mid afternoon mania

Ah...now I know why I don't actually devote four hours a day to meditation. It's not necessarily that I don't want to. But when I start cultivating that good feeling a little too fast, I find my brain getting a little manic. Visions of filling the world with inspiration and wellness. Writing the Eat, Pray, Love of Zhan Zhuang. All my career and financial anxiety disappearing and narcissistic dreams come true. Next thing you know I'm talking to Oprah while I do the dishes.

Better to take it slow. Keep the afternoon meditations down to twenty minutes. Just enough to boost the good feeling of the morning med....Med, meditation, interesting slip.

Belly ball of well being

this morning I watched Mathieu Ricard give a speech a google on how to change your brain by changing your mind.
I've seen him give a shorter version of this speech as a Ted Talk. In fact that Ted speech which I watched a few weeks ago is what has motivated me to come back to this practice. I do believe that well-being is something that we can and should cultivate. And once we've cultivated it we must help others cultivate it.
So after I watched the speech I took a half hour to cultivate the pleasant energy that is begining to tickle my tan tien again. The tan tien is of course that part of your gut that fills with chi as you practice any of the chi based martial arts. For now though I'm going to all it my belly ball. I need to give it something concrete so that I come back to it everyday and throughout the day.
Ricard's speech brought to my attention again, how much love really is a skill that we need to cultivate. Not just a feeling that we should allow to come and go as it pleases. I found myself starting to take the words of the traditional lovingkindness meditation and turning it towards my belly ball. Sort of like "may my belly ball fill with a sense of well being", may I have this sense of well being available to me at all times.
And as I started to imagine my life with a feeling, a conceret physical feeling of joy and well being, I started to think of all those people struggling through life without that (myself included). Of course I want that for everyone. If we could have free happiness for ourselves, how could we not want that for everyone. How could we want to hoard it?

silence between thoughts

I have done this before. And when I did I gradually got to the point where the silence imprinted itself on my brain well enough that it became a presence throughout the day that would interrupt my thoughts.

Today as I stand here, the silence greets me like an old lover. Something I've known for a long time. Something unconditional that I have turned my back on. I don't know why. Why would I want to live without this silence, so gentle, so nurturing, so strong.

It's strength will become my strength. And my strength, I hope, will be a source of strength for others.

The fragrance of scattered maple leaves

Hit by the first rays of Indian summer.

Just that. One of the most perfect smells in the world.

return to standing

Fifty minutes of standing. One of the things that's difficult is that I'm conscious of how much tension and stress I've allowed to build up in my body. I feel the first pings of chi in Tan tien, a kind of cool carbonated feeling for now. I hit stretches where my body feels suspended by magnetic energy and I know that this energy will grow and that my body will eventually surrender to it. I then I won't think of it as "the energy." I'll be the energy. I'll just be floating there in the energy.
But I'm not there yet because I got caught up in other things for a day, a month, a year.
I'm back now. This time I will religious record all the good.
But there is sacrifice in doing that. I can feel the writing going on in my brain. I can taste the anxiety of striving in my body. I really can literally taste it, a metalic buzzing feeling, kind of nauseating fear that wants the good feeling so desperately.
I need to be patient and stand and record and stand and record and just do that and see what happens.
But I feel more confident and strong than I have in a while. That's because I'm connected to the strength of the universe, I guess.

Writing to improve well being

Read something interesting this morning. Alice Brand did a psychological study in which there is evidence that writing accentuated positive emotions and blunted negative ones.

So if I'm writing every morning and recording my progress, my good feelings while I do this practice, am I solidifying them? And will this help others?

I feel in some ways that I'm collecting these feelings, kind of like an elixir.

What will that do to my brain?

Is standing a technology?

I read something yesterday that hit me hard. Writing is after all just another technology.

uh oh...my son is up. Will have to stop writing for a bit.

Socrates was worried about the effects on memory that writing would have. Plato disregarded those fears by writing down his teachers conversations. Writing was to the Greeks in some way, what video games are to our era.

And in the same way that video changes the brain, so does writing. It can slow down our thought. It can help us remember. But it can also lie in a way that oral culture couldn't, or couldn't accomplish as successfully.

So, just for the sake playing with this idea. Is standing a technology? I mean I am cultivating energy and electricity, the same way any conductor does. Maybe it's an ancient technology that we've lost. It is a technology that brings power to our body and to our brain. It is a technology of consciousness.

We look to technology to bring us wellbeing. This is another way of bringing us that wellbeing. The question is also, perhaps, is it a better technology for bringing us what we really want? If what we really want is peace, well being, freedom, creativity, health, then this may very well be a more successful technology, than anything we've ever invented.