Getting my Practice back

This is hard. Harder than I thought it would be. So I'm going to start to re-build exactly the way I built this in the first place, five minutes at a time. It's actually part of the Zhan Zhuan discipline to start with baby steps. It's strongly discouraged to strike postures that your body might not be ready for, physically or neurologically. I second that. You can have some pretty intense experiences with this practice that you aren't physically or psychically. Take a challenging stance, like holding the balloon, and do that for five minutes the first week, ten minutes the next, building up to twenty.
Because I've built myself up to an hour before, and had all kinds of trippy peak experience, of course I want to start there. But I'm not. I'm going to pick a time, let's say 8:45, after I've dropped Ben off at the bus stop and do my five minutes this week. I'm going to add five minutes a week. In three months I'll be back to an hour.

How I lost my sap.

I started this blog about a year ago, feeling strong. Feeling like I was hitting a whole new level of consciousness. And then....Here I am a year later. Depleted of energy, knotted with stress, twenty pounds heaver. Here I am, once again, starting from the beginning. Somehow this practice just slipped away. My dedication to the practice just disappeared, after three years of steady commitment. And my life has kind of unraveled with it.

So what happened? Work came my way, money. I don't know, I just got more and more easily distracted every day. Found it harder and harder to just plant my feet on the floor and let the energy do its thing.

I'm happy for this blog now. To be able to look back and remember how strong that force was in me a year ago and to try and find my way back. And who knows. Maybe the process of beginning again will be more helpful to people who are curious about the path and thinking about starting it, than my breathless writing about my success and my peak experiences. As I begin again I can remember what it was like slowly building that energy, and I can reflect on why I keep being drawn back to it. Failure is part of the process. How can I know what I've accomplished, until I've lost all those accomplishments.

This blog can be like that open tai chi class I return to from time to time. Instead of a linear path, this is a circular path that starts in at any point, and anyone reading this can just jump in and start the path with me.

No big drama. Just starting again.

traumatic sprouts

This morning on the cbc I heard a scientist talking about the post traumatic damage to trees that is still going on ten years after the montreal ice storm. So many healthy boughs were frozen and fell off during that storm. Branches grew in their place, but these are tiny branches not quite up to the task of life as a major bough. They are more susceptible to rot, infestation, disease.
And they are much more likely to break off in the winter repeating the cycle again.
This strikes me a great metaphor for the cycle of trying to recover from any kind of psychological trauma. We create these behaviours in reponse to loss and grief and pain because we want to grow, we want to flourish, it's our nature. But they aren't up to the strain of life, so they die, only to be replaced by more behaviours, plans resolutions.
It's a rigged cycle, but we can't just not grow.
Today I had a completely different zhang zhuang experience. Yesterday was all about floating in the ether. But I forgot to mention something. I felt my body re-alligning. I felt and intense growing kind of suffering, almost like the fear and excitement of losing your virginity. It was terrified, but suddenly I felt my body and my psyche re-alligning and I felt my tan tien, felt exactly where it was supposed to be.
When I started practice today, I started from that allignement. But there were problems. This allignment forced a stretch in my spine that brought back memories of major back pain. That memory made me less willing to hold the position. If I disappear, lose self-consciouslness I'm afraid I'll shift in such a way that puts strain on my spine.
So I'm careful. I want to stay close to the new allignment, but I don't want to risk putting too much stretch on my lower back. All of this self-awaress makes the experience much more internal. I feel the energy collecting in my tan tien, like a water baloon holding me in place. I feel a cold energy, which is weird because the literature usually tells you that it's warm. I feel it still, and I also felt a cold energy begining to flow along my lower spine.
It's new growth, I feel it. But I have to protect it. I don't want rot to set in.