With only handful of lessons to go of The Standing Meditation Module it’s time to reflect on my experiences.
I’ve found the material incredibly clear, where there has been confusion it’s been when I’ve added something myself, either wrong ideas or habits from other practices.
I found the ‘ideas and models’ easy to make sense of, but moving to finding the ‘sensations’ and organising a mental structure of the felt sense was a wee bit trickier. I was cautious of prematurely concluding that I was getting, understanding and feeling what was being described, but at the same time I was clear that I had to start somewhere and would have to build a map from what was being presented, and from the sensations that emerged from these efforts.
Listening to the various students questions and feedback was key , and from the those questions, Sifu’s feedback, how the students fed back to that I was able to clarify the terminology and make sense on the sensations. And my approach was basically : listen to instructions and feedback, form the idea, try it out , what feels different, check the instructions again, did I follow them all?, go back to step one.
I loved the introduction of Bow and Bend and the Lower Cavities. This made a huge difference to the feeling of ‘The U’ and I just enjoyed playing with that set up in form and in stick.
I’ll end with a couple of anecdotes of the most recent experiences of where The Standing Model went when outside of the training.
I was on holiday. My partner and I had planned to go to Amalfi and had turned up at the bus stop about 20 mins early. We got ourselves organised with tickets, found the platform etc, and after standing about for 5 mins, I said to Ruth, my partner, that I was going to do some standing ‘til the bus arrived. The set up was very light Yi, “I’m in a public space, I don’t want to be ‘acting weird’ I’ll look around now and again and I will occasionally touch my face”. For the 1000 yard stare I’ll ensure a ‘safety’ set up of light Yi open awareness registering of people and things, their movements, speed, proximity, movement ‘quality’ (normal, agitated).
I activated the backstop and the footcouple and very quickly my chest/esophagus region relaxed and the soft ‘body smile’ arose as the mind and body found quiet. This happening so quickly is a new thing, so I have to remind myself that I still need to go through the 10 meditation points in sequence, so I carry on with that. In the 15 minutes that I am standing there, I observe the same two people, who are also waiting on the bus, repeating a cycle: One checks his watch every few minutes, the other walks up to the corner to see if the bus is coming then walks back to the stop. They repeat these things about three times, and I realize I'm watching a reflection of myself from just a few months back. The reason I decided to simply stand lightly was that I had caught myself checking my watch earlier and recognized that familiar feeling of being in an ‘actively waiting mode'. I chose, this time, to use those fifteen minutes for stillness rather than engaging in that old, agitated pattern.
An observation about the smile. I had a different expectation of what ‘it’ would be like. In the 90’s, long before I had started practicing Tai Chi, I read some Mantak Chia material around ‘The Inner Smile’ and had practiced over a period and concluded that it never seemed to produce anything genuine in me. Now I would probably see it as an ‘outside -> in approach’, but maybe I do it a disservice and am blaming my failure on the method. My experience of the ‘smile’ in the standing meditation method is quite different, it seems to emerge spontaneously from a certain relationship of body & mind once the normal everyday noise of both quietens down.
Other noticings: I used the metro a lot and mostly had to stand as they were always busy and there’d rarely be a seat. I’d use the ‘stick pivot point contact’ on the handrails , the Foot Couple, and over the last while I’ve noticed a belt like stretch across the lower back/pelvis and trocanters (feels like a fascial wrap/stretch) which responded to Foot Couple and Cavities and I felt as if that area was involved in managing the stabilisation . On one ride I remember feeling ‘ wow, I’ve got a skeleton, I’m being stood !’. I have real sense that my structure beginning to change.