Moving Meditation

….Or Ki exercises.

If you have never tried this particular form of meditation, I highly recommend you give it a shot.  You won’t believe the change in temperment, clarity and sense of well-being you will experience.

Suffice it to say, the last seven years of my life have been marked by more than a fair share of pain, loss, frustration and demoralization.  Compound this with some unwise investments, costly business “partnerships,” and some good old-fashioned lack of clarity, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.  Chaos is not a nice place to live.

Somehow, I found my way to the woman who is now my friend and my Roshi, or meditation master.  This was divine intervention.  With her guidance, I have experienced more breakthroughs in seven weeks than in seven years of traditional therapy.  For me, this has been amazingly transformative.

Every week, Roshi leads me in Zen meditation.  In truth, I never know what she has in store for me from one week to the next – but it always seems to be something perfectly suited to where I am mentally and emotionally….it’s uncanny.

This past Tuesday, for example, I walked in feeling completely pre-occupied with an incresingly dismal financial situation, (a.k.a. perpetual unemployment), and a new business I am attempting to get off the ground, punctuated, of course, by the accompanying apprehension and self-doubt which permeates the soul in these uncertain times.

Enter Roshi – and this week’s meditation – Ki excercises.  This was an active mediation during which I was to mirror Roshi’s movements on the mat.  It was not strenuous, but slow and purposeful.  Not tiring, but profoundly energizing; involving simple movements, grand stretches, and elegant imagery.  It was like a beautifully choreographed dance, but with no music.  None is needed for this exercise to be performed and understood.

Roshi explained afterwards that part of the reason it works is because one is forced to focus on not simply copying the movements – but mirroring them.  This take concentration and one-pointed attention.

As she made a grand, circular sweep with her right arm, my first instinct was to do the same with mine….but no.  In order to mirror, I needed to move my left arm in such a way.  It was fascinating to see just how much concentration it took, while at the same time maintaining balance on the squishy dojo mat.  (Yes, I fell over sometimes – which made me giggle like a 3 year old with a new puppy)  The nice thing is that there is no wrong way to do it.  If you fall, you simply get back up and continue mirroring – no harm, no foul.  As I am prone to fits of laughter at my own ineptitude, this was also a practice in mental discipline.

I will tell you that by the time I left, I felt completely at ease, optimistic, relaxed and nearly joyful at all the possibilities life can hold.  I still had no job, my bills still overwhelm my inbox, no investor had magically appeared begging to bestow me with oodles of cash with which to launch my business; but I felt peaceful.  And that, my friend, is worth more than anything.

The best part is that the feeling stayed.

Want a piece of the action?  I highly recommend visiting the website for the Zen Studies Program of Rhode Island at:  http://zen-studies-rhode-island.com/
Be sure to check out The Oracle Birds link, which will bring you to a funny and fascinating daily journal of the avian life which resides outside the dojo.  The program offers morning, afternoon and some evening meditations.  Both group and private sessions are available.  Please don’t allow a lack of money to deter you from doing this for yourself, as cost is not a primary factor.  Read the website and you will understand.  Or simply drop in.

This practice is transformative.   It has helped me immensely, and in entirely unexpected ways.  You deserve this too.

A Word About the Boogieman

Have you ever had a true epiphany? The kind that really registers in your whole body?

Not the vague, yet “brilliant” notion that dances through your brain in the midst of the proliferating to-do, must haves, need to change, have to fix lists. That notion gets lost once it completes it’s brief twirl across your frontal lobe.

I’ve had a lot of that kind….believe me.

This blog is inspired by one of those real epiphanies….which felt like a lightening bolt went straight through the top of my head, through my heart, and stopped at my feet. This sucker was powerful, and yet so outrageously obvious, that I felt momentarily shamed by the simplicity of it.

I’m not going to write about the specific nature of my epiphany, but rather why I believe we rarely have or acknowledge their importance in our lives. In a word…..it’s ‘they.”

You know, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ the self-proclaimed ‘experts,’ the pundits, the talking heads, the….gulp…”media.”

Yea, that’s right, I said it.  All this external source of information, opinion, fluff, info-tainment, “reality” shows….it’s all a bunch of crap that is spewed forth on a continuous basis so that we will be too overloaded to even consider important things….be they happening in our very own house, or two countries away.  The whole point is to keep us dazed and confused.  And, for the most part, it often works; regardless of one’s IQ.

Have you ever spent any time watching how “they” market to teenagers, tweenagers, and children?  (For the purpose of simplicity, I will refer to “they” as just They for the rest of this piece.)  I’m not talking just soda, make-up, skin care, etc., but how youngsters have been given their own flashy talking heads:  complete with laminated teeth, 4 hour hair and make-up sessions, and all the movement and voice coaching a sadistic parent could ever hope for.

The worst part, our children think this is real life…this is how people their age are supposed to act, to be, to look.  It is far more damaging than the fashion and skin care advice that Seventeen magazine used to dole out when I was much younger.

This is all part of Their attempt to keep us off-balance too.  If They can enlist the unwitting help of our children in addition to cramming social theories, pop-psychology dictum and supposed pragmatism down our throats, They have all but won.  They can so overwhelm us that we begin to believe that we need this media-generated garbage in order to not succeed, but to simply survive.  Who of us simply wants to survive?  Don’t we all want to flourish?  You know, be happy on occasion…..contented, more often than not?

It is no wonder that a book like The Secret, and people like Tony Robbins are so successful. (In this writer’s opinion, the success is well-deserved)  We both want and need to have alternatives to the rat race that They are so carefully perpetuating.  Mr. Robbins is the real deal, and offers us a much needed alternative.  He talks the talk, and walks the walk; and does so with personal integrity.  As a nation, as a culture, we need that.

We are so accustomed to being bombarded with scary or”sage” unsolicited advice from Them that we swallow it.  Heaven forbid we should actually acknowledge or value our own opinions.  It amounts to media manipulation vs. organic inspiration.  Which one do you think we should trust more?

They know that once we have been frightened, unbalanced, slightly agitated, or even just a wee bit uncertain, we feel terrible.  So we seek out relief from the discomfort and consume the “solutions and advice” that gets dished out in two-minute sound bites.  It’s how control works.  Put the target (us) in a fearful state, initiate the adrenaline; then just when we’re about to completely freak, rescue us with a bile spewing talking head.  The fix…the info-tainment fix.

What a relief  that They exist, or we would be truly lost….our own feeble minds unaware or blissfully ignorant of the next looming threat.  We are so fortunate that They are looking out for us; or else we’d surely lose our money, our health, our freedom, our sanity, our stuff…..

Heeeeeeyyyy…wait a minute!?