Boston Notes pt 2

Posted on November 12, 2018 by admin

(continued from previous post)

Breathing from The Three Burners

From pelvic floor to navel = Lower Burner

From navel to diaphragm = Middle Burner

From the diaphragm to either 1st rib or roof of mouth to include the throat = Upper Burner

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, one of the 12 acupuncture meridians is known as the sanjiao or triple burner / triple heater. There is no equivalent in Western Medicine, but its role is the balance of yang/fire and yin/water through the core of the body. In general, fire rises and water sinks, so the sanjiao helps in remixing them so the tissues and cells are always at the optimal temperature and fluidity for health. This breathing exploration helps orient us to the inner spaces where this alchemy takes place.

Our primary shape for the breath is the sphere, expanding and condensing like the action of a Hoberman sphere seen here to the right. We always begin from the space inside of the sphere, not the sphere itself. Space moves the form, rather than the form moving the space. With inhalation, the space expands and the sphere does likewise. On exhalation, the space condenses and the form gets smaller. At the end of the exhalation, your attention is still inside the sphere, the sphere is just smaller.

Practice 1. Sitting or lying comfortably, align yourself, relax and bring your attention to the breath. Gradually focus your attention on the lower burner space, from the bottom of the pelvic floor to the navel. Imagine this space is spherical, with the center of the sphere in the center of the pelvis. Feel expansion in all directions on the in-breath and a slow release inwards on the out-breath. Stay with this for a few minutes, 9 breaths or whatever feels right.

When complete, pause for several breaths and then shift your attention to the middle burner, between the navel and diaphragm. Imagine a sphere centered between your two kidneys and allow the expanding and condensing sensations of the breathing fill this mid torso region. Stay for 9 breaths, or whatever, and then pause for several more.

Now bring attention to the upper burner area, with your imaginary sphere centered just behind the upper heart. Repeat as with the previous sections. Finish by feeling the breath, rooted in the lower burner, moving freely throughout the whole torso, keeping eyes, ears and spinal muscles soft.

Practice 2. Bowls and Domes
We will repeat the same steps as above, only this time noticing the ‘north and south poles’ of your sphere. In the lower burner, the north pole will be about four fingers above the navel, in the center of the body, the south pole, CV-1. The north pole holds the top of an expanding dome, like an umbrella, the south pole the base of an expanding bowl, like a flower pot.
The whole sphere continues to expand and condense, but our attention is only on the two energetic points along the median line, or chong mai. On the in-breath, feel the energy of the points, let the space expand and the structures respond. On the out breath, let the energy points and the space lead the condensing action. Let the structure follow. There will be no gripping or contractions this way.

With the middle burner, the north pole of the lower burner becomes the south pole of the middle burner. It descends bowl-like on the in-breath while the north pole, in the center of the diaphragm, ascends dome like. On the out breath they reverse.

In the upper burner, again there is a reverse. The center of the diaphragm, now the south pole descends bowl-like , while the north pole, mid-throat or top of the soft palate ascends. Again, on the out breath everything slowly reverses.

If you fell adventurous, play with the three burners. Imagine and breath with lower and middle as a single space, from diaphragm to pelvic floor. How is this different from the previous practice? How is it similar ? Then, middle and upper as one, with the diaphragm between the two. What do you feel in the various organs/tissues of the region. Finish by rooting in the lower burner and feeling the wholeness of the breath.

Climbing the Wall from the Three Burners

An old favorite: Reminders:
A. engage and open K-1 on the feet and PC-8 on the hands
B. relax neck, shoulders, kidneys, spinal muscles. We are looking to feel the inner body lifting and the whole periphery hanging down.
C. Press down through K-1 to create the lift. The heels will rise up, but not because you are lifting them. Actually the ankles lift and the heels hang down from the back of the ankles. This keeps you in the Deep Front Line (anatomy trains) and not in the outer calf muscles.|
D. Ascend as high as possible and then descend slowly at first. Then, ascend and remain fully extended through core to fingertips and slowly release down without dropping your hands. This will alert you to the glue in and around the diaphragm and mediastinum.

New Practice: Combining the previous breath practice with the wall climb, begin by ascending and descending with you full attention on opening the lower burner, using the movement of the N and S poles to create a charged space. Then the middle burner, followed by the upper burner, same process. Expand the space, create a charge of vitality, feel the charge melting dense tissue. Then take a walk around the room, feeling the median line/chong mai as you move.

New Practice: Combining Bhoga block bridge with tail lift from the previous post.

Find a comfortable place for the block, staying grounded through K-1 in the feet and long through the core of the body. Begin to lift up vertebrae by vertebrae until you reach your limit. Then reverse, slowly returning, link by link in the vertebral chain, letting the anterior lumbar/psoas lengthen circularly to the floor while still lengthening the back body. This will keep you in the center. Move the block around or reverse its direction. If you only have a regular yoga block, roll up a blanket and place it on top of the block (not the full height!) to create a curved shape.

Notice how this action affects the three burners. The lower burner includes the deep groin muscles. Find a way to help them become more elastic. The middle burner includes the kidneys, liver, gall bladder, stomach, spleen and pancreas. This is the keystone of the backbends and if the breathing, space and energy charge can expand and open, the strain is removed from the spinal muscles and the core opens more deeply. The upper burner extends into the throat and soft palate. Energy can be trapped here. Height under the shoulders can help to elongate C-6 through T-2 or T-3 to open this inner channel. My face is redder than the torso, indicating a blockage. It is a work in progress.

This inner experience can then be taken to sarvangasana and variations or viparita karani. When you are inverted, the legs can really help create inner length. In shifting from extension to flexion and vice versa, the middle burner serves as the intermediary between front and back, upper and lower bodies. Photos above: young me, current me, fantasy me.

Part 3 coming next. Please write with questions about the practices. They are not always easy to express verbally, and the inner experience is totally impossible to verbalize. “The tao that ca be spoken is not the true Tao.”

PS: As I am posting this, California is again in the midst of conflagrations from hell. Hold us in your prayers.

Healing, Meaning-Making and Story

Posted on July 27, 2018 by admin

In the last post, I included a link to an article on Non-dual Chinese Medicine and the Chong Mai or thrusting vessel, as there were many aspects raised by the author that intrigued me. One that struck home was his comment on the existential angst ‘fundamental to Western consciousness’. Given the state of the world these days, a certain amount of anxiety is impossible to avoid if you are paying attention. But author Michael Greenberg is referring to something more subtle, and more deeply embedded in the psyche.

Adyashanti, one of my major mentors in the field of awakening has been exploring this Western angst, as he sees it in many of his students (and probably himself earlier on) and has developed a home study course on what he is calling ‘Redemptive Love.’ Adhya gets right to the point: “Unworthiness is the pandemic of Western Culture.” I love this quote as it points to a serious barrier to truly deep awakening. Many years ago I heard of the Dalai Lama responding to a question from a Western student about low self esteem and having no idea what that was. He was puzzled !!! I’m not. I have heard parts of Adya’s course, but now need to really absorb it more deeply as I my own personal angst is demanding attention. This angst can be seen as continually re-occurring disturbances or dissonance in our bio- energy field, so we can make sense of their nature, we may be able to tease out and release many of these patterns.

A common source of this angst/unworthiness are the many unresolved issues of our childhood. Michael Greenberg, cited above, has a book on healing journeys called ‘Braving the Void’, and in the chapter entitled ‘Childhood Terrors’, he states: “While the average adult can control or mask unresolved childhood traumas, as we reach old age these mechanisms can weaken, allowing the hurt of fearful child to reappear. I believe this is why we so often see older people regressing to childhood behaviors and behaving irrationally. It makes sense then to try to come to terms with these fears at a time of life where we have the energy and will to integrate our various contradictory feelings.” My recent PTSD experiences are clearly coming from this dimension.

A more insidious example of childhood trauma is shame. Tara Brach, in her extraordinary book ‘Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of the Buddha” offers this commentary on the same Dalai Lama story I mentioned above. “While all humans feel ashamed of weakness and afraid of rejection, our Western culture is a breeding ground for the kind of shame and self-hatred the Dalai Lama could not comprehend.” This quote comes from the very first chapter, entitled ‘The Trance of Unworthiness”.

From another perspective, this angst can also be fed by a flawed story embedded in the ancestral field through the DNA field our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. Their belief systems around religion, personal value, cultural values and parenting all impact our personal energy fields in the present moment. In Classical Chinese Medicine, the ‘jing’, one of the three treasures is the carrier of our ancestral karma and learning how to nurture the jing can lead to more healing and transformation.

This involves the epigenetic fields and cell biologist Bruce Lipton is a great source for studies and practices. Epigenetics is where we learn about how changing environments, internally and externally, changes the ways in which the genes and DNA are activated. By healing ourselves, we are also healing our lineage/ancestors ‘now’ through the epigenetic DNA fields, and our planet needs lots of healing. We can also employ active dreaming and shamanic journeying to work with the ancestral karma.

Belief systems also manifest in our movements through what we can call ‘meaning making structures. I first encountered the idea of meaning-making as a self-organizing component of our biology in “How Life Moves” by Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose where they describe four structures that underlie how we move through life, and how life moves through us. These include the physical structure of muscles, bones, connective tissue; the perceptual structure where we store patterns of attention that determine how we perceive the world, inwardly and outwardly; the co-ordinating structure where we store learned patterns of movements, small and large that the body can call upon, and use in combinations, when movement is required; and finally, the meaning making structure, where we create stories/ideas/beliefs about ‘what things mean’, and embody those meaning in patterns of movement and also inhibition, where certain movements are ‘not allowed’.

As a simple personal example of these four structures, in my ongoing sax education, the physical structures of my whole body have to engage to facilitate new subtle movements in my fingers, wrists, throat, jaws and diaphragm. The co-ordinative structures have to keep evolving when new note combinations and different fingerings are required. The perceptual structures are being challenged by my sax guru Karl to hear nuances in pitch, rhythm, note lengths and chord harmonies. These are relatively straight forward. But when my meaning making structure is dominated by the inner critic embedded in the ‘story of unworthiness’, which probably extends back generations, there is no joy or delight possible when challenged.

If my primary interpretation of a challenging situation is that ‘obviously my being is flawed or ‘I am fundamentally unworthy of being whole’, my cellular capacity to respond from its own deep intelligence is compromised. What fascinates me is that I get the absurdity of this belief system intellectually, but that understanding is not penetrating into the biology. In fact, as I dive more deeply into the cellular/biologically driven sub-conscious and unconscious in my embodied practice, more of these strange energy fields are being released into my conscious awareness. My current ‘meaning-making’ model of the flaw in the core ‘meaning-making’ structure is that I am awakening in the DNA field of my Irish Catholic ancestors (with some English pathology as well) and ancestral healing is being requested.

This idea of inherited story opens lots of portals into fun explorations. First of all, it gets us into Dan Siegel’s work on ‘narrative integration, (see The Mindful Brain), where we need a healthy and ever evolving capacity to tell our ‘self-story’ by organizing all of our personal experiences and integrating them into our behavior. Religion and spirituality, and in fact all aspects of culture are transmitted through story. My mentor Thomas Berry, along with Cosmologist Brian Swimme, co-wrote ‘The Universe Story” as a primary story for all humanity in the 21st century, orienting them to the magnificence of creation as everyone’s personal story. I’ve been studying Vedanta for almost 50 years, and Vedanta is all story based. The Bhagavad Gita, a mini story, is embedded in the 1.8 million word “Mahabharata’ one of the greatest epic stories in human history. The Katha Upanishad tells the tale of a young boy calmly confronting Lord Yama, god of death. Vedanta’s overall perspective is that this angst arises because we ‘forget’ our inherent wholeness, or ‘basic goodness’ and just need to be reminded, through teaching.

The Tao’ists believe that the human at birth is placed in the center of the creation process, providing a link between yin and yang, making them naturally connected and relevant. Like the Vedantans, the Taoist view is that our humanity is always an expression of the whole, the macrocosm, the Universe, but because we inhabit a world of constant change, we need to continually ‘re-tune’ ourselves through practice. going out of tune, experiencing imperfections, confusion and doubt are all par for the human course. We just need to learn some skillful means (upayas) to navigate our lives and fully participate in the unfolding of our soul’s journey here on Mother Earth in the early years of the 21st century. We all have a unique contribution to add to the story of our time and place. Discover it and live it fully.

Fascia, Sitting and the Micro-cosmic Orbit

Posted on July 12, 2018 by admin

A key realization of our somatic explorations, in whatever form they take, is that fascia is both connective tissue and an integrated system facilitating the flow of energy and information throughout the body. The second part sound’s a lot like the definition of mind postulated by Dan Siegel: a self-regulating process that organizes the flow of energy and information,” which is why the Taoist model of Qi flow is directly related to fascia. And remember Taoists work with verbs, processes and wholeness, not nouns, objects and duality. And please check out Jean-Clause Guimberteau’s mind boggling “Strolling under the Skin”, here on YouTube, to see the fluid component of our amazing fascial matrix. Even if you have seen this many times, it is still ….wow!

The fascial system, along with the circulatory and nervous systems are the three anatomical systems, that, in isolation, show the fullness of our 3-D embodiment. If we consider fascia, in addition to being structural, as an organizing and integrating aspect of embodiment, we can begin to deepen our inner sense of its 3-D presence and its crucial role in maintaining the dynamic postural relationship Patanjali calls ‘sthira sukham‘. As we discover in our seated meditation practice, this ongoing balance between stability and mobility in the tissue is directly related to the stability/mobility relationship of the ‘mind’ as a whole. And, as mentioned in the previous post, the fascia also stores trauma in the form of ‘trapped’ energy.

How can we relate our meditations on the microcosmic orbit with our embodied feel of the fascia? We see on the left the ‘thoraco-lumbar fascia’ circled, and we will come back to this soon. But first notice the yellow connective tissue running from the skull down the length of the spine to the coccyx. Imagine that line as an entry point into more and more interior expressions of the three dimensional fascial web. This is the path of the Governing Vessel, right on the median line. Also notice (or even better, feel in your own body) the large latissimus dorsii and trapezuis muscles that span the same length, and check out the region of overlap.

On the right we have the linea alba, a thick band of connective tissue running up the mid-line of the front body, from the pubis to the xyphoid process of the sternum. The connective tissue continues over the sternum and up the throat to the bottom jaw. Feel this as a tangible entry to your Conception Vessel. Notice all the branches of muscles and tendons coming together at the mid-line. Hard to see in 2 dimensions, but there are connections to three dimensions to be felt here.

Our next leap is to add the Dai Mai, or Girdle Vessel, to the Microcosmic Orbit, to bring in the horizontal plane to our upright posture. The gyroscope gives us a great example of the first four Extraordinary (or Curious) Vessels. The central axis is the Chong Mai or ‘Penetrating Vessel’. This is the ‘blueprint or chakra line of the body and also provides ‘lift’ to the organs. (Here is a fascinating article on the Chong Mai and Non-dual medicine.)

In our gyroscopic metaphor, the Conception and Governing Vessels create the vertical circle. (Below, they meet at the root chakra, but above, they meet at the mouth, not the crown chakra. The horizontal circle is the Girdle Vessel and this stabilizes the vertical axis in gravity (by spinning in a gyroscope.)

In the human body, we have girdling fascia and musculature which converge on the mid-lines of the front and back bodies. Patanjali has another ‘unique’ Girdling Vessel, none other than the Divine Serpent, Adhisheysa. This drawing of Patanjali*, (autographed by BKS), sits above my altar where I do my sitting and I am always fascinated by his lower body support. It’s hard to see the mid line, but you can feel the support of the snake as it surrounds him.

And I have just discovered some new information on the girdling fascia in a wonderful book entitled “Fascia: What it is, and Why it Matters”, by David Lesondak. I’m an esoteric anatomy nerd, and I have a new favorite, the ‘Lumbar Interfascial Triangle’ ak LIFT, as seen in the diagram below, from David’s book, and based on the fascial research by Frank Willard et al. (Frank was one of my favorite presenters at the First Int’l Fascial Conference in Boston in 2007, where ‘Strolling Under the Skin was first presented.)

The LIFT connects the thoracolumbar fascia (see above) with the Transversus Abdominus, the inner most of the abdominal layers running parallel to Adhishesa. This is a fulcrum region, balancing both front and back, vertebral segment by vertebral segment, but also balances the horizontal force of the transversus abdominus with the vertical fibers of the quadratus and erector spinae muscles. Find the LIFT in your practice.

When you find the energetic field in the body that supports the fascia that engages this balance of vertical and horizontal, you begin to feel like a coiled spring. Because we are even more complex, there is actually a right coil and left coil, a spiral right and spiral left the wrap around each other. This is of course symbolized by the caduceus of Hermes, with the bonus of extended wings. We are going to keep our wings into the body for the time being as we return to our sitting practice.

I have been experimenting with my hands and arms behind for extended periods of time me while sitting. Sometimes separate, sometimes interlocked. It seems to work better with my elevated virasana, (all my knees and hips will allow at the moment.) With the slight height to the pelvis, I have more room for my arms. This engages the latissimus and traps and allows me to engage my deep abdominals. With help from the Lumbar Interfacial Triangle, this action widens the spinal column from the inner back body.

The deep abdominals do not contract in isolation, but maintain a vibrant and integrating tone through the pelvic floor and into the lower back fascia, and hopefully throughout the whole body. The LIFT is very helpful here. The pose is a bit more ‘yang’ than with the arms and hands forward and the pelvis elevated, but because there is an engagement of the front body ‘yin’ through the lift, the yang stays internal, is integrated and not distracting.

If you feel your way around inside you may find the coils easier to find down below and more challenging in the area just below the sternum, right at the middle burner and kidneys. Use your imagination to fill in the field of coiling expanding energy so the whole abdominal/pelvic area, from the diaphragm to the pelvic floor, feels balanced in energy and tone.

Up inside the upper ribs and the sternum are the transversus thoracis muscles. They continue analogous to the transversus abdominals, and then begin to veer diagonally. Use them to lift and open the sternal area by engaging them opposite to the t.a., that is away from the midline. This will help keep the the kidney region of the back body relaxed and dropping, along with the inner shoulder blades. We habitually use the kidney area to hold ourselves upright, leading to a blockage in the Governing Vessel and tension in the spine, so this is a good antidote. Now feel how the diaphragm has more room to move, especially the center dome rising up to lift the heart.

On the outside of the sternum you can fine the continuation of the rectus abdominus fascia travelling up to the back of the skull, as shown as part of Tom Myer’s ‘Superficial Front Line’. Here, the back of the skull can release up as the kidneys drop down. Feel the sternum bone floating between the fascial tissues in front and behind and connect the tail of the sternum, the xyphoid process, with tail of the spine, the coccyx, in both directions. This will open and stabilize the connection between CV-1, the seat of the yin, and GV-1.

Release the open coiling feeling up through the neck/throat to the base of the skull, relax the skull bones and soften the crown chakra. When I sit in sukhasana, my other pose of choice, my pelvis is lower and there is not the same feeling, but as I go back and forth, each position informs the other. And in the deep background, the ever-present ‘Awareness’, your drashtuh svarupe, awaits your surrender. As the body stabilizes in an effortless (relatively) vibrancy, just enjoy the Being’ and stabilize your presence there.

And all of this carries over into all of your poses, all of your postures, all of your movements, all of your life. Enjoy the ride. Not always fun, but always moving into deeper and deeper clarity and awakening.