Mark Foote

What I describe is relaxation that allows reciprocal activity in three diirections out of stretch, hopefully prior to strain and pain; this is possible in the tradtional postures, in my experience, but you're right that what is described in Three Pillars of Zen is a good way to break a knee-- an experience some Americans had when they went to Japan I believe.

Thanks, GrandmasterP for the link, I'd forgotten about that one. Yascra, I also came to hamstring stretches before sitting; checking a yoga page, I guess I'm close to janu sirsasana. Also now adding in ardhu matsyendrasana, "half lord of the fishes pose" (what a great name!). Regarding pain in the traditional poses of meditation and Chinese martial arts, I have written quite a bit about reciprocal innervation, a term I learned from reading about Dr. John Upledger's experience of it, which I've paraphrased here: "Upledger experienced the phenomena of reciprocal innervation personally, as he lay on the surface of a dense solution of salt water in an isolation chamber. When he felt his relaxation was complete, he noticed a slight motion from side to side in his pelvis and legs. From his medical training, he knew that the motion he felt was caused by reciprocal innervation: when the pelvis and legs moved to the left, ligaments on the right side of the torso were stretched, and nerve impulses generated by the ligaments caused muscles on the right to contract; the contraction on the right reversed the direction of movement and relieved the ligaments on the right, yet when the lower body crossed to the right the ligaments on the left began to stretch, until nerve impulses from the ligaments on the left caused the muscles on the left to contract. Upledger watched his lower body shift slowly from side to side as he relaxed completely." Can't tell you in which of his books he told the story, unfortunately. The application is this: the traditional postures of meditation and Tai-Chi usually involve stretch in ligaments sufficient to initiate reciprocal innervation in all three directions in the plane. I look for motion in the three directions with the sense of location, and relax. With relaxation my sense of location often flips (sinks?) into my lower abdomen. Yes there is induction here, a state between waking and sleeping, usually through relaxation with respect to inhalation and exhalation (though the induction can't be "done", it's a letting go thing). Yes that would be why I experience my awareness as in my lower abdomen, rather than in my head looking at my lower abdomen, and how I experience the parts of the body (with no part left out) with the location of awareness. I need a stretch that is close enough to strain to generate activity side to side, corner to corner, and forward and back, and a relaxation like I'm falling asleep, totally relinquishing volition in favor of the experience of the senses (including the sense of location that incorporates the body with no part left out). "Sitting shikantaza is the place itself, and things. ...When you sit, the cushion sits with you. If you wear glasses, the glasses sit with you. Clothing sits with you. House sits with you. People who are moving around outside all sit with you. They don't take the sitting posture!" Kobun Chino Otogawa, here.

ok, I can't resist (a great & funny film, if you haven't seen it- Kung Fu hustle):

"Three Pillars of Zen" was my introduction to the actual practice of zazen (using the illustrations in the back). For that, I am grateful; I had already concluded, thanks to Alan Watts, that no amount of intellectual understanding was going to make any difference in my life (meaning I read his books and understood what he was saying but I was no different for understanding it). GrandmasterP, can you give a link for something like this?-- I'm curious because I've never heard him talk about pain or how much it hurts. Not sure he sits the lotus, either, but if you say so-- I knew it was full or half, but never really heard him specify. Or maybe I have, and he mixed up saying he sat lotus with advice that the half-lotus was ok. I'm confused!

thanks for that about Cactus, Marblehead- wonderful chords, I need to give another listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcgETyVPyg

should they make a sound white walls and star jasmine blooms act like it's nothing (whew, having a hard time writing tonight! )

Too many studio effects in that one for me, Marblehead- but what a great band (that I never heard of)!

Agree with your comment on "What It Takes" above, some do and gotta be! electric contentment?

In "Zen Teaching, Zen Practice: Philip Kapleau and the Three Pillars of Zen", the students and disciples of Philip Kapleau offer their experiences with Zen study under Kapleau after reading Three Pillars of Zen. Mostly, they were drawn to study by the stories of sudden enlightenment experiences in the book, but none of them had such an experience (unless I missed something); many were disappointed, all of them came to terms with this lack of verification of the authenticity of what was described in one way or another. Your explanation of how someone would come to feel that euphoria and lack of pain is the best I've heard. The teacher I met whom I respected greatly said "take your time with the lotus". This was Kobun Chino Otogawa. Kobun also said that he could sit the lotus without pain or numbness, and when he said it he was completing the third of three seven day sesshins. I can sit the lotus without pain for thirty or forty minutes, but I only do it once or twice a day. Last time I sat a three-day sesshin, I had to go to half lotus toward the end of the period a couple of times at the end of the day, and I had considerable numbness sometimes; I'm still working on it! Anyway, when I sit without pain, it's not because of any ecstatic endorphin rush after pain; it's because I can relax and allow my sense of location to find expression in the activity of the posture. So to speak. So it's not something I do through willful activity, and although a lot of things cross my mind it's the necessity of breath that remains in the end, returning me to my senses. Point of that dissertation being that I think you are right that something unusual happened for that individual when the pain stopped, but most Zen teachers advise that sitting with pain is likely, especially in sesshin. I guess Kobun was unusual in that he didn't sit in pain, but he started very young as the son of a Zen teacher in Japan. I think Westerners can learn to sit the lotus without pain, based on my own experience, and I like to think if I knew then what I know now I could have sat without pain when I started. Might not be true, because what I really have is a string of experiences and understandings born of necessity that are more or less automatic with the posture and with the duration of the posture. "When at last you arrive at towering up like a wall miles-high, you will finally know that there aren't so many things." A favorite quote, from Yuanwu in "Zen Letters: the Teachings of Yuanwu", translated by Cleary.

One of the things that comes back to me in odd moments is the description of the ilio-lumbar ligaments in Anatomy in Movement by Blandine Calais-Germain; the ilio-lumbars are in two sets, one from the pelvis to the fifth vertebrae running horizontally, the other from the pelvis to the fourth vertebrae running vertically. I can't shake the notion that the horizontal ligaments support the lower spine in exhalation, while the vertical set support the spine in inhalation. I can sometimes relax my center of balance a little forward and down in exhalation and find my breath; sometimes upward against the spine in inhalation for the same. The knot that holds the key to my breath, literally, while my breath holds the key to the knot. That's what I think the Egyptian illustration is about, too, the ilio-lumbar ligaments and how they engage. The god Hapi on both sides represents involuntary coordination in the movement of breath (I would say).

while this thread stays soft mountains walk, and rivers too let's all sing along

Thanks, Marblehead-- love Sebastian and the Spoonful! An enduring good vibe from the era. Another one you might like from last Thursday, but the crowd is even louder-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HYHTvcoQ_k&index=3&list=PLOZTCo7VdSaeUXAq54w_NFKXYTQGZpm6b That one is my own. Rake up the fence top Sweep down the stair Break into laughter Not a soul is there If that's what it takes Living in the place of dreams Sleeping with an empty head Working up a mountain stream Running down that riverbed Walk like an oxen Bark like a dog Forget about romance Roll like a log Right out where the dead are laid There's another voice that's heard Speaking softly in the shade Speaking without any words If that's what it takes To keep a love alive

flowing like butter all over the place; salty just call me popcorn

Would that be this knot?

Love Ensenhas! Hey! Who's this turkey?! Yes, it's yours truly, doing an old Dylan tune in a new arrangement.

mineral, oh yes walking even so-- granite upright with the stars

This morning I realized that for me, my study of anatomy is the study of where I can relax, if my mind should happen somewhere. I sometimes look for pitch, yaw and roll with my sense of location, I think I am challenged with regard to the sense of equalibrium sometimes. Sometimes I'm aware of the obturators side to side hammocking hips from the pelvis, sometimes of piriformis and gluteous rotating sacrum and pelvis clockwise and counterclockwise, sometimes of sides of the PC and rectus balancing a feeling of uprightness. Oftentimes the calves, sometimes the abdominals from the pelvis to where they connect two inches below the navel with before as behind, behind as before; sometimes the diaphragm and chest, sometimes the skin and hair. Where awareness takes place, open to awareness taking place where awareness takes place. "Even so… does (a person) saturate, permeate, suffuse this very body with the rapture and joy that are born of aloofness; there is no part of (the) whole body that is not suffused with the rapture and joy born of aloofness." Freedom of awareness to take place where awareness takes place is the joy of aloofness, IMHO: “…as a skilled bath-attendant or (bath-attendant) apprentice, having sprinkled bath-powder into a bronze vessel, might knead it while repeatedly sprinkling it with water until the ball of lather had taken up moisture, was drenched with moisture, suffused with moisture inside and out but without any oozing. Even so… does (a person) saturate, permeate, suffuse this very body with the rapture and joy that are born of aloofness; there is no part of (the) whole body that is not suffused with the rapture and joy born of aloofness. While (such a person) is thus diligent, ardent, self-resolute, those memories and aspirations that are worldly are got rid of; by getting rid of them, the mind is inwardly settled, calmed, focused, concentrated.” (MN III 92-93, PTS pg 132-134) I study, but it has taken me awhile to be relaxed with my study. The anxiety of not knowing has taken the longest time to find release in the freedom of awareness that lets me breath again.

I think the key is that he was too tired to continue at that point. The Gautamid said that after his discourses, he returned to "that characteristic of concentration in which I ever abide" (he didn't name it). Zen master in ancient China said he never had mundane thoughts except at mealtime. I would say that these descriptions both point to an inability to concentrate when activity conditions the movement of breath, speaking or eating. So nobody experiences action in the absence of volition all the time. The surrender of volitive acitivity to relaxed experience, particularly the experience of the senses associated with the presence of awareness, can in the course of inhalation and exhalation precipitate physical action without the exercise of volition. "(For one) knowing thus, seeing thus, there are no latent conceits that ‘I am the doer, mine is the doer’ in regard to this consciousness-informed body." "One may think that one lives; actually, one is only 'being lived'."

Sorry to hear about the message from the cosmos to the left leg. Seems like you have found energy flow in spite of all. My surmise is that ultimately it's a left-brain, right brain thing combined with the lower/higher attachment thing from the diaphragm to the spine. I continue to believe John Upledger's accounts of a rhythm of hydraulic pressure in the dural sac that flexes and extends the entire body, and the importance of allowing movement in three axes with the sense of location to that rhythm. Then again, zzz...

Waking up and falling asleep to where I am, and the freedom of my sense of where I am to move. The advice in Zen that I've read has to do with where, and I believe I can grow this ability, yet if the sound is anything but the wind blowing across knot holes then I'm going for the wind, not the knot holes! Say-- do I feel a draft...

Interesting about the left knee-- I did a post on that awhile back. Still a mystery to me, mostly, why the left knee seems more responsive to what's going on inside than the right. Found this looking at Nisargadata's final teachings: Mostly I suffer and feel like I can't breath in a subtle way, then I return to my senses. Let me put it another way: 'The flow of consciousness, impact, and feeling is sometimes a necessary component of the movement of breath, and at such times the unconscious can effect action through the medium of the breath. As if by hypnotic suggestion, the ability to feel necessary to the breath gives rise to action in the body; Kobun Chino Otogawa described the experience with the words, "sometimes zazen gets up and walks around". ' (that, from here)

Meanwhile, on the battery technology front: http://www.caradvice.com.au/287241/dual-carbon-battery-promises-quick-recharging-longer-range-improved-safety/