day 42: T’ai chi to the rescue, again

Watching my moods darken over the past week or so, and feeling my shoulders tense and back ache from the constant face mask production, it suddenly (duh) hit me: I had stopped exercising and doing T’ai chi for a few days, and was re-entering my old way of being, focused entirely on work work work, and worries about what other people think or do. Ugh.

So I started again, and yesterday was day two of my once-habitual 90-minute workout (a series of core stretches followed by the Form, now practiced on the deck in my backyard, surrounded by hummingbirds and a friendly big dog who keeps bringing squeaky toys for me to throw, while I stand on one leg and smile).

what a difference!  Now, I hate all that cheerful blather about exercise as much as you do, so I’ll not belabor the point. I’ll just mention one tip from a favorite book: “it is imperative we keep our attention on the feet, legs, and pelvis, and use the force of gravity to source and manipulate our movement.”  (Ralston, Principles of Effortless Power, p. 15).

That’s what doing T’ai chi does for me: lowers the center of gravity, tightens the core, and pushes away non-essential thoughts… what remains is only love, and lots of it.

Here’s wishing you a day of effortless power too!

And here is yesterday’s face mask production, fyi:

 

Advertisement

avoiding eye contact for mental health and energy

This title sounds strange, yes. But I was moved to write in defense of deference by two things: 1) my recent experience doing T’ai chi at the Seattle Kung Fu Club; and 2) an article in the New York Times, “How to Meet Autistic People Halfway”.

It has been a dream come true to discover the Seattle Kung Fu Club and to become a student of Sifu John S.S. Leong and Sijeh Paula.* The exercises are rigorous and hard; it is not really fun, let alone for 90 minutes. But in that room, surrounded by symbols telling the history of the art and a great sense of human dignity and discipline, you are inspired. Paradoxically, it is a place bursting with concentration where it is very difficult to concentrate. People on the Kung Fu side of the studio are loud, dramatic, and fascinating! People on the T’ai chi side of the studio are practically silent, but they move around in fluid and overlapping ways. You have to remain aware of what is going on so you don’t get in the way.

During these times, I think always of the Zen saying, “Just Don’t Wobble!” But it is hard, and avoiding eye contact is imperative for me, so I don’t wobble and fall down off the one leg where I’m standing with knee outstretched,  or tip over from a stretched-out stance near the floor. When I read yesterday’s article which explains how autistic people use similar avoidance strategies, a faint insight emerged.

People engaged in the intense mental effort of T’ai chi, which requires extremely precise actions executed slowly, are accustomed to avoid eye contact with each other. I guess the eyes are too powerful a force of …   what exactly? Energy? emotion? intention? impenetrability? All I know is that looking into someone’s eyes can make you lose your balance and wobble. No need to apologize. We just don’t do it.

Similarly, perhaps, autistic people must work really hard to stay focused and mentally balanced. It is curious to learn how they articulate and express the reasons why they avoid other people’s eyes. In the New York Times article, psychologists Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar write, “Take eye contact. Some autistic people say they find sustained eye contact uncomfortable or even painful. Others report that it’s hard to concentrate on what someone is saying while simultaneously looking at them. In other words, not looking someone in the eye may indicate that an autistic person is trying very hard to participate in the conversation at hand. Unfortunately, this attempt to engage often gets interpreted as a lack of interest.”**

Martial artist Peter Ralston explains the psycho-physical dynamic going on in eye contact avoidance. For him, as a proponent of the inner arts, an inner focus is the key way to remain aligned with your center, grounded in the present. Since we are constantly in situation, we need to be flexible to sustain unity. “Keep a balance of awareness on all sides. Whenever we focus a lot of energy outward (energy extension), that flow should be balanced by centering and grounding our feeling-attention.”***

Along with Susan Cain’s feisty defense of introversion, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, which was a revelation and continues to be a source of sustenance to my gentle spirit, the work of Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar seems intriguing and worth pursuing too. We are all on a spectrum of some kind, as regards our social preferences and patterns of behavior. The more we realize and respect people whose ways of being are different from our own, the more peaceful our lives will become.

*Honorary terms for Teacher and Senior Student Teacher; on terms in T’ai chi, http://www.authentickungfu.com/seven_star/explanations.html

**Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar, “Opinion: How to Meet Autistic People Halfway,” New York Times July 13, 2018.

***Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, 97.

 

day three: inaction in action

Another delightful paradox of preparing for a move: some days, all you need to do is to continue doing what you are doing. Nothing more is required.

As our agent wrote yesterday in response to last week’s house inspection, “So nothing to do now.”

This message reverberated with me deeply and made me feel very peaceful. I love it when someone tells me to do nothing!

(Now that I think of it, people have been trying to tell me this for some time: witness the black plastic wu-wei bracelet I’ve been wearing since a wise friend gave it to me back in February. Boy, can we humans be slow to catch on.)

It is all about responding appropriately to life’s events, instead of thrashing out blindly in fear and self-protection.

I read and pondered this while practicing today’s 30-minute standing meditation (part of the morning routine):

“The essence of the distinction between these two lies mostly in the quality and state of mind. If an action is free from fear and obsessive desire (and I do not mean free from feeling fear or having desire; I mean not bound to, motivated by, or influenced by them), and receptive to the real condition; and most importantly, if the mind and energy are not disturbed or disrupted in any way by the stimulus that calls for action; then it is responsive. Thus, if the stimulus does not call for action, no action is taken; whereas a reaction occurs whether action is called for or not.”

“Maintaining this condition of relaxed balance and postural integration is as delicate as it is effective.”*

If this all sounds too cerebral or abstract for you, try a living experiment instead. Stand up, put your feet together so that your heels touch, and bend your knees so they feel springy like in a jack-in-the-box. Put your feet at 90 degrees to each other, with your tail bone tucked under your spine. Feel your spine click into comfort. Hold that posture for a while.

(As per the advice of T’ai chi Master Peng, I do this while looking out a window every morning for 30 minutes. Although this is much less than the three hours he does each day, it has had miraculous effects on my balance, hip-joints, and all-around sense of well-being.)

As you stand, you will feel your balance shifting back and forth between your feet and legs. You will realize it is a continual movement that keeps you upright. You are always doing that thing; you are always staying upright! So give yourself some credit for that. Let your role in life slide into observing instead acting, when it is appropriate.

* Peter Ralston, Principles of Effortless Power, 48.

 

On health (and pharmaceuticals), calm, and joy’s return (no matter what he says)

Hi,

Well, this has been another tiring week, with much grading of papers and intensive course preparation as we begin the final stretch to the end of spring semester. (Three more weeks of ND and 76 days til SEA!) More showings of the house and cleaning loom on the horizon. An annual check-up I was looking forward to, since I’m feeling so good these days, became a startling event when an unexpected symptom was brought to my attention. Inspired by the recent New York Times article on anti-depressants by Benedict Carey and Robert Gebeloff, and my own desire to “get back to normal,” I had already convinced my doctor to slash my prescriptions so that instead of taking three pills a night (two typical “women’s pills” and one anti-depressant), I take one-half of one anti-depressant. Now I’m on a strict diet also and who knows how “withdrawal” from those medications will go? Grading and prepping took all my time, so that I did not even do the morning routine yesterday. Friends I’ve spoken to have revealed more scary health events—kidney, back, and eye problems. (Old people problems! Yikes what does that mean?) And my right hip has been hurting for the past two days, plus my sinuses were acting up. I was feeling old, apprehensive, and blah.

Those were my thoughts before the morning routine.

As I settled in, I picked up a book I love and read a passage about “Being Calm—The Presence of Being.” I’ve pasted it below for you.

Gazing out the window of the sunroom, with my heels touching and feet at 90 degree angles, my back straight and spine crackling nicely back into place, I let go of all that busy thinking and just looked. The sky was blue with puffy white clouds. A few cars drove by; no radios were blasting and there were no train whistles or sirens in the air. But there was so much bird activity! I saw cardinals, robins, sparrows, and a crow.

A bright red male cardinal made my heart soar with his beautiful song, but when I tried to take his picture, he hopped higher and higher up in the tree. See him way up on that dead branch?

Later, a female cardinal showed up in a bush nearby. Last thing I saw of them, they were flying rapidly around the neighbors’ yards, him behind her.  They were pretty to watch, fluttering up and down in currents of who knows what emotion or feelings. Whatever it was, it looked exciting and fun!  (or maybe not. Maybe he was over-aggressive or creepy, and she was trying to get away. Now I see him way up in that tree again, alone.)

Suddenly, a sparrow flew up and I realized that other forms of life were right at hand: they built a nest right outside the window!

When the 30 minutes were up, my hip still hurt a little (T’ai chi should fix that). As for my mind, it feels all better.

P.S.  On what happened next.  Inspired by the happy feelings, I decided to give away one of my  “Spring Yellow Plaid” Honey Girl pillows to a young man who does carpentry work for us—who was just in the hospital for a serious operation. Since Rich works most closely with the workmen here, I went downstairs to see him and tell him my idea.

He immediately looked down, shook his head, and said, “I don’t think so. He’s not the kind of guy… blablabla negative negative negative.” I smiled and said, “But Rich, have you seen the way he looks at Honey Girl? How he talks to her?  He calls her Woofie Girl. He made a cement plaque for her in the backyard…”

But he just shook his head, looked down, and went shuffling off to do the crossword puzzle. That is a typical exchange between us. It used to bug me a lot and could even drive me to despair and great loneliness. But as you can see on the “Happy Clients” page of my fledgling business, I have learned to take his advice with a grain of salt (or not at all)! Typically, when he tells me not to do something kind and generous, I do it anyway.

And so I just turned away, saying in a pleasant, non-angry voice, “Well that’s ok. You don’t have to be involved. It makes me happy, so I’m going to do it.”

And now I am smiling again, looking forward to another good day. As Rousseau once wrote, “You must be happy.”  And as a long-lost fortune cookie added: “Don’t stop now!”

 

The text from Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power pp. 5-6:

BEING CALM—THE PRESENCE OF BEING

Sometimes we experience what we call “being calm.” It is thought of as a state of mind in which all the activity of mind is clear, at ease, and undisturbed. How this comes about is usually unknown to us; however, it is conventionally attributed to “self-control” and so we take credit for it. When I speak of calming the activity that we call “mind,” it is not to support the manifold assumptions that exist as mind, but to point to a principle that appears in the presence of what we’re calling “calm.” Being calm appears when our internal activity is aligned with the principle for which this is so. This principle seems tied to the presence of being, in which the mere presence of being is allowed to be, regardless of how it appears. In this, being is experienced without preference or aversion, no matter the form. What is the principle in which this is the case?

When the activity that occurs as mind is distorted into a form in which that activity appears to be disturbed or unsettled, it is often rejected and held as something wrong, something to be avoided. This relationship to what is apparently already occurring immediately severs us from the activity itself, putting us in the position of “fixer” rather than one of simply being. This occurs the moment we first ascertain that we are not calm. From this position we are not in the best place to correct this malady, should we hold that it needs fixing, and so a struggle ensues to find and move to a place in which the disturbance can be corrected. This way of holding calm makes calm almost inaccessible.

Being calm is essential to all that we do. Having a calm mind doesn’t depend on appearance. It doesn’t depend on situations. It is more powerful to see calmness not as something that we have to force into being, but as something already existing, or simply as a quality of being in which we can abide, something to be fallen into or uncovered. It can be held as a base or context to those qualities that we call non-calm, or different from calm. Thus we can see attaining calmness not as something that we do, like jumping from one item to another, but as a shift into the sea in which all things float.

It is our tendency toward constant reactivity that reveals to us the power of stillness.

[…]

By holding calm in the way suggested here, we can simply not “do” those things. … instead of trying to make those things disappear, we can simply let them be, not feed them energy and attention, and let them float in the base that we now call being calm. It is from this principle that we can be responsive and clear.

• Peter Ralston, Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, pp. 5-6.