Happiness

In a modern world that values activity, achievements and results, it is perhaps surprising that more people are turning to meditation. For all the activity of modern society, many still feel a fundamental need for silence, inner peace, and a moment of reflection. Take a moment to set aside all your problems, goals, ambitions, failures, and achievements. For these things are transitory, and cannot provide us with true purpose and meaning in our lives. True peace of mind is found in the stillness and silence of the present. And it is in the present that the true wisdom of the heart is revealed.

Happiness will never be found with a "gaining" idea! True happiness is synonymous with true love, it is unconditional, before and after all our gains and losses, before and after all of our failures and achievements, and always here in the present.

Take time to meditate daily, and deepen the awareness of the happiness and love present here and now.

Letting Go

Buddhist practice leads to a letting go that is more demanding than what ordinary life usually requires. Beyond relinquishing particular desires and opinions, we practice letting go of the underlying compulsion to cling to desires and opinions.This is not just letting go of outdated and inaccurate self-concepts; it also involves giving up a core conceit that causes us to cling to ideas of who we are or aren't. The practice of letting go is often mistrusted. One good reason being that without wisdom it is easy to let go of the wrong things.
Also it can suggest deprivation, weakness and personal diminishement. However, when someone is clinging to the past, it is not the past that needs to be abandoned, rather it is the clinging . The past may be a source of understanding. When there is no clinging to it, it is easier to learn the lessons the past provides. At times, it is important to understand the shortcomings of what we are clinging to before we are able to let go. Sometimes it is more important to understand the shortcomings of the grasping itself rather than the object of grasping. Grasping always hurts. It is the primary source of suffering. It limits how well we can see what is happening. When it is strong, clinging can cause us to lose touch with ourselves. It interferes with our ability to be flexible and creative and it can be a trigger for afflictive emotions. There is another side of letting go that we learn to let go into something valuable. From this side, letting go is more about what is gained than what is lost. When we let go of fear, it my also be possible to let go into a sense of safety or a sense of relaxation. Forsaking the need to be right or to have one's opinions justified can allow a person to settle into a feeling of peace.
By letting into something beneficial, it can be easier to let go of something harmful. At times, people don"t want to let go because they do not see the alternative as better than what they are holding on to . One of the nice things about letting go into something is that it has less to do with willing something or creating something than it does with allowing or relaxing. A wonderful result of letting go is to experience each moment as being enough, just as it is.
Buddhist practice leads to a letting go that is more demanding than what ordinary life usually requires. Beyond relinquishing particular desires and opinions, we practice letting go of the underlying compulsion to cling to desires and opinions.This is not just letting go of outdated and inaccurate self-concepts; it also involves giving up a core conceit that causes us to cling to ideas of who we are or aren't. The practice of letting go is often mistrusted. One good reason being that without wisdom it is easy to let go of the wrong things.
Also it can suggest deprivation, weakness and personal diminishement. However, when someone is clinging to the past, it is not the past that needs to be abandoned, rather it is the clinging . The past may be a source of understanding. When there is no clinging to it, it is easier to learn the lessons the past provides. At times, it is important to understand the shortcomings of what we are clinging to before we are able to let go. Sometimes it is more important to understand the shortcomings of the grasping itself rather than the object of grasping. Grasping always hurts. It is the primary source of suffering. It limits how well we can see what is happening. When it is strong, clinging can cause us to lose touch with ourselves. It interferes with our ability to be flexible and creative and it can be a trigger for afflictive emotions. There is another side of letting go that we learn to let go into something valuable. From this side, letting go is more about what is gained than what is lost. When we let go of fear, it my also be possible to let go into a sense of safety or a sense of relaxation. Forsaking the need to be right or to have one's opinions justified can allow a person to settle into a feeling of peace.
By letting into something beneficial, it can be easier to let go of something harmful. At times, people don"t want to let go because they do not see the alternative as better than what they are holding on to . One of the nice things about letting go into something is that it has less to do with willing something or creating something than it does with allowing or relaxing. A wonderful result of letting go is to experience each moment as being enough, just as it is.

What is Wellness? Wellness is a multi-dimensional state of balance including emotional, environmental, physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of an individual.The key is to develop balance within each dimension, resulting in balance between all dimensions. Simply put, wellness is balance.

The importance of developing balance between all dimensions of wellness is expressed clearly using "the wheel" metaphor. As the wheel is comprised of many spokes, it only takes one spoke out of tune to throw the wheel out of alignment. As individuals and members of one universal organism, we must realize wellness to live the fullest potential of quality and longevity of life.

The purpose of offering a wellness program is to facilitate supportive environments to help each individual realize total well-being. We will accomplish this by offering educational, inspirational, and experiential opportunities to explore and develop balance within and between all dimensions of well-being.

The spokes:
1) People are disconnected from people. We must learn and develop skillful, compassionate social interaction in all relations. If this is not addressed as a key factor in our individual well-being we will experience toxic relationships within families, cities, states, and nations.

2) People are disconnected from nature. We must come to understand our place as human species in nature, what effect we have on nature, and how we can live in balance with/as nature. We are of nature, if we fail to see this inherent truth of our being we become toxic to nature, which means we become toxic to ourselves.

3) People are disconnected from their physical body. We must come back to functional movement as a natural physical state, we must understand what nutrition is, and we must see how stress (mental/emotional, chemical, physical) effects the body. Look around you and you will see the results of neglecting physical wellness, obesity, heart disease, cancer, chronic back, neck, and joint injury, etc.

4) People are disconnected from their minds. Are we our minds? are we limited to our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. Do we have control over our thoughts, feelings, perceptions? Are we using our minds in a way that creates harmony and balance in our lived present (Now) experience. Another way to say this, an even more accurate way is to say "when we are truly connected to our minds, we are connected to our hearts". Life is love, love is life, if we do not find and develop a connection with our minds/hearts we will pay the ultimate price, we will not experience true love.

The path to well-being starts now.

Step out of the gym, and into the light

Light is usually underrated as a factor in human health. Modern discoveries in chronobiology are revealing the power of light in health, disease, psychology and
happiness. As it turns out, light acts as a master force, tuning and synchronizing every process in the human body. Unnatural light sources scramble our physiological rhythms and wreak all sorts of downstream havoc with our health and fitness. This is amazing stuff!! This "master force" that is continually fine tuning our physical organism is known as the circadian, day-night rhythm. All animals, including humans, are intimately connected to this cyclic pattern. All organisms on earth are driven by circadian cycles.

It turns out there is actually a functioning part of the brain which comes equipped with a circadian pulse generator called the suprachaismatic nucleus (SCN). This bit of tissue consists of a mere 20,000 neurons that keeps a circadian beat, roughly timed to 24 hours. This is totally cool in itself, but even more fascinating is the fact that this endogenous pulse generator is only a blunt timing instrument that approximates the earth’s circadian rhythm. To manage physiology effectively, it needs to be fine tuned (entrained) by actual environmental conditions, specifically by exposure to direct, natural sunlight.

Our modern world provides weak, ineffective cues to day-night cycles. From the modern body’s point of view, it is almost as if dawn and dusk are constantly shifting in random patterns. It is no wonder that we’re confused. We are not being refreshed by the master system. We stay up late into the night and/or get up before dawn. We watch television and live in front of computers. And even when we are awake during the day, we expose ourselves to artificial lights that are simply too weak to entrain our biological clocks. Clearly, the light coming off a computer screen is no substitute for the sun. It’s no surprise that our rhythms tend to drift. Ultimately, the result is physiological mischief. There is no telling how many physical afflictions stem, directly or indirectly, from poorly synchronized physiology.

As a body professional, I was taught that homeostasis is the body’s prime directive, but that is only half the story. The body drives towards a stable homeostatic state, but it also seeks oscillation and synchronization with the environment. Thus, my physiology is different at sunrise than it is at noon. And of course, it will be different tomorrow than it was today. I am constantly rearranging my tissue in waves of anabolic and catabolic activity. What this clearly indicates is that the timing to my food consumption and exercise is just as important as "what" foods I consume, and frequency and duration of my exercise.

Unfortunately we have not yet tapped into the power the circadian cycles offer. Very few physicians tell their patients when to take medications for example, and scarcely any trainers are scheduling their sessions to match up with circadian realities. And in the world of big fitness, modern health clubs show blatant disregard for light, dark or time of day. With constant levels of illumination in 24 hour facilities, every hour is the same as every other hour. To me this is a reflection of the mentality and underlined motive of most companies and individuals in the health and fitness industries. $$$PROFIT$$$, and that's it.

For now we can work with what we know. Here are some tips to help you take advantage your new found knowledge.For the moment, we can build on a few key findings. For example, we know that tissue repair peaks between midnight and 4:00am. (“Go to bed!”) We know that concentration, logical reasoning and alertness are at their lowest between 4:00am and 6:00am. (“Take your time waking up.”) We know that heart efficiency, muscle strength and flexibility are all highest between 4:00pm and 8:00pm. (“Try for your personal best in the late afternoon.”) With experience, we will ultimately be able to tune our activity to match up with these circadian realities.

And #1 on the list, if the sun is shining, get your butt outside!!!

Be Well,
Abijah, Fat Free Buddha, Offering Outdoor group fitness classes. call for consultation and first class free. 408-469-6764

Move from the center! The practice of Zen meditation and Wing chun kung fu are one and the same, to harmonize body and mind as one. This practice is finding ones center, moving from it and continually flowing to it. The Center is completely silent, still, and empty. From this center all life, love, and creativity arise as a continuous flow of experience. To realize and develop ones intuitive awareness of the center is to find the source of what you are, which is true peace, love, and harmony.

A Zen Master was once asked " after over 65 years of Zen practice and meditation, what would you say is the core of what you have learned? The Master answered " An appropriate response". Moving from the center is another way of saying appropriate response. The Zen master went on to explain that an appropriate response is what is revealed when one can "be close and do nothing". This statement should not be interpreted as nothing is done, or nothing gets done, but who does the doing?

"The art of letting go" is another coined term in the Zen tradition, which is being close and doing nothing. When we consider letting go we see that it takes great faith and trust, faith and trust in the unknown, which is the great challenge for one who sees himself as the one doing his life. One must be patient, attentive, intuitively aware, and in a state of faith and surrender to see the truth that he is not the one doing his life, that there is a power greater than himself that is sustaining all life including his own. Look to your breath, must you will your lungs to inhale or exhale to continue breathing, to continue living? No, but the body continues to respond to each moment with a breath.

When we do chisao (sticky hands, sparing) in the wing chun tradition we must learn to be close and do nothing, to let our body respond rather than our mind react. We must develop an intuitive awareness of our own body's movement and energy as well as our opponent's, to be sensitive and relaxed is the key, even beyond the skill's and techniques that are learned.

What is needed to be known will be relieved upon the time when it is needed. This is an appropriate response.

WingChun with Abijah

Tenets of Wing Chun include practicality, efficiency and economy of movement. Practitioners are encouraged to sense the energy behind their movements. The core philosophy becomes a useful guide to practitioners when modifying or refining the art.

Wing Chun believes in using the least amount of required force in any fighting situation. It believes properly timed positioning and movements can and should be used to defeat an opponent. This is achieved through balance, body structure and relaxation.

Wing Chun uses deflection and counter-attack in the same motion or will intercept the opponent to nullify an attack, rather than blocking then attacking in two separate motions. This means that the opponent's attack is automatically deflected by the arm-structure of the Wing Chun practitioner as the counter-punch is delivered.The "structure" permitting this deflection to occur is controlled through the correct focus of energy from the "core" to the "elbow".

Notice the Key word here "Core", this is a new concept in western fitness but has been the main focus for physical fitness for thousands of years. The development of intuitive awareness of body is an art form, a practice. Wing Chun Kung-fu is one of the many traditional Chinese art forms used to develop this intuitive awareness of body thereby harmonizing the relation of body & mind. The byproduct of studying this art form is the ability to defend yourself in threatening situations.

For me Wing chun has been a physical confirmation to what has been revealed in zazen meditation. Wing chun is moving from the center, and after having realized this has been an amazing teacher of The Way. I would like to reveal some of the deeper insight that I have been so fortunate to see through the practice and contemplation of Wing chun. Over the next few weeks I will be posting these insights every other day or so, I hope you enjoy.

Moving From The Center

Is the main purpose of your body to carry your head around?
If we answer no we should examine our experience a little closer. If we take a moment at any point during the day to examine our immediate, present experience, we will find that this may be closer to how we relate to our body's than we think. Funny how that last sentence ended, the key words (relate, body, think). You may be interested to find that how you relate your own body is very similar to how you relate to some external foreign object. Do we ever stop to feel a foreign object external to ourselves? Probably not, if anything we will give fleeting moments of thought. How often do we actually find ourselves living in the body?

The body has a located center, some names for this center are, the core, the hara, the dan tien, and so on. From the eastern perspective this center is located, but has little to do with the actual physical form of the body. It is perceived more as an energetic point from which the body's life force springs, and is harnessed. From a western perspective this is where the lower and upper halves of the body meet, ( the hip complex). Both perceptions are relevant to moving from the center.

Moving from the center could also be defined as "Moving toward wholeness, from Wholeness". People exhibit this when they are "in the flow" or "in the zone". This is perceived as a centering of the mind in the body or as the body (where body and mind are one). In a sense "Moving from the center" is being in the flow, or just "being the flow". What is the "flow"? How can we find the center, move from it, and be in the flow?

Our whole life in this one pointed "now" moment is the flow. Whatever is now is the flow which is the constant unfolding of our life. So the center is this now moment, all of it. The center is the circumference of now. Makes sense that all these meditation techniques keep directing us to be present for this ever present now moment. The physical body is the vehicle to perceiving this now moment, which is why so many meditation techniques bring us back to the body. We can find the center and move from it by exploring through intuitive awareness our body.