Boston Notes: August, 2019, pt 1

Posted on September 18, 2019 by admin

Stillness, Heart-ness, Kidney Qi

Opening Meditation: Opening the heart to 6 sacred directions: Option A

Sitting sthira sukham, allow the heart center to soften and breathe.

Attending to the front body, the east, allow your heart to open through your ribs and sternum to new beginnings, like sunrise, like the first of spring, like the beginning of your inhalation. You can use CV-17 to help soften the heart, as it relates to the heart chakra and links the heart, pericardium and lungs. Soak in the feelings and let them settle.

Now, feel the right/south side of the heart, (we are in the northern hemisphere) radiating outward through the ribs, absorbing the fullness of light, of yang, like the energies of midday or midsummer, like the fullness of the pause at the end of the inhalation (antara kumbhaka). Let the feeling soak in and settle into your cells.

Now feel the back body representing the west. Opening the space behind your heart, through the spine and out into the world. West relates to endings, like sunset or the end of summer at the equinox, the releasing of the exhalation, or even death. Let your heart let go of whatever it is ready to release and let that dissipate into the space behind you.

Now the left side, the north which represents the fullness of yin, the darkness of midnight, of the winter solstice, the longer pause after exhalation (bahya kumbhaka). Soak in the depths of the stillness, of the darkness and feel the nurturing restfulness.

From the fullness of the first four directions, let your heart feel Mother Earth, through weight, through gravity, down through your root chakra, the seat of the yin (CV-1). Feel your attention flowing down down down into the heart of Mother Earth and feel the merging of your heart with Mother Earth. Feel her nurturing yin energies rising up within you. Then open your crown chakra (GV-20) and allow your heart to rise up into the heavens, merging with the heart of father sky, basking in the vastness of the celestial spheres, allowing that vast spaciousness into your own heart. This completes the holy trinity, father sky, mother earth and the fullness of you.

Option B: Instead of beginning with the four horizontal points, begin with heaven/crown and earth/root, in either order, depending upon what your intuition tells you. (I need more grounding, or I need more spaciousness.)
Option C: Go with whatever inspires you to land in stillness.

Now, listen to, and rest in the vast vibrancy of fullness and the vast silence of emptiness. Welcome home. Chinese Buddhist Master Hsin Tao offers this for advice on this challenging practice:
“As we progress, we realize how constricted we are by our discriminating mind: our minds, not our hearing organs, make the distinction between sound and silence. But if you practice listening until you no longer make distinctions, you develop a power that is liberating.” To read the full, quite extraordinary article, please click on the link below. Note that listening is different from hearing. Listening is open and spacious, without choice. Hearing involves landing on a specific sound and activating the mind.

—Dharma Master Hsin Tao, “Listening to Silence”

Yin, Yang and Embryology: Bring the Tao into Our Practice

From unbounded spaciousness, Love brings us into the world of form, especially obviously at the moment of conception, but always moment to moment also. Our Micro-cosmic orbit model captures the emergence as a dynamic interplay between yin any yang. Remember there is no such thing as pure yin or pure yang. In the pathologically dualistic modern culture we inhabit, we need constant reminders to see the unity in duality. And remember the Tao is the mystery where there to no discrimination between dual and non-dual.

Notice the relationship of the green yang Governing Vessel to the yellow yin Conception Vessel. In embryological terms, the conception vessel, in general corresponds to the endoderm/gut body as well as the mesodermal organs like the heart and the uro-genital system. The Governing vessel represents the ectoderm, including skin and nervous system and the mesodermal connective tissues that make up the spinal column. Notice where they meet: at the floor of the pelvis/root chakra, but not at the crown chakra, but at the mouth. In other words, at the two ends of the gut tube, where at birth and the activation of breathing and peristalsis, these circuits open. To re-integrate the circuit and have healthy energy flowing freely, both ‘circuit breaks’ need to be linked with energy flow.

To accomplish this, at the root, GV-1 at the tip of the coccyx (not shown on the chart below) needs to feed energy of the whole GV circuit forward, across the anal mouth to meet CV-1 in the center of the perineum. This circular flow forward is much more subtle than ‘tucking’ the tail, as it is not initiated muscularly, although the muscles feel and respond to the flow. It is a subtle action, not a gross one. You may feel it as a subtle elastic pulling of the center connective tissues in the middle of the figure 8 link anal and urogenital sphincters.

The flow through the GV circuit can be blocked not only at the coccyx, but also at other obvious places such as the kidneys (GV-4), back of the heart (GV-9), and back of the skull (GV-16), which is why Daoist master Jeffrey Yuen has included them on the sheet above.

In a similar manner, the CV/ yin energy needs to flow in the opposite direction. For better leverage, and because of abdominal weakness, we can begin this action at CV-2 on the pubic bone, past CV-1 and into the GV circuit. We will get to some other key points such as CV-6, 17, and 22 later. Eventually all of the points along the CV pathway have to be engaged in this to complete its component of the micro-cosmic orbit, and, of course the energy should be free to flow in both directions, forward flexion of the circult/down the front and up the back, and reversing action of torso extention, up the front and down the back. Think of our natural state is a neutral idling of a car engine, neither engaging forward or reverse. When we want to move, we transition (use the transmission) to direct the flow in the correct way.

Now check out the boy and girl turning the waterwheels in the lower dantien in the Nei Jing Tu above and make the connection. They are paired, yin and yang, as right and left, because we have a dynamic right/left symmetry throughout the body but they also set up a dynamic curving field that induces energy through the central microcosmic orbit channel. Notice the natural curve of the sacral-coccyx region and feel how the ‘wheels’ follow the curve. You can find the same energy pattern in the circular right and left acetabulae and the femur head. Some questions to ask yourself in reference to the wheels, the sacrum and hip joints: In which direction is are my wheels turning? Are the two wheels working together, or are they out of phase? My right hip/leg imbalance is totally obvious from this perspective and I am slowly learning to restore some balance from this subtle work

The water wheels represent the kidneys, the key organ system in Chinese Medicine. They are the first ‘organ to appear, even before the heart, and represent the water element. The are the most ‘yin’ of the six yin organ systems, and the heart is the most ‘yang’ of the yin organs. Yin involves listening, receiving, nurturing and storing, where as yang represents acting, giving, protecting and relating to the the outer world.

To help feel how the kidneys are crucial in the linking of all of these pieces, we can use the principle of ‘kidneys grasp the qi’. In Chinese Medicine, the qi of the in-breath is pulled in and down all the way to the root of the pelvis by the action of the kidneys. Connect the right/yang and left/yin wheels to your right/yang and left/yin nostrils and feel the in breath coming all the way down into the pelvic floor area. The out breath comes from releasing the central tendon of the diaphragm upward, not releasing the kidneys nor the forward pull of GV-1. This elastically links the central tendon of the diaphragm with the seat of the yin at the center of the perineum.

Interlude: Non-Digital Alternate Nostril Breathing: Explore linking the nostrils to the two water wheels down in the pelvis, feeling right and left side for differences. Imagine the breath travels right through the center of each nostril on both in and out breaths. The try alternate nostril without using your hands, just your mind. Exhale through the right nostril fully and then allow the inhalation to come in through the right. Exhale through the left, inhale through the left; exhale through the right, inhale through the right, etc. For those who are familiar using the hand and fingers for alternate nostril breathing, feel free to practice this way. In all cases, if possible, stay in touch with the ‘water wheels’, linking nostrils to pelvis.

One more gem from the Nei Jing Tu: Notice that the water wheels send the water up the front of the spine to fill a cauldron being heated by a fire. Water (kidneys/bladder, a yin/yang pair) rises to meet the descending fire (heart/small intestine, another yin yang pair), bringing fire and water into a dynamic and balanced relationship. As the water wheels turn, feel the bladder lifting up toward the small intestine. The meridians of the bladder and small intestine, both yang organs, are linked in Chinese medicine through what is known as the TaiYang or greater yang, a single channel. This channel is frequently used to alleviate back pain, and you can find this your self be feeling how when the kidney wheels are engaged and the qi is flowing freely, strain is removed from the spinal muscles.

This water fire balance can be experienced in any and all yoga poses. It is a good way to discover how to dissolve old habits and liberate new layers of tissues/consciousness in the body/mind field.

(PS: somehow this was published by accident a few days ago, before it was ready. I have tried to clean it up. More to come including:

Fibonacci Series, Taoism, Embryology, Iyengar’s Yoga practice, and the nature of growth, development and evolution.

PS 2: I’m into my chemotherapy treatment, so my brain isn’t always sharp and/or energized, and the Boston Notes blog has been coming more slowly than I had originally hoped. There is a lot more to unpack. Stay tuned!

Foundations of Daoism

Posted on August 17, 2019 by admin

Guidance from my teacher’s teacher, Dr. Jeffrey C. Yuen, an 88th generation Taoist priest from the Jade Purity School, Lao Tzu sect, and a 26th generation priest of the Complete Reality School, Dragon Gate sect.

4 Stages of Daoist Meditation:

1. Relaxation of the body: The physical body, muscles, bones, fluids etc, find a way to settle down so that sensations do not become a distraction. (Sthira sukham asanam)
2. Concentration: focusing of the mind through various means. Daoism often uses the micro-cosmic orbit to link different parts of the body to each other in circuits of qi/energy/prana, integrating front and back, inner and outer, yin and yang.
3. Relaxation of mental body/mind. The concentration practice can create its own form of mental tension through the challenge of harnessing the mental energy. It may feel like work! Create an ‘inner smile’ so you enjoy the practice. This becomes concentration without distraction, while relaxed.
4. Lightness of spirit. The final stage is a feeling of levitation or lightness, as spirit is freed up from entanglements.

4 Basic Principles of Daoism:

1. Shen: reconnecting back with my ancestry to learn and have respect for the gift of life that has been passed along to me. This is the early reference to the divine, the source of all life.

2. Xian: Life or existence always arises in a duality known as yin and yang, or as Patanjali would say, the dvandvas, the pairs of opposite. One of the things we do as humans is to take the natural order of duality, of yin and yang, and divide the world into good and bad. This is of course the exact same action described by the second skandha we have been discussing in our Buddhist teachings.

3. Ming: Is about our lives and the choices we make in this dualistic world. The human being has paradoxically both free will and pre-destiny. We are born into a given body, in a given social climate, at a given historical moment, at a specific place on this planet. Without getting into the subtle realms of karma, as humans we have to face the world as it is presented to us. Deep reflection here shows that all human experience has its ups and downs, good days and bad days. This is the natural cyclical view of Daoism, but we often, as mentioned previously, get entangled in chasing after ‘good’ and running away from ‘bad’. This is not necessary. Alan Watts, in his last book “The Watercourse Way” tells the story of a farmer to illustrate this.

This farmer’s horse had run away, and the neighbors all came by to offer condolences for such bad luck. “Maybe” the farmer said. The next morning his horse returned followed by six wild horses, and his neighbors came exclaiming his good fortune. “Maybe”, the farmer said. That day his son broke his leg trying to tame one of the wild horses. “How awful”, said the neighbors when they heard the story. “Maybe” said the farmer. The next day, the local army recruiters came by to conscript his son into the military, but he was rejected because of the broken leg. “How lucky”, said the neighbors. “Maybe” said the farmer.

Our free will comes in regards to how we react to the world. An angry person tends to see an angry world, just as an anxious person tends to see an anxious world. A happy person tends to see a happy world and a loving person tends to see a loving world. In other words, we have the opportunity to make the best of the world we have been given, not that this is in any way easy. In the chapter 2, verse 48 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna offers similar advice to Arjuna

yogasthah kuru karmaani sangam tyaktvaa dhananjaya
siddhyasiddhyoh samo bhuutvaa samatvam yoga ucyate

Remaining steadfast in yoga, oh Dhananjaya (Arjuna), perform actions, abandoning attachment, remaining the same to success and failure alike. This evenness of mind is called yoga.

This steadfastness or samatvam comes from reflection and the disciplined cultivation of your own personal principles for living. In Daoism, as in yoga, you yourself reflect upon your life and the world around you and use your own insights for self discovery. It is not a belief system that you ‘buy into’.

4. The Dao: The Way: with reflection, mediation, observation of life, we discover our own connection to shen, the divinity, we can reconcile our behaviors, and begin to live our lives in harmony with all, moment to moment. It is self cultivation.

The Five Roots, or Lessons for Humanity

(From Chinese Herbal Medicine, these are literally roots that carry lessons as well as herbal support for humans. The homonym shen, although written as a different character, is used to describe the plant aspect, that points back to shen as spirit. )

Sha Shen: Life is impermanent. Trying to grasp sand is futile, as is trying to grasp at life. Let if flow through you. Appreciate the impermanence as something beautiful and delicate, so you can be totally present and appreciate what is happening in this moment.
Ku Shen: Bitterness: Life the root ku, life can have its bitter moments. All part of the nature of things. We have conflicts and challenges, but these allow us to grow. If life was always simple and easy, we would never learn anything. Also, we learn that those who may cause us conflict are also Divine, so we learn to suffer together.
Ren Shen: Humility: We are being held/ cared for by a much larger presence. The Universe is operating as a vast on-going flow of love and our ‘small selves’. To be human, to be humane, is to be humble as we bow to the Divine, not in fear, but in gratitude for all the little gifts.
Dan Shen: Alchemy: Dan means alchemy, as in the term dantien. Our physical form has spirit as its fundamental nature, but this is often hidden. Alchemy asks how can I redeem, from matter, Spirit, which is immutable, incorruptible. And these can be seen in many small ways on a day to day basis. A smile, a bird song, a flower, the night sky, a leaf falling from a tree. We don’t need large miracles, but only to see the miraculous of life itself. Can we change ourselves such that we know this as a living reality, and not just as a good idea.
Xuan Shen: Ever Desire-less. When we let go of our thoughts, beliefs and desires, we begin to see the mystery. As we humans we often think that we can conjure up the divine through ideas and beliefs, in our own images and desires. But ultimate mystery, the Dao, Truth, is not available to our thoughts. It is in awe and letting of of our beliefs. This takes a lifetime of practice.

And Now, we return to the Nei Jing Tu, for your cultivation of these aspects of Daoism.

The first set of lines above the image is from just to the right of the lower dantien and describes aspects of the whole picture, the single grain of millet sitting just above the crown chakra (GV-20). The blue eyed foreign monk is said to be Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who brought Buddhism to China. Can you find that inner support? Can you find the other images in the painting, and then inside your own inner sensory world.
The second set of lines is across from the middle dantien and the third, across from the upper dantien. Let your imagination and perception meet. There is much imagery around the organs in Chinese Medicine as well.

The iron ox plows the field where gold coins are sown;
Engraving the stone, the young lad holds a string of cash.
A single grain of millet contains the entire world;
Mountains and streams are decocted in a half-sheng cauldron.
The eyebrows of white headed Lao-tzu hang down to earth,
And the blue-eyed foreign monk holds up the heavens.
Orient yourself towards the mysterious and it is realized-
Outside of this mystery there is no other mystery.

I am properly and attentively cultivating my own field-
Inside there are numerous sprouts that live for ten thousand years.
The flowers resemble yellow gold, their color not uncommon;
the seeds are like jade grain, their fruits perfectly round.
Cultivation completely depends on the earth of the Central Palace.
Irrigation necessarily relies on the spring in the Upper Valley.
The practice is completed suddenly and I attain the great Tao-
I wander carefree over land and water as an immortal of P’eng-lai.

Fa-tsang says: Violet eyes clarify the four great oceans;
the white light pervades Mount Sumeru. (Mt Meru in Sanskrit)
Tz’u-shih (Maitreya Buddha) says:
Between the eyebrows white light constantly emanates.
This can liberate all sentient beings from the suffering of ceaseless incarnations.

Stillness, the Relational Field, and Collective Awakening

Posted on July 8, 2019 by admin

As I write this in early July, I am now back in Ojai, trying to rebuild my core essence (Jing), getting ready for the challenges of the chemotherapy series I will begin in the fall. I was surprised at how subtly exhausting the radiation treatments were. On one level I feel fine, but at a deeper level somewhat empty. I’ve just gotten back in the pool which is helping, as is the assistance of my expanding body work team, and the integration and refinement of the three Taoist treasures, jing, qi and shen through work with the microcosmic orbit, fish body orbit, and the thrusting vessel.

Of course the ultimate resource is resting in the unfathomable, mysterious Tao, or, to simplify, ‘Stillness’. ‘Remembering’, re-minding myself to return my attention here, moment to moment is the core practice. And, the first evolute of ‘creation emerging from mystery’, the relational unifying field of unconditional love, may be even more important in healing as it permeates all forms at all levels.

What was extraordinary about Hope Lodge, my home in Boston during the radiation, was the concentrated strength of the relational field spontaneously channeled by the residents. With forty cancer patients, with differing levels of health and intensity of treatment, and an almost equal number of caregivers living in a small community, there was a lot of emotional energy. But universally acknowledged by all was how powerful the field of unconditional love was. There was a lot of turnover of the residents, but the field was amazingly self sustaining. New residents were embraced, and almost everyone who could, participated, in both large and small ways, in the building and sustaining of the field. Hope Lodge, the building and staff was the constant container, throwing us all together for various meals, movies, Bruins games and other events.

Much greater then the sum of the parts, the collective experience touched everyone. It wasn’t something the be figured out. It was a flow of energy that was just there, touching you deeply. Cancer puts you right in touch with the ultimate questions of life and death and opens the portals to unconditional love. And now after being away for over a month, I miss it. It was a truly unique environment. My lesson is to create that relational field within myself, so each of my ‘parts’ contributes unconditional love to the whole, and especially to the skeptical and wounded parts who may not have a clue. And also find ways to awaken this out in the world as well.

In a similar way, over the last year, and especially after the word about the prostate cancer got out, another, less physically contained relational field emerged with me at the center. Friends from my neighborhood growing up in Braintree, MA, from high school and college, from the yoga world, from Ojai, relatives, even people I barely knew, all reached out to me in differing ways, letting me know I was on their heart radar. My name was brought up in churches around the country! It has been great reminder how we all are unconditional love at the core of Being. This is easy to forget when living in a world driven by greed, fear and ignorance, but in spite of the insanity of the world, all of creation is fundamentally unconditional love, including the aberrant aspects that keep showing up in the news.

It is through the Stillness of Being and the relational field of unconditional love that the collective awakening is proceeding and evolving. If you look closely, you will find that all spiritual teachers are channeling the same insights. The language maybe slightly different, and the ‘techniques’ used in the different traditions to get you started may vary. But ultimately, ‘Resting in Stillness’ and tapping into the unbounded spring of unconditional love are the yang and yin, the masculine and feminine sides of the collective awakening.

What is awakening? All of Creation is awakening. Wholeness is Awakening. And we are all embedded in the multi layered fields of this on-going process. And the human mind, individually and collectively as a macro-field effect, is constantly sending up smokescreens of distraction to keep us from realizing what is happening right under our noses, so to speak. Illusion, delusion, confusion, ignorance, and any others words we may find to describe this, all point back to how unhealthy skandhas, arising as a reaction to the terrifying shock of emerging into form, are at the center of the on going delusion.

My favorite spiritual teacher and go-to guy for insight into the cutting edge of the collective awakening, Adyashanti, addresses this directly in a chapter in his latest book, ‘the most important thing’. The chapter is entitled ” The Dirty Little Secret of Spiritual Practice”, and begins this way.

“The dirty little secret of spiritual practice is that confronting the true nature of our self can be terrifying. For those of us who engage in spiritual practice, it is common to struggle with facing our existential fear. This is not the kind of fear that is necessarily derived from the past or from a traumatic event; it comes from a place inside of us. It is that sense that within consciousness that we have met an immensity of the unknown or the infinite, and in our fear we grasp onto our egos.”

Adya goes on the describe the three general manifestions of ego-grasping, which interestingly enough, correspond to the three dantiens as well as the skandhas. The first is conceptual, where our self sense is composed of images and ideas, beliefs and judgments. This ‘me’ that lives in our heads roughly corresponds to skandhas three, four and five.

The second, (Adya calls it more interior) is the emotional, centered in the chest. Here, our self sense comes from our feelings and the whole spectrum of emotions: positive, negative and neutral. As these are embodied in a way that the abstract conceptual level is not, that is, in a more interior and older region of the brain, this level can seem real, even if we have awakened from the conceptual level of ego. Skandha 2, known as vedana or feelings in engaged here.

The inner most ego center, associated with the primal terror of skandha 1, is according to Adya, centered in the lower dantien. “At the gut level, this ego is the experience of a contracted void, or a contracted state of emptiness. For this contraction to give way, so that we may be free and know God, we must access something deeper and more fundamental than instinct. In Zen, this is called “the gateless gate that we must pass through as we reach spiritual milestones or shifts. It is “gateless” because all that is happening is that contractions are released, as there was never anything there to begin with – we created the gate in our minds – and we will be annihilated, but not in the way we fear we might. Once we have passed through the gateless gate, once we have unclenched the fist of rudimentary ego, we can access something deeper than instinct and go beyond existential fear.” There is a lot more form Adya on this but you’ll have to get the book!

Those familiar with Patanjali may recognize this as abhinivesha, the last of the five kleshas described in the Sadhana Pada: (Vyasa, in his commentary to II-9, offers that abhinivesha infers previous deaths and reincarnation.)

II-9 svarasa-vaahii vidusho ‘ pi tathaaruudho ‘bhiniveshah
Fear of death affects even the wise; it is an inherent tendency.

Whether wise or foolish, we all begin at skandha 1 and have to navigate the ‘gateless gate’. Because we are all going through this simultaneously (the collective awakening), we call all support each other in this process on unclenching. As somatic practitioners, we are already familiar with how tissues hold patterns of tension and how we can use breathing, subtle micro-movements and leverage to help let go. A good body worker can also disentangle regions hard to find on our own.

And often life provides its own surprises. Hospitals have always given me the heebie-jeebies, possibly as part of my pre-natal ptsd, also now amplified by the cancer. So of course I had to go to Brigham and Womens Hospital on a daily basis for nine weeks. Great meditations and observations on the nature of belief systems and fear, and on how, in spite of the seemingly chaotic nature of the place, the underlying energy everyone working there was love. My skeptical cells began to soften a bit. Still a long way to go, but a good start.

Speaking of a long way to go, the day after I returned to Ojai, my neck went into acute spasm and stayed out for a week and a half. But, this mini crisis led to more new revelations and a new friend. I was able to discover a wonderful upper cervical chiropractor in Ventura who has opened new perceptions on the skull – C-1 region which as expanded my sense of how the Governing and Conception vessels interact at the floor of the skull. Funny how the collective awakening process works in real time!! Wow!

In the next post I will go into some ‘yoga nerd’ detailed notes on ways to dive more deeply into some of the points along the micro-cosmic orbit. Keep resting in stillness. Keeping bringing love into the world. Be aware of what is happening collectively and do what you can to make the world a better place, one breath at a time. The whole Universe is supporting you!

Speaking of the Universe, this is ngc.6946, also known as the ‘Fireworks Galaxy, part of the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies, a mere 22.5 million light years away. The name “Fireworks comes from the fact that this galaxy produces an unusually large number of supernovae. Apropos, a belated happy 4th of July to you all.