We are a continuum: We activate our life force through the connection with all
There is so much disconnect both on the macro and the micro levels I observe everyday. I have been researching how we can get back to the state of completeness - so complete and content that we don’t need to go and look for who we are outside of us.
Our eyes and minds are in close relationship with each other. When the mind is suffering, the eyes are straining and we cannot see very well. When the minds are at peace, the eyes are relaxed and we can see better.
Sun light is the remedy for all. Let's catch as much sunlight as we can to BOOST your IMMUNE SYSTEM!
Spending time on mundane things really grounds me. Well, perhaps they are not mundane after all.
How and when did we stop optimal breathing? As I observe people with certain pain and discomfort, I notice that breathing is often compromised.
With the recent increase of virtual device use, many people are suffering from eye strain. Here are a couple of tips as to ease the strain.
In our modern life, we have no need to articulate our toes like our fingers. The ground tends to be flat and the types of surface are not varied.
Sun light is the remedy for all. Let's catch as much sunlight as we can to BOOST your IMMUNE SYSTEM!
Eyes are the window through which things enter into our consciousness. In everyday life, we often use our eyes to focus, interpret, analyze, and understand what we are seeing, activating our cone cells in retina. What we use much less often is the peripheral vision, we see with the rod cells on the outer edges of the retina. These two ways of seeing are vastly different. When you meet someone, are you using the central vision? Or are you using the peripheral vision? Or both? When do you think you close up the peripheral vision, trying not to feel the person? When you encounter something overwhelming, can we keep both central and peripheral visions open? How does that change how we see and respond to the outside world?
Here is a small experiment. When you see something or someone, feel that you are seeing this object with the surface of the exposed part of your eyes. Observe your breath. Observe the tension of your eye balls.
Now let’s shift the awareness. Feel the weight of your whole eyeballs. Feel your eye socket that is filled with liquid in which eyeball float. Imagine that light is entering into these eye sockets and it travels from the back of your eyes via optic nerves, to the back of your brain, the visual field. This is where you are actually seeing. When you see an object in this way, see how the tension in your eye muscles shift. Now, start including the peripheral of this object. More and more and more. Include your body in the whole ‘seeing’ process. Feel your breath. Feel your skin. Feel your body in the environment.
When you can start entering into this encompassing consciousness, you can start seeing unseen aspects of things/people. Your vision becomes more 360 degree, more permeating, more expansive. You breathe with ease. And you can see with your whole being.
When do we get drawn to Symmetry? Asymmetry? Symmetry is stable, calm, and solid. Asymmetry is jarring, uneasy, and potentially hazardous. I look around my living space and see what is symmetrical and what is asymmetrical. I notice that individual objects tend to be symmetrical. However, they are grouped together, creating asymmetrical patterns in the rooms of asymmetrical shapes. Nothing in nature is completely symmetrical. No human body is completely symmetrical.
Coinciding with Corona Virus eruption, my body seems to be erupting as well. When the body starts getting into an unusual mode, it is telling me something. Using the FREE time opened up due to the stay-at-home state, I am forced to face my own physical condition.
DAY 1 - organizing my body
Pain/discomfort is on the R side of Pelvis as well as the lower back right above the R pelvis. This pain is on and off for the past five or six years. I lie on the floor and compare the placement of R pelvis and L pelvis. R pelvis is higher, closer to the head than the L. Consequently, my R leg feels shorter than my L leg.
I start doing Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement exercise. It is the one that I lie on one side and connect shoulder and pelvis movements. After moving R leg in a circular motion initiated from R pelvis, my R leg gets longer, meaning, my R pelvis dropped to the ground and space has been created in my hip joint as well as knee joint and ankle. It feels good! After completing the whole cycle of shoulder and hip, I feel much more grounded. Walking around, my hip has less pain.
DAY 2 - more organization, specific image of body parts, facing the ‘ignored’ body part
I still have great amount of discomfort in my R pelvis. So today, I decided to look carefully at the structure of pelvis to see where exactly my discomfort is.
As I trace my pelvis and examine which part feels tense, I notice that it is the anterior sacroiliac ligament, as well as the superior pubic ligament and the ligament that connects the great trochanter and the bottom of R iliac. The posterior SI joint on the R side also is tight. I have to admit that I have much weaker image of these areas compared to the L side. My R side in general feels smaller and tighter than the L side which is freer and larger.
I lie on the floor and feel all these parts mentioned above. I notice that when I breathe in, inside of the R side of the pelvis has much smaller movement. I roll my pelvis to R and L and notice that I DON”T WANT TO role it to R at all. I have much less intimate connection with my R pelvis.
I exhaled and inhaled my breath into the lower abdomen, making space in the R side of the pelvis. It is like entering into the unknown territory. What makes me so hesitant to enter into this area?
I continue to do the same Awareness Through Movement lesson of shoulder and pelvis from yesterday. Now when I get up, I don’t have the pain in my R hip joint.
DAY 3 Pelvis-Shoulder connection
As I examine my R pelvis further, I noticed that the pain is greater when my L shoulder is tight. I suffered adhesive capsulitis on both R and L shoulders about 10 years ago. L shoulder didn’t quite heal completely. So sometimes, it gets tight from the shoulder joint, elbow, wrist, to the 4th and 5th fingers. There is a connection between my L shoulder and R pelvis/hip joint.
I enter into my body, inside of my R pelvis and trace the line from under the superior pubic ligament, down to the R sitzbone across the body inside all the way up to the L shoulder ligament.
I move the L shoulder joint a little and it moves my R pelvis. As I continued examining this connection, I start discovering the relationship between R ribcage and L ribcage. As I continue this exploration, I feel my R hip joint and inside of R pelvis is honored, looked at, and paid attention to, and HAPPY. I stood up and felt much more rubrication inside of R pelvis.
DAY 4 Pelvis-Leg connection
Today I traced my R pelvis down all the way to my R toes. My 4th and 5th R toes are a little numb compared to the rest. I have been observing them to see where this is coming from. It is, in no doubt, related to R pelvis, but there is some distance between my foot and pelvis - there is calf, knee, and thigh before I get to the pelvis. As I continued moving two of my R toes, I noticed something. The lower part of the leg bone, Fibula, hurts. This is the place I broke in a car accident 25 years ago. Could this be the case? My body still remember the memory of that traumatic experience, I thought to myself as I continued trying to move my 4th and 5th R toes. As I lie on my bed and stretched my 5th toe far away from the rest, I felt the sensation I remembered from that time. Then all of it came back to me - how this accident and injury impacted my life then and all the complex emotions I tried to move through at that time. Certainly, not all was digested then. My body shrunk up as I was hit by a car and dumped to the ground. Only bone that broke was fibula, but because my R leg was put in a cast immediately, and I had only one leg for months. My body seemed to be operating still in that mode, especially when I have more stress than usual or when I stay in a sedentary position for some time. My body remembers that ‘confinement’, that painful helpless feeling. It stored all of it inside.
As I became in touch with my own emotions stored in my muscles, ligaments, and tendons, I felt electricity running thorough my R leg all the way through my R pelvis. R leg became much more vibrant and alive than usual. All I had to do was to GET INSIDE OF DISCOMFORT.
DAY 5 Pelvis and internal organs inside
Having studied Feldenkrais and GAPS nutritional protocol, by now I have an understanding of how skeletal structure and internal organs are connected. So I wanted to look at what is in that particular part - R pelvis and hip joint - of my body. It is about the place where small intestine connects with large intestine. It is also where appendix is. It is entirely possible that bad bacteria hang out in these ‘juncture’ like places, whcih gives me an idea of increasing probiotic food, fat, and animal protein to increase good bacteria. Some detox remedy such as detox bath with baking soda would be also good. I’ll see how these nutritional and detox remedy will affect this area of my body.
img_20170112_155811998
I love the feel of a vacant lot. Leaving the trace of the past and holding a dream for the future, it waits for the unknown in tranquility. My body yearns to vibrate with what will arrive in this empty space.
miracle_apples01
Akinori Kimura, a Japanese farmer, succeeded in growing apples without fertilizer which had long been considered to be impossible.
He married into an apple orchard in his 20s. Working there, he had been suffering from sickness and his wife from terrible skin inflammation caused by the fertilizer. While he was pondering what to do to improve this situation, he encountered Masanobu Fukuoka's "The Natural of Farming". He decided to adapt this method to grow his apples.
Soon after he stopped giving fertilizer, his 800 apple trees got infested by harmful insects. They were so many and he picked them by hands (three full plastic bags per tree,) They lost leaves and started dying. He kept trying to find the right fertilizer chosen from food items such as soy sauce, milk, whatever he found. He lost all the money and started working for a night club. His wife managed to prepare meals using wild grass as material. His children supported him as well. However, year after year, no sign of apple. After not being able to find a solution for six years, he decided to commit suicide to take responsibility. He went up to a nearby mountain and was looking for a place to hang his rope. That's when he saw an apple tree with lots of apples shining in a distance. He wondered why this tree is growing without fertilizer in a forest. When he went closer to the tree, he found that it was not an apple tree, but he got an inspiration. He immediately checked the soil and it was soft. He intuitively realized that if he can reproduce this environment, his apples will grow without fertilizer.
He went home and grew wild grass in his orchard. Every day he intensely studied insects and succeeded in recreating the ecological environment where the harmful and beneficial insects are balanced (so there are not harmful insects that infest apples). Three years later, all his trees produced apples which don't turn yellow being exposed to oxygen or deteriorate for years.
IMG_20150221_183325088
This is one of the best books on 'you are what you eat'. In the chapter on 'health and illness: new definitions', she talks about what health means. These conditions might sound like a common sense, but it actually take good holistic care of the whole to stay in this condition.
PHYSICAL
1. No fatigue 2. Good appetite 3. Good sleep
PSYCHOLOGICAL
4. Good memory 5. Good humor 6. Precision in thought and action
SOCIAL
7. Taking responsibility 8. Making choices
SPIRITUAL
9. Honesty 10. Gratitude 11. Humility 12. Love
From "Food and Healing" by Annemarie Colbin
0007b
I’ve been thinking about being vital. It is not the same as the energy we feel when we are excited. When we are in high tension. But sometimes these two seem to be granted as the synonyms. As a performing artist, I experience the ‘high tension’ moments on stage. Heated, exhilarating intoxication takes over me. I love my audience. There is a charged exchange between us. My body feels ‘filled’. I feel alive, and awake. Unfortunately, these moments are short-lived. They evaporate immediately after arising, and so, to fill the void, the cycle of regenerating more of this feeling continues. Being vital seems different. It's about feeling quiet and continuous motor inside the body. Gentle and effortless. This amorphous, vibrating essence exists in all living things. If we descend into calmness to connect with it, every moment in life becomes vivid and special without seeking for excitement.
IMG_20150215_124153201
Today was probably one of the coldest days this winter here in Baltimore. One digit. As I move on the surface of snow, wind blows with force, hitting my body without mercy. One step, another step, running becomes a slow dialogue with snow and wind. Wind still keeps coming and the exposed skin of my face manages to responds by hardening its surface. I'm almost out of breath. My feet receives the freezing coldness of snow, slowly becoming numb. The boundary between inside of my body and outside stimuli becomes blurry. My whole body starts tilting forward to compliment wind and snow. It's a strange dance. I think of people who lose their lives in the severe snow in mountains. I think of a Japanese ghost story, YUKIONNNA (snow woman) and how the travelers get wrapped up by her white kimono as they embark on their journey to the other shore. I embrace snow's shamanic mischief.
IMG_20150210_115043453
There is something special to run on the icy surface. I need to balance my feet in a certain way. Not to hang on to the ground too much. Not to put too much pressure. I put a little more weight on the right edge, then the left edge, then the center, the front, and the back. This dance with my feet continues one step after another. Instead of making an effort to move forward, I'm in every moment, going up and down, enjoying the contact with the ground, having a dialogue with my weight sinking in and lifting from the slippery surface.
I've been on a journey to reunite with my child inside me. For a long time she has been hiding from me, with her back against me. I enter into myself carefully, with a calm mind and body, leaving the whole 'thinking' behind. My left brain calms down and my right brain starts being fully activated. My body slowly starts remembering what is was like to really feel. All of a sudden, my feet sink into the earth. with each step, many different parts of my feet scream. The trees start revealing their texture and their true personalities. Without touching, I can feel what it's like to touch them. Sensation takes over me. I FEEL them. Vivid colors start entering into my eyes without my trying to look at them. I'm EXPERIENCING the color. I start seeing patterns. Everything I become contact with becomes more and more vivid. Vital energy. I dive into myself. I knock the door and call her. I extend my hand towards her and slowly start pulling my little girl out of the dark small hideout. I can almost feel it. That aliveness. That vital energy which used to make me feel that anything was possible. Continuous flow of curiosity. Inner, deeply satisfying excitement. I'm gradually reuniting with her. My girl is smiling at me. Invincible.