Balance 2: Transformational Balance

Copyright Lance Kinseth, 2012

IN BODYMIND PRACTICES, improving balance can come to reference literal physical balance.  And so studies of health benefits of practices such as tai chi and yoga report gains in physical balance that prevents falls and offers better mobility.  And yet, this sense of balance is facile, missing the heart of balance.

There are, for example, yoga practitioners who can assume amazing feats of physical balance, and yet, may be quite imbalanced in terms of relatively high anxiety levels and/or limited skills and interest in calming and quieting.  

Bodymind practices that concentrate on providing an “antidote” to hectic everyday life are likely to be far more beneficial, both physiologically and psycho-spiritually, than gains in physical balance.

When you cross a threshold into a space where gentle bodymind practices are occurring, there can be a major, dramatic shift from the fast pace of the everyday that offers an important sense of balance.

And yet, such an “antidote” tends to be rare.  When balance in the everyday is pursued, popular efforts tend to be a “physical workout.”  “Working out” may be broadly touted as countering the stress or imbalance one experiences in everyday life.  And often, “working out” stresses physical intensity to exorcise frustration and stress.  And the generic report is that one feels better, but somewhat paradoxically, post-workout from an endorphin rush, and one can retreat home and rest.

There is physiological evidence that vigorous exercise produces body chemistry changes that are associated with stress reduction and mood elevation.  And yet, is not “working out” somewhat akin to stress producing “working.” We become our words.  One begins to presume that stress-reduction is, paradoxically, shorter bursts of stress to overcome the dastardly effect of long runs of stress.  Slowing down and quieting and calming may become anxiety provoking, and endured for perhaps minutes only.  Why?  Because one seems to be doing nothing, and how can nothing be good. 

Intensively working out—especially finishing the workout—may be somewhat akin to coming down from the highs of summating a mountain.  Too fast, one is quickly back in the everyday, with no transformation to a more regular state of emotional balance.  The antidote for work is a workout.

At some point, a bell sound might be heard.  It might be the clack of a stone on the cobbles.  It might be weariness in facing the start of another “workout.”  There might be a moment where “release” comes from doing next to nothing.  And this release is, somehow, balancing.  And this “doing nothing” is more complex than heretofore imagined.  One might begin to feel like a rat on a treadmill, chasing survival.  But now, there is something qualitatively different.  It is not about survival.  It is about thriving and optimizing, and repeating the same behavior might be sensed to be circling on the exercise wheel.

Life is change.  Open.  Graced.  And this is health—open, graced.  Suddenly, there is a sense of permission to still, and calm.  And nothing stops dead.  Rather, the streaming of the universe may be touched. 

One surrenders, takes refuge, and is bolstered up by everything.  Not needing to be in charge, but rather, following, freeing rather than controlling.

One bobs in a vast ocean of support rather than is alone.   Each breath is fresh and overfull of oxygen.  In tadasana [mountain pose], Rodney Yee [Yoga: The Poetry Of The Body, p. 57] writes of offering ( likely costly piece of a yoga workshop with him) permission to lean this way and that—“falling and recovering”--as an aspect of experiencing the asana—“bobbing” as I might say, being held up by the whole ocean of existence and being.  Each step and each step is, in Zen practice, a fall off a cliff, never hitting bottom, due to life being a constancy of change.

And so bobbing, not really touching bottom, is the swim of authentic balance.  And it requires stilling and calming to perceive the way to fall and recover.  Tomorrow, an ache on awakening, snowfall perhaps or oppressive heat, the call of bird, sun shadows painting the wall, a new sound and then another, respiration and elimination and digestion, the turn of a planet and the flight the sun, unending—all wondrous and magical and, in our sway with it, transformational balance.   

Radiance

Copyright Lance Kinseth 2012

RADIANCE IS THAT WHICH we refer to in namaste as perhaps its essence—seeing light emanating from ourselves and from others and from all events that we experience.  But seeing the radiance is perhaps much more rare than imagining the radiance when we offer namaste.  Seeing radiance requires practiced calmness and openness. 

Sometimes radiance may come spontaneously in what we call “peak experiences.”  Perhaps we are in a rare landscape and come to experience a light emanating from everything, from objects or other persons or the flow of wind or water.  But as a peak experience, we stand to quickly lose it.

In Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes,

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at

all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.  I saw the backyard cedar

where the mourning doves roots charged and transfigured, each cell

buzzing with flame.  I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that

was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.  It was less like

seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful

 glance.  The flood of fire abated but I am still spending the power.

Similarly, from a poetic perspective, in the international anthology of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz, A Book Of Luminous Things [Harcourt Brace, 1996], Milosz selects poems that are realist and accessible, and that ‘illuminate’ the “secret of a thing.”

When we get it and however we get it and for however long we have it, one of the qualities that this ‘light’ produces is a sense of the disappearance of otherness—separation.  At first, this holistic view can appear to be a dream, because the world that awe have come to know seems to be a landscape of differences.  And yet, the obvious differences may come to be understood to be facets of the whole.  And emotionally, there be the experience of expansion, thus reducing anxiety that may be associated with a sense of constriction and isolation/separation, and a newfound landscape of support.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests, are

 always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always

emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding

to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

It is just because you miss it right where you are, or avoid it

even as you face it, that you are unable to attain actual use of it.

[76, Zen maser Yuansou, in Thomas Cleary, Zen Essence]

Such luculent, luminous radiance will most likely remain invisible in the fast pace of the everyday.  In the return of daylight that marks the coming of the New Year in the Northern Hemisphere, this light may be symbolically expressed in the electrified Yule tree and lights that decorate houses and lawn ornaments that metaphorically illuminate the everyday.

 

But in any season, by stilling and quieting and calming, Dillard’s “lights/fire” and Milosz’s “secret of a thing” and Yuansou’s “subtle, precious light”—may be opened and lived.

A Metaphor: The INTRA-net Of Body-Mind—Enfolding & Outspreading

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Living Computer, 2012

THERE IS, OF COURSE, the “cybernetic/electronic Internet” that weaves us into the world in remarkable ways.  Within each of us, there is also an inTRA-net with memory that goes deeply back into time, even well before time itself.  And were we to understand this intranet, we might find that it is, perhaps, something not exclusively within.

The body is this intra-net’s  “electronic computer” of sorts.  It has been contrived across the millennia.  Seemingly thick tissue is porous—with a variety of intricate systems of channels—nerves, and circulatory [blood and lymph] and respiratory and digestive, and some sort of more elusive energy process at work [chakras and “meridians,” and quantum processes and chaos patterning and dark matter and suspect particles jumping into other dimensions]. 

In the simplest reflex, perhaps a near ancestor’s gesture is there—that gesture which appears at times in your gesture.  Your index finger—an uncle’s—taps the table.  The tone of your voice is perhaps that of another relative embedded in you carrying forward, alive in you.  Your aging aunt may have pointed such things out to you.

All of the ancestors are there (were you to calm and deeply attend).  And all of the most tested knowledge that reaches far beyond the emergence of genus Homo and species sapiens on the nature of life is also present.  The Earth itself is a billions-years old computer of sorts, outspread into and interconnected with innumerable computers that we name “flora” and “fauna” and “mountain” and “water,” aspiring to answer (as is suggested in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Universe), the “meaning of life.”

This intra (“within”) net is “on” in each moment, but it is typically only “reading” (at least, consciously to you and I) the very selective “email” of everyday chatter that is both essential to accessing needs and intrusive to the point of inducing stress.  Because of the overload of just this small range of process, we rarely, if ever, intentionally/consciously go much further, and “search” the files and their connections to the external, infinite “cloud.”

The stillness and calmness of some body-mind practices are the essential “search engine” of this intra-net.  And their most simple objective can be just to induce a little rest and, perhaps, bring a greater sense of harmony between the “little universe” of self and the larger universe that expresses and designs it for a goal of improved health.

When we very intentionally still and calm and quiet, we stand a chance of accessing this Oceanus of information, both stored internally and in the infinite cloud.  Often, however, we get caught up in the rituals of the practices, and may do little more that reflect or mirror our beliefs.  Or we simply aspire to find some moments of respite, and so we lean back into the rituals of a particular body-mind practice.

The ultimate promise of the stillness and calmness of body-mind practices is the possibility of reaching deeply into a landscape that is imaginal rather than imaginary, which is really to say, a deeper reality that is intuitively read.  “Google” “Quiet/Stillness/Calmness,” and be sure to combine your search with a strong sense of self-criticism to gradually bypass our cultural/social/psychological filters enough to begin to access this intra-net, and see what might present itself.

Aspire to offer an invitation rather than set an intention [often culturally driven and therefore limiting.  Quiet, still, and calm, not making anything, not believing, not defining, just opening a gate where there had appeared to be a wall.

Yoga Play

YOGA CAN BE intuitive.  And intuitive practice can be playful.  And this play can be gentle or intensive.  One might sway gently like seaweed in the ocean, similar to “flow” in tai chi—in “tabletop,” “down dog,” or “seated.”  One might utilize features of the practice space or props.  Play and softness can be a way to “pre-begin” rather than jump right into either stillness or a sequence of poses.

preliminary stretching 1

By week’s end, after consistent practice, perhaps a little strength building or “friskiness” begins the practice session.  More exploration, seeing what might call out and what will be needed to realize the idea.  The goal then is not to be perfect, but more playfully “edgy.”

frisky Friday 1

frisky Friday 2

And then, it might be time to let it go, rather than make this “yoga.”   Because this 5000 year old practices are not primarily concerned with physical softness or friskiness or even with poses or as a process that is done to give physical health.  And skill with strength or flex or balance can miss the mark, and have next to nothing to do with mastery of yoga.  In Awakening The Spine, Vanda Scaravelli writes,

To Be Proud Of Our Yoga Positions is bad taste.  To be able to do poses “successfully” means nothing, nothing at all.  Yoga should not be a circus.  It must not be done as a refuge from life.

And so, back to stilling and calming and quieting and opening a gate where there had, heretofore, appeared to be a wall.  Gentle as the deep way forward.  Calming, holding, breathing, listening, releasing, following the body vs. controlling.

Soft Power Baddha Konasana / Yin Butterfly

A Gift: Cracks In The Heart

90^th ISLANDS OF GRACE POST

Lance Kinseth, 2012

AT FIRST GLANCE, it would appear that participants in gentle body mind practices do so because of difficulty practicing more arduous strength and flex-favoring classes.

Observation of participants who practice gentle body mind over time may reveal a more profound reason for participation.  Most participants may initially be drawn to gentle practices simply because they are “gentle” or “relaxing.”  But across time, the practices open something more compelling.  In marital arts, people may begin as a form of exercise or self-defense.  But by the time they approach black belt, they typically describe the benefits in terms of virtues and self-development that outweigh physical attributes.

The youthful heart is rather impenetrable—self-centered and perhaps less compassionate.   But life has a way of “cracking the heart.” 

A timeline of a person’s life is a roller coaster of ups and downs.  And the “downs” leave cracks in the heart.   Encounters with sorrow and loss, responsibilities and choices that seem to limit freedom, a growing sense of mortality, and a growing sense that one controls very little challenge the sense of impenetrability. 

The “downs” in life can seem to make life appear to be a battle and a struggle for survival.  And so there are body mind teachers who even teach that “cracks in the heart” are the problematic elements to be driven out by rigorous body mind practices.

 

When one calms and quiets, instead of the heart being broken and wounded by “downs,” the cracks may allow light in.  And as the light enters, “downs” might begin to transform to opportunities and possibilities.  The black and white world may become subtle and eloquent.

Many young and seasoned body mind practitioners who acknowledge that the gentle practices are those to which the highest levels of body mind aspire, but never “find the time”—so very busy trying to stay up and in control.     

Cracks in the heart are powerful—not weaknesses.  They are gifts that open the heart.  Everything offers.  Because the heart is cracked, love and light flow freely in and out.

Yoga & Nature

IN BODY-MIND practices, there is a strong sense of tai chi’s metaphor of human life as the “little universe” within the “larger universe.”  With such a view, for optimal human life, the task to optimize human life then involves bringing human life into harmony with the larger universe or cosmos.  But in general human activity, there is a tendency to reference human life as somehow separate from the universe, often as having come into the physical universe and leaving it upon death.  Human life seems far more cultural than creatural, and sometimes more negatively artificial or positively civil than natural.

The focus of body-mind practices primarily engage the body in specific activities, and in that sense can be experienced as more natural than everyday routine.  But body-mind practices can reflect and reinforce the popular sense of human life as separate and above nature.  As such, body-mind practices aspire to control the body—to control nature--to ultimately optimize and free the spirit that is referenced as temporarily housed in the body.

In ancient civilizations and pre-literate societies, the sun was not a physical star as we understand it to be today, but rather was a god who crossed the sky.  Similarly, stars, the seas, the mountains, as well as flora and fauna were gods, or intermediaries or the architecture/furnishings of landscapes of spirit rather than events with standing in their own right.  The sacredness of place came from an essence that was beyond the events rather than from within the events.  Again, the beyond—the apartness—was often culturally reinforced.

There have been periods in cultural development that have marked quantum shifts in human perception and action.  These renascent periods, such as the Italian Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, markedly shifted cultural life.  In the post-industrial, cybernetic context of contemporary human life, there may be a new renascent task.  In The Great Work, Thomas Berry suggests that the renascent task of human life involves integration into the larger global ecosystem.  And this would not be a begrudging step back in human development to address environmental degradation that now feeds back on human health in a now-peopled Earth.  And it would not be a Romantic step back into a pastoral.  Rather, it would be a step forward to advance and optimize human life.

The biggest challenge to integration within the larger ecosystem is the predominant sense of separation from the natural world.  We become our words.  And if we imagine ourselves to be separate, it is difficult to integrate.

IN 1970, we saw Earth form space, and our image of the Earth from desk globes was changed forever.  We were inside the thin, membranous biosphere.  And we have not really caught up with our eyes.  Our ecological literacy is still in its infancy and it only vaguely includes human life.  Our languages still only vaguely express Earth even though the origins of our words may have their origins in the natural landscape/processes as Emerson posits in his essay Nature.  As we advance as a species, we are finding that we are more deeply in nature, not apart from it. 

In body-mind practices, we listen to the body.  It has a voice, and it is our deep voice.  Our hands are in a very real way our ancestors’ hands.  And so, in body-mind practices, we aspire toward stilling and calming cultural bias and everyday chatter to listen to wisdom.  We should remain critical of the voice, as it is likely to be strongly colored by our cultural biases.  But when we repeatedly calm, there is a sense of something rich and authentic and optimizing to which we attune.  We begin to find that the body is both natural and that we are more than our body.  The landscape is the longer reach of ourselves, not a stage-set in which we act out our lives but an ongoing creative process that is both expressing us and designing us.  Not separable islands as we might come to believe, our respiration and digestion and our thirst are currents that reach everywhere.  And this landscape extends into infinities of largeness and smallness. And the more subtly and rationally that we measure, we find the influences of oceans and subtle influence of stars and of galaxies and likely of an infinity/multiplicity that we cannot begin to comprehend.  Our culture is valuable, but small.  To imagine ourselves as primarily cultural is to express our limitations.

In a now-peopled Earth, it may be more important than ever to integrate with the larger Earth ecosystem.  How might the Earth express itself in us?  What if the waters and atmosphere and mountains and even tiny blades of grass were temples, events not to be lost, stolen or strayed from human life?

Throughout human development, there has been a tendency to go out into nature as if it were external/outside.  But now, with fresh eco-literacy, attending to the landscape of the body is the most intimate ground of nature.  Restricting nature to unsettled wild places is another measure of our limits.  Our eco-literacy is beginning to reveal an inherent wildness in both the destructive aspects of contemporary human life and in adaptive features of urban ecology. [See blog: “The Manicured Wilderness,” http://cityasecological.blogspot.com] We remain fragile and far more wild and creatural than artificial and cultural/civil.

But perhaps we can first begin by challenging our words and beliefs, or just let them go for some moments.  And then attend to the body as something that we aspire to free and follow rather than as something aspire to control, as if it is really not us and something that gets in our way.  And see what gate might open.

Deepest Root: Stillness, Calmness, Quietness

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Restorative-Yin Yoga Practice, 2012

STILLNESS, CALMNESS, AND QUIETNESS open the gate of deep body-mind practices.  We come into the place of practice and gather together what we need, and then return to silence.  In this first step, we cross over a threshold, exiting the fast pace and multi-dimensional demands of the everyday and entering a landscape without explicit dimensions.

In body-mind practices, whether seated or reclining or moving slowing in tai chi or aiki, we might dial down the chatter and the video clips and sound bites of everyday life.  Then, when very concrete things begin to occur—such as our slowing metabolism—our senses have a little less distraction or even purpose, and become more receptive or open.

As our metabolism slows, body physiology is no longer overwhelmed, and spontaneously shifts to monitoring and balancing a variety of complex systems.  And then, stilling, calming, and quieting, are, paradoxically, “accelerators” that flip a body switch in us, and a boil of complex chemistry begins.  That which is really different for us is a shift from controlling the body to freeing the body and following the body.  And a gate opens in the moments of practice that, by returns to such practice, carry over into the everyday.

And then, having awakened the next day after such a calming practice, perhaps we open as I do in my local place and season:  a humid, surprisingly warm day in autumn, after a morning rain.  We still and calm and remain and be taken by the changing colors of the trees, and inhale the moist air.  Gradually, rather than just looking out to the trees, the rain and trees and atmosphere are no longer just interrelated events.  The trees are living miracles and they, in turn, are as much rain and atmosphere and sun as they are trees.  And these events are also inside of us in a very concrete, practical way.  The trees before our senses represent flora that oxygenates the vast atmosphere and offers it freely to each of our breaths. By calming, we might dissolve a wall of sorts in the everyday, and be deeply inside eloquence—a reality--rather than “looking out” to the world at if it was separate from us.  Perhaps for this gift of seeing miracles, we might give over a few moments of gratitude.

In Returning To Silence, Soto Zen master Dainen Katagiri has suggested that From moment to moment, the tree explains itself [11].  If we look casually, we likely see our sense of what we have learned to define as a tree rather than see the tree.  But if we empty or exclude our presumptions, Katagiri has suggested that There is something more beautiful and much more worthy than what we usually see [3].  Katagiri has suggested that the universe is the content—“the whole personality”[7]—of anything that we are looking at as well as our own personality. Everything is working together.  This is not simply an esoteric point of view but the way that the world works and in sync with an ecological/evolutionary morphological perspective.  Intentional effort to still and calm and quiet very naturally comes back or returns to silence.  And in returning to silence we are in communication with something we cannot say with our words when we open the whole personality of an event.  It is the feeling that we generate in the everyday in life-turning experiences such as birth or death of a loved one when all words fall short.

Our discrimination of our experience into objects and events functions well to help us choose and then access resources.  But it also limits us.  Returns to stillness open a gate of integration.  With practice, we are offered the gift of seeing miracles.  But much more important, stillness, calmness and quietness can come inside us rather than be something that we observe.  Returns to stillness can offer us qualities that do something to us to optimize our health.  And they are qualities that are judged to be the very best by any measure, but that are likely to be occur only infrequently in our everyday: suppleness, efficiency, freshness, graceful flow, release, integration, contentment, and many other virtues.  By consistent returns, these qualities can become regular attributes of our actions rather than qualities that we experience either infrequently or not at all.

When body-mind practices are only fast and furious, such practices are likely to be largely mind over body.  But when we prioritize stillness, calmness and quietness, body-mind practices may become mind following the well-tested wisdom of the body, freeing rather than controlling.  And then. a gateless gate to spirit may suddenly open where, heretofore, there appeared to be a wall.

And so the deep base—the heart of body-mind practice—is not a sequence of yoga poses or martial forms [patterns of movement], but rather, stillness and calmness and quietness.  Out of this stillness, breath flowers into awareness, and then relaxation, and then openness and expansion, and then, new unchecked information/ideas/creativity, and then transformation.  Without stillness, calmness and quietness, all effort is still wondrous yet facile—too easy—lessened, and superficial.

Restorative-Yin Yoga offers a penultimate process for entering stillness, calmness and quietness, because its very heart is the foundation of yoga.  The final physical gate is perhaps a posture of sitting and/or savasana that no other body position can equal.  As Katagiri roshi has suggested, all you need to do is sit.  Sit down, that is all you have to do [28]. And yet it is not casual like sitting on the couch.  But it is also not difficult.  It is sitting, seeing—from my experience—with eyes of spirit.  With such eyes, you might see the dying in Calcutta, as Jesus or as yourself—like Mother Theresa—or like Martin Luther King looking over the mountain and seeing that very real coming day of equality, or like a Lakota holy man having a great dream of an inseparable river of life, or a more secular sense of the Earth as a poem in which we live and express.  Then, like the many flavors of the sky—storm, beautiful archipelagos of clouds, overall ashen ceiling, soft rain—sky does not change.  There is a constancy that we can touch and yet not really name, and yet that is meaningful and directive.  And so to mind—angry, imaging a beautiful idea, sorrowful, then bored, then elated or even ecstatic—mind does not really change.  Always fresh, luminous, and graced, and STILLED, CALMED AND QUIET.