Awareness and Intention

today's Tai Chi lesson

I’m clearly not going to learn the Wu form at the rate I’m studying this lifetime. My motivation is sincere, my commitment to study and practice is woefully inadequate to think that I can achieve any degree of competence let alone a hint of mastery. This is a reality-based appraisal, not self-deprecation, I assure you. So, my Western enculturated mind chimes in, ‘Why are you bothering with this? I mean, I’ve studied the Yang form with Maggie Newman for years and then putzed around with it for 30 more years, and you still really only recall the first third. True. So, what’s the point?

In today’s class, I received some insight as we dissected a part of the form. The instructor described the sequence and used the word 'effort’ in relation to how to engage the flow of movement in this particular movement. He continued to use the word, yet his demeanor, as he demonstrated, conveyed none of what I would call effort. Finally, I said, you’re using the word effort differently than how I understand it, and he agreed that maybe the word, in this case, needs to be reframed to imply more about awareness and intention and not determined exertion to achieve a goal. This resonated with me very deeply, and I was transported back to San Francisco and attending a group lesson at the Tai Chi studio of Ben Lo, a senior student of Prof. Chen Man Ching. His principles were: relax, separate empty and full, turn the waist, and beautiful lady’s hands. (See below)

I recalled doing the form, and Ben came and stood in front of me and said, ‘No principle’ twice and walked away. My ego was stung by his comment as I’d been trying hard to show him how much I learned from his colleague Maggie Newman. His critique has echoed down the decades, and it continues to serve as a guide for how I engage with pretty much everything. It taught me to delete the word ‘try’ from my vocabulary before Yoda made the concept famous: ‘No, do or do not, there is no try’.

Effort is not simply measured in calories burned to achieve a given task, certainly not when we are seeking to deepen self-awareness and hone intention. I had been aware of this in my professional work in neuroscience, specifically, understanding how we can noninvasively assess and influence cortical and subcortical activity with transcranial near-infrared light. The key lesson for me is the primacy of bringing my attention and intention together to mutually reinforce how I relate to practicing the form. It matters more where my intention is, i.e, on the principles, rather than how many hours a day or days a week I spend. This helped me reframe using neurofeedback training to modify central nervous system efficiency and include transcranial continuous and pulsed light stimulation. Feeding the mitochondria with light, ahead of requiring the persons engaging in neurotherapeutic operant conditioning, provides the additional resources needed to make use of the training without depleting their already deficient neural resources.

I now can see Ben Lo’s 5 principles at work in how I approach consultation and training clinicians in photoneurotherapeutics:

Relax before engaging physically - continuous 1070nm light nourishes upper cortical mitochondria, glia, and structured water (Pollack,2013) surrounding our cells. This is followed by individually determined pulsed light to entrain renormalization of the central nervous system’s adaptive responsiveness and optimize neurofeedback training efficacy.

Separate empty and full - making clear, energetically grounded discriminations between similarities and differences. This allows for the optimization of effort and the highest level of functional efficiency.

Turn the waist - exclusively responding from our core drivers, ie, the first principles governing and directing every action. Sustained intention and commitment to grounding our actions in deep awareness and sensitivity to our energetic core

Beautiful lady’s hands - maintaining optimal systemic structural and functional integrity throughout all levels, ie, the isomorphic adherence to the 5 principles at every level of analysis from the micro (neuronal) to the macro (self-expression).

I’ll continue to refine the above and maybe start including Tai Chi exercises into the clinical and professional training process to provide direct sensory metaphors for the deeper principles for which there are no words, let alone physical sensations.

References:

Pollack, GH (2013): The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Ebner & Sons Publishers. ISBN: 978-0-9626895-4-3 Fourth Phase of Water