Experiment: Holy art Thou

There’s a text in the Golden Dawn rituals that’s always struck me.  It seems to be based, in part, on a Corpus Hermeticum text from the first through third centuries AD, and it goes like this:

Holy art thou, Lord of the Universe,
Holy art thou whom nature hath not formed,
Holy art thou, vast and mighty one,
Lord of the Light and of the Darkness.

This song has been rattling around in my head for a few days, so I recorded it, and now you have access to it through my Tumblr account.  Enjoy, and I hope it’s useful to me.  Mostly, I’m hoping that recording it, and putting it out there, will make it possible for me to go back to doing things like writing exams and reviewing homework.

Update: I hadn’t realized this until just now, but this is my two thousand six hundredth post (2,600 posts!). And a couple of days of visitors like the last two, and I’ll hit 50,000 readers/visitors during all-time visits, about two weeks earlier than I expected…

Taiji Day 74: Use Your Flanks

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/science/a-mathematical-challenge-to-obesity.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

Found an interesting article at the New York Times today, about how obesity may be linked to the amount of food we have available to us as Americans:  food is so overproduced, and so cheap (for us) that we consume much more of it than we would under other circumstances.  The article also suggests that I’m going to have to do taiji far longer than 75 days in a row to see much of a body change.

That said, I know that doing the work daily is helping quite a lot. I feel better, and healthier.  I stay calmer, longer, and I manage stress better (although the end of the school year freak-out is coming on strong… too much to do, not enough time, not enough sociability in my calendar to make me feel good, and my house is getting to be a mess).  I eat better, knowing that I am working on the “whole me”, than I would if I was just lazing around.

Today’s reminder is to use your flanks. These are the muscles along the sides of your ribcage: not the abdominal muscles which have their own work to do, but the muscles on the sides of your body, from armpit to hipbone.  These generate a lot of power on the twist, and you must learn to activate and use that power.  It takes some time.  Your shoulders so often do this work instead, you may want to twist higher up on the body than the waist…. Resist that urge. Turn at the waist and hips, and use your flank muscles.  You will thank me later…

Once you get over the mild soreness.  Ouch.