Resting in flow

The flow is getting a little stronger, pings in my navel, my neck, lower back.  All signs that I'm re-connecting with my natural vitality. In this morning's meditation I spent some time just resting in the growing warm wetness of my navel area.
  In the Tergar program there isn't any specific guidance on this, but I can still apply the method.  In the same way I rest bare awareness on thoughts, feelings, body sensations, I can simply rest on this warmth.  In the same way that sound and awareness of sound can become one.  This flow and the awareness of the flow can become one.
 That said, I don't want to overdo it.  I've lost this connection to flow so many times, and I wonder if part of the problem is that I plunge in too far and too fast.  Feel the pings, rest in them. But also don't be afraid to let go and rest in open awareness.  Alternating between this and grounded open awareness will do more to stabilize this than getting lost in some blissful state of altered consciousness.
 Navel gazing.  That's always been a label of shame in the western world.  The dangers of getting caught up in flow is not something to be ashamed of. But it is something to be aware of.

Flow

I've been feeling the pings of energy in my navel that I seem to often feel towards the three month mark when I've committed myself to any kind of energetic practice. From what I've been told, and from what I've read, this can mean two things: that I'm on the verge of transformation, and that I'm starting to store energy.
  The idea of transformation is interesting, because if I'm succeeding at my Tergar practice, my "transformation" is about recognizing what I've always been. Progress is really about how permanent that recognition is, and how it changes the way I see others.
  It's not permanent since I seem to barely be able to concentrate on writing this one entry. Monkey mind is pretty active this morning. Not sure exactly why since I had a pretty good meditation. Building on the "essence of love" meditation that Mingyur Rinpoche's brother, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, gave a while back, I drop into the nervous energy flowing through my body.  Just be with it and in time it naturally transforms into the love it takes to just be with this energy.  It's a lovely practice. So simple and so effective.
  This morning when I did it, I started to feel that familiar wetness in my navel, my chest, the back of my neck, the crown of my head. I recalled one of the foundational practices I'm learning in Rinpoche's new book, From Confusion to Clarity. In this practice we contemplate how precious and rare this human life is and how fortunate we are to even be born at all. To be born, to be in the process of awakening, to feel and know how spectacular and interesting the human body and mind is.  It's like winning the lottery. It is winning the lottery, no matter how much my monkey mind wants other markers of success.
  Of course I want to write a successful book that enriches other people's lives. But I want this book to come out of this recognition, and to enable those who are on the cusp of this awakening.
  To get the courage to continue, I need to know that those people exist.

 

Cognitive Body

Sometime around last summer, I started to notice an energy that seemed to be stabilizing in my heart area. Like a kind of ballbearing, but composed of clear moving energy. Now in the last few days after my retreat, I've felt this energy sinking down. Now it's stabilizing in my gut area.
  Everything for the next few months in my practice is going to be about stabilizing this gut energy because I believe this is the seat of wisdom.  This is the place from where wisdom shines.
  In the meantime I need to allow a lot of frozen energy to thaw. Okay it doesn't actually feel frozen as much as fossilized, or solidified to the point of carbonization. Yesterday I could feel a lifetime of self hatred in my gut and my body, and it seemed impossible for me to be anything but a big, block of self hatred.
 This is where The Mirror meditation is probably useful. The more I see the world around me as reflection and illusion, the easier it is to feel this about my inner life.
 I'm curious to see how my running practice affects this belly energy.  I know that I felt an increase of energy in my heart after six months of running, but I want to start working on my core strength so that I can get faster and run for longer periods and protect myself from injury. Will this translate into an actual feeling of wisdom, physically as well as spiritually?
  What I'm starting to feel the more I bring my Tergar and Zhan Zhuang practice together is a kind of "cognitive body."  This is a body that has been created from years of thought and emotion that have become habits, not always good, but often quite good. When all I see is the bad, it can feel pretty hopeless.  But the more I practice, the more I remember all the work I've done towards finding these feeling of peace and joy.

Self-directed Retreat Day 2

In my first hour of meditation today I had this insight.  Just as thought is impermanent, so is the consciousness and the life that is driven by thought. In my life, and I imagine in the history of humanity.  We are, right now, in a society wrapped up in the neocortex, as though this were the only part of the brain.  But the brain extends all throughout the body, and increasingly I believe that the most important part is the gut.

Certainly it's the most important part for physical health.  And wisdom, for me, begins with the decision to do what I can to stabilize my physical health.  So in hour two sitting with my Tan Tien was not the most comfortable feeling.  The neocortex feels like a safe abstract place.  But the gut is full of toxic, uncomfortable, sometimes weak feelings.  No wonder everyone wants to hang out in their brain.  Or at least that's where my habits bring me.

Hour three I decided to stand. But first I did a little reading from Bruce Frantzis Opening The Engergy Gates of Your Body. Somehow I seem to have skipped over the part where he recommends at least six months spent with an instructor, just on stabilizing the tan tien energies.  Longer if you're doing it alone!  Okay, well, I have spent about what now?  Twenty years?  I have made some progress.  But I've got some work to do to make it really stable.   I think this has something to do with the erratic parenting problem.  But I need to believe that I will get the stable love I didn't always get.   I stood for an hour and started to feel the hope that I can give myself this stable energy.

And then I can give it, to myself, to Ben, to my parents and my brother.  There are according to Mingyur Rinpoche four Buddah nature blockers, the first two being self-hatred and the second being hatred, or contempt towards others.  In hour two I started to feel the dissolution of my self-hatred, and finally in my belly joy.  A really nice joy that I reconized from the moment I learned I was pregnant.  This was a a creative, delightful joy, and if this is the kind of joy that tan tien generates than put me down for the next six month, or next twenty years.

Whatever, there is no time really. It's a fabrication, like sense of self.  And this is what I played with in hour five.  I love this freedom meditation that I learned in JOL3.   Letting go of self, and time, and with it agency. Once I let go of that I can feel the chi charting its own agency.  I got a big dose of self in the last 10 minutes, when I started to feel that familiar restlessness and craving.  But I decided to let the chi deal with that, and like a lovely, competent parent, it soon distracted me with a blissful warmth.  That is what will be driving me for the next twenty years, not my thoughts.

It's not that I won't have thoughts.   But I volunteer my life to the path that this energy will open up for me.

Self Directed retreat, day 1

I noticed in my JOL3 guidebook yesterday that I'm supposed to do a two day retreat at some point during my six months of practice.  Because I'm actually at midpoint--14 weeks into it--and because I'm not sure I'll have the time again in the next few months--or ever--I decided to do it now.

I'm supposed to do at least six hours a day, each day.   It's possible I've actually done that in my more enthusiastic stages.  But I've never done that much meditation formally before.  It's kind of like doing an ultra marathon of meditation. At first it felt incredibly daunting.

But I'm up to it.  I've just completed five hours of meditation.  I'll probably go out for a run, and then I'll do another hour tonight before bed.  To make it a retreat, I'm staying away from news, internet surfing television, even as much as possible, imaginary conversations.

So far it's been an interesting trip.  In the first hour, I felt a pleasant all over vitality that seemed to originate mostly in my brain and felt like what I would call, a sort of spirit molecule awakening, as though my body was heading into the either and was kind of connecting with all the awareness around me. Towards the end of this first hour though, I started to wonder if this was really happening, or this was just come kind of intellectual concept I was framing my experience in.

Hour two was more challenging. The excitement of starting a meditation retreat was starting to ebb, and I found myself sitting in boredom, restlessness, all the feelings I try as much as possible to avoid during a normal day.  Doubt starting setting in about this path, about this decision. Shouldn't I be doing something more important with my life.  It started to become clear to me how much I really do believe that happiness is a result of staying with the program, the job, the status, the security of a respectable life.  I doubt myself, deeply, because I feel I've permanently fallen off that track, that debt will weigh me down and money problems will win out, and that this is my due.

Hour three I found myself a little happier.  I felt a joy in my heart that I know has very little to do with money or status, and everything to do with my spiritual beliefs.  Nothing wrong with money, an important job, power, status, respectablity, any of those things.  But the joy in my heart that I've cultivated out of my spiritual practice is not something that can be bought, or given as a reward.  It's there because of many, many hours of faith in this energy.  So it felt good to get my faith, the ground of my practice and my power, back.

I broke for a light lunch and did a little reading of Rinpoche's book, and found myself drawn to a passage about Buddah nature as a nugget of gold hidden deep under a mountain of waste and mud. As I set into hour four, I had that story priming my mind, and I felt the energy move down from the joy of my heart to the discomfort of my gut.  As yes, my gut, the mountain of waste in I hide, ignore and forget my most powerful feelings, the most powerful seat of my practice, the dan tien.

Hour five was really about explore the literal, experiential truth of gut wisdom.  This insight is such a flickering fire fly, or so it feels like.  Man I hate resting in my gut.  But it's where the wisdom is, and if I don't accept that, I'm like a banana (or is it a cocoa) tree.  The fruit of my practice gets cut down once a year, and everything has to start again.  If I want my power to have staying power, even though I recognize that the fruits of that staying power will never be permanent, I need to really root myself back in my tan tien.

I need to keep working on that energy.

For mysef, and for everyone who might be open to this teaching.

Sinking into my gut

I've spent a long time, during this process of letting my energy sink, resting in my heart. There is so much numbness in there, so much work that still needs to be done,  that I haven't wanted to leave. Yesterday I had an emotional/physical insight into hatred.  I could feel a layer of hatred in my heart, and then underneath, in an actual physical place, I could feel the desire to be free of that hatred.  I could feel that desire to be free, my compassion, in a place deeper.  And that's when I knew that the hatred would never last.  Things sink, and one day that hatred would simply dissolve into my much deeper desire to be free of it. I would like to continue this project of mapping out the heart.  Locating feelings, especially the positive ones when I feel them. And perhaps I will.
  But I sense that my heart is telling me it's time to move on, and move down my body into my tan tien. Moving down into this place feels like a rooting process.  I'm allowing this energy of an open heart to now move down my body into the earth of my liver, of my lower body. That's where the blocks dissolve, that's wear the toxins get cleansed. I'm going to take my time.  I'm going to take it slow.  Resting in my Tan Tien is a very intense experience.  Alot of feelings will emerge.
  But here lies wisdom.

The immutable calm and power of the tan tien

There are so many experiences I am grateful for this morning it`s hard to know where to start.

I`ll start with the most recent and perhaps from that I`ll find the energy to move back.  I`m sitting here this morning with a full belly of calm and vitality.  About ten minutes ago I felt the right side of my tan tien open up and the warm vitality begin to flow like water.  Earlier in my practice I felt the urge to concentrate my energy there, like a ball of sun.  Like the shining pink sun of dawn over the pond at Fortunes Rocks.

I felt solid.  Like there was this solid core of stored energy that would last all my life.

No let`s switch that. I knew I was solid. I knew there was a solid core of energy that would last me all my life. I knew this. I was grateful for it.

I knew that this was happiness. That it was mine to have and to give, and that I would have access to this for every day of the rest of my life. I might lose my way, but I would inevitably find my way back.

With this knowledge of happiness, it is inevitable that I will find the outside circumstances to support it.   The community of people who know this happiness to be true. The resources to live in a decent home, eat good healthy food and have leisure activities that energize me instead of drain me.

With this knowledge of happiness, I have an entirely different sense of self. The self that I felt at the end of the 10K I ran yesterday. With little training, I was able to hook into a web of energy in the last 3K. I felt people pulling me towards the end. I was running fast and effortlessly harnessed to this communal energy.  I was a node in the universal energy that propels us all towards joy, and healthy and wisdom.

I am privileged and deeply grateful for these experiences and this life.

Now I let this calm flow into the more conditioned channels of happiness, the urge to keep a clean house, the vision and confidence to keep the flow of money happening. To clear up my debt and see this power and energy expressed as the usual markers of happiness. To express and use my creativity towards the books that will help people unleash their own power.

May all of our wisdom shine together like the morning sun.

The Pulse

This morning of a full moon I had an interesting stand.  For the last couple of days I've been feeling a fluttering just outside my gut.  Almost as though a bird where trapped in porous concrete and I was feeling the brush of wings. Then this morning that fluttering turned into a pulsing energy to the right of my gut that felt like a separate entity.  I can still feel it if I stay still.  It's as though I can now feel the pulse of my gut in the same way I would feel the pulse in my wrist or my neck.  That feeling that assures you that your heart is beating without your conscious effort like a separate entity from your brain.

Now what?

I dunno.  I'll keep you posted.

Cleanse

Today I'm on day 2 of a dietary cleanse.  I'm cutting out sugar, alcohol, caffeine, gluten, and animal meat for at least a week.  Maybe longer if I feel inspired.  I'm doing this mostly because I've accepted  in the last few weeks how much my poor eating habits affect my morning practice.  I hope this tan tien energy that I want to build, and make a permanent core in my body,  would be much stronger if there weren't so much sludge for my liver to deal with every evening.
   I started yesterday and began immediately to feel the effects of my caffeine addiction and whatever else it is that I can't seem to stop myself from consuming. I literally felt the same way I used to feel back when I was routinely trying to quit smoking.  I felt all these toxins in my body fighting to stay alive. I felt dirty and headachy.
  Two things helped me quit smoking.  First my tai chi practice made me protective of my breath. And second, I moved.  Not associating cigarettes with my cues in environment made it much easier to quit.
  I'm feeling hopeful that this is the same process that is happening with my food addictions. I'm feeling protective of my gut. And you can't care about your gut and eat and drink things that make it feel lousy.  With my gut in better shape, I hope I'll be able to make better food choices more instinctively. I'm going to be moving in the next months, so this is a good time to set up a new environment.  It would be such a relief to my psyche to be finally liberated from these constant food cravings, in the same way I've been liberated from my nicotine addictions.
 Today though I have to deal with side effects of getting off these things.  I feel less trashy, but there are definitely going to be feelings to deal with.  This morning in practice I could feel the muscle tension.  I didn't know this, but caffeine works by creating muscle tension, so when you get off it, your body needs a lot of time to learn how to relax naturally.
  The other thing I'm feeling is fatigue.  Obviously.  Caffeine keeps the cycle going because fatigue becomes the trigger.  One thing I learned through quitting smoking is to reframe triggers as symptoms.  Fatigue is a symptom of caffeine addiction.  It's not going to go away with more caffeine, it's going to become entrenched.  So today I'm going to have to take it easy, live with the fatigue.  Maybe try and get outside to get some oxygen and whatever natural stimulants I can find.
I don't feel like running, but if I run hopefully I'll sleep better.
  Journaling helps to entrench a positive cycle.  It helped with my smoking.  It will help with my eating.

Patience

I've had some interesting and exciting experiences this week as the energy in my tan tien starts to build.  I've connected with the warm liquid center.  I've felt the pulsating electrical energy outside of myself as a living breathing presence.  I had a moment where all my suffering disappeared and I was just bare awareness of the profound peace and abundance in the world.  And I heard a voice telling me that this was now a permanent part of my life.  This happiness.
  But this morning, just a mundane practice.  The impatience builds, wanting to feel the deep satisfying  state of peace and joy.  The impatience that I am coming to learn is the worst block to my progress.
  Impatience means that my desire is coming from the wrong part of my body.  Mostly the desire is in my head, in some place where I conceptualize what happiness is: a mystical state, a constant permanent state of thriving.  And happiness may very well be these things.  But it's not achieved by conceptualizing.  It's achieved by achieving.  Impatience is the vision becoming more important than the work.
  So I bring the desire down to the core loop in my belly.  This is the place where desire will be most quickly and productively satisfied.  But I resist it because this desire, the place where this desire comes from has been so problematized by my life and the culture I come from.  Real healthy desire feels a lot like sexual desire and in my celibate, single mother life, that desire connects me with a place of sadness, fear and abandonment.
  So I go back to visualizing, rather than feeling what happiness is.  It's safer.  It's more comfortable. And my impatience protects me from having to go back there.
  Babysteps.  The smartest thing to do is to bring my awareness for brief moments, brief sessions to that place again and again.  Don't look for the explosive clearing house, orgasmic moment of revelation and transcendence.  Just get used to living, feeling, wanting from that place.  Regularly, throughout the day.
  The goal is not a mystical experience.  The goal is a mystical life.  A regular, habitual connection to this vital, healing, empowering energy, that I hope to share with as many people as I can.

My Energy Bank

The energy in my Tan Tien is beginning to stabilize. I feel it as a more reliable flow, accessible to me more easily.  Like a bank with a steady flow of money.

This week I had an allegory that served me well.  I imagined that the vitality in my gut was the equivalent of a billion dollars.  A massive amount of energy and power, of security, excitement and freedom that was available to me at any point.  All I had to do was to be aware of it.  Whenever my monkey mind wandered off into another petty, or quotidian obsession, I would equate this with an indifferent decision to walk away from an easy billion dollars.

I will try to frame the decision to practice more like this throughout the week.  I can  watch T.V., another episode of S.U.V. or some really tired, stressful show.  Or I can have my billion dollars and   all the feelings that go with that.  All the feelings of security, of potential for unlimited generosity.  Of unlimited adventure.

It's an interesting exercise, thinking about how to spend this billion dollars.

But the best part is reconnecting with that vitality and confidence that happens when my Tan Tien is full and functional.

Deep comfort, security, well being have never been things I've valued.  Maybe because I've never known them, or known that I had a right to want these things.  Or that there was the possibility of having these things.

I knew that it was possible for other people to have them.  But when I have this deep, core energy, I know that it's possible for me to have it.

I'm aware of what is available to me, this deep, deep peace.

This morning I had the thought that I'm kind of like an energy farmer, cultivating, tending accumulating this energy.

But I kind of like the idea of feeling like an energy banker. Having all this physical and spiritual wealth that I can use for others, to connect them and to enrich their lives.

Okay, maybe that feels a little grandiose.  But the main thing is I want to enjoy 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.

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....