Moving Meditation

Few spots left on the 100 tier to see how the body moves naked and learn yoga and fitness naked. Mind Muscle Connection creates big gains in movement

A lot of people want to learn meditation here’s are great way to start through moving meditation and training your mind.

So you hear this concept from all circles that handstands are a form of meditation, moving meditation. But what if we were to take the technical points of meditation traditions and apply them to our beloved handstand? Then we really do have a vehicle of awareness.

Meditation in all its forms is not really about the form, mantra, seated standing, Buddhist, Daoist, Prayer etc itself. It’s an attempt to get to a certain state of mind, and there are a lot of very precise methods to achieve this.

We think of trying to become aware of this state like tuning a radio to a certain frequency. We drift in and out of this frequency many times a minute throughout our lives . This is what meditation masters mean when they say you are already enlightened / perfected / one with God, whatever your preferred terminology is. We just do not have the preconditions in our lives to easily notice and then maintain it. We can imagine an old radio with a tuning dial and we are trying to finely tune to one frequency very clearly and what the various practices do is add more and more decimal points to the dial so we can tune it finer and finer and eventually lock onto the state and not just skip over it.

Let us look at meditation in the steps of a handstand. If you are not practicing handstand, let's look at it with a plank hold or standing tree pose.

Step Minus One:

Until you have practised all the steps for some time do not try and compare this practice to anything else you have done. Engaging in the act of comparing, judging and commenting will box the practice. Just treat this as a technical exercise with certain skills to be mastered and layered. Simple.

Step Zero:

No social media, no filming, no music, just you and the floor.

Step One:

In the Daoist philosophy they have the idea of man situated between sky and earth, Material and immaterial, so we need to emphasise the line. This will mean we want to generate an internal stretch from the head/palms to the toes, the intent of the shape to fill as much space as possible. This has to be coupled with the least amount of tension in the body possible. Tension will kill the ability to do the next stages. You’ll know this is right when there is a stretching / connected feeling all over.

Step Two:

You must not fight for balance during the handstand or plank. If you lose it you lose it no big deal. Get out of the way of the body and let the natural balance you have strived to train emerge. Ride the balance wave

Step Three:

The goal here is to find a moment of perfect immobility. For this to happen the eyes must not move for the whole hold. You lock the eyes on a spot.

Step Four:

In Miyato Musashi’s book of five rings he talks about the balance of kan and li, fire and water, for the two visual systems of peripheral and focus. We can generalise these to focused attention and peripheral attention. Now we need to set a peripheral awareness.

For this we need to shift our awareness to encompass the whole body in its totality. If you find you are locking onto a specific part of the body, then it is shifting your focused attention off the visual point and into focused interoception. Reset the visual and try to expand the sensations of the body in a spherical manner.

Step Five:

Breath silently. The breathing should be smooth and relatively deep but without being pushed. Breathing itself will cause shifts in balance that are part of the waves of balance.

Step Six:

All these steps need to be practiced solo and then trying to combine them.

Step Seven:

Tuning the radio, We now have our radio built, we just need to hold all the parts together and start playing with the dial. In breathing we have 4 phases, inhale, retain, exhale, retain. Depending on your breathing cycle these will be different for each of us and you are not going to try and alter it one iota. We now start the hunt for the state, there is one moment in the retentions that is the perfect centre of the breath. The Point where inhale shifts to exhale, if you hold the breath to try find it you will either be holding the end of the inhale or the start of the exhale, so there has to be a level of non involvement with holding the balance of the focus points and letting the still point in the breathing cycle infuse to our balance. Hard to describe but very clear when you experience it.

This part is like trying to watch a bird while hidden in a bush. The bush is made up of all the steps above the better our steps the move coverage we have and the more hidden we are. If we lose a step while seeing the bird we shake the bush and scare the bird and have to hide again and wait for it to return.

Further details:

This practice has to have a balance between correcting and working on the details and then just doing. I would suggest that when you start, aim to do maybe twenty mins split into ten mins working on the steps, and then ten mins just doing and letting the training emerge. Once you get better at the steps and are able to repeatedly use them, then you can expand the doing section of the practice.

Let us practice meditation, yoga, fitness and dance and make 2023 our wealthiest year yet with our real wealth our health here on Patreon. So often we forget when we have our health we have endless possibilities to make our lives beautiful. However, when we are limited by our health and bodies that means less abundance and less possibilities to make better tomorrows. It means we can't move freely with out loved ones, our mental health impedes us to see the beauty, simple things like getting out of the bed in the morning becomes difficult or pleasures like sex or watching tv becomes limited because we can only do it in certain ways. Our health is our greatest gift because if we start from endless possibilities we have so much more opportunities to make the rest of our lives the best of our lives and not rewrite our past, but make our past a stepping stone to our greatest future instead of our hitching post.

Password: Meditation

Blessings and love Rhy xo