Crazy Dreams

05 Dec 2016 2 Comments

by TheRestlessRaven in breath, day to day, Dreams, energy, healing, intention, meditation, Mindfullness, moving forward, self care, small victories, surfing, tai chi, taichichuan, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

I woke up in the middle of the night after a crazy dream… I was compelled to write it down and this is the result :):

Catching the world in plastic bags.

Reviving life by thinking and running around catching it all in plastic bags. Tons of plastic bags, fitting everything in it. Everything shrinking to fit inside.

Creating silliness and stopping to enjoy the things around us. But focusing so much on what is ahead or behind.

Chasing cars and trying to put them in a plastic bag. Pure silliness.

Chasing the long lost reality will get you nowhere. But creating your own will lead to the greatest treasures. The past is gone, create something from today.

planet_bags

I have taken December off from physical training.

Instead I have been meditating on yin. Trying to figure out what it means to do something you love, without focusing on an end goal. Doing for the sake of doing, instead of doing for the sake of achieving.

I made some considerable break throughs this week, but the most important one is I have found my laugh.

It was hidden deep inside the moment, no longer thinking of how I would be training next, or day dreaming about the day I start my own school. I found myself in the present, interacting with those around me with no buffer time. (You know, that time where you spend trying to decipher hidden meanings from the conversations and the responses get catered to the scenario…No? You dont? oh… well there is a snippet of my brain for you.)

My mornings have been consisting of compassionate awareness meditation. Allowing my monkey mind to express its frustrations and its need to drive forward as to better understand where all that is coming from. Still a lot to uncover, but I have started to discover some of the fear and the insecurites that have been rooted in a lot of my long term training.

Fear of seeming weak, fear of letting my body fall apart, fear of being seen as unfocused and well dumb. Its has been rooted in there for so long that I kind of forgot that I should look at it.

The funny thing is, as soon as I realized it and allowed myself to accept it there was a physical weight that lifted from my shoulders. I started asking myself, what do I feel like doing right at this moment? If I had no THING to do, what calls to me?

Suddenly, I had\have space in my mind and was free to laugh and joke with strangers waiting for the train.

Much like Super Adam, the drunken me, I was laughing and having a good time with people I was never going to see again. But, not only strangers. I have been more engaged and present with people I have known for much longer. Able to laugh and joke freely, from the heart, like I haven’t done in ages without the aid of alcohol.

It has been truly liberating, I will continue with my mediation and see where I end up at the end of december.

Oh! I also forgot to mention, my cough and all signs of flu\sickness have vanished. I think have been bottling things up and forcing things instead of trying to listen. Just like Malcolm said, but don’t tell him I would hate for it to go to his head.

Colds, Exhaustion, Frustration and Food

05 Nov 2016 3 Comments

by TheRestlessRaven in breath, chakras, day to day, energy, focus, horse stance, kua, listening, meditation, Mindfullness, moving forward, practice, tai chi, taichichuan, time management, Uncategorized, Zhan zhuang Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I haven’t written in my journal or my blog (obviously) in over two weeks.

When I got back from vacation, I was completely floored for 4 days with, what I am assuming to be, the flu. Since then, I have been trying to get my strength back to practice at full capacity again. My morning routines have fallen away as I have been restless through the night fighting off night sweats and yet to have a full nights rest, leaving me exhausted for much else then trying to get ready for the work day.

I have been to several classes, but as I was not sure if I was contagious I missed a week and a half after I got back. Since then, I have gone to 4.

We are learning the sword in the advanced class, so that has been memorization and the other classes I have been leading or going through the 24. I have picked up some new concepts from the reviews, but over all I just feel extremely distant from my practice.

Without my personal practice time, I loose my connection to my body in class and I am not able to delve as deeply in to the forms, or the movement in general. I begin to look at it again through the analytical mind instead of discovering the movement through my body.

This has lead to a lot frustration internally that tries to lash out looking for someone or something to blame it all on. From my inability to ask the right questions, to looking for more teachers, to wondering if I have ever been actually developing in the first place.

But the crux of it is, I have not been practicing and the blame rests squarely on me and my exhaustion. But perhaps blame is the wrong word, it implies wrong doing, I have just been too tired to focus on full training.

It’s a couple weeks of this built up that I woke with yesterday morning. A morning with eyes open at my regular time (7AM), feeling awake and with more energy I have had in the last couple weeks.

So naturally, I decided to work out AND train.

I have read that working out can help boost the immune system, and in the past when I was training for intense obstacle course races, I had broken this cycle of getting sick during the winter. So the answer must be that I need to start sweating regularly again.

I kicked the morning off with 15 minutes of meditation, to get my mind right. Then I went in to my routine.

Squats, leg lifts, crunches, squat holds, scissor kicks and hip thrusts. Aimed at getting my legs and core activated and the blood\sweat pumping.

It took about 30 minutes total, but was aimed mostly for intensity and I worked up a really nice sweat.

Then it was time to train, I practiced what I learned of the sword twice, then timed 15 minutes of stick work targeting a deep horse stance and keeping my mind centered and focused on the activity at hand,or at least pulling the attention back when I felt it wander. (After almost two weeks without meditation it was quite the greased hog to settle down).

Then it was time to eat, I was feeling really good!

3:00 hit at work, it was time to do Qigong with a coworker. We have been doing 15 -20 minute routines just as a nice afternoon break, yet another thing that has not been done in 4 weeks. (Vacation + sickness + exhaustion).

So, I was all jazzed and feeling great so we went off and did a full 30 minutes. It was probably one of our best sessions, we both worked up a sweat and I was able to correct a couple of movements for him.

Overall, I was feeling pretty good about myself and honestly really excited about being able to start real practice again.

Then about 5:30, I started to feel it.

A flushing of my cheeks and a heat to my face. At that moment, I realized that I had also been coughing today more than the last couple. One that was more insistent than just a nagging piece of phlegm that had dislodged and needed to be expelled.

The worse kind of cough, a dry pointless one.

My girlfriend, out of pure chance, made her famous chicken soup last night.

Perfect timing, I thought to myself.

I gobbled it down, along with tea and zinc for dessert.

But it only helped momentarily.

At 10 the coughing started again, and I could feel the pressure in my sinuses start to build. It was taking hold.

Coupled with an open window last night, and the heater in the house being turned off. I woke up sick.

I was up sneezing at 5 AM, blowing my nose and wheezing yet again.

I woke up long enough to gargle with salt water and write an email to my teacher saying I’m not coming in for fear of infecting others.

Needless to say, I am pretty god damn tired of being sick.

This time I am going to defeat it fully. I am going to be eating chicken soup every day and drinking tea with every meal, I will just take stock of my studies and read some books. Practicing VERY lightly until I feel strong for more than a day.

sick

Wuji – Emptiness in Emptiness

07 Sep 2016 2 Comments

by TheRestlessRaven in energy, focus, healing, intention, life, listening, meditation, Mindfullness, practice, road blocks, routine, self care, tai chi, taichichuan, training, wuji, zuan zhuang Tags: , , , , ,

It will be an interesting month.

Work has picked up considerably and we are now required to work 10 hour days until October.

Kind of sucks for my afternoon classes as I will no longer be able to make them, but it has allowed me to focus on some aspects of my personal practice that were unclear before.

Knowing that I was going to be at the office until 8 every night, it released the pressure of sticking to a schedule off and suddenly I didn’t have that extra anxiety in the morning that I didn’t even realize was there. I was able to focus completely on my practice and still got to work at the same time.

30 minutes of meditation and 20 minutes of stick work every morning for the last week (except Monday).

Sunday, I got a full two hours of my own practice at the park which was incredible, I did 30 minutes of qigong, 20 minutes of stick work, then I did the 23, 48 and 83 Erlu forms. The 83 was a bit rusty, but I took it very slow and just paused at the moments I was stuck until the next move came to me.

I started “The root of Chinese Qigong” again, which I never finished the first time. I had put so much pressure on myself to remember everything that I just burned out.

For the last couple weeks I have been suffering from a crisis of resolve. Wondering if I was wasting my time in all this, or if I was just convincing myself that I was feeling the sensation of chi, relaxation you name it. Wondering if I had just allowed myself to be hypnotized by the mysticism of it all and was just blindly going through the motions. (Which I realize now, I was because I was partially disengaged)

I felt like I had frozen in progress and that I was just kidding myself that I could teach this in the future at all. I was convinced I didn’t know anything and that my knowledge was so thin it would blow away at the slightest gust of wind.

I have had this intention to read all these books, to grow my knowledge, and yet I had not read any of them. Basically, I felt like a fake who was not doing justice to this ancient practice and that I should just quit.

Not to digress too much… but, I realized that the only way I was going to learn or to feel satisfied, was to do two things.

  1. Start reading and retain the information I could. Not stress so much about retaining everything, just letting the things that stick, stick  and the stuff that doesn’t well… I will come back around to it.
  2. Dive in to the meditative side of personal practice to build a greater foundation for pushhands, form and just general life. (I also realized the importance of building familiarity with the wuji state of mind. You begin to be aware of where your mental center is at all times.)

One late night last week working, I just picked up the book and started reading it again.

I was feeling exhausted, the exhausted I usually feel right before I decide to go to bed or just shut my brain off and watch a movie (which i have been doing a lot of lately to distract myself). After the first page, I noticed a palpable wave of relaxation just pass through me.

I was not “straining” to read the book. I was actually relaxing in to it.

The words kept going by and I was finding myself not only understanding them, but enjoying where they were taking me.

So, I have been reading at work for breaks and when I get home at night as a way to wind down and decompress.

I seem to have accidentally brought over the intention I had during meditation, to detach all value and purpose from the action. In doing so, I was able to enjoy it just for what it was, not to reach some end goal of knowledge or relaxation, in the case of mediation.

To actually be present in the moment of action completely and fully with a focus and relaxed mind.

I now can see the reason the old masters stood in mediation for two hours every morning. it changes you. My thirty minutes will have to do for now.

wuji

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