Building a bough

I've figured out some things this week.

I've been putting these posts in chronological form so that I can mould this into a book some day, and I'm struck by an insight I had in the first week that really frames this entire adventure.  Post-traumatic sprouts.  This was a phenomenon after the ice storm of '98.  The worst storm in Canadian history. The ice was so strong and so thick that many trees lost major boughs.  In subsequent years, sprouts would appear, but they weren't strong enough for life as a major bough. Rot would set in and they would die.

I grew up in a place of trauma.  My father was an alcoholic. His father a child who had to bear the entire weight of his father, the son of a single mother in Portsmouth, and WW1 veteran who never successfully reintegrated with the family on his return from arguably the worst war in the history of humanity.  My mother the daughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant mother who never said the words "I love you" her entire life, and a loving, but spoilt Glaswegian.

My parents marriage was an ice storm that is still going on.

Some days I feel like a trunk with spindly branches and rotting sprouts that never make it into branches.  But some days, I recognize one bough that is strong enough to support a lot of aborted growth: my meditation practice.  And on another day, I recognize another bough: my writing practice.

I'm reading a fascinating book right now, How Emotions are Made.  The theory, and it's a good one, is that our bodies are in a constant state of flux that is the interaction of Valence, the pleasure/displeasure values, and Affect, the calm/arousal values.  Low arousal and pleasure, for instance is a state of serenity.  High arousal and pleasure is elation.  Medium pleasant is gratitude.  High arousal and displeasure is distress.  Low arousal is depression.  Medium unpleasant is garden variety misery.

Graphing my meditation practice to this, I realize that sitting meditation puts me in low arousal.  Standing puts me in high.  I did both this morning and I can clearly see the difference. I can feel the high arousal that courses through my body.  It's even stronger that walking.

To build some other boughs, healthy eating for example, I need to be able to achieve equanimity within the entire spectrum, because when I'm triggered, I eat.  And I need to stand, because sitting meditation on its own risks keeping me is such a low arousal state that I'm still susceptible to depression.  Another reason I eat.

If I'm going to finally make peace with the hungry ghost that lays waste to every effort at growth that I make, I need to construct a place for both of these practices in my life and nurture this is though my life, and Ben's life, depends on this.  Because it does.

Nurturing Power

Yesterday I completed my second 10K race.  Big difference between this year and last year.  I felt good, I felt strong, mentally and physically.  I ran that race with ease and joy.  I ran that race with power.

Last year, I just ran/walked the race.  I had a good time.  I had a great moment.  But this year was a good moment from beginning to end. So, I've decided to sign up for the half marathon.  I think I'll sign Ben up too. A real adventure for both of us.

What can I do to maintain this power and nurture it so that we can share this great moment next year? Well first I can realize how much I want power.  What do I want more than anything else in the world?  I ask myself this question constantly throughout the day, and I feel like I will never stop asking it until I have the right answer.

The answer is power.  But not in the way that it is usually defined in my society.  When I mean power, I mean this moving energy that keeps me running with ease.  This mixture of body memory and thriving energy. The ability to make myself and help others to be really, truly happy.

This is what I want more than anything in the world.  Real power.  And this is what I want to nurture in myself and in Ben.

After the race I downloaded an app to help me with my training.  It suggested I choose an activity to cross train with.  I decided to make this an opportunity to renew my Zhan Zhuang practice.  I still meditate, but it's been a while since I stood. Really stood.  I'd like to bring standing back into my life and into my running practice.  So at least twice a week I'm going to stand for 40 minutes.  I may stand for shorter times on a daily basis.  Maybe get back to standing as part of my meditation practice.  But it's all about nurturing power.

I forget this again and again and again.  But there's only one way to remember it.  By being powerful. And then power becomes its own habit.

Stillness Saves

Tolle writes that stillness will save the world. I don't know if that is true. But stillness is saving me. Every morning I wake up and stand, stillness grounds me. It builds a hub of awareness in me. If I make a conscious effort to pay attention to the silence and to the post of energy that holds me up, I feel the particular pleasure of stepping out of mental conditioning. If for whatever reason, I forget to do that and start getting lost in my thoughts, stillness is still there working its way through my body, working its way through my psyche. As long as I maintain a strong devotion to stillness, I will lose myself less and less in the things that are weakening me, consumer culture, ego driven careerism, entertainment overload. I will return again and again to that place in me that is a rest from all of that, and in time none of those things will have the power to drive me.

Timelessness

It happened this morning, this timelessness I've read about. I started standing at 6:30, and it was like the next minute I looked up and it was 7:15.

This has much to do with a decision I made yesterday to think of the real me a pure awareness and not this conditioned thinking. To not see meditation as an escape, but to see thought as the escape. This doesn't mean that to be myself I have to spend all day standing. It just means that I need throughout the day to regularly take the time to be still, so that my thoughts serve me rather than drive me.

When I really spent this meditation coming back to my true self, standing quiet, listening to the morning silence, deeply still, all the usual markers of time--boredom, the urges to get back to important thought using tasks--lessened. There was no need for time. There was just now.

An exciting thought

"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks. Tolle believes that stillness will save the world. This is a hard thing for me, child of busy journalist/activist/professor types, to accept. That is might be inaction, not action that will create a better world. But what Tolle says, what he conveys about the excitement of stepping out of conditioning, speaks deeply to the heart of my practice. I have felt those moments, those thrilling moments of stepping out of the flow of habitual belief, routine, buzzing cravings and unhealthy worries. They are what keep me coming back to this again and again.

My Job

It's snowing. A very late Indian summer is officially over. Hanging out with my three willows, feeling the abundance of stillness, I suddenly felt the stab of guilt. Of course I should be working. I have debt to deal with. Private school fees to save for. All that.

But then I felt that sense of paradox that I so often do when I'm standing. Things were so good this morning in our home. Peaceful, playful, everything moving smoothly towards Ben getting off to school. I could feel the consequences of regularly tending to my peace of mind. So it hit me in the park. However rushed, however stressed I am--this is my job. It is my job to plant this field of peace at the beginning of my day. It is my job to nurture the inevitable creativity and physical, mental and spiritual energy this time supplies me with. It's my job to cultivate this and to pass on the skills of this cultivation to my son and to my readers. This is my job and I have deep faith in its rewards and its renumerations.

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.

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.

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.

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.