, this happiness could only mean bad things on the way. Disappointment, disillusionment, failure. All the price of happiness. Something in me is rock hard solid sure about this.
When the well being came, I felt a distinct sense of "huh? Is this all there is to happiness? Could it really be this ordinary."
Then I became conscious that I was standing in a room, staring into a ball of solid magnetic energy, having just half an hour before, felt the disappearance of my ego, and the presence of some kind of spiritual being.
And remembered, "oh yeah. This isn't really very ordinary." In fact it's so lacking in ordinariness, that I am afraid to share it as something ordinary.
But it is ordinary, this amazing, unlimited, sustainable, gorgeous, vital energy. It is so ordinary. And such a tragedy that so few people in the world seem able, or willing, to feel it.
I am deeply blessed to have it, even for one day.
So I will not set a goal to grasp it, or make it permanent. Just take this day by day.
And continue to be grateful.
And continue to be amazed that this is it.
