by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
2002
Woke up feeling that emptiness
Puttered around the house, no connection
Turned on the radio to fill the space, the grey corners of the house
Morning elongates into afternoon
no boundaries
no demarcations of minutes
hours
Dragged out of this void of a house, finally
Shin bumped car door, no pain
Legs rubbed by cat, no feeling
Saturday afternoon
Driving down crowded Queen Anne Ave
Cut off from the actions and flow outside
by this box of metal housing me
Me.
Suddenly, “I” makes itself aware in my chest
A fluttering spirit above finds its way, settles within
A smile creeps up from the “I” onto my face, bright, fast-climbing morning glories
The weight of the body is
The solidness of “I” is
A clear boundary between body and world…is
In one moment
The bigness of the universe is “I”, beyond buildings, cars, the city
A gladness spreads in me
A deep weep from the chest into the vastness of me…
I thank you
For letting me feel that switch in my body
Out of unfeeling out of disconnect out of loneliness.
by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
Oct. 03
I was invited to spend a weekend at the Goldmeir Hot Springs. The five of us arrived Friday evening. Saturday after breakfast, the other four decided to do the eight miles hike up to Snow Lake. I stayed, taking my time wandering amongst the old growth forest. The big trees, more than four arm lengths in girth, beckoned me.
Ten minutes up the trail, I stood in front of one of the largest trees I have seen in this area. It had rooted itself on the bank about four feet above the trail. Its roots were exposed above earth like tangled serpents. A smaller tree grew out of this mass of roots. The uncle tree and the nephew tree seem to have a communicative relationship that keeps both healthy and vibrant. I put my hands on the uncle tree’s coarse bark and felt its masculine energy, stable and calming. When I put my forehead on the tree, I realized that my head and hands were stuck there by tree sap. I laughed out loud, put a drop of the clear sap onto my tongue and enjoyed the clearing fragrance throughout my body.
Trees are more like human beings than most of us think. They have a physical body; they have energy; and they have spirit and soul. They have personalities and character. Each kind of tree has its unique configurations of energy. They get ill from time to time. They get physical injuries like us. They get worms, bacteria and viruses just like us. They learn lessons and grow knots around the injured and ill areas. Once in a while, one gets eliminated by lightning.
I raised my head and saw the biggest knot on the tree. That moment I understood that trees face obstacles just like us. This knot bigger than my two hands testifies to that. The old tree adapted itself to the change and continued to live. I grew up in the Temple of Agriculture in Beijing and played among trees more than three hundred years old. They had so many knots all over that they were easy to climb for a six year old. We all had our own preferred tree as our ”houses,” and invited other kids to be our guests. I didn’t appreciate those gnarly trees then because at night the moonlight made them look grotesque and frightening. Now to me, the knots mean courage to heal and to continue to grow.
We are like trees. Trees are still intrinsically connected with their surroundings. We forget. Trees must give and receive to live. The more they give, the more they receive. Just as they give off oxygen and take carbon dioxide, they give off energy we humans need, and take away unnecessary energy in us. We know that especially well when we practice qigong by trees, or do healing around a plant. The plants get healthier and more vibrant from us sloughing off our “sick” qi. Information in many shapes and forms are exchanged when we calm our running minds and attune to the trees. Every moment of their lives they are constantly connected with earth, sky and their surroundings. We forget. Sometimes we forget for years and generations, until something in us and around us goes terribly wrong. The less we give, the more our happiness diminishes. One day we wake up and ask ourselves, “Why am I alive? Am I needed?” Ask a tree.
Trees cannot hoard. They cannot just get and not give. They don’t have bank accounts. All they have they store in their roots, their trunk and their leaves and branches. Few human beings still have that kind of confidence, trust and faith in the bigger. I remember one autumn afternoon, walking with many thoughts around and in my head, I looked up and was stunned by life. A baby tree with its trunk barely a handful in girth was in flames—its leave in every shade of red: orange red, apricot red, fire red and blood red—the purest and boldest colors of life. Behind it, the sky as if answering to the baby tree, illuminated itself into a transparent blue. The essence of life flashed itself in a moment, like the most touching drama on the stage of life, the moments you can recall to your friends but could never quite catch with words.
The next morning after a night of storm, I walked on the same path again and saw only thin, bare and lonely branches. All the flames have faded onto the ground, though still touchingly red, orange, apricot, fire and blood. The colors are unchanged, but location has changed. The sky behind the bare branches continued to be blue and pure and an expanse of life. Another tree next to the baby tree had just turned a glorious golden yellow, assuming the center of the stage of autumn. I felt my brows furrowing, don’t I remember seeing this tree and that tree last year this time? Yet every time, my sigh joins the earthbound leaves after my exclaim decorates the changing leaves on the tree. The beauty of the leaves last but a year. The beauty of humans last but a few decades. I exclaim and sigh every year with the leaves, while the trees continue living year after year. And what about the sky? It continues being for millions of years, millions of life times. So how can my heart be with the sky? Can my heart understand the expanse of the sky? How does one have the faith and trust of a tree winter after winter? Thoughts went around and around. My head began to ache.
That evening in our Image Therapy healing class where we usually go right into healing related practices, I wanted everyone to practice the Big Tree standing meditation which is more of an individual qigong practice. Students were surprised of the sudden change of curriculum. We stood for half an hour. In one moment of that half an hour, I became an old tree in the winter, with dark, bare branches against a grey sky. An understanding spread through my body. The confidence, the trust, and the faith don’t come from the head, or reasoning. Being connected to the earth and sky, it’s a knowing, a knowing that every tree is born with, a knowing that we are born with, too, but forget. This knowing is found again by a few people who live and wonder on earth, with nothing but their connection to the earth and sky. They have come in touch with the flow of eternity. Taoists call them immortals because they are free from fear, free from disconnect.
I understand now why for years we practice being a tree. It takes time to relax our body so it’s open. It takes time to relax our energy so it’s calm. It takes time to relax our spirit to truly, unjudgingly feel, exchange, and understand. Openness allows one to give and to receive. Pay respect to the tree and the tree will open up. The respect in you will open your body and heart for receiving as well. The oldest trees in the world have been living for four to six thousand years. They live in the White Forest of California. They live in the desert oasis of Africa. They live in the tropical forest of Mexico… These endless wells of living wisdom are here, living with us, and open to us to connect and remember with.
Big Tree Standing Meditation is one of ZY Qigong’s central practices, where one stands as a great big tree, connecting with the Earth and the cosmos. For more information about qigong (ancient Chinese practices with vital life force), visit our website: www.zyqiogng.org
by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
The deliciousness of feeling earth qi entering the feet and body for the first time;
The deliciousness of feeling the mind calming and the relaxed awareness releasing from the brain into the entire body like stardust;
The deliciousness when feeling weightless, formless, nothing and everything;
The deliciousness when the heart opens and quivers as it feels another person’s deep emotions;
The deliciousness when warmth radiates outward from the lower Dantian like a small sun warming the universe of our body;
The deliciousness when I am an ageless, great, Big Tree;
The deliciousness of opening our eyes to a brand new beauty of the world after a vibrating practice;
The deliciousness of knowing in the bones, understanding beyond time…
by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
March, 04
In Level Two of ZY Qigong practice, we let our energy naturally raise from my Lower Dantian to activate our Middle Dantian—middle energy center in the heart area. These exercises activate and strengthen our emotional empathy. We work on building our Middle Channel, and get external information beyond ourselves, we gain wisdom. We work on our second respiratory system through Body Breathing, and we gain physical empathy for others. We work on our yin-yang ball of qi as a tool to gain empathy and understanding in all above ways. We literally feel others’ pain, and joy.
Then we grapple with all these pain others feel, physically and emotionally. We eventually learn that we can feel others’ pain all we can, but we cannot change the pain—fundamentally. We can help lessen the pain, but we cannot change the people experiencing the pain. We cannot change the course or circumstance of their lives. It’s absolutely their choice in whether they hear or not, see alternate routes or not, take up the helping hand in changing direction or not.
We can feel their pain, but we cannot attach to the pain, to the people, and to the outcome of their circumstance after we offer help. We can feel the pain whether we decide to say or do something or not. We can say or do something, but be okay with any kind of response—whether it’s utter ignoring, not hearing, or hearing with utter indifference, or hearing with angry attacking response, or hearing and misunderstanding the advice while believing that they got it…
Once you choose to teach, to heal, you cannot be attached to the responses. Stay with your integrity, and detach from your ego. Of course this is an utmost difficult thing to do. Because even when we first sense someone else’s pain, our own pain get hooked and dragged up from our past. Then sometimes we can start with the right intention of lending a helping hand, but our kind advices all of a sudden began to be charged with our own emotionally pain, fear, anger, despair and sadness.
Or we began to pour our attention onto the other in an obsessive passion to try to get away from feeling our own pain. We make others our projects of hope. We get utterly distraught when they sense our own emotionally imbalance and run the other way. Have you noticed that you can say the same exact words but have totally different intentions behind them? It’s all in the intention. And the intention could change from good to evil from one moment to the next.
How can we be aware that we are coming from the right intention? We can ask ourselves, “From where I am now, am I doing what I now know is right? Is my self watching my ego, keeping it in check?” The definition of what is “right” will change with our own growth and understanding. That is why it is important to give ourselves space and time to learn from our interactions with others, to understand their pain and our own, to assimilate the learning, to integrate into oneness. Let go of rigidity. Let go of resistance to change. Let go of fear based controlling. Let go of divisions in the mind. Become oneness within. Know what is right in that moment. And have integrity.
Once you have practiced Level Two exercises, you almost cannot avoid teaching and healing because you feel others’ feelings, and their pain. When you are outside others’ confusion and can see the whole picture, when you can see where they are coming from and where they are heading to, how can you not say anything, not do anything? The clearer the picture you see, the more responsible you feel, and the less likely you will turn your head or leave the person behind when the person is actively seeking help. You become more empathetic to even strangers, because they are no longer strangers when you feel them. All their sufferings and enjoyments take on new vivid dimensions.
This is when you also feel responsible to root yourself, so you can say or do something from a deeply connected place, and stay connected through and beyond the response you will get. That’s why I always tell my students that teaching and healing roots and grounds me. They take me out of my own dramas. I become more even, balanced emotionally and physically, little by little. We come into a full circle of learning and helping.
by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
March, 04
Things are just fine, we say.
We like to keep things the same.
We like security.
We like the familiar, routines.
We like an easy life.
We like our ways.
We like to stay with what we know.
We like people who are like us.We don’t like new things.
We don’t like big changes.
We don’t like adversity.
We don’t like obstacles.
We don’t like pain.
We don’t like upheavals.
We certainly don’t like our enemies.
Or do we?
Can we switch our likes and dislikes?
We all like happiness.
But we don’t agree on what makes us happy,
or how much something makes us happy.
Everyone pays attention to happiness. Even scientists who are supposed to be dispassionate, are churning out studies. They assigned numerical values to happiness and let people rate how much something would make them happy:
Before they got it,
When they get it,
And after some time.
They found three outcomes on happiness.
Everything material, people tend to rate them high while expecting. When they get it, the rating is almost never as high. And the value depreciates in time.
When people rate the time they spend with loved ones, the outcome is just as high if not higher than they expected. As time goes on, people recall these memories and the happiness value goes higher and higher. In another word, the value appreciates, or high ROI—return on investment.
So how do we spend time with our loved ones?
Some of the deepest pains are also caused by some of our closest family and friends.
How can we continue to find happiness, grow in happiness
when we argue, we get mad, irritable, disappointment, sad, hopeless, fearful…
with our closest loved ones?
One way of modern thinking must be changed—
the way we think pain is bad.
We avoid, we suppress, we do everything we can
to not have pain, not even discomfort.
We bandage, we drug, we numb our pain and discomfort
instead of finding out what causes the pain.
We stay right on top of pain and darkness in ourselves,
sometimes all the way until death.
We become more and more rigid
from deeper and deeper layers of fear of pain.
3. The third outcome the psychologist learned from their research is that whenever people expect something to be really bad, when it happens, it’s never as bad as people thought, even when it is the death of a loved one. We always get over the pain sooner than we could image. Almost without fail, happiness returns sooner than we expect.
If we are not forced to look at pain and always run away,
more and more fear and rigidity builds in our psyche and our body.
Emotional and psychological pain becomes physical.
When we suppress physical pain, it doesn’t really go away.
It continues to build, cause bigger and deeper pain and more severe illness
in our body.
How to get out of this endless vicious cycle?
Reverse the spiral—
Choose to look at the pain.
Look right into the pain, physically and emotionally.
Know that we are strong and resilient,
that we will survive the worst healing crisis.
Know that the pain is never greater than who we are.
When you trust yourself, and let go, release,
you go through the pain.
Then we are a layer lighter. Brighter.
We feel our strength as ever-flowing water, not as aging concrete.
We become truer.
We can be with our loved ones closer.
Our enemy can become our friend.
This is when
Happiness can build,
Endlessly.
by Claire | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
March, 04
Life is simple.
The essence of life can be known.
We can understand each other and ourselves.
We can feel the connectedness always.
How, you ask.
We need to unlearn things that are untrue in ourselves,
and re-learn our internal truth again—
Children sometimes say things that embarrass us adults because they are telling the truth. They always tell the truth about whether they like or dislike something until, one day, they are trained not tell the truth all the time. “Say you like auntie’s gift.” “Tell grandma you liked her dishes.” This is when children learn to disconnect their words and their thinking from their feelings. When this continually happens, we loose touch with our true feelings, and eventually our body and mind disconnect. This is when gifted children lose their extra sensory abilities—when they reach social age.
When we systematically ignore, suppress and try to forget our true feelings, one day we don’t know that our feelings are there anymore. We cannot tell what we need or don’t need anymore. When our body feels uncomfortable, we don’t catch the early signals. We wait until we cannot possibly deny the symptoms anymore. For some, this might be too late. Continual denial of our true feelings lead to sickness. Disconnection does not allow our body to activate its self-healing abilities.
Some of us learned to be diplomatic with our answers and evade questions. When asked whether the tea is good, we coyly reply, “It’s hot.” When this type of miscommunication persists, our body eventually would tell us we are cold when indeed our body feels damp; When our legs feel heavy, we tell our doctor we feel pain in the legs. We are denying our own intuition when we don’t say what we think. Then we certainly won’t be able to develop our intuition and extra sensory abilities.
You may be thankful for that someone is offering you something of theirs. Then be thankful and separate it from whether what they offered is what you like, or what you need. Telling them the truth can help them get in touch with their sensitivities as well. Or it may help them face whether they are giving out of true generosity or it is to serve their selfishness.
So you say, “We cannot always tell the truth. We would make a lot of people uncomfortable, and hurt people’s feelings.” From Level II Image Therapy Body Scanning, you learned that there is no secret. We are all able to develop the ability to feel how others feel. As soon as you think, the thought is in the universe. It’s in our collective consciousness. It’s no longer just yours.
When we are trained not to tell the truth, our lives become more complicated. Relationships are difficult because we simply cannot believe someone completely. When we don’t tell the truth, how can we trust others? We over think, over-analyze because we cannot trust others, and we cannot hear our own feelings and intuitions clearly. When we deny our emotions, we become disconnected from others and the world. We feel unhappy and unwell on many levels. We lose our integrity on the most basic level.
So the children who embarrassed us with their truth are our teachers. People who can still tell the truth are here to help us. When we feel embarrassed, we are given the gift of peeking into our own fears. When children say some socially unacceptable words in public, such as sexual words, parents get embarrassed because fear has been installed in them as children, so we would all obey social orders, control. Social rules are set up to take away freedom. They got set up out of fear. The more rules and law a place has, the more corrupt the morality is among people. So when someone gives us a gift by bringing up our embarrassment, stay with it and look at the fear behind it. Eventually truth emerges out from the fear like fog clearing and we can see the land.
Someone once asked me, “So where does our rational mind fits in in this practice of telling the truth?” Our rational mind is like a computer, or a complex analytic tool. Its parameters are often already set up by social conditioning, like an equation based on societal rules. When our ego feeds the equation, we become societal models of success, climbing the corporate ladder and accumulating material things. When we feed the equation with truth however, it might jam the computer at first with fear. That’s why enlightenment happens when the mind is still, resting, out of the way. An enlightenment clears up some social conditioning in our rational mind. We can see the truth clearer. We can see a clearer and broader picture of what life is. When our extraordinary senses develops, when we can see with our third eye, our mind must be calm. When the mind is busy, we do not see.
Indeed, life can be simple. We can be in touch with our true voice and feelings. We can understand and trust each other. We can be connected to our world—
The first step is to develop our internal honesty, believe in it, strengthen it so that our intuition becomes stronger and clearer. We become intoned with our internal truth, our integrity and the truth of the universe. Our extrasensory abilities develop so we don’t just see the material world but also the energy and spiritual worlds. Then we can begin to understand what life is, and we can understand others, people, animals and our natural world. That is when we don’t just think we are connected to others and the world, we feel it, we see it, we know it with our own senses, our own experience. Then the essence of life and self will be revealed.
This is the first step of healing and self development—telling the Truth. It is the first step on the path of a life-long spiritual journey, an adventure in discovering the ultimate truth of the universe.
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