leg stretch

9/27/2010
for me it seems, professional sitter in a chair, i need some number of minutes of quad burn and long agons of ham stretch or i find myself irritatingly out of the zone. expanded definition of "comfort" & "fun" required to proceed. that burn thing has to go in the fun category. so related to "pain." it goes on through time, part of the "me" is going "oh, please, don't." means it & doesn't mean it at same "time."

in bendover i want to touch my legs. reason not immediately apparent, perhaps a desire for the comfort of contact in the face of imminent loss of balance. i compromise with my "self" on the 3rd bend and allow the left lower leg to be massaged where the adhesions are around that vein valve that is blowing out. candy for the good animal.

9/28
1. apparent ovalness of visual field because of lids, brows, cheekbones. actual field is circular. extrudable eye stalks would be nice, wouldn't they? even just to the edge of the brows.
2. clearly noticing the twoness of the visual cones, noted an "automatic" switch of attention between one field and the other, that tendency subject of course to modification now that "i" have noticed it.
3. forgot. let it go.
4. session of sword shomens with eyes closed, noticed possibility of straight line from hanmi to jodan, the opposite of "throwing the blade." if i don't do the movements as circle arcs but rather as linear translations the question of blade wobble substantially goes away. take it away from where it was then put it back. more or less. what's the difference between this way and the old way? wrists don't abduct independently but only in response to the lifting of the upper arms, i.e. the biceps run the show, the wrists maintain their positions relative to the forearms, the sword ends up at the correct angle up in jodan as much as it was in the correct position in hanmi. (hanmi is the wrong word for basic bokken position but too lazy/rushed to look it up - someone tell me?)

ben dover

the position of bending over and allowing the fingers to eventually touch the floor.
1. one of the only times in life when the knees are supposed to be locked.
2. for 30 years i did this and my quads would be bunched up over my knee, the kneecaps lifted, i noticed but never imagined relaxing them. then i did, took about 2 weeks to get the quads to relax.
3. just hanging, allowing the low back fascia to stretch and the muscles to relax, the fingers at my age do not touch the floor immediately the first time, takes me about 30 seconds, leave the palms-on-floor for last, if feel like it.
4. one gets different results with mulabandha open or closed (that is the asshole, that is what that is).
5. Because of this aspect probably every human will have some psychology to deal with in regard to this position. It is about as unprotected as one can get in vertical. Of course there's bending over backwards, but that's a different story.

oh

9/14/2010
oh

quiet eyes is not the kingdom of heaven but it is like the koh in that it demonstrates subjectively the endlessness. the tendency is of course to slip back toward ordinariness because that is what we spend most of our waking time doing: anything else than dealing with reality. right?

so there i was attempting to go there in my setup session and i'm standing there in natural man position chin & pelvis tucked knees bent, belly relaxed and a set of ahas:
1. every time the heart beats the body expands and one gets taller, the layers should move in quiet gaze. i try to do that, see the layers, not happening anywhere else but the imagination, the layers are not seen. go on with the exercize, moving the attention around the visual fields in the standard sword manner.
2. at some point a duh: body really expands on inspiration: gets taller, parallax shifts, layers will move. try it, of course it works. and bonus realization, a tiny little shift to the left - the smaller side of the body.
3. add on bonus duh: so if i stop breathing & just stand there with or without air in the lungs the heart beat jumps out into the awareness of the "me" and the results on the vision in quiet eye mode are clearly visible. reminder of koh 24/7: lub dub.

layers, mistakes

i am thinking that if i put this out now when i am developing the process you can perhaps see the mistakes as they get made and perhaps you will find some use in that, usually i think the same mistakes get made over and again.

so today i have had "quiet eyes" for about 3 days straight, i can do it all the time in any dimension, occasionally i can't but i can notice and get it back. it is a completely "see the world anew" experience. the metaphor is the trompe l'oeil foreground/background pictures u no: profiles/wineglass, etc. but for me this is 3d and everything.

i know i am doing it because the "layers" emerge as i move. the layers are produced by the shifting parallax of the 2 visual cones. "Normal" eye operation, that which i (because that's all i know) did exclusively since at least i was a toddler, was to jump from one item of interest to another, so always the gaze resting on some object, or as i found out eventually, at some spot or other in space.

now i have separated the attention from the eye movement muscles and those muscles from the head muscles so that the desire no longer has a leash on the attention, etc. and i can just leave the eyes in a neutral position and work on taking it all in.

my question today is: is this taught directly anywhere in any form?