Month: October 2010

…the last few days I have been reminded of Chen Man-Ch’ing’s practice description for the stage of man, mainly: relax from the shoulders to the wrist, from the hip joint to the heel, and from the sacrum to the headtop (in the Ben Lo Martin Inn translation, this is “relax the ligaments”; I don’t think that’s actually possible, as ligaments stretch and resile but it’s muscles that contract and relax- nevertheless, I take the meaning as resting weight on the ligaments in such a way as to realize reciprocal activity in associated postural muscles).

So your practice is very clear, as to the relationship of the movement of breath and the free movement of the sacrum. You are describing how it feels, and a big trick for me is that the sense of place as consciousness occurs can cause the stretch in existence to generate activity to align the spine and produce feeling. This is a big trick because if I put all my energy into feeling the breath or the movement of the sacrum, I will finally lose actual feeling for having directed the occurrence of consciousness to the particular place. So I think to rely instead on the movement of breath and the cranial-sacral rhythm to place consciousness, and I look to realize impact as consciousness occurs, impact and feeling. Is this natural? It is really just staying with what’s happening, not a gaining practice.

My posture is pretty bent, usually, so I envy you the clarity of “up the spine”. I guess the reason I mentioned learning to dance is because that’s where I sometimes feel an uprightness in the spine both on the inhale and the exhale, yet the feeling is intimately tied to resting the weight of my body on the sacrospinous and sacrotuberous ligaments and allowing movement from that stretch. At least, that’s the way I feel it.

The asleep/awake thing I still believe is the placement of consciousness by the two autonomous respirations.

Sense organ/sense object-consciousness-impact-feeling is the placement of consciousness by the two autonomic respirations, with perhaps different emphasis of sense waking or sleeping, and the in-between hours are the traditional times of practice. If I can follow the movement of awareness and relax, I can fall asleep; if I can follow the movement of awareness and relax, I can wake up. The mind is a sense, yet having a thought-stream is like having a dream; we recognize waking up when the thought-stream or the dream is over, even if we are still in our mind or physically asleep.

My hope is that the more I recognize the stretch I am in as consciousness occurs, and the more I can accept the feeling associated with that stretch and relax into the activity, the more readily I wake up and fall asleep. There’s a funny goal, isn’t it?

The discontiguous moment of feeling is the continuity, in a very real sense; goals can obscure the discontiguous moment of feeling, yet the experience of well-being may sometimes return to us through luke-warm placemarks of understanding and feeling. Doesn’t it seem so?

You are welcome to post my comments anywhere you feel is appropriate. I confess, I copied them to my blog. I believe in the vocabulary I have developed to describe these things (of course, it’s bits and pieces of the Pali Cannon, Tai-Chi teachings, and cranial-sacral theory, so I’m just the collector of it), and I have come to understand that I have to realize it fresh every time I sit, and every time I write it down.

That means I have to encounter my personal necessity very physically, very emotionally, and very intellectually in order to communicate to myself and others, at the moment. So to speak. So if I think I done good, I copy it to my blog, because ultimately I am writing to myself and I might need to refer to it. Hope you don’t mind.

As to consciousness rooted in the body and the heart, I certainly have benefited from Goleman s “Emotional Intelligence”, where he describes the way the amygdala charges memories with adrenalin and then can override our learned behaviour patterns when something comes up that matches the memory. In order to experience the place that consciousness occurs as moving, I have to deal with a fear of falling, and the thing I do with my consciousness and my body as a consequence of that fear conceals the movement of consciousness and the involuntary activity of the body that keeps me upright. I realize you are perhaps talking about responding more from emotion than intellect to your circumstance, but that’s all I can say about it with regard to sense organ sense contact-consciousness-impact-feeling.

I don’t think it has to do with a trigger (people collapsing next to me when I am practicing intensely). In both instances I described, I was looking to develop feeling for activity generated by weight on the sacro-spinous and sacro-tuberous ligaments. There is a balance in anything like this, between looking for feeling and experiencing the free occurrence of consciousness, and at some point the free occurrence of consciousness is the activity of the reciprocal muscle pairs and we step beyond volition. That is how a person develops what the masters refer to as tenacious strength, rather than muscular strength; the ligaments and fascia generate activity at a certain level of stretch, and the stretch and activity reciprocate between the paired ligaments and between paired ligaments around the body. I have years of experience letting go and allowing my body to walk on, so to speak.

Having said that, I have to add that to really let go is to experience a continuity, and the continuity for me is in the whole she-bang: sense organ/sense contact-consciousness-impact-feeling.