Do you have a hard time remaining still without falling asleep?
I find that the more I spend time with fitness people, we are like kids...go,go,go and then crash. But the crash isn't only physical. The brain sort of crashes along with the body. It's like if we're sedentary too long the brain feels like it's time to take a break.
Here is a little challenge, try sitting (preferably in the morning) somewhere very quiet and look at one spot in a very neutral place. This could be near a wall in your house, or in a room you don't use that much,etc. Set a timer for 20 minutes and sit there and just concentrate on your breath.
The first thing that will happen is that your mind will start to ramble. You'll either have thoughts about what you have done or what you need to do. Try and discard those thoughts and just give yourself 20 minutes to have some silence. You may get sleepy but try and stay awake by just being aware of the breathing going in and out of your body. Make sure your posture is nice and straight.
What will this do? This will help you throughout the rest of the day. When your mind is racing and stress starts to surge, just remember to breathe. That way in every moment you can just take it back to the basics and have the mind and body clear at the same time. s
This will also help rejuvinate you. Being people concerned with fitness, it's good to look at natural ways for top performance. As soon as you get frustrated, heart rate goes up, etc so take a moment just to get the breath regulated and your body will calm down.
So those of you feeling stressed out (all of us at some point) try doing this at least 5 days this week and let me know how you like it! I meditate on the breath every morning and believe me it does come back to you throughout the day and is a wonderful way of waking up
Holly,
A timely post, considering my current chaotic life of present. I have been stressing myself to the end of my ability to cope! It has had a very negative impact on my health, my joints, and my mood. Thanks for the drill. I am not really good at meditating but this seems like an easy enough intro to meditation that I may actually be able to do.
JP, sorry to hear. I am also not good at 'meditating', but I found this audio CD pretty helpful for stress relief and even enhancing athletic performance. You might want to give it a try.
Tip: Breathing: A Mental Energizer
If you need a pick-me-up or are feeling a bit anxious, try the following breathing exercise: It can help to bring energy and clarity to your mind. The first time, do it for just 15 seconds, increasing the duration by five seconds every time, until you can complete one full minute. Always breathe normally between exercises.
* Sit upright with your back straight, eyes closed, and shoulders relaxed.
* Place the tip of your tongue against the bony ridge above your upper teeth.
* Breathe rapidly through your nose, in and out, with your mouth slightly closed.
* Keep your inhale and exhale short and equal. Your chest should be almost mechanical in its movements-rapid, like air is pumping through it.
* Try to inhale and exhale three times per second, if you can, keeping your breath audible.
Ideally, you will feel the muscular effects of this breathing exercise at the base of your neck (just above the collarbone) and at the diaphragm. Put your hands on these areas to get a sense of the movements. *
I don't meditate - I probably should, though, with 2 young kids.
I use the breathing exercises as neccesary. I don't make a regular habit out of them although, once again, I probably should.
That one is supposed to be energizing, but it is a pretty good workout for the diaphragm. It is similar to another one that come cyclists use to try to boost lung volume. I use the 'relaxing breath - 4:7:8 ratio - extensively to get my heart rate down during physical activity and when I am stressed. It works just about everytime.
Where are you in HI, if I could ask? I have a good friend who moved out there after growing up in Chicago and he has been there for 11 years and loves it. He was on Oahu for a few years, then Maui, then a 2 year stint on Lanai (he got sick of everybody knowing everyone else's business though), and now back on Maui. He's a HS teacher. If I could move there (my wife's and my family are all here in Chicago), I'd do it in a second. We've already talked about doing it in the future.
Thought I'd jump in here. I've done a little mediatation off and on for the past... well, we won't go there!
About a year ago when I was working on getting my blood pressure back down, I was trying a variety of tapes and I found this one to be the best for me: Deep Relaxation
I haven't used it for a while now but I'm keeping it handy. After a while, you can do this stuff w/o needing the tape but it's useful to have around to get back on track if necessary. Along with breathing, most meditaiton that I've done involves the tensing and relaxing of muscles throughout the body to get really relaxed and focused.
I don't get into the other stuff often associated with meditation anymore but I do believe that it has undeniable physical benefits.
Good start of a discussion on meditation. But the points are missing the mark some (not alot but some).
The reason we meditate is not to relax, solve insomina, or even lower blood pressure, even those are certainly some by byproducts. Its a life practice, like many things we do that connects us to source within us that is more real than the thoughts, beliefs, preconditioned responses, and emotions that govern our lives.
By life practice, I mean an ongoing inquiry into how to be completely engaged and intimate with the wild force that runs through everything, and is running through us, if we would just pause long enough to notice. There is no real life in the past, as there is no real future. These are just mind approximations that are mostly inaccurate.
A life practice, then, is anything that we do over an extended period of time that consistently and reliably deepens the connection to our experience and expression of aliveness NOW. While meditation offers a vast repertoire of formal practices and situations that accommodate the different predilections of individuals, almost any activity can be used as a life practice if it reconnects us with the source of our aliveness in this moment.
Becoming physically fit, or a master in a sport has a particularly rigorous set of conditions that requires the individual to see the world and themselves as they really are - mental or physical; brave or timid; careful or reckless; competitive or cooperative; dishonest or honest, vain or humble; pessimistic or optimistic; distrustful or trusting, judgmental or tolerant. The circumstances that we find ourselves - assessing our progress, surrendering to the program, accepting our bodies as they are - not what we imagine them to be - connects to the wider universe as it is. Through meditation we can begin to see that everything is impermenant, transitory even our current state of body.
You could say that the greater purpose of formal practice, a physical fitness program or otherwise is to apply this acute attentiveness of the external and our internal environment to determine how well they contribute to the harmony of ourselves, others and the practice. Finding this uniting awareness filtering through the rest of our relationships, our work, and our play is the ultimate goal.
Through such a practice, we come to know that the most reliable and consistent thing about us is the silent substratum or witness within ourselves that observes all these passing and changing phenomena, including our foibles. This training ground for the rest of life, helps us to become resilient, tolerant, and accepting of the inevitable, perplexing, and often agonizing losses of that comes with being alive.
It's essential to remain diciplined in the practice as much as possible, to set a regular schedule based on your existing life conditions, and to come to an understanding that this is an activity that is an implicit part of our being. Detached awareness of our performance, not identifying with our insecurities, celebrating success in ourselves and others makes us realize that there is really is no need to be defensive or judgemental abouy ourselves or others to be successful. Meditation is hard at first, because like any work-out, the brain is not accustomed to not having an object of thought, or emotion running its incessant tape. Everyone experiences the difficulty at first. You will get better. Just witness the thoughts, perhaps label them (past thought, future thought) and return the focusing on the breath. The point is NOT to calm the waters, the point is STAY in the boat. Just as your body responds to physical conditioning, your brain will respond to this mental conditioning. Eventually, your response to all sorts of stressors and even your perception of reality and time will change. You will become much more effective in everything you do.
Incomplete participation only divides our attention and detracts from the complete engagement and flow that is central to all of life. Sometimes, the need for spiritual development requires radical re-prioritization, at least for an extended period, to experience the lessons the practice can provide. If your family needs you to find a job, then your family's needs becomes more central to your practice. It's important the we give ourselves the permission to re-prioritize, because our time on this planet is short and we have much to learn as the world provides the lessons.
You know you have learned the lessons when you can drop the practice in good conscience and still be happy and totally engaged with whatever you are doing.
Someone recently taught me this technique for quieting the mind. In this exercise, the cat represents your awareness, and the mouse is your next thought. Sitting still and quiet, visualize yourself like that cat patiently watching a mouse hole, waiting for the next thought to come by.
For some reason, this particular visualization seems to still all my racing thoughts and give me a few moments of quiet mind. I've taken several 'mouse watching' moments in the past few furious days as we race toward Christmas.
I need to stop in more often to keep up with this discussion group. I suppose I should admit that I am a long-term observer of Jean-Paul’s work; and, as often as I can, I lurk around to see how things in his world are evolving. In the past few months, I was taken in by the polemics over the Bush Administration and the war, and I especially enjoyed watching the skillful vivisection of the troll. Otherwise, I have been too involved in my current work to become engaged in dialogue (multilogue is probably better) with this interesting group. Regardless, I could not withhold commenting on the recent emphasis on yoga and the remarks on the philosophy of mind, particularly since your comments come across as serious and authentic.
In regard to yoga, I believe that jasciu’s comments, if taken to heart, show the way to every benefit that may be obtained from its practice. (I doubt that anyone could speak with such confidence and clarity without having achieved some level of mastery of the subject.) Building and strengthening new practices rather than struggling with old bad habits is an idea that is well understood in the fitness profession. It is not that old habits should be ignored, especially those that are disruptive to self-efficacy and personal relationships, but the most important goal of fitness training is the cultivation of practices that lead to self-transformation. Most people that come into your gyms do so because they want to transform themselves into something healthier, better, more effective.
Physical culture and yoga are similar in this regard. In fact, I have known many yoga practitioners and meditators that have been at it a long time and have yet to develop the discipline and control that I have seen physical trainers develop. Many yoga trainers eschew strength training in lieu of emphasis on stretching, control, and relaxation (all factors typically found in a professional trainer’s approach). I think this may be because many of them fail to understand the discipline involved and the ultimate aims of the art, especially with assimilation of science-based training methods advocated in this forum. A corollary might be the martial arts training in the East and practices like Wabi-Sabi (tea ceremony) and Kendo in Japan. All of these forms emphasize skill in execution and mindfulness of the actions involved.
I have no doubt that control and skill mastered by fitness trainers, as well as the aims of their teaching are equivalent to these traditions. In this regard, I would wager that every serious participant in this forum shares a passion for self-transformation, not only for yourselves, but, as a personal lifetime interest and a commitment to the well-being of those around you. This desire for personal transformation is precisely the point of almost all teachings on yoga. The crushing demands of civilized life on the individual, the natural forces that wither away health, the vagaries of self-indulgence, all have the potential for giving birth to a passion for life, healing, and renewal. But this passion is not Dylan Thomas's raging against the night as much as it is an embracing of life itself, or as William James described it, it is a “Religion of Healthy Mindedness.”
I would not go so far as to label any of the contributors to this forum as evangelists of a new religion, but that you discuss your interests in physical health and discipline in the context of mind and Eastern philosophies suggests that a convergence of perspectives is surfacing. Like worrying a broken tooth with his tongue, Allen goes to root of the problem as it developed in the dogmatic dualist views of Western thinkers like Rene Descartes. Perhaps a better path, a path not taken in mainstream Western thought, was suggested by Descartes’ contemporary, Benedictos Spinoza. Spinoza proclaimed a doctrine of the unity of mind and body, a form of double aspectism holding that nothing occurs in the mind without happening in the body and vice versa (cf, gardener’s posts on July 19 & Nov 1). If you ground your practices in physical culture in this kind of a doctrine, then you add, or perhaps make clear, a new dimension to your work. Interest in a more holistic vision, while not fully formed, is certainly latent in the comments in this forum. If this is indeed the direction that your discussions are heading, then you may be converging upon a method developed over three thousand years ago in India (figurines in hatha poses have been discovered at the Harrappa excavations in India).
Hatha yoga, as it is described in perhaps the most venerated of writings on the subject, “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,” is but one of the preliminary steps in a series of practices that lead to an ultimate transformation in personal existence. One way of describing it would be to say that hatha practice, as well as breathing exercises (pranayama), are preparatory steps leading to higher forms of cognitive training. The higher practices may be loosely described as learning incrementally increasing levels of concentration. You might consider concentration practice as similar to weight training in that it begins with simple, short exercises that condition the mind to maintain longer periods of focus and freedom from distraction. As strength increases with practice, so does mental focus. Without going into more detail (as Bryan pointed out, yoga is a vast subject), the point I want to make is that there is a seamless unity in yogic training of the physical body and the mind.
What would be interesting for me would be to see how this group would articulate ideas like this in the evolution of your practices. Would it go toward answering the questions you are raising? That is, questions like “how is it the mind registers an idea about a time to awaken, and as if having an internal clock, you awaken at the appointed time?” “Are there two things interacting or one thing functioning?” “How is it that your words and directions lead to some level of transformation in your clients, or even in yourselves?” “Is there a connection between physical training and meditation practice?” Most interesting, “if there is pattern of development anchored in the physical that flows into the mental, what or how will you be teaching others once (or if) you adopt these principles into your methods?” What makes your approach more interesting is that your focus is thoroughly pragmatic; that is, you invest your body & mind in the “how” of it more than explaining the “what” or “why.” So, someone let me know; are these the sentiments of this thread, or, am I injecting my presuppositions into your discussion.
tWelcome back, Wazier! I know exactly what you mean by being “a long-term oberver of Jean-Paul’s work,” and lurking “around to see how things in his world are evolving.” Right now, there is a lot of polemical material on these forums. I’m interested in these, but more interested in the themes of transformation that you perceive in these precincts.
I haven’t answered quickly, because your post is very rich. What it really calls for is a face-to-face seminar. Various participants in J-P’s forum could sit around a table and take up points you raise.
As far as eastern philosophies are concerned, I’m not able to go with any ease down these roads, partially because I have had so many academic colleagues who professed being adherants of this or that eastern system of belief but who really ended up as Zen Southern Baptists. (It is very hard to free ourselves from the subject-verb-object construction of the world that is hard-wired into our thinking processes, I think because it is given to us in Indo-European languages.) If we begin to look at the world in terms of personal transformation, however, there are major resources to draw from.
One is poetry--and I think first of Rainer Maria Rilke in the magnificent Duino Elegies, and, with painful directness in “Archaic Torse of Apollo,” the poet’s meditation on an encounter with a fragment of an ancient Greek statue. Not liking any translation I’ve seen--most try to preserve the rhyme scheme at the expense of clear statement--here’s my effort--
We can never know his magnificent head
With its eyes like ripe apples, and yet
His body still glows, from within, as if
It has become a lamp, in which his watchfulness,
Though turned down low, continues to shine forth.
If this were not true, the curve of his breast
Could not dazzle you, nor could you stand transfixed
By the line running like a smile through hip and thigh
Toward the groin
Where procreation flares forth.
If this were not true, this piece of rock, this stone, would seem broken and truncated
Under the shining slope of these shoulders, and would not gleam
Like a wild animal’s fur--
Would not burst, starlike, from each speck of surface.
With each speck
Looking at you.
You must change your life.
That final line is one of the most startling in all poetry: “Du musst dein Leben ältern”
Transformation, I take it, is not a one-time change from one state of being to another, but an ongoing process. The kids who frequent the Men’s Health boards seem to think that with this technique or that, this supplement or that, his regimen or that, they will (quickly) arrive at perfection. Grownups know better. The natural trajectory of our physical lives is upward and then downward, increasing power followed by diminishing power, eros succeeded by thanatos. We grow from helpless infancy into power and strength, and it’s all downhill from there on in, unless we intervene with all the strength we can muster--when? About the time we start to notice a thickening around our waistline.
I’m glad you picked up on my November 1 post. No one else did. I do think that the mind/body puzzle disappears once we start looking at human lives as stories. Maybe even at the lives of animals that live in our orbit. (See Christopher Smart: “For I will consider my cat Geoffrey...”)
Speaking of puzzles, I’m not at all puzzled by the ability of some people to awaken at precise times, without benefit of alarm clocks. My wife used to work as an R. N., changing from one shift to another. Often she didn’t even bother to set a clock. My own experience is that 99% of the time I am awake in time to hear the alarm goes off. It doesn’t wake me up.
This seems something to wonder at, until we realize that the history of reliable clocks begins only in the late 14th century, when clocks were features of public towers and struck only the hour. (Minute hands, if I have it right, came along around 1670.) The history of clocks involves progress from weights to springs to quartz to the behavior of atoms.
We could, I think, tell time, before we had clocks. Not precisely, but sufficiently for the purposes of daily living. I have a theory that it involves our sense of rhythms. The heart beat. The pulse. The awakening light of dawn. The gradually diminishing light of sundown. The seasons and their changes in vegetation. The quite precise and measurable differences from one day to the next, as the daylight hours change from equinox to solstice and then back again.
And then there’s music. Good musicians, resting for 23 bars before coming in to play a succession of quarter notes in 4/4, don’t have to count to come in at the precise right moment.
Reading? Spinoza, probably. (I mean to look into those books by Antonio Damasio.) Bergson, I think: I haven’t read him since 1958, and that was during a semester when I was falling in love to the exclusion of almost everything else. And Augustine, pre-eminently! Whitehead may have said that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, but I would say that Augustine’s Confessions is a mother lode that has yet to be mined. Filter out the God-talk and the talking to God, and it gets really rich. “I had become a question to myself...:” “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet..” His appalling blindness regarding his treatment of his unnamed mistress...his love for their son. His analysis of what happens to us despite our wills, when we become spectators of blood sports. His narrative of breaking free of the mental prison of Manichean beliefs.
I am not a believer. Any more. But I admire Augustine more than Plato or Kant. Or Samuel Pepys. (And to make sense of that mention, you’d have to follow one of those polemical threads.)
Happy New Year a few hours from now. One of the best things of the departing year was becoming friends with some interesting folks, thanks to JP Fitness and those like you, who have contributed to its history beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Allen. aka Gardener
__________________
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
I am impressed with the intensity and depth of this group. This isn't your quick in-and-out 'multilogue'(appropriately coined by Wazier). Sometimes it takes me days to process the new posts before replying.
((and WELCOME to all NEW and RETURNING friends of this forum!))
I began my yoga path with no knowledge of benefits other than physical stretching. My first teacher spoke very little, only directing the poses. After several months of practice, I started noticing my mental abilities and focus had improved. I witnessed the change before I knew to expect it.
As WAZ put it, "your focus is thoroughly pragmatic; that is, you invest your body & mind in the “how” of it more than explaining the “what” or “why.”" I wasn't initially taught the what or why, but certainly got the HOW!
As a teacher, my primary focus is on the 'how'. (I admit I love to teach the 'what' and the 'why' as well!) I see students progress at different rates. It is very nice to get feedback from a student who has made a breakthrough or discovery of some concept or principal working in their lives.
I believe the heart of yoga teaches us to be aware of the here and now, allowing us to fully integrate and ENJOY the path as we travel it.
Below, an excerpt from my last post of 2003--which is a spectacular example of failing to see the obvious. I have mulled and brooded over this Rilke poem for decades, without--duh and double duh!!!--noticing the obvious. The fragmented statue is of Apollo, the god of the sun, which makes everything in our immediate universe visible. Duh!!! And all the language of shining, seeing, and so on, is directly connected with this particular deity.
The old Pennsylvania Dutch saying is right on. We ARE too soon old and too late smart!
If we begin to look at the world in terms of personal transformation, however, there are major resources to draw from.
One is poetry--and I think first of Rainer Maria Rilke in the magnificent Duino Elegies, and, with painful directness in “Archaic Torse of Apollo,” the poet’s meditation on an encounter with a fragment of an ancient Greek statue. Not liking any translation I’ve seen--most try to preserve the rhyme scheme at the expense of clear statement--here’s my effort--
We can never know his magnificent head
With its eyes like ripe apples, and yet
His body still glows, from within, as if
It has become a lamp, in which his watchfulness,
Though turned down low, continues to shine forth.
If this were not true, the curve of his breast
Could not dazzle you, nor could you stand transfixed
By the line running like a smile through hip and thigh
Toward the groin
Where procreation flares forth.
If this were not true, this piece of rock, this stone, would seem broken and truncated
Under the shining slope of these shoulders, and would not gleam
Like a wild animal’s fur--
Would not burst, starlike, from each speck of surface.
With each speck
Looking at you.
You must change your life.
That final line is one of the most startling in all poetry: “Du musst dein Leben ältern”
__________________
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Gardener: Your erudite comments should not be disturbed by further commentary but are certainly worthy of more poetry. My introduction to both Rilke and Zen was provided by Norman O. Brown, the classicist and Freudian revisionist who provided refuge to many oppressed inquirers from the dogmatic neopositivism and scientism dominant in mid-70s. Brown allowed me to openly reject these ideologies and explore forbidden regions that were labeled as ideologies by these ideologues. His central lesson for me was that “the proper response to poetry is more poetry.” If Brown’s ideas may be reduced to a sound byte, it would be a statement of his distinction between symbolic and literalist consciousness. Literalists, those people who are convinced that they have received immutable Truth and have a duty to use any available means to force, even coerce the rest of humanity to accept their views, are the bane of the human race. I have a trace memory of a saying by Confucius that government is safer in the hands of the greedy because greed cannot be requited without having other people to dispossess of their goods. Ideologues, on the other hand, do not need other people to satisfy their impulses, ergo, they do not hesitate to eliminate infidels and disbelievers (as witnessed by the 250 million plus individuals put to death in the 20th Century by Communists, Fascists, and others of the same ilk). Anyway, I digress. I have had many acquaintances that pursued Eastern philosophy and became “Zen Southern Baptists.” (My current view of these individuals is that they may be influenced by physiological anomalies – there is a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy that is significantly associated with religiosity and strong fundamentalist dispositions.) Yet, my experience with Brown and his synthesis of literature, anthropology, and philosophy suggested a phenomenological approach to understanding activities embedded in different cultural contexts. It is difficult, most often impossible to bridge the gap between cultural frameworks, but with tenacity, some alternative perspectives seep through. I think the main insight for me was the realization that Zen Southern Baptists tend to speak of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, etc. are monolithic and homogenous movements when in fact every tradition is infused with variety. Furthermore, within this variety are activities that work free of ideological constraints without abandoning the symbolic framework of the dominant culture. This variety within the totalitarian and monolithic traditions of the Catholic Church has roots in Augustine whose teachings also became the basis for many of the most rigid dogmas of the Catechism. Some elements of a pattern that seems apparent to me in comparing these various activities is the theme of renewal, transformation, Eros, unity of mind and body and mind with nature, distrust of belief and finality…all of which may be observed in many of the comments of this community of inquirers. While I may have indulged in the opportunity to insinuate my own presuppositions into this thread (I think legitimately), this theme seems definitely palpable; but only when there is enough pressure to push through the sinews and fascia. The theories of psychology that attempt to explain how awareness of time is linked to experience with clocks fail to reach the mysteries of consciousness. Consciousness is inseparable from nature; it is not a disenfranchised spectator of the cosmos. As you point out, language confounds, nature cannot speak about nature, it can only be nature. Where discourse fails, I follow your leap into poetry with more poetry. To the haunting “otherworldliness” of Rilke, I add the images of HD:
Mysteries Remain
The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you,
and you.
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