Taiji Day 80: Revelations

Of course  I’ll find new possibilities the day after I say I’m not likely to find new revelations for a while.

After Taiji (Form, Golden Coins, Pieces of Silk) this morning, I noticed two muscles that hurt after doing form work.  One was in my lower abdomen — ok, in my large overhanging belly — and the other is in my left hip.  The left hip is where I got hit by the car three decades and more ago. It hurts particularly when I’m doing deep-knee bends or postures like “snake creeps down”.  The lower abdominal muscle is the one which, when it’s tight, causes me to breathe properly, but also just wants to relax.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m doing Rufus Opus‘s course on Hermetics, and part of this work involves summoning spirits, talking to them, and getting insights from what they say back.  (I’m also using Jason Miller’s course on strategic sorcery, but that’s for another day. That’s about figuring out what you want, and going for it using all the means at your disposal, both mundane and magical.) Let me just say, out and in front, that it feels ridiculous to read a bunch of words on a page, play some music, and then act as though the spirit of Kammael the Angel of the planet Mars is present.  That is, it feels ridiculous to write that down, and tell my readers.

On the other hand, actually making the equipment to call up spirits, and then saying the words, and then waving a wand around like you’re Harry Potter, and all… well, you have to pretend the spirit is really there, when you’re doing it.  Even if you don’t quite believe it.  Acting as if the spirit ISN’T there is a bad idea, or stuff gets really messy, really fast.  So I call up Kammael, as I said, and I ask him about these two muscles, the one in my gut and the one in my hip. And Kammael basically says, “yeah, if you fix those two, your taiji practice is really going to take off. So work on those two.  And really work. None of this namby-pamby ‘it hurts’ stuff.”  And then, when I asked, Kammael agreed to assist these two areas in healing.  And they both immediately felt better.

If you think about this from a different perspective, I’d like you to consider what I did without adding in all the mystical woo-woo of summoning an angel.  I sat and meditated while looking at a candle flame through a crystal, and considered the problem of these two pains in my body.  And a part of my brain was able to ‘read’ the pain, and self-assess, and determine that the two actions that were causing the pain — a lazy abdominal muscle and an old injury — both need healing work, and of different kinds. The hip muscle needs to relax and let go; the abdominal muscle needs greater tension. And, having determined what the problem is, my body, in conversation with itself, figured out what to do.

My decades-old injury is relaxed right now.  A belly muscle is tight, and I’m breathing correctly.  Is it the work of my mind, or of an angel?  Is it the revelation of eighty days of practice?  Is it simply a coincidence?

These are complex questions, and they’re not easily answered. Especially when I should be grading papers.

Taiji Day 79: Ordinary Time

This post doesn’t have much meat on it.  I did Five Golden Coins, then the form, then eight pieces of silk.  I’m able to do Eight Pieces of Silk without notes all the way through (though I must admit I don’t do the pieces in the right order yet.  Room for improvement).

The medieval Church acknowledged the season after Pentecost as Ordinary Time — the long period when things had to stay more or less the same. There were no major feasts of the Church, no major fasts, and the expectation was that things would be normal for a while.  So be it.

Taiji has its ordinary time too, one which I’ve been putting off for a few days at least. I’m entering into a season of maintenance, I think, when it will be enough to do the form without talking about it very much.  When the insights return, then I’ll write about them, but otherwise you’ll just see a quick acknowledgement that it was done.

Of course, the mere fact of saying, “no more insights for a while,” may be enough to trigger a new season of insights. So we’ll see.

Taiji Day 78: Outdoors

Taiji outdoors is so very much better than indoors, it’s a wonder that I don’t do it outside more often. It’s a much better quality experience — the ground is uneven, you feel the Sun’s warmth, the tall grass brushes against your legs, you much more aware of whether it’s a fly or a tick that just landed on you, and in general you’re just so much more aware and alert. It leads to a better quality workout. I feel like my flanks and my arms and legs got a better workout, and so did my mind and heart, because I was outside rather than in.

As I’ve noted before, outside has a downside too. Being in the open, in a space you haven’t secured yourself, invites the risk of attack. I remember wearing my taiji jacket to a party on one occasion, and it was just a dress-up occasion, but another guy felt it was ok to put me in in hold — to grab me — because I was a “martial arts dude” in a “real uniform and everything”. Holding
yourself as a martial artist, especially by doing form work in an outdoor place, even your own back yard, invites others to test you.

In the same way, though, just as practicing martial arts outside risks others wanting to test you, so does practicing outside in itself invite the test. You find yourself wanting someone to test yourself against, to be sure you’re practicing in the right way, in a way that will truly prove the effectiveness of all the practice. And that carries the risk that you will ultimately be the one who grabs someone else at a party, “because you’re wearing a martial arts jacket, so you must want to spar, right?”

So. Acknowledge both the benefit and risk of practicing outside, and practice outside whenever you can. At the same time, swear in open ground, under the blazing Sun, that you will not be that guy who invites another to spar, by grabbing them. That’s just rude.

Taiji Day 76: Go Back

Today I left a sequence of the taiji form out.  I reversed through the next few steps I’d done — clumsily, it must be admitted — in order to reach the place where the missing piece should have gone. Then I proceeded forward, as if I were a video tape or a rewind function, to do the pieces that I’d left out the first time around.

I don’t wish readers, especially taiji practitioners, to think that this was graceful. When we train our body to do moves so that they become second nature, it’s difficult to reverse the order.  One has to learn a new flow, rather than stopping and saying, “Now what comes before this?” or “Wait, where do my hands move to next, if I’m going backwards?” or “God that was awful.”

There’s a place where Socrates is talking to a professional rhetor in the dialogues of Plato, and Socrates asks the rhetor to recite from memory a certain passage in the Iliad or the Odyssey.  Being a professional, the rhetor instantly complies, because this is a party trick he knows how to do. He recites the piece as a trained professional does, and then, when Socrates asks him, he stops.

Then Socrates asks a much more difficult question: “what came just before the section you just recited?”

The rhetor cannot answer.  Socrates can.  He gives the previous line, and the line before that, and the line before that, and then rewinds his brain to the point where the rhetor is again able to pick up the thread of the story, and recite the passage which ends with the lines that Socrates was looking for.  The rhetor has been trained to master line-code in the Iliad and Odyssey, but he does not know how to search the whole text in both directions.

I’m more like the rhetor in the story than Socrates. You can tell me where to start, and I can move forward from that point in the form.  But I can’t yet flow in either direction, like Socrates could in his own particular realm.  And in that direction, true mastery lies.

In a slightly different example, yesterday I went to see the Kavad of a Sacred Geometer, a kind of unfolding storyboard, and saw (at a different time) David Kelley’s talk about Creative Confidence. Both examples show what that kind of true mastery can accomplish — a means for non-creative people to become creative, and a cabinet of wonders that can be folded or unfolded in order to reveal the mysteries of the universe.  Taiji, in all its various forms and flows, is kind of like that.

Taiji Day 75: Shuffle the Order

This morning I was able to perform the three elements of taiji forms I know, all from memory — Five Golden Coins, Taiji form, and now Eight Pieces of Silk. Was Eight Pieces entirely correct? No it was not.  But “good enough”?  Yes.  I’m discovering, thanks to the design work at school, and the creative exercises I’m doing for Frater RO’s class (belated birthday shout-out to him!), that I’m OK with “good enough to start” and with “good enough to move on”.  Practice is the thing that makes OK into great, and that means… shuffling the order.

OK, here I am, guy in my early forties (my colleague says I’m actually 105, but since each year working in a middle school reduces your actual age by 5 years, I’m really only 63), doing taiji every day. But if you do the same form, and the same order of moves every day, for years… you stiffen up just the same as if you did nothing.  The reason is that the postures are the same, and you’re doing them the same way. Maybe a little better each day, but you’re not breaking up the tensions that those same moves put on your body, or in the same way.

So vary the order of your elements:

• Taiji, Five Gold Coins, Eight Pieces Silk
• Taij, Eight Pieces Silk, Five Gold Coins
• Five Gold Coins, Eight Pieces Silk, Taiji
• Five Gold Coins, Taiji, Eight pieces silk
• Eight pieces silk, taiji, Five Gold coins
• Eight pieces silk, Five gold coins, taiji…

and so on.

I did the one in italics, above, yesterday, and felt nothing.  Today, I did the one in boldface above, and sweat hard from the results.  The Hermeticist in me notes that there are six possibilities in the list above, but seven is a beautiful number in Hermetics, and it would behoove me to learn one more element for my taiji practice: The Way of Energy, or stillness, as represented in this book. I’ve got the book, I’ve studied it, and it’s damn-hard.  Standing still while your body buzzes with energy like thousands of ants crawling all over you, yikes and wow.  But doing it once a week would bring me to seven, and it feels right…  Maybe for Sundays.

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.

Taiji Day 73: Internal Changes

One of the things I notice after a rather intense (for me) morning taiji session, is that there are internal changes going on long after I’ve stopped doing Snake Creeps Down and Bend the Bow.  Today I did Eight Pieces of Silk first, followed by the taiji form, followed by Five Golden Coins.  When I was done, there were sounds and sensations rather like gurgling in the belly… but not in places where the belly is.  There were tremors in my flanks, as muscles I’d just worked out tried to figure out what their new positions should be.  Or this tremor started up in my left bicep that didn’t stop right away.

Part of me doesn’t know whether to worry or be pleased by these sensations.  They’re sort of loud, they’re accompanied by feelings like an earthquake set off inside of me. But. But… when they settle down, when the sensation passes, I feel better than I did before the change.  These events don’t happen at other times, other than just after taiji of some kind, and they’re never so localized that I can point to this place or that place, and say, “it happened right here.”  Nor have I noticed that they leave any sort of permanent mark.

In that sense, it’s like a controlled demolition of a building in a great city: a lot of work goes into bringing down a building, most of it done in a state of high activity. But the building itself is brought down in the calm moment that follows, with a sudden burst of energy and a shock wave, and then — with the arrival of dump trucks and bulldozers — ultimately leaves no sign that the building was ever there.

All I can say is that these events happen, and I feel as though some sort of a shift is going on inside me, as parts of the old me are demolished, and the new me emerges.  Old buildings are getting demolished, and new buildings are going up.

I guess that means I’m undergoing gentrification.

Taiji Day 72: Reverse Order

Today, I did the taiji form first, then Five Golden Coins, then the first four of the 8 pieces of brocade (from memory).  Reversing the order of the activities (although not the order of the postures in each form), allowed me to work up a sweat.  Not that I need to — last night was hot and steamy and uncomfortable.  The weather was sort of chilly when I went to bed, and by morning I had thrown off all the covers except a single sheet.  It’s going to be a hot, hot summer.

Anyway, that’s sort of drifting away from the main point, which is that by doing things in a different order from time to time, you’re preventing your muscles from getting too comfy with one pattern.  By doing some taiji first, and then qi gong, or doing your forms in a reversed order, you’re strengthening the core and your periphery by challenging them to work in a different way than usual.

Taiji day 71: use the window

On a busy day like today, use the window for Taiji that presents itself. It’s going to be busy all day — take the time to get the Taiji done when everyone else is asleep. The whole household is still in bed, but you are awake. Get the work done.

Then you can go back to bed. You will sleep the sleep of the just.

Taiji Day 70: Get Used to Compliments

So, in the last couple of days, I’ve run into a couple of people who haven’t seen me in a while, and gotten positive feedback. They say I look good.  When I get on the scale, of course, I don’t see any change.  But people ask if I’ve lost weight, if I’ve been on a diet, if I’ve changed my eating habits. None of these things are true, but people have been startled at the change.  Which means it’s working.  Taiji of course is primarily an internal art, and it’s so smooth and ‘easy’ that most Western weightlifters or workout-aholics smirk when I tell them I do taiji.  But the changes it cultivates are mostly internal and mysterious.  The changes take a little time to develop and integrate.  For a long time, I thought nothing was happening, too.  Every day on the scale would say the same.  Nothing happening, nothing changing, no improvement.

Yet not all changes are on the surface.  Don’t be surprised if people who haven’t seen you in a while are shocked — startled, surprised — at the change that your habits of discipline have made.