The yin and yang of modern living

I’ve been reading a paper by Roger Jahnke, a much respected author of many works on energy  medicine, and Qigong -  a rare sane voice in a field otherwise beset by fools and charlatans. The paper is quite technical and discusses research into how the body functions at the cellular level, how it sometimes fails, and how it repairs itself. It basically says Qigong is good for you, and then presents the evidence.

There was a lot of hype a while back about Genetics and the mapping of the Human Genome. We were told you could read the profile of a person’s DNA then tell them what illnesses they were going to get, even when they were going to die. It was a scary idea and only the life insurance companies really took to it with enthusiasm. For the rest of us, it was a depressing concept; here’s the roadmap of your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But now we know better. Your DNA can present you with statistical data on those ailments you’re most susceptible to, but whether you fall foul of them depends mainly on environmental factors. In fact we have about the same number of genes as a rodent, but there’s clearly a great deal of difference between a person and a rodent, a lot more going on in the maintenance of our well-being than the bare facts suggested by a DNA profile.

What do we mean by environmental factors? Basically stress.

When early man roamed the wilderness with his bow and arrow, his stresses were obvious – an angry bear, a hungry lion, the threat of being killed by another man. Faced with an immediate and obvious danger of death, the body responds by pumping you up, it sets the heart racing and readies you either to fight for your life, or to run like the wind.

We still have this “fight or flight” response, but in modern living the things that scare us are less obvious. A powerpoint presentation in front of the top brass? The ever spiralling cost of utility bills? Rumours of redundancy at work? A two hour commute in heavy traffic? An endless list. But how do you fight or run from such things? You can’t. Modern man is presented with a new kind of predator, one against which the old responses are useless – indeed worse than useless, because if you don’t physically fight or run, your body’s response becomes toxic and makes you ill.

The fight or flight mechanism is Yang. It’s active, dynamic, hot, and potentially dangerous. It can burn you out. It pumps you up and it says: “Do something!”. But without balance, Yang is indiscriminate and self destructive. Fight or flight is important, but should be used wisely, and for that we need the Yin side of our nature. Yin equates to the body’s “relaxation response” – the mirror image of “fight or flight”, like the nestled tadpoles in the yin-yang symbol. It’s natural and we all possess it, but modern living  causes us to neglect it, to belittle it,… even to laugh at it.

Techniques like meditation, yoga and Qigong work by awakening the relaxation response – defusing and dissolving toxins, encouraging repair rather than corroding us with the bitter acid of a million nagging worries. The methods are quite easy to learn and they allow the mind to enter the whole body, to sense it, to enjoy its vibrant aliveness, and to soothe the parts that are tense and troubled. Over time, the stillness these methods induce becomes a part of who you are and you no longer see the old stressors in quite the same way. You react to them with more discernment. Instead of terrifying, your old enemies begin to look jaded and foolish.

Internal methods like Qigong are taken to their extreme in martial arts. When skilled opponents face one another, they do so, not in a state of tension, pumped up with the fight or flight chemicals, but in stillness. When action comes, it’s swift and purposeful, rising forcefully out of stillness. And that’s the healthy way to live: acting when required but out of a more general stillness, rather than being forced to run like the rodents those early geneticists tried to tell us we were, forever moving, jumping at shadows, for ever reacting to life’s imaginary enemies.

So stop. Think. Breathe.

Relax.

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Doctor’s orders – Tai Chi and Qigong in the real world

I’m not fond of hospitals. The only times I’ve been in one was either for the births of my children or the seeing out of elderly relatives – all of them traumatic experiences, though in different ways of course. This was why I felt nervous sitting in the waiting room yesterday with a complaint of my own, the prospect of surgery hanging over me, and the knowledge that the last few times I’d seen a hospital doctor they’d told me there was nothing more they could do and someone was going to die. Doctors, I assured myself, were useless. All of this was irrational of course, but analysing it into stillness passed the time.

It was my nose.

Years of Anosmia (no sense of smell) had finally led me to the Ear Nose and Throat department of my local hospital. My GP – not the most reassuring of characters – had referred me there somewhat half heartedly and with the caveat there probably wasn’t much anyone could do. It was partly his negative outlook that had led me to explore all the complementary therapies first, including acupuncture. The acupuncture had worked, but only briefly – a three week window of scented delights, late last year, but which had then closed, and in spite of the continuing administrations of my TCM practitioner, had refused to open again.

So, there I was, waiting to see the doctor – not your ordinary doctor this time – not like my GP who was merely a “Dr”. This guy was a “Dr Mr”. A surgeon. A proper sawbones!

My GP had  told me off for wasting time and money on acupuncture. Complementary stuff definitely doesn’t compute with him. On previous occasions when he’d asked me if I exercised, and I’d replied I do Tai Chi and Qigong, he’d looked blank. When he’d asked if I was taking any medication he was unaware of and I’d replied: “Does Ginseng count?” again he’d looked blank.

He wasn’t entirely to blame, poor guy; it was as much my own insecurity, perceiving his credentials as materialist and stereotypically unsympathetic to the traditional eastern world view, while I feared my own approach still lacked the proper grounding in verifiable fact. So, I was guarded when the Dr. Mr. Sawbones asked me these same questions and I muttered the words Tai Chi, Qigong and Ginseng in an almost apologetic tone.

He was a young man – late twenties I guessed, studious, smart, clean looking coupled with an easy smile and an effortless sense of humour. His manner, his energy, was a world away from that of my GP – which always left me feeling slightly depressed. I’d gone to the hospital that day jumping at shadows, ready to run if anyone came near me with a scalpel,  but I decided at once this guy could stick a scalpel in me any time he liked. I trusted him.

He then astonished me by saying he thought Qigong was a remarkably effective mind-body technique, that he practiced it himself, and highly recommended it. I said I was surprised, given his background in western medicine and its traditional antipathy towards the non-materialist world view. He replied that things were slowly changing, then went on to discuss the Chinese meridian system – this while he slid a camera up my nose.

I wondered if he was having me on. Don’t tell me you support that as well, I said – though it’s not easy to talk with a camera up your nose. He replied that given the amount of compelling research data, western medicine really had no choice now but to find a way of assimilating at least certain aspects of traditional energy medicine into modern practice, though he admitted ruefully it would probably take another hundred years. His own view was that emotion played a large part in determining both the nature, and the incidence of a body’s malfunction, that he equated “emotion” with the term “energy”. The meridian system, talk of chi or whatever, was a tangible way of getting a handle on the emotions, thereby curing ills that were unresponsive to medicine alone, or for simply preventing illness in the first place. It was all related to the so called Relaxation Response, which we need to be able to balance out the other side of the mind-body equation – the Fight or Flight response.

Healthy mind equals healthy body.

As for my own ills, he announced I had a load of polyps up my nose – little non-malignant growths that stop the air from getting to the smelling apparatus, and there was a good chance he could get rid of them without surgery. He said I looked fairly fit off my Tai Chi and Qigong, and I should keep it up, otherwise the sackload of medication he was about to prescribe would be laying me pretty low.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my encounter with this guy – almost forgetting I’d been to see him over my nose. But as well as identifying a concrete reason for my Anosmia, and a frankly positive assessment of the likelihood of curing it, my ten minutes with this highly educated western surgeon, working at the sharp end of the British National Health System had unexpectedly deepened my understanding and appreciation of  eastern energy yogas as well.

Any form of exercise is good for you. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it moves the body, it’ll improve the circulation of the blood and the lymph, and the body cannot help but respond in positive ways. But if, as well as moving the body, you can move the mind,… now there you have a powerful technique  – and not just as a health system, but also as a means of taking a human being to the very edge of what is possible.

I do hope this bag of pharmaceuticals helps me smell the world again, and they don’t make me too ill in the process. But I’ll also be taking my Tai Chi and Qigong practice far less self consciously in future.

Doctor’s orders.

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What is not imagination?

Adam watches Sunita as she lowers herself into the snake-creeps down posture. It’s one of the most difficult moves to perform in the sequence that makes up the standard Beijing 24 Yang form. He knows women half her age who could not even attempt it, and he’s hoping she will not ask him to follow, because his knees are still hurting after this morning’s meditation.

She feels him watching. “You are thinking something Adam. I feel a question in your silence.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because your thoughts are like half bricks hurled into the still pond that is the universe. I feel them from a distance.”

“I’d no idea I was such an unsettling influence.”

“I do not say you are unsettling. Only that you lack the art of stillness. So,… ask your question.”

“I was just wondering, how long before I start to feel the energy in Tai Chi, Sunita?”

She stops now, looks up at him, her stillness broken for a moment. “How long, Adam?”

“It’s just that I’ve been practising for months and I don’t feel anything yet.”

She thinks for a moment, then stands, looks at him directly in the way that always makes him blush.

“Hold your hands in front of you,” she tells him.

“Like this you mean?”

“Yes, that’s good. Now close your eyes and relax.”

Adam closes his eyes and waits for her next command.

“Tell me,” she says. “Without opening your eyes, how do you know your hands are still there?”

“Well,… I can feel them, Sunita.”

“Good. What you feel is energy, Adam. Now move your hands gently. Wave them like clouds in the sky. Can you still feel them?”

“Not so strongly now.”

“No, your mind is thinking of the movement, thinking of controlling it. The mind is happier dealing with little things like that. You must find the stillness in the movement, then you will find the energy again.”

“The stillness in the movement? That makes no sense.”

“A part of you is always still, no matter how fast you are moving. Find him for me, Adam. Listen for him. He whispers to you at that point where one breath ends, and  the other begins. “

Adam seeks the stillness. With eyes closed, he listens for it at the closing of his breath, and slowly finds his hands again, finds the feeling in them, then finds them joined to the feeling in his arms. Then his chest becomes alive at the  rhythm of his breath, and then his legs are tingling, alive at their contact with the earth. At first he’s excited by this extraordinary discovery, but then his mind pops up once more, denying the experience, questioning it: “But Sunita, is all of this not just my imagination?”

“Of course it is, Adam,” she replies. “But tell me, what is not imagination?”

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Too cold for Tai Chi?

I’ve been missing my Tai Chi of late, focussing instead on Kung Fu which I don’t seem to be making much headway with, grading nights coinciding with family emergencies of one sort or another with a regularity that seems almost fated.

The Tai Chi is something I’ve withdrawn from the more public arena of the class, and adopted more now as an integral part of my private life, practicing in the garden of a summer’s eve as a pleasant after-work wind down, or as a Saturday morning energy booster. But it’s winter now and it’s been a while since I was out there – and doing a compact freestyle in the kitchen while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil doesn’t really count. All that does is annoy the hell out of my good lady when she catches me at it, and I’ve grown kind of shy about doing it.

But I was tempted out this afternoon by the pale winter sunshine and the thermometer nudging its way above 10 Celcius. There were even little clouds of midges sunning themselves among the evergreens. But the garden isn’t at its most welcoming this time of year. I found the lawn thick and squidgy with moss, the pond choked with duck-weed, and the borders filled with the dried and dead remains of last year’s glory. There was also about a mile of fence, all lichen stained now, a luminous green instead of a rich brown cedar stain, and when I looked up at the roof line, I spotted we were missing a couple of tiles, torn loose in winter gales and now no doubt lurking in the gutters.

To be fair it was probably like this in the summer too, but there’s something about this time of year that makes you focus on the shabby imperfection of it all and makes life seem only the more burdensome.

Anyway, I warmed up, then ran through the Chen Style short forms that I know – the 11 and the 18, pausing afterwards in the post stance while I caught my breath and began to feel the juices loosening, and the palms tingling. Then I ran through the Old Frame, the 74 moves coming one after the other with the kind of memory that lives in the muscles, rather than the brain. It was imperfectly done, a bit wobbly, but not too bad after such a long break. Then I closed with the Yang 24, and a bit of Heaven and Earth Qigong – putting the energy back in the box, as we used to call it, pressing it down to the root, somewhere under that moss-throttled lawn. Then I opened my eyes to see we were still missing those tiles, and the pond was still thick with weed so I slunk back inside where the air was warm, feeling none the better for any of it.

Too cold for Tai Chi? Well, it’s still winter after all and I’m not expecting Snowdrops until next week, but there’s another kind of winter – one we carry in our hearts and that can take more than spring to thaw because the seasons of the heart keep a different kind of time.

At this point in my story, I decided to cut and paste from the notes app on my iPad, into WordPress, because it looked like we had the makings of a blog piece here, rather than simply a first circle diary kind of thing. But “Control C” on an iPad’s not the same as on a PC, and I lost the whole of it, stared at the blank screen a while, wondering if I could piece it back together from memory, figured I probably could, but then wondered if it was worth the effort.

Decided it was.

Graeme Out

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Beginning meditation

Meditation should be a straight forward business but is too often shrouded in a mystical  fog. In fact meditation is very simple, literally as simple as breathing and should be looked upon as a basic life-skill, like swimming or riding a bicycle – things that at some time or another can prove useful, life-saving, or just life-enhancing. But where do we start? You’ve only to read a few books on the subject to realise there are so many different techniques. Which one is the best? Who knows? If you’re interested in the subject all you can do is read widely, try out those methods that make sense to you and don’t worry about those that don’t. But perhaps the best advice is to keep it simple.

In the words of Lao Tzu:

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

I’ll outline a basic technique of my own in a moment, which may or may not suit you, but as Lao Tzu also said:

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.

So you must make of this piece what you will.

Before we sit down to meditate there’s something we need to get out of the way or we’re wasting our time. What we should never do as lay meditators is have any ambitions of being lifted to a higher spiritual plane, or attaining enlightenment, or discovering the delights of astral travel,  because it most likely won’t happen. I’ve been meditating off an on for around twenty years and I don’t know what any of these things are supposed to feel like, but I do know there is a belief that meditation is the key to them. While this may be true for certain dedicated individuals, you’ll find no secrets here.

Enlightenment is a serious business of course, but you don’t achieve it in the hours either side of your nine-to five, nor even in one of those expensive weekend workshops. You’ll most likely need to become a monk, or a hermit, or some kind of self flagellating ascetic, and unless you’re willing to give up just about everything else in your life for the pursuit of that one goal, then you should forget it, otherwise you fall into the trap of New Age Materialism. And materialism is like opium: sweet dreams for a while, but ultimately useless.

Society programs us from an early age to be ego driven and goal orientated – we have to do well at school, pass our exams, get a good job, earn some money, get a house, a bigger house, be successful and so on. It’s counter intuitive then, to grasp the notion that in order to feel good for longer than five minutes we have to forget this “achievement culture”. We have to let go of any ambitions. New age materialism? You’ve only to look all those self help books, and all the money you’ll need to spend in order to achieve the promise of a happy, fulfilled and enlightened existence. But of course the answer isn’t in the next book, nor the next new age trinket – just like for most of us meditation isn’t about sitting down with a mind to gaining spiritual awareness, or opening the door onto  an astral plane.

Having said that, we’re obviously looking to gain something, or we wouldn’t be doing it. But as lay meditators I would argue we’re looking to achieve only a degree of clarity, we’re looking to feel better in ourselves, which is a much more modest goal than that of attaining Buddhahood. Let’s just say to ourselves we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know how we’ll feel. or where meditation will lead us,…

We’re happy to simply keep an open mind.

So why meditate?

Hopefully by now we’re no longer troubled by inappropriate ambitions in our meditation. But, at a basic level, meditation can bring about a gradual change in our outlook, in particular our sense of personal well-being, simply by calming us down and enabling us to remember who we really are.

What does that mean?

We are happiest in life when we are comfortable in our own skins, when we like ourselves, when we can look in the mirror and say to ourselves – yes, that guy/girl is okay.  I’m not talking about becoming conceited or narcissistic here – it’s more a case of being at peace with yourself, also having a sense of the rightness of your life’s direction, even though it might not be clear to you or anyone else what that direction is.

If you’re not blessed with what contemporary society considers to be “good looks” – for example, if you’re fat or bald, wrinkled, over 25 and short sighted – no amount of meditation is going to change that, but what it can do, is enable you to look in the mirror, at your fat, bald, wrinkled, ageing, short sighted self, and be comfortable with it by virtue of a confidence in yourself and your God given right to simply be – how-ever, and who-ever you are.

Such a state requires mental clarity, and meditation restores clarity.

What does clarity feel like?

It feels calm.

Calmness comes from stilling the mind. It comes from slowing down the rush of one’s thoughts. If you take a glass of muddy water and you keep stirring it, this is a good illustration of the way the mind feels with its swirl of thoughts. If only the mind could become still enough for the sediment to settle and for clarity to be restored.

Meditation restores clarity.

Clarity feels calm.

So meditate. -

How to Meditate

There are many meditation techniques. What I’m about to describe is just one of them. It blends Buddhist mindfulness with a little Daoist internal energy work. But don’t worry about what that might mean. If you’re in a dark place right now, any meditation technique will help you. Whatever method you decide upon, do it every day until you feel steady enough to start forgetting the practice. If you should start to wobble again, dust off your meditation notes, or see if you can find the link to this blog posting, and start doing it again.

That’s how you meditate.

As for the method, I’ll summarise the main points at the end, so if you’re patient to get on then skip to there, otherwise here’s the nitty gritty.

1) How long shall we meditate for?

The first thing we need to do is decide how long we can spare to meditate. Ten minutes is a good starting point. As you get into it, you’ll naturally want to increase the time you spend doing it. I generally aim for about thirty minutes, but when I’m really in “the zone” I’ve been known to go on for an hour or more.

Normally I take a dim view of any gadget that’s touted as being essential for your spiritual, emotional or physical well being, but I make an exception here, because we’re only talking about a simple timer. If you can set a timer, do so – an egg timer, an oven timer, an alarm clock, anything that pings or rings or dings, but without tick tocking all the time while you’re doing it. The timer lets you relax. You’re not constantly wondering if your time is up yet and checking your watch. So, get your timer, set it, and forget it.

If you don’t live alone – and especially if you’ve got children running about all over the place, you need to be honest with them about what you’re doing. So, tell them: “Look, I’m going to meditate. I know you might think that’s a bit weird, but I’m really serious about giving it a go, and I do not want disturbing for the next ten minutes.” Or you can try:”Come and get me if the house is burning down – otherwise I’m not here, okay?”

This probably won’t work, but at least you’ve done your best, and hopefully they’ll get the message eventually. Be kind to them, and be kind to yourself. Don’t be angry if you get disturbed. Anger is the opposite of where we want to be. If they burst in, think of it as an opportunity for measuring how far away from being angry you are.

Anger, under any circumstances is really bad for you.

Fortunately, with experience, you’ll find you can shut down and meditate anywhere, even an airport terminal – though I admit it’s not the ideal place to start. Also, very few of us can enjoy the luxury of a private “meditation room” so just use your common sense and go somewhere you think you’ll be the most comfortable and the least likely to be disturbed. If that means doing it in the bathroom, then so be it.

Now sit.

2) Sitting

In an instructional video on the subject of Chen Style Tai Chi, Grand Master Chen Zheng Lee describes the process of meditation with  disarming simplicity:

He says: “Just sit quietly for a while.”

Really – don’t get hung up about it – just sit.

If you can manage a “full lotus” without it hurting you, then go for it. If not, just sit as best you can, legs crossed or splayed open, it doesn’t matter – the main aim is simply to provide a comfortable and stable base from which to align your back gently upright.

The back is the important thing here, and we can achieve something like the right posture if we imagine our heads suspended from a thread attached to our crown and pulling us gently upright, with our back hanging from it. Don’t worry too much about this – just do what feels comfortable. Roughly speaking the right position is somewhere between slouching over and sitting bolt upright.

If you can’t sit on the floor – if you’ve got troublesome joints and struggle to get down, or get back up again, then sit in a chair, but again, pay attention to the posture of your spine and avoid the temptation to lean back into the chair. In his famous book on Microcosmic Meditation, Mantak Chia rejects outright the idea of sitting cross legged on the floor, and heartily recommends using a chair. Confused? Me too. Don’t worry, just do what you want – we’re not looking to move the earth here.

So, now we’re sitting.

What next?

3) Quelling the restless mind

What’s next is you’ll be interrupted – if not by someone you live with, then by someone you share your head with. It’ll say something like this: “I’m not comfortable. Can we move over a bit?”

So, you’re an obliging soul and you move over and sure enough in no time at all the voice comes again: “This is no good either,” it says. “My leg’s killing me.”

You can put up with this for only so long, shuffling about, sitting this way and that, hands resting here, there and everywhere, but then some point you’ve got to say: “Look, we were perfectly comfortable a moment ago. So what’s changed?”

Quietly but firmly, say “NO” to the nagging voice.

This is the first step in letting go.

Settle into position and do not move from that position until your time is up. Really! Relax into it, then freeze. Become an inanimate doll, a living statue. Do not move a muscle. Not even one millimeter.

So, now we’re quietly resolved not to move. What happens next is we encounter the annoying conversationalist.

This is like when you’ve been given an important job and you want to focus on it, but you’re constantly interrupted by others with nothing better to do but tell you about their holidays, or a bit of silly gossip. It’s that child in your mind again – assailing you with a string of thoughts. What do you do? Well, you can’t consciously stop it, no more than you can consciously stop breathing. So, like with the real life gossip, you take a step back, and you only lend half an ear, while remaining quietly focussed on your task. And our task, remember, is nothing more complicated than sitting quietly.

Let your thoughts come and go. Don’t try to stop them, but try instead to avoid actively dwelling on them. If you catch yourself lingering over something, don’t be hard on yourself – just let it go, brush it gently aside, say to yourself – I don’t want to be thinking about that right now. It is ultimately our aim to subdue these flittering thoughts, but it’s early days yet and one never counters force with force. This is your own self we’re talking about  after all, so be gentle. No sense in beating yourself up over it.

No sense in getting angry.

Anger is the opposite of where we want to be.

What now?

We breathe.

From the Dantien.

4) What’s the Dantien?

Chances are, in the human biology you learned at school, there was never any mention of the Dantien. The reason for this is the kindest thing western medicine has to say about it is it’s imaginary. However, if you take the  trouble to imagine it, to focus your thoughts upon it as if it were real, then, eventually you will feel it as a physical presence, as something moving, something swelling, something firm, warm, tingly and inexplicably energising. Then try telling me the Dantien does not exit.

Where is it?

If you rest your hand on your belly, put the tip of your index finger into your belly button, then press down gently with the tip of your little finger, that’s where your Dantien is, a few inches inside your lower abdomen. Familiarise yourself with the idea of this “imaginary” thing called the Dantien and try to persuade your mind – perhaps against its better nature – of the physical reality of this region inside of you. Nurture it ,even when you’re not meditating. Think about it and see if you can feel it. What we need to do is wake it up and we do that, in part, by breathing. If you’ve never felt your Dantien before, don’t be afraid. This is the most intimate part of you, the very centre of your being. It’s like the best friend you never knew you had.

5) Breathing

The way we breathe in meditation is important – in fact the way we breathe is meditation, so I’ll take a little time to describe it.

We should always breathe through the nose. Take notice of your own natural breathing, and if you discover you’ve fallen out of the habit of using your nose, then try to re-educate yourself. Nose breathing is the proper way to breathe and without too much effort it will become automatic again. Of course if you’re troubled with a blocked nose, then forget what I’ve just said and breathe through your mouth.

To help you breathe through your nose, close your mouth and touch the tip of your tongue to the hard palate just behind your top front teeth, and keep it there. You might have read about this somewhere before. Various reasons are given for it  depending on the kind of books you read. A Kung Fu fighter does it so his tongue’s out of the way, and if he gets kicked in the face, he won’t bite it off. A serious qigonger will tell you it’s to complete the circuit on the conception channel that runs down the front of your body, that Chi can’t settle in your Dantien without it. For us lay meditators, it’s best to think of it as being simply a way of double sealing our mouth in order to re-enforce the message to our brain that we’re really serious about wanting to breathe through our nose.

So,…

Nose breathing.

When we inhale, we imagine the air being drawn into the Dantien, as if the Dantien itself were a kind of lung, swelling out and sucking in air. To help with this we breathe with our abdomen rather than our chest, which might seem odd. In fact what we’re doing is filling our lungs from the bottom up, so as we breathe in we push the belly out – this causes the lungs and the diaphragm to extend downwards. This is called abdominal breathing. Over time this technique will increase the capacity of the lungs and encourage a longer, slower breathing rate.

It’s healthier to breathe this way, the lungs take in a much greater volume of air and the blood becomes more highly oxygenated. It also stimulates the lymphatic system, clearing out toxins and generally any nastiness we can do without. Once your body becomes familiar with the feel of abdominal breathing it seems to become automatic, so its well worth playing about with as a technique in its own right, even when you’re not meditating.

The average, non-meditating adult breathes at a rate of between 12 and 20 breaths per minute, when resting. The higher the breathing rate, the shallower each breath is, with some people seeming to breathe only with the very tops of their lungs in a series of rapid, short, panting breaths. Everyone’s different and results will vary but after practicing for a number of years, my own natural respiration rate, at rest, is around four or five breaths per minute, and during meditation it will drop naturally to about one and a half breaths.

The Dantien and the breath are important in meditation, at least the way I practise it, and even when we’re not meditating, its good to become familiar with the feel of them. When we breathe in, we imagine the Dantien swelling as the belly expands, imagine the air being drawn down to the Dantien like a cool, silken thread, but when we breathe out, rather than imagine the Dantien collapsing, it’s as if we seal it off, it retains the air, and as the belly contracts to normal on the outward breath, the sensation in the Dantien is one of compression, compaction, or consolidation.

All of this might sound a bit silly, and to begin with it will be an entirely imaginary exercise, but if you’re patient you’ll eventually begin to feel the Dantien, feel an “energy” building up in it, and once you’ve made it’s acquaintance – even if you don’t meditate for a while, you’ve only to settle your thoughts upon it again and you’ll feel it stirring. Exactly what the Dantien is, I’ve no idea, but to feel what I can only describe as the breath energy building up in it is a very relaxing and a very comforting thing.

Getting a feel for the Dantien then is one of the milestones in the kind of mediation I do. It won’t come right away, and we shouldn’t try to pursue it, or in any way become fixated upon it. The Dantien is like a cat purring on your lap. Stroke it, feel its heat, it’s comforting vibration thoughout your body, but other than that leave it alone.

Getting a feel for the Dantien goes hand in glove with the feeling of relaxed, slow, deep breathing. Once you develop the feel for it, you’ll discover that focusing upon it has given the mind something else to do and you’re less troubled now by flittering thoughts.

But you can go further.

It also helps to listen to the sound of your breath.

So listen.

If you can hear your breath while you’re breathing, you’re breathing too fast. It’s when you can hear only the sound of your silent breath that you enter into a deeper state of meditation.

5) The sound of the silent breath

A Zen koan? The sound of the silent breath. It’s like the old chestnut about the sound of one hand clapping, it doesn’t make sense at all – but really it’s very simple. If you breathe normally, and listen, you’ll both hear and feel the air moving in and out of your nose. Breathe more slowly and the sound and the feel of it will fade until you reach a point where you only know you’re still breathing because of the almost imperceptible movement of your abdomen. There is no sound, no sense of the breathing process in your ears or your nose. This is the sound of the silent breath.

Slow down.

See if you can find it.

Congratulations.

You’re meditating.

Summing up

(1) Decide how long you’ve got to spare. Set a timer.

(2) Sit, back straight and not touching anything. Legs crossed or open, on the floor or on a chair. It doesn’t matter. Relax.

(3) Settle on a position, say to yourself this feels okay. Relax.

(4) Don’t move a muscle until the timer pings.

(5) Say to yourself, I don’t want to think about anything right now, but don’t try to stop your thoughts arising spontaneously – it’s impossible. Aim for a centered, calm, unthinking zone. If if thoughts arise and you catch yourself dwelling on something, brush those thoughts gently aside.

(6) Close your mouth, touch the tip of your tongue to the hard palate just behind your top front teeth.

(7) Imagine your Dantien

(8) Breathe through your nose if you can. Imagine the Dantien sucking the air down when you breathe in. Imagine it is the Dantien, rather than the lungs doing the breathing. Blocked nose? Then obviously breathe through your mouth.

(9) As you breathe in, let the belly expand. As you breathe out let the belly relax back naturally, and see if you can fel the Dantien purring.

(10) Follow your breaths, slowing them down until you can’t hear them any more.

(11) Be sensitive to any feelings coming from your Dantien.

(12) Relax and enjoy them.

(13) Let the timer ping.

(14) Get up and go about your day.

Meditation, when and how often?

This is really up to you. It depends on your lifestyle and how much time you’ve got. If you’re being a martinet about it, set a specific time aside every day in your private meditation chamber, preferably some ungodly hour in the morning. If you have the discipline to do that, then go for it. See if you can manage an hour a day. Otherwise don’t worry about it.

If you’re a suburban creature with a nine to five, living with a houseful of other active folks, most likely setting any kind of specific timetable for meditation is useless as it’s inevitable some familial crisis will interrupt your neatly ordered existence. In practice you need to be flexible then. If you’re feeling troubled and tense, then try to meditate at some point every day, gradually bringing up your time spent in the zone from ten to thirty minutes. Afterwards you’ll feel steadier. Calmer.

What you shouldn’t do is get into a situation where you feel guilty because you’ve missed your meditation, either because something came up and you really didn’t get the time, or you felt an internal resistance to the idea. We’ve all been there. Be kind to yourself. Don’t feel guilty.

Me? After attaining a certain degree of steadiness from meditating every day, my practice falls off and becomes sporadic. I don’t think this matters. You come back to it when you need it. I’m not aiming for Buddahood, just a little clarity.

What does clarity feel like?

It feels calm.

___________________________________________________

Books I enjoyed and found very helpful with meditation are:

Mindfulness: Bante Gee

Being Nobody Going Nowhere – Aya Keema

Starting to meditate – Professor David Fontana

The Healing Power of  Dao – Mantak Chia

The Dalai Llama’s little book of Calm – the Dalai Llama

The Secret of the Golden Flower – Cleary/Wilhelm

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle

The Lavender and The Rose  – Michael Graeme

(only joking about the last one – it’s rubbish)

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A punch in the face.

I watched “Fight Club” recently, at the recommendation of number two son. It’s a film I’ve avoided for years because, as a strictly non-macho kind of guy, I didn’t think I’d be able to make any connection with it. I was wrong though, and I enjoyed it very much. The premise of the film is that we’re sleepwalking, being fed a junk diet of consumerist crap, that we’re slaves of a deliberately engineered paradigm of debt, and victims of a society that systematically humiliates each and every one of us. For the male of the species this is like being castrated. It damages us, psychologically, turns us into neutered Toms, into lazy, purposeless zombies, our only respite being dangerous opiates like drink, drugs or mindless sedatives like TV soaps.

Fight Club however, restores a man to his essential being by providing a forum where men can simply go and beat the stuffings out of each other. Paradoxically in doing so, according to the story, you regain your self respect, and also respect (where respect is due) for your fellow men. It also opens your eyes to those places, situations and characters where respect is not due, and where your outspoken contempt is morally, if not always legally, justified. The message of the film is thus highly subversive. It was made in 1999, but if anything its message is even more relevant today.

I can’t boast much in the way of testosterone, perhaps even less now than I had in 1999, but I wondered if the film really did have something significant to say about the emasculation of men in the modern age, and what the suppression of our natural energies can do to us in the longer term. I also wondered if we weren’t all a little more grown up than the film suggested, that we men had moved on, embraced our feminine sides and rejected our Martian cave-man roots. It’s a question that was partly answered for me today, by virtue of the fact that last night, incredibly, I managed to get myself into a fight of my own and, though I can hardly say I came off the best, this morning I was feeling rather good about it.

Let me explain.

I’ve been learning Kung Fu for a little over a year. Now, an hour a week’s not going to turn me into the next Bruce Lee, especially at my age, but I’m okay with that. It’s not everyone’s idea of fun, but I enjoy it, and it gets me out of the house. At the club I attend, we do a bit of soft sparring – all pretty tame, slow motion stuff to demonstrate the basic principles. We have a laugh and a joke, also a damned good sweat, and rule number one of our little fight club is nobody ever gets hurt.

Enter Jack. (not his real name)

Jack is an eastern European émigré and recent recruit. He’s short, powerfully built and I’m sure he’s a wonderful guy, but we’re all scared poopless of him because he doesn’t seem able to follow basic instructions, and he doesn’t know how to spar gently. Nor does he understand key language concepts like “go easy Jack”, “Okay, you win” or just plain old: “Stop!”

He only knows how to fight.

By contrast I suspect he thinks by now we English fight like a bunch of cissy-girls, that is if our little Kung Fu club is anything to go by. Hopefully he’ll move on soon to find some bigger, rougher boys to play with, perhaps down on Liverpool docks, or teasing the bouncers in Manchester on a Saturday night.

We’re not supposed to be fighting, Jack. We’re only playing, all right?

Pairing up for sparring these days is like watching a game of musical chairs – everyone trying to avoid Jack. Okay, I suspect you already know where this is going.

After an unexpected mid-sparring reshuffle last night, I found myself making the covered fist gesture to Jack. We were about to play a game called tee-shirt tag. You try to “tag” your partner on his upper body with the flat of your hand. He tries to block you and vice versa. Bear in mind we’re not youngsters here – we’re mostly middle aged guys with saggy bellies and creaky bones, and we take our mature conditions into account, never taking things too seriously, or too far. There are no egos here. This is Kung Fu. Not Karate.

However, there are no half measures with Jack.

I knew this was going to end badly when I spied the guy he’d partnered previously. He’d ducked out and was  by now looking on from the sidelines, seemingly a little worse for wear. I swallowed hard but otherwise didn’t have much time to consider my fate because Jack was already coming at me like Rocky Balboa. He obviously doesn’t understand the word “tee-shirt” either, otherwise how come I was suddenly having fists landed on my face?

What the!….

“For @&*$ sake Jack, go easy, mate.”

Jack grins back – something evil in that grin, I’m thinking. I can see him in a grungy bar with a broken bottle in one hand and a chair leg in the other. Anyway, I land a palm on his shoulder, you know – tag his tee-shirt with a quick, playful slap, and he looks at me with an expression as if to say: “Yea, like that hurt.”

“But this is what we’re supposed to be doing Jack. Come on, play the game, man!”

But then he’s coming at me like Rocky again, or like Popeye on steroids, and I’ve just ravished his Olive Oil. I manage to keep his fists off me this time, which I’m quite proud of, but he’s such a bulldozer, I run out space and he has me pinned up against the wall.

He blinks and I manage to land a cheeky tag on on his side. I’m fast, and quite pleased by this, but even though I suspect the dear man believes he’s pulling his punches, I’m thinking by now he’s got a screw loose, and I’m in danger of a black eye, or busted specs, and that the good lady Graeme won’t let me out to play again if I come home with blood on my shirt from a broken nose or a fat lip. I’m also, let’s face it, a breathless beginner trying to defend myself against a powerful opponent who really knows how to fight. I decide the guy needs to be shown this isn’t how we do things. So, when he’s coming at me again, I hold my hand out and lower myself like a cissy on one knee, eyes down in total disengagement, but bugger me if he doesn’t take the opportunity to land several more “playful” punches around my ears.

So much for unilateral disarmament!

“Tee shirt, Jack. Remember? TEE SHIRT! Play the game,  old man.”

The instructor calls time. Everyone peels away, gasping for breath and looking for a swig of water. I’m unable to hold my hands steady enough to drink just yet and end up dribbling it all down my front where it disappears into the pool of sweat on my chest. (Bruce Lee, forgive me). When I’ve gathered my wits, I seek Jack out, press him lightly on the shoulder to get his attention. I’m still in bit of a daze . ”You meant that, Jack,” I tell him, finger raised in polite warning, trying to convey the impression that he wasn’t supposed to pretend to mean it quite so realistically. I sense the subtlety is lost on him. He replies with a goofy grin and he mutters something back in his mother tongue. He could be calling me a big girl’s blouse for all I know, but I’m sure he’s not. He’s laughing – good naturedly – at least I think he is.

And me? I don’t know.

I’ve meditated for years, thinking the discipline of it would sharpen my mind, but as those years have passed, my mind feels more and more like mush. For a moment last night though, I was as focussed as I’ve ever been in my life, because there’s nothing like avoiding a fist in the face for sharpening you up, and dispelling all useless distractions. There’s just you and him and nothing but skill and focus in deciding whose blood will be on the floor – and all right this time it was mine, though not literally, thank God.

I’ve had more energy today, more than I’ve had all year, in fact, and I’ve found myself dealing with people I normally avoid, dealing with them confidently, even assertively – which isn’t like me at all. Thinking back, Jack didn’t actually hurt me last night, but he definitely took my breath away, and I need to be more careful in avoiding  him next week – but I’m tempted to say,…. I’m not sure I want to.

I think that movie really has something.

Graeme out

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A rainy, contemplative Sunday

It’s been rather a soggy weekend here. I woke up this morning to find that all of my plans for the day were off because it was raining, and I’d have to find something else to do. So, I stood in the back porch and caught up on my Qigong practice, which I’ve been neglecting recently.

It’s interesting that I immediately ran into a consumerist distraction, thinking I was bored with the music I usually practice to – an album (do they still use that word?) of traditional Chinese music by Hong Ting. So I dialled up iTunes on my iPod and began searching on music for Tai Chi. Half an hour passed during which my finger hovered dangerously close to the purchase button – a quick click and £7.99 might be gone on an electronic download – except I resisted the temptation, realising in time that I was suffering from the curse of wanting what I’d not got, and no longer appreciating what I had, so I put Hong Ting on the player and I began my practice.

For the next hour I ran through the 8 Brocades, which is my usual routine, then did some memory jogging on the Yi Jin Jing – another set I learned a while ago, then some standing meditation. Afterwards I sat with coffee, marvelling at the smell of it because I’ve been without a sense of smell now for several years, and for no reason I can think of this week it’s come back and increased the depth and texture of my world immeasurably. But anyway, as I sat there, I was thinking about my writing and where it’s going, and if I should think about charging for the next one, which is called “The last guests of La Maison Du Lac”. Should I, I thought, put it up on Smashwords or Kindle bookstore, or even step over to the darkside again and resume my quest for that most mythical of characters – an agent? Fortunately I looped back through all the same arguments for why I shouldn’t. As a UK writer I need to get as US tax id before those websites will let me sign up, which is fair enough but it seems a complicated process, and am I really going to sell that many copies to make it worth my while? Smashwords distribution on “The man who could not forget” is hopeless, and it’s free. So if I charged for it,… blah-di-blah-di-blah. As for the agent, I find I’m still in not in the frame of mind to want to waste years chasing one. I mean, there are so many other works I want to pursue without getting bogged down again trying to publish something that is for me ‘old news”. At the moment it takes me about half an hour to publish, and I can pretty much guarantee a decent distribution – and isn’t that better than beating your head against a brick wall? So I come back down to Feedbooks and Lulu as my usual outlets and decide to keep things pretty much as they are. It’s a bit like that earlier consumerist distraction - why don’t I want to make a shedload of money from my writing? Why would I want to spend years writing a story – the best part of a decade in the case of “Lavender and the Rose”, beating myself up over it and wrestling it into a shape I think will make a half decent read, and then just give it away? Answer: I’m fortunate in having the day-job to pay the bills, and if I lost that job I’d have to get another conventional kind of job – though probably one nowhere near as well paid – what generation x might call a McJob, just to cover the bills while I go on writing in my spare time. Because this is how it is for most writers, and just be thankful the internet came along when it did or you’d be really bitter and twisted by now.

And then I get to thinking about my life and how it’s such a small thing, and without wishing to appear morbid, does it really matter what I think or feel or do about anything? Maybe I shouldn’t mix qigong with strong coffee, but sometimes I sit there in the qi-tingly afterglow and my mind casts off for lands unknown,… but I’m thinking that it does matter – not that many people read my words, because that’s not the point, and the most important thing in all of this is that you’re somehow offering up a gift of your thoughts for your maker. There’s a hexagram in the I Ching that’s always fascinated me. It’s called Ting, which is basically a melting pot, a cooking vessel. The vessel is you, your life, and what it contains. You heat up the contents and the vapours rise to heaven, and the important thing is that you offer up what’s most sincere about yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s just between you and the universe. It doesn’t matter that not another living soul knows nor cares what it is that you think, and the ability to be accepting of that is an important step along the way to making peace with the world, as well as yourself. Perhaps the first step towards realising your immortality is to embrace the beautiful imperfection and the fleeting ignominy of your mortality, and carry on anyway.

The rain continued, and I tuned in to the news around lunch-time to find there’s been yet another twist in the so called phone hacking scandal that’s currently gripping the British media – where certain newspapers famed for their scandalmongering have been caught out hacking into people’s telephones and somehow accessing all manner of private details – not just of the great and good, but also of the bereaved in certain high profile murder cases. And though I share in my nation’s revulsion in all of this, I’m surprised that anyone is surprised. At the same time I thank God for my small life and that no one would want to hack my phone – not that they’d find much on it, though it impresses me that even though I’d struggle to tell you my own mobile ‘phone number, a newspaper could have it with so little effort, and access details which I probably couldn’t myself because I’ve forgotten my blasted passwords. How is it done? Well the only thing that springs to mind is corruption of those in authority who supposedly guard the digital gateways to this mine of personal information, which comes down to money again and the corruption, not only of those in authority, but through them the values we should be aiming for as human beings: sincerity, humility, and dignity. Instead the ‘phone hacking scandal seems to highlight the degree to which we have become each of us commoditised, our details, our selves apparently up for sale in an amoral free-market free for all.

And then as the day closes, we have a two hour TV special of “The Apprentice” – not about apprenticeships as I understand them of course, but a reality TV show where the future captains of this free-market free for all have the opportunity to strut their corporate stuff – and a pretty tawdry show they make of it as well. And I wonder, with the economies of the western word in such dramatic decline, if we don’t have need of a different model of leadership these days? That you can only go so far in undercutting the financial bedrock and the dignity of the vast majority of the citizens of the world – who just want to make a living – without the whole lot coming crashing down on top of you.

And now it’s 9:00 pm and the rain’s finally abated, and the sky’s a uniform blue-grey, deepening by the minute, and it’s work in the morning, and I’m contemplating a pile of stunning novels I’ve managed to pick up for a few pounds from the charity shops in town, and I’m wondering if I should start one or save them all for my two weeks annual leave coming up next week, and how, living such a small life those two weeks are the world to me, and I wonder what’s the world to those captains of the tawdry sleazy landslide of the western economies?

And what can we do about it? Well,… believe there is a power working silently for the good – behave yourself, and never mind the rest.

Thank you Beatrice.

Graeme out.

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Old Grumpy Strikes Again

So, I have this car, a  1.8 litre 07 registered Vauxhall Astra which I’ve moaned about before on my blog (search “old grumpy”). It’s the most expensive car I’ve ever bought – got it three years ago when it was a little over a year old, and to say the car’s been giving me a bad ride is an understatement. I live about 15 miles from the  job but the public transport is such that it would take me two hours to get there (late) and two hours back, so I need a reliable motor, but this one’s given me more sleepless nights than every other car I’ve driven put together. I’ve had a blown gear-box, blown radiator and all the plumbing; I’ve had the main wiring loom, and the tensioner pulley (twice). And this evening, backing out of my drive to go to the shops, the gearbox wouldn’t engage drive at all. So, you try putting your foot down and, with the engine red-lining, you just about manage to crawl a few yards, but then you think this is stupid, so you switch off, wonder what you’re going to do in the morning about getting to work. Then you switch on again, engage drive, and off it moves like you’d imagined the whole thing. You drive about a bit, stopping, starting, trying to repeat the fault,… nothing.  I have it booked in for a service at the end of next week, but I’m wondering if I’ll make it that far without getting out the recovery team,… again!

In the mean time, we’re seeing the first signs of brighter days with snowdrops in bloom and the early crocuses, so it’s hard to get too wound up about the car.  And speaking of new beginnings last week I decided to extend my knowledge of Chinese martial arts by taking up Northern Shaolin Kung Fu. The original idea was to take numbers one and two sons to learn it, while I watched because what do I want with Kung Fu at my age? But I couldn’t resist joining in, and enjoyed the evening very much. So as well as the Chen style Tai Chi old frame to keep in my head, I’m adding even more complication by learning a whole new set of moves. I must be mad! I seem to be in good company though – the group is composed of a bunch of young-uns as well the more senior students like me. Why do I want to do it? Well, I felt a gate opening and the opportunity arose,.. so I stepped through.

On the writing front, I’m struggling with my latest novel, called La Maison du Lac, or something like that. I’m  trying to wrestle it into a form that makes sense but I’ve been doing this since last September and I’m at the stage of wanting to give it a rest, but the characters won’t let me. I’m not sure what’s going on here, whether I’m trying to force the story in ways the muse doesn’t want  it go or if I’ve just not stumbled across that magic key yet that tells me the story’s finished and means something. It’s a frustrating business, the dark side of writing,… a barren plain without a single landmark in sight to guide you, and you don’t even know if you’re heading somewhere worthwhile, even after ninety thousand words.

So, I’m distracting myself by blogging and even writing book reviews over on Goodreads. I’m not sure I’ve got the point of Goodreads yet. You go on there, list the books you’ve read or want to read and you rate them. But reading’s such a subjective business and unless you’re a professional critic I’m not sure what the opinion of Joe Public is worth. For example, you get someone awarding Orwell’s 1984 one star and saying it’s a crap novel. I would beg to disagree, but my opinion’s not worth that much either. You also get the wannabe critics calling the authors of books rude names and questioning their fitness to be authors, which seems a bit childish to me. I may be biassed but authors are people too and anyone who can sustain a hundred thousand words of prose should be exempt all personal insults, whatever you might think of their efforts. Anyway to all you Goodreads wannabe critics, please don’t simply say a book is “crap” – because you’re not in a position to judge. If you  don’t like a book, then say you didn’t like it, and tell us why. Same if you liked it – tell us why, tell us what you got out of it.  To simply say a book is crap tells us nothing about the book, but perhaps a whole lot more about you. And don’t call the author rude names because they might read your review and it would hurt their feelings.

Other than that I think Goodreads is an interesting forum. And you don’t need to be a traditionally published author to get listed. They’ve even got some of my books on there!

Okay, enough procrastinating,… back to La Maison. 

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Tai Chi and the importance of the “Now”

It’s been a while since I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, but I’m still pondering upon it, letting it inform the seething mass of my thoughts, and I’m finding it sheds light upon aspects of Tai Chi and Qigong practice.

I’ve read that the practice of Tai Chi and Qigong has a number of distinct phases. First comes the initial enthusiasm, sparked by the interest of doing something new, and something that apparently produces unexpected benefits in the mind and body. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about these, in spite of the mystical hype perpetrated by self-styled masters in their various self-help programmes; you simply feel more relaxed, and even though the exercises don’t seem very strenuous, you also find yourself feeling physically fitter, healthier and more energetic – less likely to nod off on lazy afternoons. You just need to practice – preferably in the company of others because the social aspect keeps your interest levels up as well. I’m sure many at my Tai Chi group get as much out of the cup of tea and a bit of a natter as they do from the practice, which has them laughing – and that’s also good.

But then your body adapts, and if you’re only putting in the same amount of practice time as before, you may find that while you retain the fitness levels, you lose that lovely tingly feeling at the end of your sessions. I began to wonder if it was no longer working for me, or if I’d started doing something wrong. For me the initial, enthusiastic phase lasted about a year. Then you’re into the dead space of simply turning up for practice, going through the forms and trying to convince yourself that you’re not deluding yourself.

Many students drop out during this phase. You wonder if you might be better off with another teacher, or taking up a different style of Tai Chi, or maybe it’s down to such minutiae as the fact you’re not holding your palm/arm/leg/head the right way – but really there’s no need to fuss. You’re fine as you are, and in fact after learning the basic forms, if it’s the health aspects you’re after, rather than the technical skills of the martial applications, I suspect you become your own best teacher at some point. If it’s martial skills you’re after, then okay, you need to spar against another student and learn from the bumps and bruises under the guidance of an expert bone breaker.

I don’t know how long this second phase lasts, because I think I’m still in it, even though I’m in my fourth year of practice now. But I’m still fairly regular – turn up for class once a week, and do the daily Qigong forms in between,… but I still find myself wondering what the hell I’m expecting.

Tolle’s book answers this question.

When looking for happiness, for satisfaction, for enlightenment, or whatever, we always fix our minds on some point in the future. The experience of meditation pulls us back into the present moment. Thus, centred in the present, we’re no longer interested in whether another form of Tai Chi is any better for us, or if yet another Qigong book from Amazon will contain that one useful gem that will transform our lives. Of course it won’t.

Practicing Tai Chi with a slow deliberation teaches us “presence” of mind. On bad days, when I’m doing the form, maybe with a hangover, from the night before, I can drift off into cloud cuckoo land and find myself lost. My head moves into the future or the past, daydreaming – while the rest of the class, more focussed in the present, stick with the correct movements and make me look stupid. So here’s the first insight this idea of Nowness grants us into the value of Tai Chi: it brings us into the present moment and teaches us a means of holding onto it. In the Yang style for example there’s something deeply relaxing about focussing on the palm as it moves into the Single Whip posture. Practice enough and you start getting the same feeling when drawing the curtains, or loading the dishwasher (all right maybe I’m pushing it a bit with loading the dishwasher, but you know what I mean).

The other thing Tolle’s ”power of now” talks about is the value of attaining an intimate sense of the inner body. The inner body can be felt in Tai Chi as a kind of invisible skeleton, or an inner ghost, an energy form, if you, like that occupies your body space. Awareness of it comes most readily to mind when we focus down on the Dantien, this spot in the lower abdomen, but we also get a sense of it in our arms and legs when we concentrate, or when we practice the forms in a relaxed way. The energy body may be imaginary, a figment of  the mind, but it is also “real” in the sense that we can actually feel it – whatever it is.

Awareness of one’s self from the inside out is something I’ve written about before, without fully appreciating its fundamental value. This awareness goes hand in hand with a sense of the Nowness of things. You can’t feel your inner self if your mind is preoccupied with the past or the future. Tolle speaks of the importance of discovering this sense of one’s inner self and cultivating an awareness of it at all times. It’s another thing that stills the mind and brings you back into the present moment, the place where you belong.

Emotional pain, anger, frustration,… all of these things have their roots in our tendency to live with our heads in either the anticipation of some future event, or the regret of something we perceive to have been irretrievably lost in the past. The Power of Now reiterates in very simple language, the message of Zen Buddhism. It makes sense of the idea of an enlightened glimpse or moment of sartori, and grants us the means of approaching it, by teaching us what it feels like.

An hour of Tai Chi, no matter how imperfectly performed will reward you with the feeling of yourself from the inside out. You will feel your arms, legs and abdomen warm and tingling. You will feel them buzzing with an electricity which, if you like, you can put down to your imagination. Whatever it is, it’s a lovely feeling to sink into. This awareness of oneself, is in itself energising. Tolle speaks of its restorative, its rejuvanating properties, and this this sounds like Tai Chi to me.

The forms, be they Chen Style, Yang Style, Sun Style, they all have a set sequence to them, a choreography if you like, but I no longer believe their secret lies in completing the form, in memorizing it or repeating it. The forms are derived from their martial applications, and if all we’re interested in is our health then, a pernikerty adherence to their correctness is no more than dancing.

In Chen Style, it seemed the most important thing to me to gain a knowledge of each of the 72 forms, but having completed them, I now know that all the health benefits are effectively contained in the first five moves – but that repeating them over and over would be boring, so the 72, the Lao Ja or old frame, mixes them up to make them more interesting to practice.

In fact, I suspect it doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you try to achive the Tai Chi basics of an “open” body, wide stance, shoulders rounded, chest sunken, arms relaxed,… then you can make it up as you go along, so long as you can remain focussed on what you’re doing. I’ve begun to experiment now with a mixture of the Yang and Chen forms, mixed in with a bit of Silk Reeling and Qigong moves, just doing whatever the inner body seems to gain the most expression through.

In such free-style practice, the Nowness becomes the essential thing. The blood and the lymph circulate freely, stimulating the body and enhancing the feel of the moves, so that when you stop, this inner ghost continues to tingle and helps you to remember what it feels like, at times when you’re not practicing – like sitting in a ten mile tail back on the M6, or when pushing your trolley around the supermarket. You just take a breath, push it down to the Dantien, and it wakes up. You remember it. You remember your inner self, you are pulled back into the now, and you no longer feel anxious, frustrated or bored. You still feel good, relaxed, aware.

So there seems to come a point when everything is Tai Chi. Maybe this is the third stage. No! Hold that thought right there, you’re letting your mind run off into the future again.

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Want to understand Qigong a little better? Don’t read this.

I’m going to write this down before I forget it. I’ve just spent five hours doing a refresher course on the Yi Jin Jing, Damo’s legendary sixth century Shaolin Buddhist Qigong set, and I’m feeling very relaxed and qi-tingly as a result, but I’m also confused. This is normal for my qigong practice of course. The difference now though  is that I see a reason for my confusion and it’s this: there are two schools of Qigong: Physiological and Spiritual. For the past three years, I’ve been aspiring towards a greater understanding of the spiritual, while practicing what is essentially the physiological.

No wonder I’m confused!

The spiritual approach is characterised by its Taoist influence and is the one we’ve all come across in popular books, the one that talks about an “energy body”. Its proponents describe qi as a derivative of the Tao, a universal unknown, a fundamental energy which can be harvested by physical and psychological methods in order to produce effects within the gross body. These effects range from a sense of general well being, improved health, the healing of chronic ailments in both oneself and others,  the ability to sense, manipulate and project qi, right through to the acquisition of paranormal  abilities, including astral travel. Phew!

Taking the Taoist system to its extremes, practitioners work towards refining their energy body through internal alchemical methods, to such an extent they are able to achieve feats of super-human ability, as well as spiritual immortality. Those of us who do not practice such methods, it is said, will be unable to carrying our personality forwards upon death – we just fizzle out, unable to maintain our self-awareness on the energy plane – or so the theory goes.  Proper Taoist immortals are rare, and possibly mythological characters.

The important thing in this school is the acceptance of, or the belief in the human energy body and this mysterious stuff called qi.

The physiological school, on the other hand, which is the one I’m familiar with, on a working level, doesn’t talk about an energy body and it doesn’t mention qi either, except in very guarded terminology that wouldn’t offend a western physician. Significantly, on the course I’ve just done, qi wasn’t mentioned at all. Instead, the emphasis was on “energy” in terms of vascular and lymphatic kinetics – basically movement of the blood and lymph.

And that’s it.

The blood gets the good stuff into the body – the oxygen – and qigong sends the oxygen deep into the tissues, where it’s needed for regeneration, repair, or day to day function. Meanwhile the lymph gets the bad stuff out, the waste, the pathogens, the poison, all the stuff that’ll do us harm if it’s given the chance to settle in. Qigong methods stimulate the flow of the lymph by a mixture of deep breathing and movement. I know this. I’ve known it for a long time. I’ve even written about it – so why is it suddenly a revelation to me?

All of the health benefits of practising Qigong (or Tai Chi) from the physiological perspective then, are the result of preventing the stagnation of blood and lymph. There’s nothing spiritual or philosophical involved here, and all it boils down to is that if you want a healthy body you have to keep it moving. In other words it’s a purely biological thing, and for anyone looking for something more mysterious behind that qi-tingly feeling, it can be a bit of a let-down, like being told there’s no such thing as Father Christmas.

This is all very interesting, but while I apparently practice the the physiological style of Qigong, and its rather prosaic explanations do answer many of my questions regarding my experiences of it -  it doesn’t explain everything.

Even in the western-friendly physiological qigong school, we are taught an awareness of the meridian system and the vessels, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, derived from the Taoist tradition. We are taught to imagine the flow of “stuff” along specific channels while performing particular movements of a Qigong set. In the Yi Jin Jing, for example, when Weituo presents the first part of this pestle, he’s opening up his heart channel, and my understanding is that in physiological terms this works to the benefit of that particular organ. But when Weituo presents the second part of his pestle, it opens up his triple burner. Now, the triple burner  doesn’t exist as a physical entity within the body at all – more as a concept – more a part of that imaginary “energy body” of the Taoists, so what the blood and lymph’s doing when we open up the triple burner channel, where it’s flowing to or from in physiological terms, I’ve no idea.

I’m really not getting the whole story here! All of this is very confusing of course and of no interest whatsoever to anyone else, so I think we’ll end it there.

Just one more thing! (thank you uncle)

At a practical level, it doesn’t matter what your understanding of this process is, physiological or spiritual; you simply do the moves and you feel the results.

You feel great!

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