Roller Coaster

Put people in a dark room and show us the view from a moving roller coaster and we will bob and weave even though we have gone nowhere and done nothing.

Spend the evening watching the view, and you will get tired. And so many people are in the dark watching screens showing persuasive lies of mimesis.

Fatigue is induced. It is a feature not a bug.

We cannot turn it off. We cannot make it go away. And we cannot escape. It is the water we live in. It is our ecology. It is the culture that takes over the world. It is what we must work within; we have no choice.

Ok,
How do we work in it?

Kinko’s was once an important tool.

No message, no number of messages, can do in this maelstrom of messages what I once did with Kinko’s. And all the media are algorithms always favoring the most exciting, and tiring, that gets the most views.

The house always gets its percentage. To win in the game, to get your many views, means you lose as you feed the machine and fatigue your audience.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

The internet is not a better copy machine.

There is not a better message when you are pouring it into water.

I teach people ways of moving. I teach ways to reshape how they feel themselves move. How they come to feel themselves then reshapes how they move all the time. This is not information. It is not done with words.

How we get through too much information is not more information, even if we think our more is better information.

We need to teach people to be blind and deaf. And our tools to teach that are words and images and sounds.

The koan is the arm pointing at the moon; look at the moon not the arm.

The technique is not the content of expression but in the manner. Stop informing. Teach fish to lose their eyes.

Meditating to…

The prevailing rationalization is almost never empiric. It will serve purposes other than clear explanation. The coercion in a society promotes understandings that perpetuate the established. And these ideas persist and mislead for hundreds of years.

No words dislodge these misunderstandings. They shape our perceptions and get confirmed by how we unthinkingly see our experiences — however the mismatch.

Silent insight turning away from the conventional by turning away from ideas and words, deep listening without expectations, opens the opportunity to notice. And then we might begin to feel that an idea does not fit our experience, our world, does not fit us.

Rinse, repeat. There is no bottom; nothing is revealed. There is a little unburdening: a received rationalization shapes our expectations and perceptions a little less. There is no arrive; there is no gain. There is some useful loss.

This does not feel secure, does not feel comforting; thus it is not popular. We cannot tell someone how to see around. We can suggest that they sit silently and hope they become detached from explanations.

Breathe

You should keep your mind on your breathing until you are not aware of your breathing.

So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment, when all effort disappears.

Shunryu Suzuki — Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Sitting still

The Still Point: Capturing the movement of the mind
Tricycle Fall 2004

Spokane Men’s Yoga Gathering 2019-09-22

Wuji
Constant Bear

Enso 8 ways

Neck

Mountain
Mountain Extended

Mountain – Forward Fold Half – Mountain
Tree
Mountain – Forward Fold Half – Mountain

Mountain Wide – Forward Fold Wide – Mountain Wide
Warrior 2
Mountain Wide – Forward Fold Wide – Mountain Wide

T lateral chain extension – explore

Standing quad extension – explore

Mountain
Tree
Mountain
Eagle
Mountain

Constant Bear

No mat needed