Zen in the Office – Extend Your Ki

I am at a stage in my life where I don’t have to take my work home with me.  I am able to separate my work from the rest of my life and this gives me the advantage of being able to shed the stress of my daily grind once I leave the office and move on to, to me, the more important things in my life.  However, there is a downside to separating the two.  When I’m at work and I start to feel that stress or I see someone being treated unfairly I forget about all that I am working for outside of work and I feel anger or despair that goes against my goal of a 24/7 Zen mentality.

When I am happy, as I usually am, I am outwardly happy and talkative.  Once something goes wrong I tend to keep to myself so it is apparent, though I try to hide it, when I am not myself.  Today at work I discovered something though.  I can’t recall what had happened but I was working quietly when a co-worker said something offhandedly to me about ‘finding moments within moments’.  Something about the way he said it made me turn around and give him 100% of my attention.  I asked him to explain what he meant and we and ended up in an elaborate conversation about ones ki (or chi).

In ‘Zen in the Martial Arts’ one thing I really took to heart, and read and re-read several times over the course of a year, was a lesson on extending your ki.  Joe Hyams explains that we have a certain amount of energy at any given time.  If you are working and are distracted you are not using all your energy toward your work and are therefore not performing at 100% of your capacity.

Recognize A True Threat

Taking a mature approach I am looking at kumite from another point of view.  I just finished reading a book called ‘Black Heroes of the Martial Arts’ and the author, Prof Ron Van Clief loves kumite and choreographed fighting.  The more he talked about it the more I questioned why I don’t like it.  Now I have to assume that I don’t like it because I don’t understand it because most people fear or hate things they don’t understand.

If I had to choose to dedicate an hour to kata or kumite I would always choose kata but because I don’t feel comfortable with kumite I think I should now dedicate a little more time and effort to it.

In ‘Zen in the Martial Arts’ Joe Hyams had the same problem as me and his Sensei order a fellow dojo mate to keep kicking Joe to the head until Joe realized that he was not in danger.  I have now decided to do the same and have asked a dojo mate to keep at it until my reaction is second nature.  I believe that the instant that kick no longer feel threatening and I am confident I can deflect and counter that kumite will change for me.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see because it hasn’t happened yet.

Zen Breathing: My New Morning Routine

It’s 7:30 in the morning and I’m en route to work via the bus. This bus takes approximately an hour, just long enough to accomplish a small task for the day.I ran to catch this bus and was doing the usual deep breaths to get my breating back to a normal pace and i notice that even with these long breaths my breathing is still very shallow. Once i let air out i quickly want to inhale; a completely unwarranted fear that i don’t have enough air.I believe this would be a good place to start my Sanchin training. Breathing is important in all kata but is given enough a great weight within Sanchin.During the hour on the bus, as the sun rose, I practiced my Zen breathing on the bus. In my head I heard two small rocks clap together to instruct me to breathe in, and breathe out.Joe was right when he said that this alone could be a warm up. By the time it was my turn to get off the bus I felt energized and better balanced.This is now my new routine until i can easily breathe in, imagining a light smoke entering and coursing through my arms and legs without feeling the need to gulp in more air. I will write more on this as i progress.

Un-Thinking Pain

I first read Zen in the Martial Arts in the summer of 2010. That summer I had stupidly (I won’t go into details) put my hand in front of a high pressure water hose while washing a car and found layers of my skin had blown off in a matter of a second.

Now I was with my gentleman friend at the time and he loves this car with everything he has and while it felt like I had just put my hand in a fire, I looked at his car with all the suds and soap on it and told him ‘Please, don’t look at it. Finish rinsing your car’. Finally, he went back to washing the car off as quickly as possible and as he did so I quietly turned around and without looking at the damage, began to picture my smooth orange rock. I’m not sure why I always chose orange but it seems to soothes me for some reason. This rock looks like one of the many I would pick up at a beach when I was little. Its rough edges have been worn away from the rush of the water until finally it is ready for my small hands. I always liked the way it feels cold yet not wet when you first find it.

And suddenly, he’s done rinsing the car. I was so engrossed it this exercise I was able to stay calm while I waited and now I am on my way to get a bandage. This makes me think, before I had read this chapter I would have just practiced deep breathing and focusing on nothing until it was time. But I have not mastered meditation so I can only do it for so long. This is a way to meditate for longer for a junior and I am thankful I had this tool back then.

Empty Your Cup

Coaching teenaged girls may have been the greatest challenge I have given myself lately.  To have leadership skills are one thing, to know a sport well is another, to take those two and teach it to someone who believes they know it better than anyone else- that is a whole different ballgame (sorry about the pun).

After this chapter I knew what I had to go back and teach them at my practice and as I spoke  I could see that many of them were no receptive to my techniques.  While not everyone was entirely convinced I could see that that was their own battle to take on and I was tested myself not too long after.

When I was younger one of my coaches had the bright idea that I should be a pitcher.  After going to pitching clinics weekly and playing on both houseleague teams and all-star I was pretty good in my prime.  It’s been a while since I’ve pitched and my current team was struggling for a new pitcher as everyone was starting to get injured after an on again, off again season with a lot of rain.  I decided to try it out and I was warming up before one of the games and my coach came up to me and said “why do you warm up that way?  If you’re not going to pitch anything but a windmill why warm up any other way then a windmill?”.  That was a completely fair question and with no disrespect intended I went to answer what I had been taught and why I was doing it.  Before I could even get two words out she stopped me and said “I can’t teach you if you’re going to argue”.  From then I realized I had to empty my cup even more than I normally do because it was threatening to her.  While I would never argue with a coach I could see my kids mirrored in my actions- I could see sometimes they meant no harm by questioning my every move but sometimes I had to tell them to just trust me and try it.  In this instance I had to just trust her.

This is a very good lesson- if you’re full of your own ideas how can you ever achieve greater concepts?

Zen Breathing

Breathing.  We do it without thinking.  Some of us also don’t do it without realizing.  I’m in the second group and I only realized it recently.  When I am concentrating to the point where I don’t want to waste a single ounce of energy on anything but the task at hand… I tend to stop breathing.  It’s a bad habit considering I do it while working out when my muscles need the oxygen the most.  When I want to exert force in a good punch or hard throw, for that second I stop breathing.  Throughout my whole kata when I’m concentrating- I stop breathing.

This is one test I can’t lie and say I have under control but at the very least I know now what I am doing wrong and that is the first step to doing it right.

Sensei had a challenge for us this week which included smiling more and taking the time to breathe.   I’m going to start working on my breathing through this exercise.

Stay tuned!

Process Not Product

I think this is one of the chapters that I struggle the most with applying to my daily life.  I am so focused on the outcome I want that I am frustrated by the process to get there.  After reading this chapter I read another article in a runner’s magazine that mirrored what Joe was saying.  This finally tied what he was learning to what I was going through at the time.  I was training to do a long distance run and I was having so many setbacks that it was becoming so frustrating that I no longer enjoyed it as much.  I felt pure disappointment if I didn’t do a better run then I did the day before and it became about the timing of the run.  After reading this chapter and the runner’s article I remembered why I started running to begin with and it had nothing to do with beating my own record and everything to do with overcoming pain and weaknesses and showing your true strength to MYSELF.  Running is the only sport I’ve come across that takes you to the brink, where you can feel your insides and your body tenses and you feel the aches and protests but if you can run past that- there is no greater feeling.

To come full circle, I started to enjoy running again and to focus on where I was going and look at the distance later rather than to plan it out so if I didn’t do that route I felt self-loathing.  The more I enjoyed running again the better I became at it.  Ultimately, once I learned to love the process I finally was able to achieve the product I wanted.  I’m sure that this lesson will be used time and time again until this is something that comes naturally to me.