I spent most of last month Standing in the Stream.

Searching on-line for an image to illustrate, I came across this descriptive guide to the practice:

 Imagine that you are standing in a stream, with the current flowing toward you. Two balls float on the surface. You remain motionless, steadying them in the flowing water, with your fingers parallel to the surface of the stream. Concentrate on holding the balls steady as they try to float away with the current. Your body sinks down so that your feet reach down into the soil of the stream bed and take root.

I snagged the image and text above from a post called “Playing With Balls on Running Water,” an apt and evocative title that captures the essence of the practice as described above.  Both are posted here with the kind permission of the author, Walt McAllister – a poetic and profoundly insightful master/ seeker/ artist/ philosopher.  As this was the only graphic of the stance I could find on the web, it brought me directly to Walt’s blog.  In true “6-Degrees” style, the connection turned out to be a re-connection; Walt was also a Portsmouth Square habitué and student of Sifu Kuo Lien Ying back in the day.  Small world.  And in a lovely stroke of writer-esque irony, while I’ve grandly labeled my bit-of-froth blog “Stringing Pearls:  reflections on qi,” Walt’s astonishingly deep and thoroughly-researched reflections on Qi, clearly born of a lifetime passion for and dedication to the energetic arts, are posted under the modest heading “Froth From Walt.” (http://frothfromwalt.blogspot.com/)

That said – and with all due respect to the world’s QiGong masters, with all due honor to  the beauty and power of the practice in question, and in full recognition of the benefits “Playing With Balls on Running Water” must bring the practitioner – that’s not what I’ve been doing.  I’ve simply been Standing in the Stream.

Guess I’ve been doing it “wrong.”  Fair cop… but is doing it “right” the right goal?  Or is the goal excellent, playful practice that brings about its own perfection?  Is the worthier goal kung fu? 

We give serious lip service to the superiority of learning through discovery, rather than by rote.  We acknowledge that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.  We ask that teachers give students the tools to learn, not the answers, because we want our kids to find the answers for themselves.  We revel in the “ah-HAH!” experience – that glorious thrill that suffuses our being when we really get something, like fireworks going off in the pleasure centers of our brains – and recognize that our “ah-HAH!”s are intimately, inextricably linked to figuring stuff out on our own.  And yet….

Yet, born and bred in a competitive, goal-oriented, fast-lane, consumer society, we are conditioned to crave and expect at least some measure of instant gratification.  Aloud we insist, “Life is a journey, not a destination.”  Tacitly we judge ourselves and others by where we are, not how we got here; by quantitative standards of individual progress, not qualitative appreciation of an individual’s process.  We recite affirmations to help us accept where we are in the moment, but with our self-esteem and status bound up in the number of our achievements and the rate of speed with which we attain them, we can’t resist assessing the “here-and-now” on the basis of whether we’re getting far enough fast enough.  If we’re not – if our tallies come up short – we conclude there must be something wrong with our path, our guides, or our method of travel and chuck them all to seek a truer path, wiser guides, and a smoother ride.  For most, even stepping onto the path of enlightenment doesn’t mean stepping off the merry-go-round and giving up the brass-ring mentality.  Our world boasts a few fully-realized souls who know how not to encumber their goals with ego attachments.  Aspiring to swell their sparse ranks may be laudable, but only if our aspirations hinge on the journey.  As soon as “enlightenment” becomes a coveted goal, it boomerangs us back to the very value judgments we wish to expunge, turning relative degrees of enlightenment into a criterion of excellence and making our actions and everyone else’s ripe for enlightened/unenlightened comparisons.

If I seem to be saying that we shouldn’t set goals for ourselves – I’m not.  I’m saying we often make goal choices blithely, habitually and without conscious intent, conforming to cultural patterns and pressures so ingrained in us, we’re unaware of their influence.  I’m saying that unconsciously applying similar goal-paradigms to all the learning we do may, at times, prevent us from learning much at all.  Our desire for corroborative evidence of our successes goads us into trading the lengthy, laborious and uncertain possibilities of trial-and-error, intuitive, self-guided education for finite courses with certified instructors who stick to their syllabi, warn us which parts of the lecture are going to be on the test, and give us that all-important “final” grade – glorious proof that we’ve met our goal, or damning proof that we’ve failed to.

Within academia, the system sort of makes sense (though it doesn’t necessarily make for good learning).  While the Ivory Tower doesn’t deny us “ah-HAH!” experiences, they are not its primary purpose.  The Tower’s degree and credential programs exist to award specific students official documents attesting that said students have successfully jumped through specific hoops.  With both the institutions and their attendees in cahoots about goals and prizes, neither dare suffer free-form classes.  Equivalency is required, if the paper prizes are to be worth anything:  across the board, homogeneous curricula is presented in analogous style within comparable time increments using similar textbooks and resources.  Before a course can be added to the schedule, its parameters and learning outcomes must be described and posted and the instructor’s syllabus must clearly outline the exact topics, readings, activities and homework for each session, note dates and times for all quizzes and tests, and explicitly define the grading rubric.  Except in very rare cases and very alternative educational institutions, a teacher who deviates from this plan will be castigated by the students and garner perilously poor supervisorial assessments.

Beyond the Ivory Tower, and especially in the areas of artistic or spiritual education and training, there’s little rationale for employing such stringent protocols.  We apply them, anyway.  The academic model so well suits our ladder-of-success notion of how learning works, we’re skeptical of instruction that doesn’t conform to it.  Some believe the lack of hoops and prizes means there’s nothing of value to learn; others may doubt their ability to negotiate a learning path that’s utterly lacking familiar hoops-and-prizes landmarks.  We want words, descriptions, explanations.  We require ideas, patterns and sequences we can wrap our left brains around, even when we’re attempting to learn a right-brain skill.  We don’t want to wander lost, searching our souls for answers.  We want practical, easy-to-follow directions to the heart of the mystery.  Caught between the reality of their students' time-deprived, activity-cramped lifestyles and the necessity of attracting and retaining sufficient numbers of them to make a living, modern-day masters cater to our desires and yield to our expectations, drawing up the requested maps, replete with legends, keys and glossaries.  Hurray.  Everybody gets an “A”.

We had been standing in Wu Ji awhile, the posture of primordial emptiness and limitless potential.  My attention rested in my lower dan tien; my intention was a quiet mind and senses fully open.  Sifu’s arms drifted gently away from his body and to his sides until they floated between heaven and earth, about waist high, palms toward the earth.  Drinking in the lesson, I shifted my intention to my dan tien and allowed peng – rising energy – to lift my arms in harmony with his.  Opening fully to Sifu’s direct transmission, I let his stance inform my own, cell by cell and without conscious effort.  Opening fully to my physical, emotional and energetic sensations, I let the new stance inform my awareness and teach me about itself.

There are as many stances as there are Hindu deities.  Some require major kinesthetic re-education to master, some we were born knowing.  This stance… this one my heart-mind-body recognized at once.  Flowing waters had taught me this stance when I was just a little girl and I’d practiced it all my life.  Stepping across a rill, wading into a river, walking into the ocean, our arms naturally drift from our bodies and out to our sides as the water deepens and rises around us.  It’s partly about balance; the bottom of the stream-bed, river-bed, sea-bed is invisible to our eyes, but energetically perceptible through our palms and fingertips.  We steady ourselves on shifting sands or rolling rocks by centering our dan tiens in a fuller circle of qi and rooting in the wet earth through our arms – and we do so instinctively.

Whether we’re striding out so we can dive in and play like otters, or strolling out to stand in the flow like a boulder and bask in our aqua-centric view of the world, there is a point where we stop – especially if the water is cold.  Our legs can take it, but chill waters are a shock to the thin skin over our bellies, ribs, and organs.  Naturally, inevitably, we pause with our lower halves submerged, our upper bodies in the air, and the dividing line between water and sky exactly at our dan tiens.  Standing in Wu Ji, in Zhan Zhuang, in Crane or Cat or Upholding Heaven, our heads are always anchored in the sky, our feet in the earth, and our dan tiens are always at our center.  But standing in an ocean or river, standing in the stream with everything below the waist in one element and everything above it in another, our experience of the world as a balance of yin & yang isn’t limited to the energetic and gravitational.  Our experience is brilliantly, blissfully tactile.

I spent most of June standing in the stream.  I didn’t bring any beach balls with me, didn’t play with channeling my energy into a dynamic resistance to the current.  I stood still in the flow and let it rush between my legs, around my hips, under my arms, through my fingers – accepting all the stream carried to me as the days stretched and the light peaked and the mid-summer tide rose and fell.  Broken branches from the wind-torn trees bobbed by or scraped along me, some made slick by the racing waters, some made slimy by their sojourns in stagnant eddies and pools.  Twigs stripped of their summer green streaked through the heart of the current like tiny Viking longboats.  Breeze-blown blossoms danced awhile, then drank too deeply and sank to the depths.  Bedraggled seeds spun downstream, snagging the minnow’s unblinking gaze.  Shivers of silver brushed against my legs.  Silt swept over my toes.  Yellow leaves caught on my fingers, clinging, even in death.  I’ve been Standing in the Stream while the moon waxed and the moon waned, while babes laughed and friends cried, while dear ones died and lost cousins returned, and the rivers ran down to the sea.