My plan for returning to Zhan Zhuang is to start the way I would start if I were arriving at this blog for the first time, and starting the way I started almost 25 years ago, with Lam Kam Chuen's Way of Energy.
The plan is to stand five minutes a day this week, ten next, until by the end of the month I'm doing the regular twenty minutes, and by three months I'm back to an hour.
But I'm going to add something new. A new Chuen book. His Qigong workbook for anxiety. While I don't tend to think of myself suffering from anxiety, I clearly do. I had a terrible dream last night, in which my insecurity and reactivity lost me my job. Of course this anxiety is at the root of all my cravings and bad habits. Bad habit are almost always a poor response to nervousness and fear.
Last night I noticed once again how hard it is for me to lie still in my bed and go to sleep. There is a kind of terror that still grips me when I lie in bed. You'd think after years of meditation it would have ebbed, but it's still hard.
Chuen's approach is not to eliminate anxiety, but to work with it. So here goes...
