Monthly Archives: August 2007

Practice Whenever You Can

Posted on
7

My training time has really taken a dive lately but an opportunity presented itself to me a couple of days ago. My son was having ‘one of those nights’ at bedtime. So, I came in and did a new game with him called ‘Big Boy Sleeping’. The gist is he would sleep by himself, get his own water, etc while I was in view. Additionally, if he got scared or needed reassurance, I told him to call out ‘Ba Ba’ and I would respond.

During his self soothing time, I could have easily sat on the couch in his bedroom and dazed out the window. Instead, I took this opportunity to squeeze in a bit of training. With all the fire fighting at work for the past couple of months, I decided I would do some zazen to center myself. I found a big cushion and placed it near the opposite corner of the bed from my son. I then sat down and focused on my breath. Counting my breath and thinking of the air flowing through my nostrils, I heard a call for ‘Ba Ba’. I responded, ‘Ba Ba is here’ and my son went back to self soothing.

After a period of time in zazen, I found it increasingly harder to maintain my posture. My back was beginning to slouch and I started tilting backwards. My hips still aren’t flexible enough to hold the zazen posture for very long. I decided to switch to some zhan zhuang.

My son heard the rustling as I stood up. ‘Ba Ba is just going to stand right here’, I told him. He responded with, “Don’t leave me alone Ba Ba.” My heart warmed as I heard his response, and I assured him I would not leave him. I got into the wuji zhan zhuang posture and easily called upon the inner smile. Standing, I was shocked to feel how much tension had gotten into my upper shoulders and mid back. ‘Melt the tension down’, I told myself, ‘Melt the tension down and release the energy into the ground’.

The tension in the mid back was the most peculiar as it was mostly a couple of muscles on the left side of my spine. Had I been slouching at work? Had I been leaning more to one side? Perhaps it’s the build up of carrying a laptop to and from work using a briefcase style bag. I may need to switch back to my backpack style laptop holder to equally distribute the weight across both shoulders.

I slowly raised my hands a bit to do the ‘embrace the ball’, but at the dantien level. Wow.. the accumulated tension in my forearms and hands was crazy! Again, I told myself to melt away the tension and visualized a downward melting energy in my body. Noting the tension had not completely melted away, I lowered my hands down and remained in the wuji posture for the rest of the session.

Looking at the clock, about 40 mins had passed and my son was sound asleep. It was a good session ;)

Trimming the Noise

Posted on
2

I am beginning to realize there *is* such a thing as information overload.  I have so many RSS Feeds that it’s impossible to stay on top of them all. The solution: View each feed and determine if it stays or goes. Make the decision up front and stick with it. Sure, I may miss something or not hear about it within the first couple hours of the story breaking, but if it’s truly pertinent news, it’ll find its way to me.

In addition to trimming RSS feeds, I have pretty much cut out visiting forums from my daily routine. I don’t even remember the last time I visited EmptyFlower to see what’s the hub bub on the taiji chatter. Just to test, I looked the first page of posts on the taiji forum, nothing of interest.

There’s this idea called the Signal to Noise Ratio, converting this to more layman and info tech days, I basically translate it to mean, if you have too much noise, you may miss the signal.  Instead of spreading my attention too thinly, why not focus. 

Don’t Forget about the Elbows

Posted on
6

I was looking over the Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan text translated by Louis Swaim, when I ran across the following passage covering the ‘Beginning Form’ posture of the Yang long form:

Movement Two: The two elbows sink down and naturally lead the two hands slowly and steadily pushing down until they are near the thigh (page 27)

This describes the sequence after raising the hands to shoulder height in the beginning of the form. What really caught my attention was the whole notion and emphasis of the elbows leading the hands.  After reading this, I realized I often focus on my hands instead of thinking about the elbows in a transition.

It’s easy to focus on the hands, but if we truly consider the 6-joint harmony, more attention needs to be paid to the elbows. Ideally, when we move, the hands should be connected to the feet (joint 1-2), the elbows connected to the knees (joint 3-4) and the hips connected to the shoulders (joint 5-6).

Let us go back to the second movement in beginning form. After reading this, I tried doing the move, this time, focusing on the role of my elbows. Right off the bat, I felt a distinct difference in execution. My arms felt more relaxed when I focused on the elbows leading the hands in the downward path! Doh!

To test this out some more, I tried a couple of others moves that had downward components. Repulse Monkey – yup.. felt much better when the elbows lead the hands. In executing brush knee and push while focusing on the elbow of the brushing hand, the movement took on a totally different quality. Focusing on the elbow, resulted in a feeling as if my brushing arm was more ’rounded’, expanding beyond the physical structure of my body.

Okay, what about the flip side. What does focusing on the elbow leading the hands do in upward and forward components?  In raise hands, focusing on the elbow resulted in my forearms feeling less tense. Much more relaxed. In repulse monkey, when the rear hand came near my ear, I focused on getting the elbow ‘into position’ before thinking about extending the hand to do the push. Whoa… much different. Not only was the section from the elbow to fingertips more relaxed, the movement also felt more powerful when connected to the knee in the rear weight shift.

Wow.. crazy how one sentence made such a difference.

Slipping on the Daily Review

Posted on
2

Hi, my name is wujimon and I’ve fallen off the GTD wagon. It has been weeks since I’ve done a daily review, let alone a weekly review. I have been working out of my inbox and yellow sticky notes.

The first step to combat the issue is to start anew.  With a preview pane in my email application, I have a scroll bar! A big no-no… By viewing the preview pane, I only allow myself roughly 10 emails before it starts scrolling. Back to up-front decision making. Create action, file, follow-up, or trash. Pick one and move on.

Trying to ween myself off the palm desktop, I’ve been fumbling with other task managers. Not good because it requires too much thought. My flow is broken. I like the simplicity of the Palm Desktop Tasks application. No priorities, no due dates, just context categories and a space for my to ‘check’ things off. Oh.. how I love to check things off.

Yellow stickies have become tasks lists when they should really be capture spots. Capture then process. I process a couple of the stickies, crumble them up and throw them away. I feel good. Ohh.. how I love the sound of crumbled paper hitting the garbage can in the morning.

The daily review is a thorn in my side. I have a reminder about 15 mins before the end of each and every work day to do a daily review. In the midst of fire fighting and tight deadlines, this is often ignored. I don’t want to be a fire fighter.  Instead of a reminder, it has been changed to be a 20 minute appointment with myself at the end of the day.  Respect the hard landscape of the calendar.

Has anyone else fallen off the GTD wagon?  What are some of your own strategies to get back on?