Pounding the Bag

Update on the little one. She is home now for almost five days and she is settling in just fine. Most babies are fussy, this one is pokey...you have to bang pots all day just to get her to get up and eat. Good news, we are getting some sleep and peace. Bad news, we have had a lot of drama around "is she getting enough to eat" and general breastfeeding issues. Today it seems like we have turned the corner and Baby Girl is eating well. Mother in law came today to help out for a week, so I think we are settling in well here on the forest moon.

Iron palm training is actually very simple . You start with a bag of mung beans, pounding it with your hands every day for 20 to 30 minutes, back, front, chop and finger strike. At first, their is pain, but very quickly it becomes a very comfortable massage.

Then you graduate to gravel.

Pea gravel, full bag, hitting it continuously. At first, your hands bruise, knuckles swell and painful point injuries develop on your fingers. At the end of each session, you massage your hands with a fairly fragrant Chinese liniment for another fifteen minutes.

Keep at it for a month, and things start to happen. Your hands change, the skin gets thicker and they feel, well, more alive and powerful. If you pay attention and mentally focus on energy flow (Rod Sirling, where are you?) you become able to get through 20 min, 30 min and longer without any injuries.

Then you move to steel shot.

Not quite there yet.

Where I am is gravel, and I have been there for some time, mostly because I have not kept a good routine. The right hand handles it perfectly, the left still gets bruised. The challenge now is to get to 40 min a day for the next three months. If I can do that, then it is time for the steel.

Why?

This is one place where the rubber meets the road. You can read and talk about chi and qi and ye and thee all day long, moving slowly in postures or stretching out in a yoga class. But when you are smacking gravel with flesh, then either you begin to understand the nature and management of energy and focus, or you get hurt. But also, you can adjust the practice to suit your own level of accomplishment. The key is not so much progress, but practice. As an old sensi once told me, "just come to practice".

Also, you can feel the results. It is a metaphor for all practice. My hands feel different, work different, are different. They are capable and real in a very new way, and that gives me hope that this path I am choosing is of value, and motivation to stay on the path.

This really does go somewhere.

Quick Update

Only time for a quick update. Spent the day with Baby Girl and Mom, all going well. Bringing them home tomorrow. Today's test of enlightenment was coming home to a couple of excretory presents from the dog..just what I needed and supposedly Son had come by earlier to let him out.

Not killing him was my practice for today...

More tomorrow.

Tracks In The Sand

So where did this all start, all this interest, on my part, in esoteric disciplines?

For most people, martial arts is something you do after you see your third Jet Li movie. It usually comes from a deep seated desire to be able to open up a can of whupass on any future "bully who kicks sand in your face" and maybe, just maybe, get the chicks to take notice. As to yoga and Buddhist meditation, that seems more often than not to be on the path of ennookiement by the guys who gave up on trying to impress the cheerleaders and started hunting the hippie chicks.

Am I being cynical? Not really, just honest about the mind of the adolescent and post adolescent male. In the interest of full disclosure, I took the Fraternity / Military path to sexual nirvana, concluding early in life that the path of the alpha male, more often that not, while beset on all sides by the slings of same sex competition, greatly improves your chances of getting lucky on a Saturday night.

If anything, the past twenty seven years only reinforces that opinion.

So what was it?

Simply, a book.

Not just any book, but a Science Fiction Book. (gads!)

It was the day, at the age of 16, when I walked into a book store and picked up Dune, By Frank Herbert.

Dune chronicles rise of a religious leader in a human universe set some 30, 000 years in the future. I will not try to begin to describe the plot or explain the world that Frank Herbert created in this blog, it is an impossible task. If you are interested, buy the book ( or for a synopses, get the mini series on DVD, the movie sucked). The story is dense and layered with concepts and symbols and themes on history, evolution, the nature of humanity and human existence. It explores what it means to be human, both the mortal, and the infinite.

Many things from that work stuck with me, but the most important was his emphasis on Human Talents. Herbert dialed much of the technology out of his universe and replaced it with extraordinarily trained humans. His Bene Gesseret were adepts at nerve and muscle control, lethal martial artists and almost superhuman in their powers of observation and deduction. Starships were navigated by specially trained and bred navigators, computers replaced with people who were deeply trained to function as computers.

Herbert's primary characters, the Bene Gesseret Atreidies, were magnificent, not because of what they were, but because of how what they were made them who they were. Herbert's work painted a vision of humanity, of humans that I wanted to be, humans that pushed the limits of what it meant to be human, trained in ways that gave them a level of awareness that was profound and captivating and fully alive.

I have dabbled with that path ever since, though it took a crisis, my own gom jabbar, to finally get me onto the path. Late, but better late than never.


Lilly asked a good question. " how do you maintain muscle tone on a diet that sounds very vegetarian. " ( I paraphrase). The answer is that it is not really vegetarian. I do eat a fair amount of lean protein, chicken and fish. Also, low fat milk and yogurt, so it is pretty balanced. The key is to dial out the sugars, simple carbs and a lot of the fats, and replace them with very complex carbs. Muscle stays, but the fat stays off.

Also, for those who have been following, Wife gave birth today to her first and my youngest, beautiful baby girl, hence forth to be know as Baby Girl.

Mother and Daugher are doing great.

Life is a magical trip!

Draw and Cut

Lets start with the fundamentals.

The past several mornings I have been up before dawn practicing drawing and cutting with my katana. The proper name for this art is Iaido, the art of the draw. The point, drilled in by repeated proper performance of some 22 katas, is to train the body to draw and cut with power, with precision and with intention. Then, to return the sword and yourself back to a place of calm and quiet readiness.

To be empty is to be ready for anything, to strike in the face of attack is to live, to move from the void is a work of a lifetime.

To remain calm throughout it all is to face death with clear eyes and a resolute spirit.

Actually, the routine is Japanese morning (katana and Sai) followed the next day by Chinese morning (Tai Jain). Prep work for each is 30 min of Pranayma practice and fifteen minutes to study Chinese acupuncture points (with me as the test dummy)

Each morning is ended up doing a set of iron palm, a training program designed to toughen the hands and learn qi control by repeatedly striking a bag of beans, gravel and finally steel shot.

I am up to gravel on that one.

I am not particularly watching diet, but I am still on the one that is high in veggies and whole grains that helped me to lose 40 some lbs in the past 18 months (and keep it off)

The point, you may ask?

The beginning of all spiritual training, in my mind, is the education of the body. One can control the mind by learning to control the body.

If one can control the mind, one can find mastery over ones self.

And, if by dint of hard work and rigorous analysis, one gains mastery over ones self, then one can find a way to live with the exquisite beauty and mind numbing terror that is the human condition, consciously, without the delusions, denial and psychosis that plague so many of us.

And that, my friends, is to truly live.

The fire that burned away my old life has given me a fortaste of that place, and I have to say, it is the best place that I ever found. Easy to fall back to your old self when disaster passes. When life rebuilds, all the old illusions come home, familiar attachments grab hold and you can lose that place of clarity that disaster can bring.

So draw and cut, wheel and cut, whip the imaginary blood to the ground, and sheathe.
and again.

Draw and cut.

And walk silently through the night
As silver moonlight glitters
In a running stream
Blackness on blackness
White blade whistles
And a demon falls

Wayfinding

I could end my last blog, but I just am too attached to Maurice to end him as an alter ego...and while I am convinced that the comings and goings of my life are not in of themselves all that worthy of a reader's time, it has become clear to me that I have need a voice.

Hmm, lots of me and I, but then again that is the beauty of a blog. I write for my own reasons and to feed whatever muse I care to, and you read or do not read. If you read and do not like, you are out nothing but a few idle minutes. If I write and you do not read, well, the paycheck from the day job is still coming at the end of the month.

Wayfinding is the real name of the art of Polynesian navigation. Wayfinding is a human talent, something that you learn to do, and once you learn it you can navigate a canoe across thousands of miles of ocean with nothing more than your wits, your senses and implements you can fashion with your own hands. Flip it over, and you have Finding the Way, which is something that is central to almost all eastern spiritual and martial arts traditions... in a way, finding the way of right living by the practice of another human talent, be it swordsmanship, open handed combat, or even the practice of a tea ceremony.

The point of Maurice before was processing a difficult passage of my life. The point now is to chronicle a personal journey to find the way, a bit of my own wayfinding.

Care to come along?