commitment

Feeling the struggle with commitment. Back to my seeing the ball exercise. And the insight I have today is to remember that this energy is committed to me. My job is not to commit to it, but to open up to its commitment to me. Such a hard thing to do. Much harder it seems sometimes than an act of will. To just be and allow the will of this energy to direct me.

I have a lot of work and a lot of responsibility coming up in the next weeks. A cover for Quill and Quire, sending Ben to Israel as he finishes school. My So You Think You Can Dance Updates. I'm worried that I'm going to let this practice go, right when I really need to be stepping it up so that I can make better decisions.

Writing helps me with opening up to commitment. The words form their own path for me.

The Ball

I'm feeling this week as though I'm in danger of drifting out of my practice.

Today I made it through half an hour. My mind is distracteded, and stressed. Argument with my son. Feeling mildly deranged.

The last couple of days I've been concentrating on the ball I hold to my chest. This focus started last week after my son had a session with his occupational therapist. They went to the park so Ben could show her the climbing course he's been mastering, a circuit of ropes, spiderwebs, bridges and other climbing challenges. She advised him that he should be concentrating on his hands and feet. Really looking at them, really looking at where they are and what they are doing in all of his activities.

I've been following this advice myself. Really looking at my hands in my practice when I'm holding the ball. I can feel this ball of magnetic energy, but right now I'm really focussing on trying to see it. Sometimes I can see what looks like waves. Mostly I see into the ball metaphorically.

This ball is like a ball of pure nurturing energy. It attaches to my heart and sends energy through that into the other areas of my body and into my brain. I can feel it, as though I'm hugging the universe.

Today this ball felt as real and as permanent as a rock. I began to see myself as a seeriels of polished boulders, sitting easily one upon the other. I felt that in time this energy would make a permanent change in my brain. Taking away this drifting addiction I seem to have to stress. Removing, making inactive all those circuits in my brain that lead me to unecessary, addictive stress. I could feel, really feel in my body the possibility that one day I could wake up and this commitment would not be such an act of will. But simply the way my brain now works.

Wouldn't that be good?

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.

electric sea

Today I got it. A shift like learning to swim. I got that there was a lot of unecessary muscular pain in my body because I hadn't yet accepted, physically, that I was floating, not standing. When it hit me that what I was doing was closer to floating than standing, it was easier to let go of muscular tension.
But instead of water I feel surrounded by a sea of thick magnetic electricity. My arms held up at shoulder level, palms facing my face, are supported by this electricity, not by my muscles. When I accept this I let go of all the things about self that I think I need, muscular and intellectual control. Better to let the electricity do my standing and my thinking for me.
Does this mean that I'm not thinking? No. If I'm not conscious of my breathing, does that mean I'm not breathing. No my mind is thinking at another level. I have to remember that my brain knows how to do this without my guidance. My brain knows how to breathe. It also knows how to connect with the electrical field that is my birthright.
This is what is hard about getting there. Relaxing and allowing the bliss to happen. The bliss reminds me of other bliss. Bliss that has more often than not led to heartbreak and abandonment. This will not happen with this bliss. This bliss is always available to me. So available that I may eventually lose interest in it and just be happy to simply be. Something that my brain does know how to do if I give it a chance.

disappearing parts

So I've managed to maintain my one hour practice through a snowstorm with a seven year old. I disappear into my room with my ipod and let him play football on his Playstation.
Yesterday I felt parts of my body disappear. And then I felt something like a post of energy, or a beam pop up through the vertical center of my body. I've read of this disappearing thing. It was less like disappearing than losing my sense of my body. Like I felt like my shoulder was up near my ear, even though it wasn't, and then I lost any real sense of where the hell my left leg was. It's a little like that book Harold and the Purple Crayon. You feel like parts of you are being erased and redrawn by a different part of your mind.
The trick of course is not freak out, because if you do you'll just end up coming back to the reality that you're used to. That's why the discipline is important, you have to allow different levels of consciousness to feel natural and to feel real. Sometimes I feel like I'm on Star Trek and I'm just waiting patiently to be transported into another dimension, but there's just something a bit rusty about my transporter.
No hurry. I realized today I'm 44. If I keep myself healthy and follow in the genetic footsteps of my father's side of the family, I've got a good 50 years, maybe longer to master this.