This was originally over on my photo site, I decided to leave the photos do the talking over there and put the writing here, since I’m now too old to worry about being hired by any judgemental corporate employment preventers.
I’ve been working on several things at once for myself, which is a great relief from working on one thing –that I’m usually not interested in– when I work for someone else.
Today, like yesterday, I gained over 3000′ feet in altitude during my walk. Not all in one gulp; the two-tracks I followed are up-and-down, so I exchanged the same 400-500 feet over and over until I reached a ridge. Then I went on up and out from there to another one.
That two-track gets extremely rocky and uneven, which makes it even more untraveled. I noted a fairly fresh coyote carcass back there yesterday. Today, on a weekend in a hunting ground, no one had yet stopped to take its lush pelt.
For the past few days I have been exploring a place beyond where I’ve gone before, beyond where I thought I could go with the respiratory ability and attendant aching climbing muscles I have in the wake of fighting long covid for almost two years. It’s motivating to go into new places and see new things, and also motivating to find I can surpass limits I’ve previously recognised.
So today, as I’m going along happily and easily, despite mental imprecations of running out of energy and needing to get back, I wondered why I had been letting my brain decide how far I could go, and not my body, which is actually doing the going. I normally know better, but cognition has been another covid casualty, thinkings and considerations take more time now. The answers do arise in time.
For a long while in the middle of my walk, I was just riding along in my carcass, watching my body walk and climb higher and higher and jump up on rocks and back down like it has loved to do since I was a child in a smaller version of that carcass.
Meanwhile my brain was busy doing all manner of pointless plotting, projecting, and worrying up there, reliving other timeframes and causing unnecessary and unrelated stress and turmoil. If anything was wasting the energy it was fretting about wasting, it was.
At one point I watched it churn and process for a while as the rest of me enjoyed myself. I know that I need it, but I don’t need it to rule me, and it slips easily into that mode without my vigilance and confidence in myself. When it gains power, it is a tyrant, just like so many humans do when they gain power. Almost like there’s a parallel there.
As I walked on I considered that perhaps many others are tyrannised by their brain, often without ever realising that they are and need not be, throughout their lives, because it interposed itself as the arbiter of reality rather than a useful interpretive tool among others. It’s like a serial abuse situation, an imposed narrative that one can’t quite see or get out of. And of course in this case the tool one would use to escape is the brain itself. Trapped.
Unless one awakens and expands and considers that one has other intelligences available. Bodily intelligence does not lie. It is true to itself, unlike the prevaricating calculator upstairs. Often people mistrust the body intelligence because the brain can place pain and sensation signals and make it look feeble.
This is what meditation helps to achieve by quietening the brain. One can then clearly see the other resources available to them and…avail themselves of them.
Walking is one way to let the body free…one of the random quotes on the site here…
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
-Søren Kierkegaard
He doesn’t mention needing to think at all, it seems like he’s was happy to get away from thinking.
Another quote, from Zen Teacher Huang Po thousands of years ago, seems to agree…it’s not like this is an original idea, in case your brain is criticising me for this post right now…
“Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not until your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.”
Body intelligence appears to be routinely denied and deprecated in absurd official daily life. Which is moderated by people whi sit at desks and think and live in their heads. Except in specific designated situational outlets, like sports, dance, etc. Usually, most of the participants are watching and judging things with their brain and not moving freely with their carcasses while these happen.
Like people who watch sports but don’t play in their own lives., so always experience body intelligence vicariously.
We must have external standards, right? Something that makes sure that things are correct? Like a god, perhaps? Or another kind of hand-puppet that reassures…like paperwork and forms.
The culture has gotten better since my childhood, with the proliferation of yoga, pilates, and all the other misc movement classes. But even those share in the problem; they are mostly about applying outside intellectual forms to the body, not really acknowledging that perhaps the body might have ideas of its own about how to form itself.
Yoga has been co-opted and commercialised, I can’t stand many of today’s yoga teachers, the ones I’ve seen are lost and removed from the original intent of yoga, instead it’s a way to get by, use some words and concepts and pretend like there is understanding. And if there isn’t understanding, how can they impart it in their students?
I’ve had a yoga teacher argue with me and try to force me to do something I was uncomfortable with and might have injured me, apparently because the women in the class (I was the only other man) were using me to make him jealous. How far from the original principles was that teacher? How many of his female students was he involved with?
Another instructor felt threatened when I did the poses too easily and after class sternly banned me from “getting near his business”. Yeah, his business. Not his practice. Not his teaching and enlightening work. His business. He knew he was doing wrong but it made money.
And then we have the example of Iyengar breaking excellent teacher-to-be Victor Van Kooten’s back while forcing him into a pose at a class in India. Victor might be the best teacher alive, despite, or perhaps because of, his beginnings with Iyengar’s inability to understand what he taught. Iyengar is the perfect example of the brain being the tyrant, knows the words only.
This seems to be the root of many forms of imprisonment that humans do, it seems sometimes like humans will stick anything in a cage, including each other. And their own body. Note the current uproar about returning to the office and how much of it is around virtually imprisoning workers and taking advantage of that to sell fuel, food, uncomfortable clothing, etc.
In response to my own insights, I have worked on my own form of movement which sets the brain aside and lets the body move freely uncriticised, as if it weren’t imprisoned in a mental concept of what a body is. Walking is one way if done body-mindfully. For my own use, I call it Noga, since there is the absence of the linking implied in the yoke origin of Yoga. It’s not a very original name or even a very good one, but in this case I think the name is not important. I would try to teach it to others for their benefit, but I think that everyone has to do that themselves.