Spontaneous listening, spontaneous responding

Some who start to practice internal arts, like meditation or qigong find it challenging.

Questions come up, doubts, thoughts, images and feelings.

The reason we experience difficulty is that we want something out of what we do. We are conditioned to seek pleasure, comfort and happiness, and avoid the opposite.

Very rarely do we encounter what is there without judgement, or without wanting anything.

But there is a way to truly reap the benefit of inner cultivation: Just listen.

Find a quiet place, stand or sit, and just sense what is there. Whatever inclination, impulse or feeling, whatever sound, smell or sight, just let it unfold.

At some point, maybe after a long time, you realize that what you experience is just that; sensation.

Listen and sense. After a while movement comes. Then you make a choice.

Either let it be, and just listen to the silence behind the impulse, or follow it without stopping. Let it lead you, like the universe is holding your hand, taking you into something mysterious.

At some point, the movement quiets down.

The very sacredness of existence is holding you by the hand constantly.

When we embrace this, we are completely authentic.

This is what is contained in the Daoist concept of “De”.

Collecting the light, preserving the body

After a workshop with my teacher this weekend, I realize how much work is really needed to maintain our state of energy, and how easy it is to lose it. Our energy is dispersed continually, and we are like vaning comets

Basically it boils down to this: The body should be integrated and fused with the light. This is an ongoing readjustment to realign the body with our essential light.

We may stand, but without “collecting” our light back into our body, we are corpes.

Only when the light is gathered back into the body, and finally back into the Dan Tian, is real qigong actually possible. Then the circulation manifests as true momement, true transformation.

Before that, all effort and work is in vain.

You can test this with just stepping lightly with an intent to move with chi, not with muscle, across a room. Step consciously, lightly, just like walking on stars.

Then, when you reach the last step, turn around and lift your left arm up above your head, and feel what comes back into the system as a trail of energy returning to its source.

Then, collect the energy back into the body, and feel how the lower Dan Tian feels afterwords.

The path is home

I moved house yesterday. In the haze of all the rushed tasks and practicalities, I sat in a rented van, feeling eerie. I should have been axious and worried.
Instead I felt peace, serenity. Something in me had stopped identifying with what I was experiencing. Full of stress and coffee, I had no sense of moving anywhere, leaving nowhere.
Instead I looked out onto the light of the van hitting the asphalt, and the darkness beyond, feeling home allready. More accurately, I felt more at home being the headlights then the moving road.

If there is no identification, there is no loss of peace, no fear.

Discoveries in inner space

I think I stumbled across  a wonderful “mudra” for meditation the other day:

Sitting with your elbows resting in the palm of each hand (crossing the arms infront of your torso), you can find a depression in the bone just above the elbow joint. Apply gentle pressure with the tip of the middle and ringfinger there, and sense the response. It takes you into a very pleasant energetic state, and is great for incognito meditations at work, while traveling, or when you are talking to someone.

I have little knowledge of the acupuncture chart of the arms, so if you have, please drop me a line and tell me which point this is…

How to connect with the Dan Tian anytime

I realize I don’t practice enough.

So while cooking dinner the other day, the urge came to find a way to do practice anywhere, and instantly. Then this came to me:

Connecting to the Dan Tian:
– Stand with right palm facing up and move it towards the Dan Tian quite fast, but stop when you feel resistance, a push or a pull. There should be some response. Think of your hand and lower arm as a knife that wants to cut through your torso at the navel level.
– When connection is made, add the left hand and turn them both towards the Dan Tian point.

The effect should be instant access to the lower Dan Tian. Then, you can move with it, or just stand there and rest.

Try it!

On initiating the Nei Dan process

“He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire”
—Petrarca, Sonetto 137.

Alchemy does not occur until your heart opens to reality. For this to happen the universe must imbue you with its trust. In the same way the ocean opens itself to the fisherman or when your child spontaneously rests its hand on yours. Only when you reach true stillness and scincerity does yang arise spontaneiusly from yin.

Alchemy is a method, not a technique. To approach it as a function of energies is to miss it.

Alchemy is resonance. To the degree I understand it, it is a communion , a correspondence. A meeting. But it is not a scheme to be followed. This is duality and too instrumental . Do not approach it as an engineer but a poet or a lover. Communion happens with the universe as you own body, not in the body of everyone.

Couple two cavities an await some response. But if you are too eager for anything , you will lead yourself astray.

Alignment is mysterious, like a riddle. It concerns inner and outer, mind and heart, body and cosmos. The central axis is found through the spine, yet is not dependent on it

I have no real idea of what needs to happen, but feel like I need a long break from my mind to access it.
What I do experience is that using effort only is needed to a slight degree. Intention needs to be initiated very subtly, and then let go of. The key for alchemy to occur is to trust the inherent correspondence in the makeup of the cavities. When there is a pulse or a magnetic reaction, things start to happen on it’s own accord.

To my limited understanding, it is how nature works, and it feels like you come across an alien spaceship that you discover, slide your hand across the control panel, and everything starts humming, and there is no way of grasping what will happen. To the degree that it is working with form, it is truly mysterious.

Sound of silence

The last couple of months have been too busy to post, and as natural counter-measure, I’ve been drawn to just quiet sitting.

Focusing primarily on just sitting and resting, with no objective, is radically different to most energy-oriented practices. What strikes me is that the long-term effect is diametrically opposite to what I feel in my regular Nei Dan meditations. In internal alchemy sessions, I feel a condensation, and an intensification of certain bodily oriented processes. I feel heat, vibration, pulsing, and often deep tension building and intensifying. Only later does the increased polarity within the body melt and dissolve. It can be arduous and even painful. It is a cooking, not a fire.

Pure sitting, on the other hand is just pure pleasure, and I feel deep rest. It evolves around the light of the heart, and opens a deep stillness. But more interesting is that my earlier experiences of sitting has been marked by mainly mental focus, this has now almost completely dissolved. The brain, thinking and “battling” the mind is still there, but I’m not entertained anymore. It continues unrelenting, yet it is deeply unsatisfying to focus on.

Instead of “detaching”, sitting in stillness is just listening. In this listening, I listen with the whole being. What comes up is the activation of the heart, and what is worked out is not so much “me” but a realignment with something that has been present through my whole life.

What is strange and unsettling when the long-term effects of this practice settles is that this space that opens up starts to work stuff out without “my” consent. All though there has always been a sort of yearning for a peace, or a longing for a sort of intimacy with my “self”, this movement has always gone from this person towards the “other”, to the transcendent. Only later did I realize that at one point one feels that there is a much greater force at work, and it has nothing do do with my own personal agenda, or my own spiritual aspirations. They are not important.

Instead, it has become clear to me that through this silence, something calls for me, draws me in. It’s longing for me is much stronger than the other way around. Something is waiting in the darkness. It feels like it is both death and eternal love at the same time. It completely mesmerizes me.  It is as if I am in love, only able to think of my lover. At the same time, it feels like standing on the brink of being sucked into a black hole, into obilivion.

Inadvertently, the realization comes creemping up on me:  I am no longer in control of this process.

The story of Ho Tenze

The moon is a bright orb in the starlight sky. It’s approaching midnight, and I’m watching a fire being lit inside a small room in an ancient watchtower on a deserted strip of the Great Wall in Hei Bei province. I have never felt so engulfed in the history of the Middle Kingdom. The view is overlooking the Wu Ling Shan mountains, and our quiet conversation is overtaken by the immense sound of the cicadas outside.

The floor is rocks and dirt. There is no furniture except a small opening in the outside wall where a small sleeping bag covers a mattress of dry hay. Our eyes meet. His name is Ho Tenze and he is 14 years old. But his posture and body is that of a child. His voice is almost a whisper. He offers us some dumplings, and trying to work past the language barrier we mime our words in the darkness. An hour ago, we reached a pass with a breach in the wall taking us up to the remote tower. After knocking on the door and shouting, a small door creaks and a little head peers at us through the opening. He’d already gone to sleep he says, but would be happy to let us come visit. Our guide is also his stepfather.

After a short awkward moment he asks us if we want to see the roof of the watchtower. The stairs have fallen down long ago, and small holes in the brick wall is used for steps and hand holds. The roof reveals a small row of weeds. He has grown herbs and medicine plants there he explains, and has been what he falls back on for nutrition when there is no other food around. Later I learn that these herbs are worth a fortune on the TCM herbal market on Beijing.

Here he has cultivated a little secret garden, and below me I see the valley leading down to the plains near Beijing. Above is only stars and the full moon. There is also the reason he is here. He performs a ritual to the full moon every month. We climb down to the darkness below and he lights up a small fire.  He sleeps on the ground with only a sleeping bag and hay as a mattress. He reaches behind a brick in the wall an pulls out his rarest collection of herbs, assuming we grasp the value of their worth for him. After some awkward attempts at sign language, body language, and then a competition in gymnastics we regress to silence. I listen to the cicadas playing outside.

Then the translator tells me the story:

Poke the universe

Reluctantly I have realized that a new qigong practice has “emerged” in my own routine. It has happened during the recent years and I have consistently discarded it as something I inclined to do without understanding what it was. It involves poking; the universe that is.

Only recently did I try to follow the inclination, and the effect was wonderful. Here’s what came to me:

Stand quietly, breathe naturally and listen to the silence inside and outside.
Feel how this evokes chi, and how it changes the structure and posture of the body. Follow these changes and let the body adjust accordingly. There is no right and wrong here.

Then, lift the right hand with the index finger extended, pointing upward. Hold it in front of your body, approximately in front of your face. The sensation should feel uplifting, inspiring, or just a sense of lightness. Visualize information coming down into your body. Then, just rest and feel the effect it has on the body and mind.

This is more like a gesture, or symbolic act than a technique. It could almost feel like a prayer. It could be practices at the start of or as a concluding part of a routine.

What strikes me is the profound effect it has on my perception of my own body and the way its effect was immediate, and long-lasting.

Conclude the practice in front of your heart with both palms meeting each other in front of your chest.

Try it and see how it changes your practice.

PS: This practice will evolve, and probably how I describe it. Thus It’s an interesting case study in how qigong forms emerge, change and how they should be viewed. I feel that the nature, architecture and information of different qigong forms should be informed by the changing nature of the information coming into the form. The fascinating implication this has in how we relate to any practice is a gradual unpacking, and makes me interested in how different people relate to the established forms and routines they practice.

Form and formlessness

The practice of Nei Dan is more or less impossible to conceptualize. It is a process of fusing the formless light with matter. It is intangible, subtle yet real. It feels something like this:

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2941486988/