A short follow up to An Adventure in Standing Still part 1
Photo by Francoise Cooperman, from madasafish.com
"The Way you can go isn’t the real way...."
From the Tao Te Tching, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
I once read a essay by the medical philosopher Lewis Thomas, in which he described an experiment I've never forgotten.
Scientists rigged up a mechanism whereby rats could trigger an electrical current that stimulated the pituitary gland, which releases a whole variety of pleasurable chemicals into our body. The rats couldn’t stay away from it. They sat there for days on end just pushing the button with their little paws.
However, when the scientists shut down the electricity, the rats showed no signs of withdrawal. They pushed the button a couple of times, and when it didn't work, they just wandered off. No depression, no anxiety, no visible sense of loss. They just went about their life as though this pure, reliable source of pleasure had never existed.
When it comes to standing meditation I am like a rat in my own experiment. When I stand in the positions of Zhan Zhuang, it feels very much like an electrical current is running into my brain. Enough so, that I believe this is actualy what is happening. But it’s not the short pulses I imagine the rats giving themselves. It’s like a long, slowly growing pulse, as though I've tapped into the some basic current of energy that flows between the ground and the sky.
Most of the time it feels like run of the mill peace of mind. Some kind of gear shifts in my brain and I don't have to concern myself with being "mindful" or "present." It's like I took some kind of mindfulnes pill that starts to kick in after about five minutes. Sometimes if I get into the right zone it's like I took something way more powerful.
I have felt lightning bolts of energy that flooded my brain with the kind of sharp awareness that I’ve only aspired to with cocaine. I have had the kind of full body seizures that leave me with body and soul peace I have felt only in the arms of someone I loved. I have felt myself floating, suspended in some kind amniotic sac of magnetic energy, and a vague sense that I’ve done this before, maybe back in the womb.
But it’s like everyday before I start this practice, I still have to convince myself that something interesting and good is going to happen. I am still in the grip of a belief that standing motionless for 20 minutes to an hour, and feeling good and happy (depending on my level of commitment) is a complete waste of my precious time on this earth.
So if something else in my life comes up, an urgent project, a chance to make the money I need for my small low income family, a guy who keeps me up at night--If a week, even a few days go by without this practice--it's like it never existed, this reliably calm, pleasant, sometimes even ecstatic part of my brain.
Soon enough I become more open to the kinds of pleasure that come with those handy built in reminders, withdrawal symptoms. Before I know it, I’m locked into somebody else’s experiment.
The other day I re-read a theory by Richard Saul Wurman, who founded the TED conferences. Almost ten years ago, he wrote a book called Information Anxiety2 (a follow up to the book he'd written over ten years before that, Information Anxiety.) These are books about maintaining your sanity and productivity in a world that constantly threatens us with information overload. Though a huge fan of the internet, and all the possibilities it offers, Wurman believes that one of the greatest dangers of information overload is that is distracts us from the subjects we really care about.
“Learning” he writes is often not so much about discovering new information, as it is “remembering what you’re interested in.”
To extend that theory to the project of living, maybe being happy is less about discovering the next thing that will make you happy, as it is about remembering what has made you happy in the past. What can make you happy right now.
I stand because it connects me to some kind of energy and power in the universe that I haven't quite figured out yet. If I don't stand, I forget this mystery exists.
I write about it now, less to convince others of its existence, than to remind some future self that I know is always in danger of forgetting it.
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Comments
Rated for making me think.
Boanarges1, I guess I was thinking about actions or values that bring happiness, rather than things or people. While it does happen, one is less likely to lose the ability to repeat an action, than to lose a person, or a thing. That's why I guess some psychologists advise us to center our lives in values, than goals or things.
By values I mean ongoing pursuits like knowledge, friendship, family. We'll never know everything we need to know. One doesn't "accomplish" being a good friend, or a good son, or good mother, since these are roles that have to be maintained if you're going to be good at them. So happiness arises out of the pursuit of those things, not the attainment of them. But how easy it is to forget that...
I do my standing meditation at the end of my daily practice, and each time -- just as you say -- I put up resistance, casting about for a legitimate excuse that will allow me to skip it today, or fretting that I'm about to spend time doing "nothing" when I could be getting something done, or inwardly groaning at the thought of the pain and discomfort I'm about to put myself through. Sure it's going to be a complete bust, I finally steel myself to the task at hand, root and raise my arms...
And all at once and completely, the mental nonsense clogging my intention is swept away by the clear, sweet flow of qi.
Rated for a brilliant answer to long-standing puzzle. (Pun intended.)
Now it's your turn!
Or maybe I can start a regular discussion group here! Let's keep our eyes out for fellow practioners.
Looking for happiness and trying to fake it
Finding that happiness is where you make it
Just read Parts I and II with great interest. I have been practising zhan zhuang for six years now. It took me about a year to get up to one hour, and that is my present daily routine. On rare occasions, I have gone for two. I would like to focus more, but gotta make a living like everyone else here.
My experience is that at some point, zhan zhuang becomes like brushing teeth. I am no great enthusiast of dental care either, but now it feels "wrong" to go to bed without meditating and flossing.
My understanding is that you continue daily until your body/subconcious yields to the practice. Then you go for longer to make things difficult again. To be honest, that meditating one hour is not too difficult to me now simply means I should be routinely going for two (which I simply can't due to work and family).
Anyway, you keep going longer and in more difficult poses until, theoretically, at one point, your body/subconcious will yield completely, and then.... I have no idea, but it's suppoed to be pretty awesome.
My routine also involves 30 minutes of ba duan jin. I also try to get in as much forms practice as I can.
Reading over your comment to JK, I urge you to go find a good teacher. There have been many stretches of time when I did not have a chance to discuss my practice with my teacher, only to discover when I did that I was heading in the wrong direction.
It also has not always been easy for me. Emotions unravelled and came pretty close to the surface, and I once suffered a minor breakdown. My teacher's guidance was invaluable then.
But it has been six years of great self discovery. I hope you get as much out of it as I do. Good luck.
You're right, of course, about the importance of a good teacher. I started from a pretty strong base of Tai Chi, and have been doing ZZ on and off for about fourteen years now, sometimes with advice from my teachers. Sometimes on my own, and always with the guidance of a couple of great books by master Lam Kuan Chen.
My teachers were really good (and I hate to think I've misrepresented them. What Ron said was really kind of a joke). I'm pretty confident in my ability now to be guided in my practice primarily by the path of my chi. I have had some really awesome experiences. But I know when to dial it down. Early in my practice I had some really intense experiences that I think could have led to instability.
I've learned to approach it very incrementally, and continue to have very satisfying results. One of the things I've found about Zhan Zhuang is that while you can become obsessed with it for a while, it's pretty hard to get addicted to it.
I'm limited for the time being in how much time I can spend with a teacher, as the single mother of a young child. In a couple of years, maybe I'll find a teacher who specializes in it, and take it to another level. But until then I'm feeling pretty secure that my practice is on the right track.
Have you read The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge? I personally found it explained some of the reasons why we practice the way we do. Why we need to practice every day, for example (the brain will not rewire itself without routine), and why it is important to learn stillness before movement.
BTW, I was in Montreal last weekend and I am also reading Cockroach by Rawi Hage. Love your city.
I know Rawi well. Spent Christmas Eve with his family once. Have you read Deniro's Game?
Hope you make it back to Montreal!
I really liked (from Part 1) the simplicity of:
"I fear that my lack of ambition is catching up with me..."
Man, doesn't that say it all. I'm hearing John Lennon's song about "Watching the wheels go 'round and 'round" in my head as I write this. Maybe its the very act of removing ourselves from "ambition" and the likes where we find (or rediscover) our true happiness.
I have reintegrated some meditation back into my life and it never ceases to amaze me that a. I'm rarely present. RARELY. Neither are most people and b. how good it makes me feel. And how things falls into place better and I'm not constantly yearning and unhappy and anxious.
Anyway, more important, kudos on a great piece(s) on self-exploration and the challenges surrounding it.
Fuck ambition.
Zhan Zhuang really does tap into a part of your brain that literally induces mindfullness. You feel this current of energy, and a shift of gears, and you are in the part of your brain that controls mindfulness. I suppose that people can access this by sitting, but in my experience, it's a much, much, much harder and slower process.
I have several theories for why Zhan Zhuang works faster. My favourite one right now is this: Our society teaches us that we have five senses. But ask any neuroscientist and we actually have seven, which include our vestibular sense (our sense of motion), and proprioception (our sense of balance and of our body in space).
Zhan Zhuang engages these senses as well. You can't keep your arms raised for an hour by sheer strength. The only way you can do it it is you instinctively learn to balance your arms in a way that they naturally relax into gravity (As though you are balancing an action figure in such a way that it doesn't topple over.) When you hit that perfect state of balance and stillness, it's like your brain, which has been struggling to balance your body, in a civilization that doesn't even know that balance is important, can suddenly relax.
It just stops all that busy work of finding shit to distract you from the fact that you are physically uncomfortable in this world. It let's you just be. And it stops the work of "aspiring" to be somewhere else, which is what a body that can't comfortably be, must always do (when it's not sleeping).
I don't know if that makes any sense.
Anyways. Thanks so much for the kinds words. I'm such a huge fan of your writing. Can't wait to read more.
What has made me happy in the past? I'll be thinking about that all day.
I know I've said this before, but I think you are a fascinating writer.
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