Tao of the Home

Last night I got so into my reverie about nature and becoming more in-tune with the tao of the place that we live that I entirely forgot to talk about another of my musings on the tao: the tao of the home. I live with a family that includes one teenage step-daughter and and a second that is knocking at the door to adolescence. There is in this, of course, also my wife. This situation creates quite a bit of the dynamic of my day-to-day existence as well as hindrances to adopting a life like those of forgotten days in which I spend six or eight hours training. Dishes need to be washed, rooms need to be cleaned up (we don't clean the kids' rooms for them!), meals need to be prepared, shopping needs to be done, and, then, there's that whole "job" thing that requires some attention. Since I'm a teacher, I'm technically "off" for the summer, so I assume many more chores and much more housework than usual during this period. Since I'm a researcher, I'm technically never "off" even when I am. I spent a fair amount of time, for instance, poking around (fruitlessly, I'll bet) with the Bell and Lah numbers today instead of training in the overcast and uncharacteristically cool weather we're having post post-alluvium. All I did, in fact, was a few forms and a few hundred strikes in the one and three-step patterns.

The tao of the home is something I'm learning about daily. When I first moved in, my normally flourishing meditation and qigong practices dropped off nearly entirely, though not as much as before my wife and I started spending more nights than not together. I had been in the habit of doing zhan zhuang each day a couple of times, once for close to an hour, followed by an equal or up-to-double time in seated meditation, including a typically fairly long session of each right before bed. Moving into the family environment cut that down, essentially, to a short sitting session about three nights a week immediately before bed and almost no standing. My practice was largely cut due to the nearly constant presence of other people, whom I felt I could not meditate around due to the fact that they would directly and inadvertently bother me. For the past couple of weeks, both my standing practice and sitting meditation have increased again, though not nearly to my pre-serious-relationship levels of some three years ago. Now I'm usually able to steal five to fifteen minutes in a corner or empty room to stand, and I find that unless havoc or chaos is reigning in the house, I can sit nearly anywhere at any time with almost anything going on around me. This is what I've decided is adapting to the tao of the home.

Our homes are rarely ideal sanctuaries in which we can withdraw for protracted periods for serious neigong, but they are the environments that we have chosen to live in and with. Our practice is ultimately our own, and neigong is, literally, the practice of that which is within us. That's just the thing, though. Modern life is not and cannot be the life of an ascetic who has the luxury of forsaking all in life except their development. We almost must live and interact in communities, with careers, and in families, and yet practicing development is as important, or more, as ever. In our houses is where this deep internal process must begin and will take place in the primary. Hence, learning to ebb and flow with the tides of our home, including those challenges and gifts our families bring us, is of equally high importance, or perhaps higher, than learning to live with the world outside our walls. If we cannot find and then be ourselves and practice development in the place and situation we live in, then we have no hope for developing at all and may as well be in a prison.