Contemplative Play

– Journey.2.13

                                                                                                                                                                  – Waterflora.2.13

The Art of Effortlessness

Effort is holding my arms suspended mid-air during Tai Chi warm down. Agony. Only 10 minutes passed. 15. Gravity. Hold still. Gravity. Excruciating. 25. Terry Hall, our Tai Chi teacher, said this kind of effort is muscular tension. If you don’t give up on the practice of surrender, effort will eventually meet effortless state. My arms were burning. Thirty minutes then 45. My abdomen was now involved and tightened in a multitude of subtle shifts in order to survive. I envisioned a warrior, then a bird. The abdomen and chest expanded and heart lifts…diaphragm and solar plexus, One. 55 minutes. Om. Hour. Gravity. Torture. Brain burst black. Then laughed to myself, crazy, really, absurd, why should it be so hard. Black burst white.  With leap of imagination: Soaring in place, my arms no longer burdened by gravity, my wings were as effortlessly central to ease of existence as rock is to earth. Terry Hall ceased our practice. But not before my mind found alternate neuropathways, or a non-reactive response to muscle tension that had to do with long held beliefs of gravity and pain. My arms, no longer segregated from my core-strength and torso, or entire body, became my wings. Earth warrior bird in flight. Terry Hall, a teacher I will remember, clapped his hands to close the lesson.

I wonder how embedded perceptions of central nervous system’s afferent and efferent ‘sensitized’ pathways, eg. perception of arms in air too long = pain, also hold opportunity for shift of neuropathways to Central ‘De-sensitization’, e.g. arms in air, non-resistant, non-pain?

2.24.13

         – Tehn

MEDITATION AND READING ON THE PINEAL GLAND

“The pineal gland is believed by Descartes to be the seat of the soul…” -1

1-Review of Medical Physiology, Ganong, W. 1997. (pg433). Descartes was criticized for this conjecture that was possibly made by virtue of its central location in the brain, but maybe there is more to this statement than has been articulated.

The text made comment that the full function of “the pineal gland and its secretion of melatonin still remains obscure.” I think we are only just beginning to discover, similar to so much of our physiology, that one rabbit hole found is yet another to be found. I have wondered since I was 17, what the pineal gland does, since when I meditated, my focal point of attention, before spontaneous launching into a lightness of being and emptiness, was at its location beneath the corpus collosum: At the roof of the 3rd Ventricle, this same location that Descartes referred as the seat of the soul.

The first time I discovered my intuited launching pad, I had graduated from high school early and moved to Boston to live with my father at the Siddha Yoga Ashram, where I learned to meditate. In chanting then silent meditation with necessary upright posture, legs crossed for hours at different times, the physical discomfort could be excruciating. I could have gotten up and left the room at any time, but was determined to endure and not quit before the evening sessions culminated – probably more from ego than egoless intention. I soon discovered that my ability to reach meditative state was my only relief – physical discomfort could be overtaken by a heightened sense of blissful emptiness and lightness of being. One evening after 30 minutes of chanting then silent meditation, my brain burst black and spontaneous conversation traversed across my mind. “What would it be like to lose my mother? My father? My brothers? Cindy. My friend Sonia and Carey. The basketball player. That person in my class. The two that never crossed my radar but went to the same school?” Each person presented a sudden poignantly painful realization that lifted the second after the realization occured, each subsequently more remote and less painful than the previous. I came out of meditation. Two days later, on a Tuesday, I received a phone call, that the last 4 students in my meditation died on Sunday. They had been in a jeep that overturned when coming down the windy mountain pass.

I wonder if the pineal gland’s location at the 6th chakra, or “third eye”, in the center of the brain, is also relevant to the subtle opening that provides access to meditation or expanded consciousness. And how would this relate to central de-sensitization, or capacity for meditative state devoid of pre-meditated stimulus or response?  Melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland not only into the blood stream but also the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding our spinal cord or CNS that is influenced by subtle changes affecting its environment. Does the pineal’s secretion of melatonin communicate with the bloodstream, the brain, CNS, and the mind, or subtle body that is also in communication with our higher selves, or our total reality?