Tai Chi Y2D73: Abs

I’ve been practicing what’s sometimes called the Bellows Breath, which is a rapid filling-and-emptying of the lungs without a pause in between inhale or exhale. It’s a pretty powerful if basic technique, and I find that I can do it while standing or sitting. One of its effects is a thorough clearing of the sinuses, which I need in this season of allergens, but the other is a subtle change in posture over time, and one which I quite like.

The Bellows Breath works the core abdominal muscles. It can’t not work those muscles — they’re central to the act of breathing. The act of tightening and releasing them to work the Bellows causes the body’s core to stand a certain way — it straightens the spinal column and ‘compacts’ the body in a sense (it also puts pressure on the intestines —stay near the bathroom!).

So, abdominal core exercises plus oxygen plus spine-straightening… huh. I wonder what could happen when that gets fused with qi gong…?

Oh, right. Chi.

So,the shortform explanation of chi is that it’s life force. That’s a simplistic explanation, but sure… go with it for now because it’s a busy Friday with all the usual Friday goings-on. When one first start s practicing tai chi, it’s easy to feel it. One lives cheek by jowl with it for months, because the channels for it in your body haven’t ever had to open up this much to the energy, and so the sensation is quite electric. Then, as your body stretches its capacity, the channels widen up, and you have to work harder and harder to feel chi moving through your body. And this is disappointing to many practitioners, because the chi-sensation is proof that you’re doing it correctly, right? Except that sensation goes away, and is replaced by …. Ordinary body sensations. Ho hum. Boring. Where did the magical energy sensation inside of me go? What happened?

But that’s just it. Your capacity to move and store energy and project energy hasn’t gone away. It’s just that the channels for that energy have been carved a little wider and a little deeper. you’ve gone from being a faulty wire installed in 1912 by a rogue electrician to a glittering new power cable thicker than a baby’s arm. The trickle charge you could barely handle before is now a broad stream of current. You have to really push yourself to feel the magical sensation of chi in your body, because that sensation is the body accepting in more chi than it currently can handle.

So, yeah… I’ve been triggering more than I can handle, and I felt that today. Even now, half an hour later, I have tingling in my feet and fingers suggesting hat I haven’t shed all I took in. It’s dissipating, but slowly. And I think it’s going to be ok. But this is how one finds new levels of practice, I think — challenge some part of your body to put out more effort than usual, and see how your regular routine is challenged by that search. You wind up working more than just your abs. .

The Dodecahedron

I haven’t done a Maker’s Grimoire exercise in a while, and it’s sort of time.  I’m a big fan of paper-prototyping, first of all, and second of all I’m fascinated by the Platonic Solids.  Once upon a time, a student’s understanding of geometry would be rooted in the study of the polygons first of all, and then in the polyhedrons which could result from those shapes… including this one.  Plus, I’m fascinated by Rosicrucian-Vault’s wooden dodecahedron how-to.  But I don’t want to build one in wood before I’m really confident of my construction abilities in wood.  On the other hand, I understand paper quite well. So much so that I drew up a Dodecahedron template in Pages (which is a word processor. No way should it be used for graphic design. Really!)  And then I added some tabs to that pentagon, and made a template. Print out twelve templates on colored cardstock, and you too can build a dodecahedron… and you can do it right, with three yellow faces, three blue faces, three green faces and three red faces, and label them with the months of the year or the Zodiac signs and so on.

First, of course, you’re going to take three of the cut-out pentagons, and assemble them. As you do so, you’re going to wind up with a structure rather like this — a trio of weird flaps glued together in a weird star formation, like this.  Don’t worry.  It gets better, just not right away.  Once you add in a fourth pentagon, you have something that looks more like a university chorus stage performance, with those odd sound baffles behind the risers so that all the choristers can see the conductor.

You keep adding pentagonal panels to your model, and glue them in place (or use tape, but tape is wonky — use glue.) Gradually, your structure begins to be oddly sphere-shaped, but not sphere-shaped.   And at this point, things begin to get tricky.

See, the template I made has three flaps attached to the sides of the pentagon.  Which is awesome, really.  And most of the time, it’s fine.  But once things reach this point in the construction,  sometimes one of those flaps has to be cut off. But it has to be the right flap.  Which means doing a bit of fitting and second-guessing before it all gets assembled correctly.

So… this is how the pieces look as you’re fitting them together, and figuring out which foldable tabs need to stay attached, and which ones need to be cut off.  As a general rule, only cut one tab off at a time — because they’re hard to re-attached, and relatively easy to leave on until the last minute.  Gluing and fitting the last two or three panels into place is a tricky job… Do the pre-fitting first.

You will get a fairly large dodecagon out of this. It isn’t a small sphere — it’s large enough for some children to throw back and forth as if it were a dodge-ball… though of course it isn’t one of those. Here’s one of them with several common objects alongside to show scale.

 

And that’s how you build  a dodecahedron big enough to play dodge-ball with.  Of course, there are real mathematical advantages which come from a study of the Platonic solids. They raise questions about area and volume, about points and vertices, and edges and all kinds of mysterious questions which are not easily answerable.  It’s practical usefulness is less clear.  I suppose the inside of this thing could have been taped, and the thing filled with sand as a doorstop… but it would need some rigidity to accomplish that, I think.

But there’s also the benefit of teaching kids to work with sharp tools like scissors or knives, and cut out precise shapes and glue them together. They’re going to want to build clear, obvious and beautiful models… and they can’t do that with those dull, unsharpened scissors with blunted tips. These are not the sort of models that can be assembled slapdash.  There’s an art here…

Tai Chi Y2D72: Be Bored

OK, so maybe this is counterintuitive.  And maybe it’s wrong advice.  But it’s hard to know for sure until it’s had a chance to work itself out.

And that is, that it’s OK to be bored with your tai chi practice for a while.  I am with mine.

I take that back.  I’m not bored with the practice.  I’m bored with writing about the practice.  And that’s a completely different thing.  Maybe.  The thing is, a physical-mental discipline like tai chi is intended to shut down the verbal centers of the brain, or at least render them dormant.  It’s supposed to become difficult to talk about what happens in Tai Chi, because the parts of the brain that know how to talk and write are being gradually trained to quiet down and not talk through the process.  And that makes figuring out what to write about, rather challenging.

Take this morning.  I got up. I did the work.

Let me break that down for you further:  I got up.  I went to the bathroom.  I went to do tai chi.  I got distracted by a small project in balsawood that is designed to replicate the structure, if not quite the function, of a Japanese tool box.   Accordingly I worked on this for almost all the time that I was supposed to be doing the first form.  Ooops.

I stopped working on the box, and I got up and I did the first qi gong form.  So far so good.  Then I realized that my office desk was dirty and I started straightening that out, and putting things away.  Then I realized, wow, I’m running out of time this morning.  Then I did the tai chi form, skipping my second qi gong form because I’d frittered away the time doing the wrong activity.

And it wasn’t until late in the morning that I was able to get back to regular work, and do the second qi gong form.

But explaining all that is ceasing to be interesting to me.  And I think it’s ceasing to be interesting to all of you.  So I’m saying, I think it’s OK that the story of the work is boring — it often is.  The question is, can the work teach you to be exciting and interesting in other areas and other ways?  And if the answer is yes, then maybe it’s OK to be boring, and to focus on the areas of your life which are arousing your excitement and interest.

Just remember that the boring bits have to be there too, from time to time.

Tai Chi Y2D71: Early Start

I knew I had an early morning meeting this morning, so I  tried to push back the start of my at-home day by getting up earlier.  No dice.  I woke at my regular time to the blaring alarm, and had to rush my tai chi routine, my morning routine, to get to my meeting on time.

Once routines are set, it’s awfully hard to adjust them, particularly when it comes to daily practice.  I imagine it would take me almost as long to re-adjust my schedule, as it took to adjust it in the first place.

 

Tai Chi Y2D70: working

I worked through the three forms this morning, as usual. They’re not getting easier, nor harder. Plateau, I guess. How does one move on from here? Keep working at it, I guess.

I started another painting, having finished “Black Pillar” and”White Pillar” last night. Scott and I were chat ting via Facebook occasionally, as I put some layers of shiny satin glaze over parts of both paintings. They look pretty cool, if I say so myself. Maybe I should have an art exhibit? Perhaps not yet.

Tai Chi Y2D69: running late

Had a lot of trouble getting up this morning, though I had few excuses for it. I spent a lot of Sunday in bed, resting and taking care of a sore throat, which appears to have quit overnight. Thank goodness. Bed rest and liquids matter!

But it meant that tai chi seemed like a luxury I could not afford this morning. I woke, and hit the snooze button on the alarm clock far too many times. When I finally did get up to do tai chi, it was rushed, rather than leisurely. And yet, now that it’s done, I realize (for today) that it’s not a luxury but a necessity.

In Progress: “Black Pillar”

I’m almost done with this second painting in the “black pillar” and “white pillar” series. I’ve put a coat of varnish on the inside/right side of the painting, so it will have a bit of a sheen or glimmer to it. I plan to do the same to the “White Pillar” too. I still haven’t decided if either painting needs any texts around time. My original thought was no, now I’m leaning toward “yes”, which means picking those texts and a contrasting color to paint them in.