Month: October 2010

I am an amateur at Tai-Chi, and at sitting the full lotus, and at being a “love radiator” as Chunyi Lin puts it, yet even an amateur can say that we have two struggles here: one is to heal ourselves, which is how the interview opens, and the other is to find the words and actions to communicate the means of healing to others.

Even though we are talking about “unproveable” realities, I believe we can find a Western vocabulary to describe relationships that demonstrate these realities exist. This is like physicists discovering the existence of habitable planets thousands of light years away by examining perturbations in the orbits of their stars; the planets themselves are unobservable, but their existence is demonstrated in the effect they have on the stars we can track.

I have no intention of practicing reverse breathing. That doesn’t mean I don’t do reverse breathing some of the time, especially in the lotus or on the dance floor, and maybe it’s useful to some people to very deliberately start out to do reverse breathing some of the time.

I look to see how the place that my consciousness occurs has impact and opens feeling, in the instant. I recognize that there’s a stretch in existence throughout the fascial structure of my body as consciousness takes place, and that the autonomic respirations coordinate through the place of occurrence of consciousness to cause action that opens the nerve channels between vertebrae; thus, the place that consciousness occurs has impact and opens feeling, through the body to the surface of the skin and in the senses.

We all know what it feels like to stretch, and how close stretch can be to pain; a lot of my practice now is learning what is stretching, and how to relax and allow stretch and activity to reciprocate as consciousness takes place. The length of the movement of breath can be a guide to healthy stretch and the subsequent involuntary activity, both with the breath in and with the breath out.

The recognition that aversion to pain, attachment to pleasure, or ignorance of neutral sensations can condition the subsequent place of occurrence of consciousness is vital to me, as this recognition precedes a witness that is itself the end of suffering at the moment. The natural mind, as it were, has within it the end of suffering; we are all healers, and I think it’s important to let ourselves be healed rather than to set out toward any particular breathing.

In my experience, the lotus is about isolating the motion of the sacrum. I like John Upledger’s explanation of that motion, based on his own research and the theories of cranial-sacral osteopathy: the skull bones, the spine, and the sacrum flex and extend with changes in the fluid volume of the dural fluid (ten cycles a minute, Upledger says here: An Interview with Dr. John Upledger, D.O., O.M.M.).

Isolating the motion of the sacrum is important, because the fundamental postural activity is generated by the stretch of the ligaments that connect the sacrum to the pelvis. There are ligaments between the sacrum and the wings of the pelvis, ligaments between the sacrum and the sit-bones (the sacrospinous ligaments), and ligaments between the sacrum and the front underside of the pelvis on the left and on the right (the sacro-tuberous ligaments). Stretched ligaments can generate muscular activity to relieve their stretch, without any exercise of volition; when the ligaments are paired there’s a phenomena called “reciprocal innervation” that arises as ligaments alternate stretch and activity from side to side.

The way to generate feeling for stretch and activity is to attend to the place of occurrence of consciousness, as necessary to realize the breath in or the breath out, and relax.

I think for me there is no path without personal necessity, and somewhere inside I have always believed that mindfulness depends on the necessity of mindfulness. In the Gautamid’s teaching, the “setting up of mindfulness” always began: “sitting down cross-legged and holding the body upright, (one) sets mindfulness in front (an odd translation?); mindful (one) breathes in, mindful (one) breathes out”. To me, this means in particular that only through realizing my personal necessity to hold the body upright, to set mindfulness in front, and to mindful breathe in, mindful breathe out can I actually realize mindfulness in my daily life.

This is like juggling three balls, which I’ll bet you’ve done, not like the mindfulness practice most Vipassana teachers in this country prescribe; at least, that’s how it feels to me, when I discover that I have the need to feel what I am as where I am.

I strongly disagree with the notion that the description of a practice given to beginners is of no consequence, that a dumbed-down version can be given because a beginner cannot appreciate the real thing, or worse yet the assumption that no real description can be made. We have the record of the efforts of the ancestors to make such a description, over and over again. This is my quarrel with most of the teachers and practices I hear about, that they do not take seriously the need to make plain the practice in which they engage, and they do not feel a responsibility to make consistent the understanding they put forward with the experience of the beginner. It doesn’t have to be simple, it just has to be verifiable, you know?