Being like a Cloud, Embracing the Tiger

The performer is Gao Jiamin.  According to Kungfu Magazine (July 2000 issue) she was born in Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, China June 26, 1966. At the time of the article she had "won 32 gold medals, a record that has never been achieved by any other competitor". She is (or was) a chief instructor at "US Wushu Center" in Portland, OR.

T'ai Chi is like a slow, beautiful dance where your hands can wave like a cloud, lift water, repulse a monkey, part a wild horse's mane, grasp a sparrow's tail, or embrace a tiger --all names of actual T'ai Chi positions.  There are 108 of them.  I have so far managed to master only the first 16.  The forms themselves are not difficult - it's remembering the entire sequence that's challenging.  It looks so easy, but each body placement and movement is precisely intended.  Our instructor's teacher spent six months perfecting a single form.  This no longer seems a strange thing to me. 

Is it True what they say, about the energy?

On a trip to Buffalo last year there sat next to me on the bus a young ex-professional hockey  player traveling from Canada to the U.S. to visit his girlfriend.  He'd been forced to reconsider his career options after a bout of devastating injuries which required immediate surgery, leaving him with an unexpected, long-term disability.  He took up yoga, one might say with a vengeance, determined to "fix" himself.  One year later his doctors were amazed.  He was now stronger and in better health than he'd been before the accident, and no longer limited in what he could do.  It was a wake-up call for him, he told me, which changed his life. 

He told me more about yoga. I told him what little I know about T'ai Chi.  We've both, apparently, at one time or another, experienced the "prana", or universal energy they all talk about.  I used to think this was all just "New Age" talk, till I actually experienced it.  I can't speak for others but since then, I find I don't get tired, rarely get sick (except a minor cold), and have none of the aches and pains and maladies most people my age seem to routinely suffer from, that require medication.  Unlike gulping down a Red Bull energy drink or caffeinated coffee where you're temporarily jolted into "reboot", this energy is a quieter, more sustained infusion. It lasts longer.  And you can access it  by practicing yoga, chi gong and t'ai chi.

Words, too, energize, heal.

To each his own.  One person's passionate pursuit is another's yawnful non-interest.  But a person's single, scratched-out line in a penciled scribbling contemptuously discarded, unexpectedly unnearthed decades later,  random words or a single line in a book--could be the impetus to change a random reader/hearer's entire life. This, too, is a kind of  energy.  It happens.  What is it, this invisible 'life' force they talk about, that no one can see, much less adequately define?  History shows us that a single word,  idea, or image, can effect monumental changes.  Hidden energies manifest in language and the creative impulse, that starts the ball rolling, whereby a connection is made and one's reality suddenly changes.  Behind everything, Consciousness.

The Difference Between Doing it and Being it

The quotation (from the person who posted the video to YouTube) describes it as a "performance".  As did I, above.  Performance can be perfected, such that it becomes as natural as say, breathing.  You don't even think about it, you just begin, until you end.  Sometimes during the doing, however, you transcend the fact of doing, and enter a place beyond the self-in-the-act-of-doing and become pure [what's the word here? Rhythm? Energy? Being?] It's not Automatonville from force of habit, nor out-of-body, -  I can list a dozen things it's not.  It's less loss of consciousness of self than total,  joyful immersion into what one might call the "dance of Life."  Even those who can't dance can see it. 

Meditating, at Sunrise

I came upon this photograph while searching for something else on the Internet yesterday morning and couldn't stop looking at it.  I wanted to be there, on that wall with those people, meditating, watching the sun rise.  Where was it taken, in what country, and who were these people?

I tracked down the photographer, who was apparently not only an observer but a participant. This photo was taken in early 2008 at Neyur Dam in Kerala, India not far from the Sivananda Ashram.  The photographer, Rishi O., said he used to swim in that lake, "maybe an hour a day."  Rishi blogs from San Francisco (when he's not out taking photos in his photomobile or trekking about India, on projects). 

My armchair travel yesterday morning took me then--thanks to Rishi--to India, where I  watched--through a musically enhanced photographic slideshow on my computer screen--a yoga group in session.  Check it out, it's incredibly enervating, you'll be a 'young soul' again.  Though I am thoroughly unused to such muscle-stretching, body bending exercises, I know and practice a few poses, such as the Salute to the Sun, which I would like to start doing regularly to replace the coffee-and-croissant-first-thing-in-the-morning-while-reading-the-news routine, as a way to start the day. 

Here are some more of Rishi's photos:

Walking into the Ocean

Man wearing one sandal, one shoe.

Two Dancers

Click here for photos of life at the ashram, and here to see a photographic slide show of Indian dancers to the music of  "Dheem Ta Dare".

I also perused some of Rishi's infrequent text postings (the blog is mostly to highlight his splendid photographs).  "I never ask a kid to smile," he says re: taking commissioned pictures of children.  "I like them the way they are."  The photographs he treasures are ones that "capture who you are and not who you want to be."


In one such posting he shares a letter from someone named "Otto" dispensing information about, among other things, healthy eating.  I was amazed to discover that many of Otto's recommendations were things I had already discovered elsewhere, time and again, from numerous sources dating back decades, and in some cases, centuries.  So there must be something to it. 

For example:

The beneficial effect of turmeric; ginger as an anti-carcinogenic [I first learned of this from an African healer from the Congo]; that Type II diabetes has been linked to processed meat and lack of omega-3, severe periodontal disease, lack of exercise, and (of course) being overweight.

My favorite of Otto's suggestions: "Spinach and blueberries preserve the brain." (Likely someone will someday come up with the idea of combining them as an 'energy smoothie', or adding them to tea, as a 'health drink'.  (But as practitioners of food combining will remind you, ha ha,  fruit should be eaten alone.)

Meditating on a wall at sunrise--or at sunset, or at any other time of the day or night--on a beach, on a park bench, sitting crosslegged on a pillow in your living room, or out on the porch before bedtime standing in the night air underneath the stars:  not everyone who meditates joins an ashram or practices yoga or necessarily ascribes to the mindset commonly perceived as associated with the word 'meditation.' 

Sometimes you just fall into it, accidentally.  You're in a doctor's office waiting your turn, you're on a bus stuck in traffic, you're at your kitchen table looking out the window, and you shut your eyes, get very still, block out everything around you.  You begin to become aware of your breathing, you sense the 'self' emptying out of you, and that you're slowly entering into ... nothingness.  This was my introduction to meditation, before I had a name for it, before I learned that millions of people all over the world do this exact same thing, not just accidentally but intentionally; and not just occasionally, but routinely, and reap enormous benefits from it.  I have to thank Rishi O., again, for reminding me, through his photograph of those people on that wall, just how universal is this need to connect with the life forces of the universe.

Images that ... draw you like a magnet, that elicit forgotten memories, that hold you, just for a moment, frozen in time and space.  This photograph did that for me.  As did the one with the woman walking "into" the ocean.  (Notice it's not walking "to" the ocean--Rishi labeled it walking "into" the ocean, as if she's intending to become one with it.)

Well, glad to have met you, Rishi, if only thru the Internets [sic intended].  :)  And thank you for allowing me to share your photographs on this blog.  And for reminding me what it feels like to be on a stone wall in the wee, early hours of the morning, waiting for the sun to pop up behind the mountains, breathing in the fresh, brisk air, meditating (in this case it was Vermont, many years ago, and there was only one other person on the wall, instead of 20).

One of the tangible benefits I neglected to mention, of such endeavors:  unexplained ... happiness.