Year 2: Part 1: Post 6: What I Do in the Mornings

I'm almost over my cold. The fever stopped that next day and my head cleared and now I just cough a lot and drink lots of tea. And I sleep a lot.

Other than sleeping a lot and not going tracking (the cold air hurts to breathe) my schedule is about back to normal. I can read and go to workshops and so forth. But I've been sleeping through the early morning classes, the ones I can take now instead of zazen, and that makes me feel like a lump.

If I weren't sick, I would go to Kit's yoga class some days and Karen's exercise class other days. I've attended both a few times (before I got this stupid cold), so I know what they're like.

Kit's is my favorite, for obvious reasons, plus it's a really interesting, different take on yoga.

It's not like I really know much about yoga generally, of course--I've tried it a few times, though I never really got into it, and I've heard about it, of course. And the impression I've gotten is its sort of a spiritually applicable exercise program. Like, you do these stretches and somehow they not only make you flexible, they also manipulate your "energy" in some beneficial way. I'm sure there's a lot more to it that I don't understand.

Anyway, in Kit's version, you don't just imitate your instructor in bending your body here and there. It's a real class, as in the objective is to learn how to do something so you can do it yourself, later.

Getting into "The Dancer"

She's very precise--you have to get each body part into exactly the right position and hold it for exactly the right about of time and you have to breathe a certain way.

She'll spend a whole class period on how to rotate one's thigh properly for one pose, for example. Or, she'll tell us to do Sun Salutations or the Six Movements of the Spine or whatever else without her leading us, to see how many of us remember what to do.

And then, a lot of what we practice either isn't actually yoga or its been seriously re-purposed. We practice good posture (sitting, standing, and walking). We practice ergonomically correct lifting and turning. She says we should never sit up in bed straight from lying on our backs. Instead, we should always roll to our sides and then push ourselves up without our arms (does this mean that doing sit-ups is bad?).

I guess this is why a lot of Kit's students have good posture?

As far as I can tell, good posture, body awareness, and good body mechanics are most of the point of Kit's yoga class. I know she has had more traditional yoga training, but I don't know what she thinks of that training. She has said that if you don't believe in rising kundalini,or whatever it is real yogis and yoginis believe, then it doesn't make sense to practice yoga as if you did, because what's the point? That reminds me about what Greg said about reasons to sit zazen. I don't know if that means that she thinks yoga only works spiritually if you believe it does, or if she just thinks it's dishonest to try to do something if you don't believe it works.

And then there's Karen's class.

Karen's class is not all that different from her introductory martial arts class that I took last summer--except it's not a class, it actually is a guided exercise session. There's a five-minute warm-up, then stretching, then twenty minutes of cardio, then we work on core strength and on strength and flexibility in our wrists and ankles, and feet. Then,we stretch again. It's intense, and it runs an hour and a half long, so there's hardly time to shower before breakfast, but it's awesome.

Like her class last summer (I think she actually offers it every semester) Karen isn't focusing on

Downward Facing Dog

martial arts in any obvious way, but aside from general fitness being important for martial arts, all the movements relate to techniques she teaches in later classes. So I've been told, anyway. Like the wrist stretches are actually gentler versions of the wrist locks advanced students learn to do on other people. Some of the other stretches are actually sequences of blocking techniques. Even I can tell that a lot of the cardio workout is a series of punches and kicks. She's trying to establish muscle-memory, so all these movements will seem natural later on.

Except, I'm not that interested in learning martial arts. I'm taking the morning thing, not so I can learn martial arts, but because I like being fit and it's too cold and icy to go running a lot of days and because Charlie suggested it last year. He hasn't said anything about it since, but I haven't forgotten.

But, as I said, I can't do any of that right now. I'm glad I can breathe without coughing just sitting here writing. I'm getting so sick of this stupid cold....

I'm not the only one who has it, of course. I'd say almost half the campus is either getting over the cold or coming down with it. Not everybody's gotten as sick as I did, though two people are worse. That's one of the few ways this place is like a normal college, I guess--once a couple of people on campus get sick, everybody else gets infected, too.

What isn't normal is that there still isn't any Advil on campus. It's all herbs and sleep and drinking enough fluids and Reiki. And there's a couple of people who say they've decided not to get sick anymore and so they walk around asking the rest of us when we plan to stop being sick also.

And guess what? Those people aren't sick.

Of course, some people wouldn't get sick anyway. And the reality is that no matter what we did--herbs, Advil, Reiki, or nothing at all--we'd probably all get better in about a week, because we've got a cold and colds last a week. But what if someone on campus were really sick? Would they still not use real medicine?

I asked Allen at Philosopher's Stone Soup the other day. He was sick, too, so neither of us were allowed to help cook and he was uncharacteristically quiet, playing Solitaire rather than goofing off. I half expected him to ask me questions instead of answering mine, but he didn't.

"We're not--collectively--against modern medicine," he said, shuffling his cards, and something about how he said it suggested that some people here are against it, and that he is not one of them. "We do what works, or what seems to work. Or what we hope will work....When Tom was sick he had pneumonia a couple of times there, near the end. We got all kinds of doctors and medicines for him."

"Tom?" The name was familiar.

"The original Craft Master. He had a stroke right around the time I started working here. He died five years later." He was still shuffling his cards. There was something strange about the cards. I kept seeing red kings go by way too often. Allen didn't seem distant or unfriendly so much as he seemed drawn into himself. I think he was just getting sick that day and maybe couldn't focus the way he normally did. I thought maybe he should go to bed and stay there for a while.

But then a few other people, hearing us talk, came over to join the discussion and Allen seemed to pull himself together and began leading the discussion as he always used to--what counts as "real medicine" and how and why and everything else. I imagine it took a lot more effort for him than normal, but he didn't let it show. Except for coughing a few times into a carefully folded handkerchief, it didn't seem like he was sick at all.

If he felt even half as bad as I did at the same stage in the cold, leading that discussion counts as a pretty impressive magic trick.

[Next Post: Monday, February 24: Moon Observance]

Part 3: Post 9: Physical Education

I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but Charlie more or less decided he wants to be my athletics master, too. Technically I don’t need one, because I ran in high school and they said that fulfills my athletics requirement here, too, but apparently I’ve got one anyway. I’m not sure yet if Charlie thinks the other masters are wrong, and I really should do further athletic training here, or if he’s just decided that something physical is a necessary part of the spiritual training we’re doing, and I might as well get credit for moving around as long as I’m doing it anyway? I have to admit, I’m starting to get a little irritated with being told what to do all the time. I’ve heard some of the other masters offer their students more of a choice, or at least they provide something like a syllabus so you know what the process is before you get into it, but Charlie won’t do either. I asked him why, once, and he said “because God has to be a surprise.”

More recently, I got mad and asked him again why he wouldn’t tell me his plans. “What makes you think I’ve got any plans?” he growled back at me.

I could hit him.

No, I couldn’t.

Anyway, he decided that my area of athletics is going to be hiking trail maintenance. There’s a network of trails up through the woodlot behind the main part of campus, and then through the wildlife preserve behind that. The preserve is not really open to the public, so the trails are only used  

Balancing

by researchers and by people from the school, but Charlie manages all of it. He says he will teach me how next year, and in the meantime I am to get back in shape and also to learn to move properly so I don’t hurt myself. Kit teaches series of workshops entitled “Practical Yoga,” about ergonomically correct motion and body awareness, and I’m probably going to take it a few times, though honestly I’m pretty aware of my body around Kit already. I’ve also, on Charlie’s recommendation, signed up for Karen’s “Personal Safety and Fitness” class.

It’s her introductory martial arts class, though she doesn’t teach much in it that seems like martial arts.

“You can take a martial arts class and learn kicks and punches and blocks,” she said, “and you can feel pretty good about yourself for being safe from bad guys out on the street. Except you won’t be. A couple of blocks and kicks won’t keep you safe in all possible circumstances. They’ll give you slightly better odds, if you can remember to use your techniques when you’re scared, which not everyone can, but a black belt doesn’t make you invincible, and a colored belt certainly doesn’t. What will keep you safe…er is situational awareness, so you can hopefully stay out of trouble to begin with, and physical fitness, so you don’t die of heart disease when you’re thirty-five. So that’s what we’ll work on here.”

I think if you take this class over a few times she lets you go on to other classes where she does teach fighting skills, and even here a lot of the exercises she’s teaching involve the same kind of movements the advanced students use for fighting. Like, there’s a pair of wrist stretches we do during warm-up that are gentler versions of nasty little joint locks. But I’m not really here for fighting skills anyway. I’m not much of a fighter, and I’m a big enough guy that people don’t usually bother me if I don’t bother them first.

Getting Better Balance

 But I like this class. She has us make a circle and bow to each other at the beginning and end of class, because we are all both students and teachers. She says that we learn whenever we push ourselves past the edge of our abilities, so whenever someone falls over during balance exercises she says “congratulations! You just got better balance!”

She plants things for us to notice, to improve our situational awareness. Our first day she tacked a sign to the wall that said “if you ask Karen, in secret, for a cookie, she will give you one.” Except I didn’t notice the sign so I didn’t get a cookie. Someone else told me about it. This week she provided a cooler full of snowballs and arranged for one of the outside students (there are students from outside the school here) to pelt us with them without warning, in the middle of class. Snowballs—and it’s almost June! It was awesome.

It’s a real class. She expects us to do our exercises for homework, and except for the warm-up she spends class time teaching us new movements or reviewing and correcting what we’re doing. We don’t use belts to signal rank (Karen says to approach everything with a beginner’s mind) and we don’t wear uniforms—not even school uniforms. She has us work in ordinary clothes because she wants us to be ready to defend ourselves in ordinary clothes.

I’m not sure what all this has to do with either spiritual development or hiking trail maintenance, but I’m using muscles I didn’t even know I had, and that has to be a good thing, right?

[Next Post: Monday, June 3rd: Philosopher's Stone Soup]