Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Zen’

POWER OF TRANSFORMATION

January 12th, 2012No comments »

“The inside and the outside – they are made of the same flesh”.  This is reportedly the cry a student of Chan (Zen) cried out when he reached enlightenment.  It is an apt description of the basic principle a Tai-chi teacher tries to teach to his students to bring them to their first perceptual breakthrough.

Every discipline of personal development is based on the principle that, to change one’s life, you need to change what is going on within yourself.  What else can we do?  We can’t change the whole world around just to our liking.

And so we learn how perfecting proper body mechanics allows us to perform physical tasks easily.  Learning about the mechanics of our attention (mind) allows us to be effective in interpersonal relationships and in navigating our lives.

As we discover the physical and mental behavior patterns that presently fill us, learn which ones are effective and which interfere with our power in life, we can reconstruct the very mechanisms we use to live our lives.

And then we discover that much of the way we perceive the world around us is really a reflection of the patterns of behavior within us.  As we become more creative in gaining Tai-chi skills, the world itself seems to change and not be as threatening or as cold.

The student discovers that much of what he took to be the cold reality of life was just the projection of a story he was telling himself, onto the world outside.

At this point he realizes that part of that story was his identity.  To really gain power in life, to be able to drop the behavior patterns of battle and self destruction, you have to allow that story about your identity to change.

And then you become just a simple person.  In another Zen story, a Buddhist student brags to his Taoist friend that his Buddhist teacher can create miracles.  “With a movement of his arm he can make an entire dinner appear in the middle of the forest.  He can knock over a band of robbers with one breath.  He can clear a valley of fog with one in-breath.”   The Taoist student was not impressed.  “That’s nothing compared to my teacher,” he said.  “What can your Taoist teacher do?”  The Taoist student replied, “When my teacher is hungry, he eats.  When he is tired, he sleeps.”

To what degree do the stories we have been told, affect our perceptions and our behaviors?  We trust that pieces of paper (money) have great value and then numbers in computer memory have great value and then learn, as we have lately, that there is nothing really backing up that value.  These are stories we tell each other to help our lives run smoother.

But we have all learned what happens when some of us no longer believe those stories.  Perhaps we need to base our lives on stories that are not “built on shifting sands”. 

In the novel, The Doubting Snake, I suggest this battle of stories is the basis for the underlying drama of our times and that those who become the new story tellers, can lead us into more meaningful lives.

But we must begin by understanding the stories that we have based our lives on.  To what degree is health, loving relationships, and a feeling of connection to the earth important in our lives?  And to what degree does the quest for money overshadow these values?

If you tell yourself a new story, a healthy one, that story may resonate with others and become their story.  The power of life is to be the story teller and not just the actor portraying someone else’s story.

Transform the inside to transform the outside. This is what every Tai-chi student must realize at deeper and deeper levels.

ARTICLES ON NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, ARTICLES ON THE LEARNING PROCESS ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

BECOMING ALIVE AND CONSCIOUS

June 27th, 2011No comments »

One of the greatest benefits of practicing Tai-chi and Zookinesis is that you experience life more intensely.  Your body seems much more alive.  Your senses and your mind are sharper.  You can feel the living energy of your surroundings.  Students often say, “I never realized I had hips before,” or they can finally feel their backs and how flexible they can be.  They feel part of the world of life around them because they are more aware of the life inside of them.

There is a Zen expression, “The inside and outside are made of the same flesh.”   When you change inside, the world around you seems to change as well.  And so I am going to suggest an internal change of perspective that may help to change the way you look at the world around you.

Within the body are trillions of minute processes within each organ, cell and even within the parts of the cells.  Most of them take place at speeds and with precision unimaginable to us. It all takes place without our great intelligence or leadership.  Yet we don’t usually think of the body itself as conscious. 

With all this intricate precision the body is capable of, when I ask a student to just move an arm or the hips in a simple movement, the student feels very awkward.  It may take months until he can move that part of his body with even basic competence.  And yet he feels more intelligent than his heart or liver, or than a single cell. 

We are amazed by the complex interactions of many species and habitats.  If we look out at the cosmos we see great precision and complexity in the interaction of planets, stars and galaxies. And yet, as individuals, struggling to get through life, understand its complexities and even move with a minimum of grace, we feel as though we are the only intelligent globs of matter in the universe.

Many ancient cultures, though, believed that consciousness was a natural force, part of every animal, plant, rock and habitat.  We now call them “animists”.  They felt that the force of intelligence was the unseen mover in all the activity of the universe.  It was not a “God” based perspective but simply included the force of consciousness along with what we now would call the four forces of the universe (gravity, electro-magnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces). 

They searched for the forces of intelligence and creativity in their surroundings and so felt a bond with every animal, plant and rock.  They searched for the forces of creativity and intelligence within their bodies to keep these forces strong so they would remain healthy.  To them, consciousness was as much part of their world as was matter.  Matter did not create consciousness. 

Now, what does this have to do with health – the main subject of this blog?  If the inside and the outside are made of the same “flesh” (as in the Zen saying) and you look at the world outside of you as if it was dead, then you tend to become dead inside as well.  When the science of physics looks at the world as dead objects moving about, then the science of medicine looks at the body as unconscious organs and cells, functioning automatically.  By removing the possibility of consciousness from everything in the world but our brains, the world and our bodies become dead to us. 

This is not a religious perspective.  What would be the point of praying to something?  You are conscious and everything else is conscious.  What is praying to what?  It is simply a way of bringing life back to our world, including to ourselves. 

As we now move into the Spring season, try to feel the energy of life intensifying.  Feel not only the warmth of the sun, the sound of the birds and the smell of the flowers, but the “feeling of the intelligence of the world.”  Let the warm intelligence of Spring penetrate your body, your feelings and your mind.  Realize that you are not separate from the rest of life, either as a glob of matter, or as a center of consciousness

ARTICLES ON HEALING, ARTICLES ON NATURAL PHILOSOPHY ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

THE DYNAMICS OF BEING A STUDENT

June 9th, 2011No comments »
When a student first begins learning Tai-chi and Zookinesis, the first thing that impresses him is how much his body has degenerated. The student is asked to use the body correctly and he can barely feel his body let alone make connections to it.
You might hear the teacher give instructions but how do you translate that into action? Your attention must be fine and energized enough to affect one nerve to move a small part of one muscle while the adjacent nerve remains still. You must be able to breathe into one small part of the lung so that the lung presses against one vertebra while the rest of the lung remains still. While it seems like it would take a lifetime to achieve these feats, you learn that they are actually very simple. They are really at a beginner’s level of achievement.
So you, as a student, wonder, “If this is simple, what hope do I possibly have of getting very far in this practice”. Add to this that as you begin to feel your body internally, the first thing that you feel is how tense, misaligned and dead the body is. No one wants to feel this. We usually are very happy to be dead so we don’t have to feel how out of shape we are. Yet what choice is there? Will you remain dead until you die or will you begin to become alive?
Every lesson and every minute of practice brings you a little closer to becoming alive. Don’t concentrate on how far there is to go. A Zen student told me that he went to a Zen monastery and the teacher had him help build a stone wall. After two hours of this he told the teacher that he was very discouraged. He worked very hard yet made little progress. The teacher told him that he looked at the situation the wrong way. “What is the right way”, he asked. The teacher told him, “Pick up one rock and put it onto the wall. Then pick up the next rock and put it on the wall.” The teacher then left. The student couldn’t understand what the teacher meant.
If you worry about accomplishing a huge task, then each effort will seem small. If you concentrate on what you are actually doing, then each effort will fill your attention. Find the joy in each little inch of becoming alive. Your body, your mind and your spirit can come to life. The mind and spirit also have muscles and bones. They have a structure – an anatomy and a mechanics – a physiology. Like the body, they can be tense, fragile and basically, non-functioning.
Tai-chi and Zookinesis teaches this anatomy and physiology of the body, mind and spirit and gives you the skills of using these parts of you. Zookinesis was originally called, “Spirit Breathing” because of the importance of the use of the breath in training. As an example, when you move in an exercise or Tai-chi form, the parts of your body create momentum. This momentum pulls on each muscle, joint, tendon and ligament of the body, aligning each part in the direction of the momentum. So each part of the body is stretched by the momentum.
As you are expanding, you breathe in. You direct that breath into each joint at the same time that the joint is being pulled by the momentum. (If you don’t understand this at this time, don’t worry. It takes training to appreciate this dynamic. I’m just using this as an example of the use of breath.) As each joint expands in pace with the breath expansion, it is also being pulled in a particular direction by the momentum. The momentum continues to pull on the joint, yet, once the joint is “filled with breath”, the breath then passes through the joint. The result is that the joint is first stretched open by the breath as it is being pulled by the momentum and then, when the breath passes through, the momentum then continues to stretch the joint. The joint is stretched from within and from without.
This is obviously a more advanced training, requiring at least that you understand these ideas in the first place. The point I’m making is that even when a student is at this stage of development, he still is amazed at how dead is his body and attention (even though it is a great deal more alive than when he started). His expectations of what he can accomplish are now so great that the above exercise seems to him as simple as moving one finger at a time may seem to the average person.
You realize that the potential of our minds, bodies and spirits is so great that it really remains hidden and unknown to most people. You begin to feel that you are living in a different world than everyone else and so seek other practitioners to have a community of people you can relate to.
Do you remember ever walking on the earth with bare feet? How did it feel when you then walked on cement? When the students have a community to relate to, how do you think it feels when they then have to deal with the culture at large? No wonder the Taoist monks retreated to the mountains in monasteries! Yet the greater achievement is to be able to function in our culture and still retain your aliveness. How else can others know what aliveness is?
ARTICLES ON THE LEARNING PROCESS ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

SHOW ME YOUR ORIGINAL FACE

June 6th, 20113 comments »
In Zen (Japanese) and Chan (Chinese) Buddhism, a “Koan” is a challenging question or statement used to bring the student to a higher level of awareness. The sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism used this Koan, “Give your bones to your father and your flesh to your mother and show me your original face”.
This Koan was a wonderful guide to me in my practice of Zen during my high school and college days. I studied in a Zen center in Ithaca, N. Y. while attending Cornell. The teacher was a toll taker on the New York State Thruway. At the same time, I studied at an Esalen study group, which was one of the beginning attempts at learning about the relationships between mind and body. My major was the evolution of animal behavior (“ethology”). I felt all this meshed together well.
Once out of college my work as a zoologist brought me in constant close contact with many species of wild animals. I had to work with each animal at its own level of awareness and become sensitive to its “point of view”. This work made me realize how “stuck” my own point of view had become. I had to connect with each animal by adopting its “dynamics of attention” because the animal was certainly not going to change to accommodate me. This in turn, made me sensitive to how variable the dynamics of attention are in people. Most people are stuck with one pattern of behavior – one set of responses to situations they encounter in everyday life. But that pattern is very different in each person.
I began to understand that developing yourself as a person is not a matter of having the “correct” pattern of responses. It is a matter of bringing creativity into your daily life so that you can adapt to each situation. Not only will you respond more effectively but, by being more creative in your life, you will live a more joyful life. Giving up addiction to your patterns allows you to “show your original face” which is your creativity.
With this in mind it is easy to understand why Tai-chi was invented. The slow forms require your attention to flow smoothly, along with the momentum of the body. Your movements are jerky and awkward when your attention is pulled by thoughts and other patterns. The slow forms un-trap your attention and allow it to return to its original state.
The Push Hands exercise requires that you fill your partner with your attention so that you are aware of the state of every muscle and joint in his body. You become aware of the patterns of attention within each part of the partner’s body so that you can take advantage of “dead spots” and throw the partner off balance. This means that your attention must become a living being. Attention no longer just means what your eyes are looking at. It is a vibrant, responsive energy.
When you develop that state of attention, you realize that attention is a universal energy, flowing through all living things. You then realize your connectedness to the rest of life. You feel that connectedness as much as you feel a hard physical object. Attention thus becomes a sense that allows you to feel how you are connected to your surroundings. You are no longer an isolated lump of flesh.
The Zookinesis exercise system strengthens that awareness and brings it into higher resolution so that you can truly use it as a sense. It ignites the awareness of each muscle, organ and cell of the body so that your body becomes stronger from the inside out.
With the colder weather approaching, the attention naturally starts to condense and focus within the body. If your body awareness is dead, then you will just feel dead, meaning tired. But if you develop your body awareness, winter can be an exciting, healing time. You can set aside a part of each day for your practice.
The summer naturally allows attention to expand into the environment. Attention goes through many patterns of expansion and contraction. Notice when your attention expands and contracts, from night to day, from in-breath to out-breath and during other cycles. You will become aware of attention itself as a living, breathing energy. Your identity will no longer be defined by the patterns of behavior and responses to situations. Your attention will be allowed to follow natural cycles and thus, your behavior as a person will start to follow those cycles.
If this becomes true for enough people, then the culture will start to follow natural cycles. When we become more natural in our lives, then creativity becomes a stronger influence. You can say that your spirit, your “original face” comes out. You see yourself, not as a collection of opinions but as joy, ready to leap from each cell of your body and participate in the world.
When in college, I also studied sociology and anthropology. I was especially interested in the question, “What is the role of culture?” What is a culture supposed to do for people? From the many cultures I studied around the world, it seemed that a culture is supposed to help its people to be happier. Is our culture doing that for us? Is it helping us to be healthier? How can we create a culture within our own lives that will help us achieve these goals?
The sixth patriarch of Chan Buddhism suggested that you need to clear out your programmed behaviors first and feel how you are connected to life itself. One of the basic principles of Zookinesis is that your life is formed from what you pay attention to. Do you pay attention to your patterns or to life around you? Use what you pay attention to, to lift yourself up out of the heavy mud of your patterns. Feel your attention and its dynamics. Does it feel like a weapon, helping you battle through the day? Does it feel like a race car? Look for role models in nature to help craft your attention.
I used the animals I worked with simply because that was my job. Notice how you feel when your attention is a machine gun as compared to a soaring eagle. Is the spirit inside us an expression of our creativity or of patterns of defense and aggressiveness caused by fear. In other words, does fear rule our lives, or joy? Give your bones back to your father and your flesh back to your mother and show your original face!
ARTICLES ON THE LEARNING PROCESS ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

THE ANCIENT ONE

June 5th, 2011No comments »
A student of any “internal” system of exercise begins his or her practice in a “catch 22” situation. He learns a series of techniques that should lead him to develop a connection of his mind and body. This connection allows him to become aware that there is an internal system of intelligence that can then take over his instruction. In other words, at some point, the awareness of his own body should itself, instruct him as to how to move and exercise. The catch 22 is that the more he focuses on the techniques he is being taught, the less he trusts his own body and the more he depends on those techniques.
The techniques, in Tai-chi and Zookinesis are considered as the “Zen raft”, that is, a raft that brings you from one side of a river to the other. Once you get to the other side, you abandon the raft and begin your journey on the other side of the river. The techniques of body awareness lead you to a living internal blueprint of the dynamics of the mind and body, of the emotions, will, memories, senses and all the other aspects of being human. You become aware of that internal intelligence and how it lies behind all aspects of your life. The techniques of Tai-chi and Zookinesis are still practiced and perfected but you become aware of how they are leading you to a greater awareness of how flesh and consciousness interact.
In our culture, we believe that everything starts with the physical world and that all other phenomena are a by-product of the interaction of atoms and subatomic particles. In most ancient cultures, the physical world was considered equal to all other human experiences. Each was considered to be an “element” of being human, so that the mind, emotions and consciousness itself were on an equal level with the physical world. The “balancing of the elements”, the main purpose of internal training, was to develop a balanced person who doesn’t obsess with any one element.
As an example, in Zookinesis, the sense of sight is considered to be one half of a paired sense. Sight gives us information about the exterior of objects – their color, shape, size, texture etc. It shows us how each thing is separate from each other thing. The sense of “chi” (internal energy) gives us information about the interior of things and about how everything is connected to everything else with energy. In our culture, the sense of chi is not recognized, so that we don’t feel it. Yet as we learn any internal system of exercise, we need to regain this sense so that we can become more balanced.
Practitioners of the internal martial arts are well versed with chi and use it to strengthen their health, to increase the power of their strikes in sparring and to be able to withstand strikes from an opponent. A student of mine once asked me if I could stop using chi to protect myself from strikes. I explained that I am so used to protecting myself with chi that it was hard for me to stop doing it. But I figured out a way to “turn off” the chi. He then punched me and it really hurt! I told him I would never do that again. He reminded me that since he had not yet developed this protective ability, I should take it easy on him. He made his point.
Often as people practice “Push Hands” (a two person exercise in which each tries to throw the other off balance), or sparring, they will come up with a very creative technique they had never learned before. This will surprise them because it is as if another person inside of them made them do this new technique. As they get used to these new techniques arising spontaneously out of them, they realize that they arise out of their own creativity. Then they come to “know” their creativity as a living energy within them. It is this body intelligence I mentioned above. This awareness will make them feel uncomfortable at first because they realize they are more than they thought they were. There is a power inside of them which seems stronger or perhaps just “smarter” than the students themselves. How can their “weak” little personalities stand up to this powerful ancient intelligence?
An artificial competition begins to try to keep the “genie in the bottle”. It takes time for the student to develop a harmonious relationship with his own inner intelligence. Push Hands is great training for this because it deals with the relationship between two people on a physical level. You can’t use force and tension in Push Hands or you yourself will get pushed over. You really have to merge with the Push Hands partner, uniting your energies until you find a weak point in his alignment or attention and then you can push.
In the case of the internal intelligence you learn to blend and connect your personality with that ancient body intelligence to form a greater self. In those old cultures there was a name for people who successfully accomplished that merging. It was called being “an elder”. We don’t have many elders in our culture and that concept isn’t admired as it used to be. We now feel that each generation knows more than the previous one. We feel that the ancient cultures were ignorant just as we feel that our parents are dumb compared to ourselves. Yet it is not the accumulation of material knowledge that developed an elder, but the type of knowledge that is always at our fingertips.  I find that my best students begin their practice just to improve their health, or to get better muscle definition or to learn self-defense. Yet as they learn there is much more depth to this training, they become even more interested. They realize there is a whole other world out there – the world of internal awareness.
The student is led to this awareness by continuing to practice the techniques until he realizes that simply doing the techniques faster or stronger is not getting him anywhere. He comes to a plateau in his training. It is only when he lets that internal intelligence (the “Body-Mind”) take over that he can continue to progress. At that point, he feels that the person he thought he was, can just sit back and let this new being take over. His exercise becomes effortless and much more rewarding. The old cultures called Body-Mind “the ancient one”. They might ask the confused student, “Let me see the ancient one”, meaning that they wanted to see the student let the internal intelligence take over his exercises. So the point of this week’s lesson is not to let the techniques become the whole of what you learn. Realize that they are leading you to an internal awareness and continue to watch out for hints of the ancient one. When he (or she) comes you will be rewarded.
ARTICLES ON HEALING ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,