Adaptation: A Question

My test has come and gone: passed. My workload has finally been put into a managed state. My back has returned nearly enough to normal to resume a full array of everyday activities and training. My allergies have abated. April's impediments are falling by the wayside (except this crick in my neck I managed to get while washing my hair yesterday). For the past couple of days, my training has started to resume an increased pace, and I've noticed a reckless tendency to invent cunning and cruel ways to torture myself with it, feeding myself ever more the suffering, in manageable quantities, required to "become the lion," i.e. to develop my so-called bagua body.

I wonder if I will adapt to my new training. Yesterday I turned for quite a while, a few times to each side in Lion, until I felt spent from it. Before quitting, I endured six or seven minutes each of the Dragon and Phoenix postures on my dusty circle before popping another short bout in Lion and calling it quits. Add to that a small spattering of body-weight resistance exercises, and I thought I'd achieved something.

Today, I repeated yesterday's workout, turning few times in each direction in Lion but for longer each time before assuming the Dragon, skipping the Phoenix, and finishing with another short dose of the intense Lion position. This came after an extensive drive on body-weight exercises, most of which involved, like yesterday, climbing around in trees with just my arms (which I'm not good at) and doing chin-ups when I would reach a suitable branch. Well, that and continuing to fail at learning to do handstands. The main difference was that today I did a large amount of the bear walk, with my rear-end down low, around the yard, house, and at the karate school I teach at, probably totaling about an eighth of a mile by the time all was said and done. It made turning hard, which was probably good because I forced myself to endure. My neck is still preventing hard striking and forms, and so a quick review of those followed before heavy stretching. I will be sore tomorrow, I suspect.

I came up with what I think is a genius idea while walking around like an animal on all fours in the grass today: I should hook up a cart and tug around heavy crap like sod, dirt, garden tools, children, etc., all in the bear-walk position. My wife is so embarrassed that I want to do this that she refuses to discuss the matter with me. She doesn't even like the bear-walking in the yard. Apparently, the neighbors already think I'm weird....

Screw em. I'd rather be strong and weird than a puss and "normal." Besides, I bet the kids would get a kick out of a Jim-drawn-carriage ride around the yard... at least once or twice. I swear, though, if one decided to whip me like a horse, there would be hell to pay once I got my harness off and back on two legs.

I'm off to meditate and get some sleep.. finally.

April's Impediments, Mark III

April had yet another impediment to throw my way and disrupt my training, or at least it would have if I hadn't been averaging fifteen-hour work days for the last week: allergies. Generally, I don't have them. For one week, usually in April, however, I firmly believe I'm getting the flu or something and am essentially a wreck, feeling heavy brain fog and other symptoms of being sick from what I can only surmise is a fairly severe histamine reaction to something that blooms mid-April each year. The thing is, I was never allergic to anything, so far as I know or can remember, until about five or six years ago. Thus, I am forced to conclude that we've idiotically imported some kind of ornamental plant and put it all over the region so we can enjoy flowers for about four days a year and make lots of people feel bad for the whole time.

Due to the excess in work, I've found very little time to train in the last week. I've put forth a little bit of body-weight type workouts, but mostly just from here to the kitchen and back when I go to get a drink or make tea or some such. The bear walk position, which I don't think is typical of bagua, is my weapon of choice. Yesterday, though, I hit a point in preparing my exam presentation where I felt confident to take time off and share applications with Bradley. We did so for a few hours and integrated a lot of body-weight exercising into our routine, being almost weekend-backyard-gymnasts, though looking mostly badly doing it. I'm sore as holy hell today, though, primarily from trying to lift myself while keeping my legs extended in front of me and from climbing arm over arm up the limbs of one of my old and strong dogwoods, doing pullups on the more level part of the branch near the top when we got there.

Today, despite the soreness, I turned for twelve agonizing minutes. The sad part is that I couldn't figure out for the first six or seven why on earth it was so painful. Then I remembered that I'm abnormally sore and didn't feel like quite as much of a puss. After a quick review of the "magic eight" forms, I came back in to my real, overwhelming life. Tonight there will be little or no more training, but since it's all grading I have to do, I'll probably be squatting while I do it. Awesome.

April's Impediments, Mark II

I thought April presented impediments to training when I mentioned those before, but that was merely a prelude to a real education in impediments, apparently. Since then, the weather has been absolutely spectacular, like dying to be outside every moment of the day in which you find yourself trapped indoors, and yet very little training happened. It all started with the shoveling, which I think I mentioned.

I threw out my back. Not Monday, when I shoveled, and not all the way. I knew I had tweaked it, but the overwhelming workload I have, which tended to be heaviest on Mondays, led to me sitting up late in the office chair of doom in my office on Monday night after tweaking it instead of stretching it and resting it like a reasonable person would have. So Tuesday came, I worked and was overtired, but still I managed some modest training, and late Tuesday night, literally out of the blue, a spasm seized my sacrum, and I swore, knowing what it meant. I did enough at the time to prevent a full-blown week in the floor, but my training, obviously, was seriously hampered. So the lesson began.

I circled through the pain on Wednesday, testing each of the animal postures that I know, four of which I literally never practice because no one ever told me to while I have been told to practice the Lion posture relentlessly. I couldn't hold any for long, so 18 turns in each direction of Lion, then Bear, then Dragon, then Pheonix, then Rooster, and then Lion again, which felt like coming home, was my turning practice for the day. Immediately I felt 80% better in my lower back, and I felt encouraged to write a post about "Turning as Medicine." I didn't. I had crap to do to prepare for "the exam" which is looming on the 23rd. I got the book that day which covers the third of the topics for my exam (I know the notice is short... but it's not entirely my fault I'm in this position... I got it a week after I found out it would be on the exam at all!). I figured I'd better look at it, which made me realize I know next to nothing about binomial posets, which is bad, bad, bad for my life this month. I spent the entire night reading about posets in general, but I didn't even look at the binomial type. [If the nerd-word lured you here or scares you, sorry... the post isn't about binomial posets, and yes, those belong to the realm of "math."]

Crap... this is going to take a LOT of time, I thought, and so Wednesday was dedicated nearly entirely to stupid posets, which still elude me today (Saturday... the 11th... which is much closer to the 23rd than it should be for my happiness). I did turn again, using Lion more on the front and back but trucking through all the animals, which hurt way more than I thought they would seeing as they're allegedly "easier." They're not for me! That's to do with familiarity, but this is no time for tangents, as you'll see. [Not math tangents... this isn't about trigonometry either]. I was again encouraged and again too busy to write about "Turning as Medicine."

Thursday came and went much like Wednesday, but the training was even less as the stress was even more and the pain wasn't entirely gone. Then Friday rolled in, and the lesson continued.

My friend and office-mate at school had a tragedy, apparently, Thursday night. I was given no details, but I was begged by the department to cover his class in his absence, which may well be the rest of the semester. I argued with myself and decided it was the good thing to do... and took on the job, effectively tripling, out of nowhere, my teaching load and work duties, and I still don't know what a binomial poset is. If I get through this giant pile of papers he left that needed to be graded, pronto, then I might find out tonight. So... my unmanageable workload became unbelievable, my back still hurts too much to do much in the way of strikes or forms practice, and so I find the impediments of April to be laughing their merry way to wherever they go when they test the abilities of a man near his limits.

So why did I stop to post this? I needed the break, I suppose, and felt I should talk about how, in a small way, I've dealt with some of these impediments.

Standing practice.

I'm not applying the upper-body halves of the postures, but as far as the low, squatting stance to strengthen the legs and enrich the qi, I've put in over thirty minutes while grading those problems that require less attention. I'm even doing it, shaking at this point, as I type this. In fact, I'm going to have to cut this here because I can't stand much longer and am trying to make a point. Back to real life. April, your impediments can suck it!

April's Impediments

Training has been sparse again lately. Working toward this exam and grading inordinate numbers of papers has taken the priority again. I long for a time when it's either not April or when my Aprils don't swamp me so much. In fact, I wish my career was one that allowed me the freedom, in April, to take time off from work in order to possibly even travel to China for the annual YSB intensive. For now, though, I'll have to be content with having a modest income and plenty of time to train in the summers. Being a teacher has its perks, but the price is that during the school year, there is very little in the way of reasons that would allow someone to take almost three weeks off of work. Fortunately, though I'm not sure what, I feel as though I achieved something mathematical today, and so I'm not compelled to do any more math tonight. A good meditation and perhaps qigong session is in order, I think.

Still, I've found some time for training. After a short get-together on Saturday to explore some applications of techniques, I decided that it is high time that I start to develop the shocking force, which sounds mystical but isn't, at least not at my level. I've noticed that my left side seems to do reasonably well with it, but my right side, for lack of a nicer term, blows. Being right-handed, that seems odd, but so are many things when we decide to investigate ourselves carefully. I need to study it more carefully from what materials I have and practice diligently. I keep hearing the repeated admonishments of He Jinbao in my head: "...practice is the way to get there."

Yesterday was unique in that I found almost twenty minutes on the circle, despite having double-dug a long row and a half of what will be a nice, and hopefully bountiful, garden. Shoveling and hauling soil and sod for two hours really cuts into the ability to hold the arms up in the vicious Lion System posture, and so there were no marathons being turned in my muddy yard yesterday.

Oh yes... the mud... April is excellent here in the South, when the Nature we're blasting doesn't try to kill us, for week-long rains. This past week was one of those weeks, and though we really need the water, it did keep me off of my lovely outdoor circle. I turned some inside, but it's just not the same. Not that I mind circling in the rain... it's the mud I don't like, mostly for the mess but also for the slipping.

Oh... April's impediments. April showers, though, as they say, bring May flowers, but analogies about my training blooming or coming into flower all sound kind of wimpy. Oh well... they can't all be winners.

Busy, but still working

Life and work conspire against me sometimes, it seems, and my training has been about half as slack as my posting since my first. I managed to get a half an hour turning the day after my hour, but I've struggled to find the ten minutes each day since that I put in on my circle. I keep reminding myself that some is better than none, but on the other hand, I keep seeing a remembered image of Matt Bild's face, thrilled with our apparent hard work last fall, reminding us to circle "for an hour a day, right?" Math, sometimes, just takes too much time to leave an hour a day for the circle... if I want to eat (and I do... I'm skinny enough as it is).

My triumph today was mustering the will to get up earlier than usual and run through all of the static postures that I know, though I put only about forty-five seconds into each side of each one. Still, since I know thirteen and did one twice, that adds up to over twenty minutes in an uncomfortable squatting position. I think I could really feel my qi firing up through the exercise, and so I followed it with ten minutes of zhan zhuang of the more traditional type. [Zhan zhuang technically means standing-still practice, for a rough translation, and so the bagua static postures count as one such exercise, but I keep them separate, using 'zhan zhuang' to mean static, non-bagua standing such as the wuji posture or those other less wide, less deep positions that are usually thought of as static qigong]. After that, a short meditation session really worked well to start my day off right.

Since, I've done a few strikes and a few more static postures, but I've also burned up half of my day without doing any math, which is almost entirely unacceptable this month due to my upcoming specialty exam. Perhaps I'll find time for more training later, but for now, I must explore the algebraic musings of Morgan Ward and Louis Comtet for a few hours. Yay.