When my Tai Chi master told me he was 60, shortly after I started studying with him 13 years ago, I could not believe it. He could have passed for a 45 year-old. The practice of Tai Chi, I was to learn, aims at moving Chi through the body in order to nourish, heal, and increase longevity. In addition to the Yang Short form that he taught us, he also instructed us in Tao Breathing (hsing-ch'i) and combining that with a mental meditation to move Chi to various points in our bodies. This is a brief description of the basic breathing technique, which I will then build on in later posts.
Tao Breathing differs significantly from how we're taught to breathe in school. It is the natural way of breathing and how babies breathe when you watch them sleeping. Sit or stand with the spine straight and perpendicular to the ground. Close your eyes half way. Relax your neck muscles. Press the tip of the tongue lightly against the roof of the mouth.
On the inhale, the abdomen expands. This causes the diaphragm under the lungs to drop, which creates a vacuum and that draws air into the lungs. To exhale, the abdomen contracts and that pushes up on the diaphragm, which expels the air.
Inhale through the nostrils, not the mouth. Make your breath in as long as your breath out--long deep and even, but not forced.
Keeping the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth closes a circuit that carries Chi through our body. If you find your mind wondering, focus your attention on the tip of your nose and pay attention to the movement of the air in and out of your body. As you breathe in, feel the air pass through your nostrils, enter your throat, and move all the way down to the deepest part of your lungs. As you breathe out, feel the air traveling back up your throat and through your nostrils.
Watching your breath this way is one of the most ancient meditation techniques. If you find your mind wondering, don't worry. Just bring your attention back to you breath.
Practicing Tao Breathing will improve your concentration and gives you a vacation from all the bothersome and worrisome thoughts that barrage you during our waking hours. The more you practice, the better you will become at this type of concentration and that will help you deal with the stressors in your life. When you feel anxious, just take a moment to practice the Tao Breathing.
Tao Breathing and Tai Chi seem weird to us in the West, however, more and more, research is demonstrating how they actually affect our brain's activities, by fighting depression, changing destructive thought patterns, and helping us manage our emotions. Below are a few references to this research:
Anna Wise-Wrote a book called the Awakened Mind, in which I learned that putting the tongue against the roof of the mouth while meditating actually has an impact on brain waves and that Tai Chi is a moving meditation that can take us to brain states that actually heal our bodies.
Religion Facts: Chi--entry that gives a definition of Chi as vital life force and explains that Tai Chi and breathing techniques move Chi around the body.
John Kabat Zinn--Medical doctor who does research on mindfulness and meditation and most recently focused on using meditation to alleviate depression. His research has shown that meditation has an impact on the right pre-frontal cortex which controls positive thoughts.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Not Controlling but Also Not Succubming: Meditation and Equanimity
Every so often, I get overwhelmed by the myriad events of life. Those times, non-rational thoughts and feelings of victimization often arise, no doubt from the pre-reptilian part of my brain. Despite all the knowledge gained from readings in psychology, self-help, philosophy, tai chi, spirituality and meditation, it still takes me a lot of effort to stop myself and realize that those thoughts are just that--thoughts and not reality. No one is attacking me; my lot in life is not harder than anyone else's; and all I have to do is take a deep breath, notice what is happening, and I can settle myself down and devote my attention to what's needed. It sounds so easy, but I often forget, and find myself wasting energy tilting at windmills in my mind.
This week, I started listening to a book called "Emotional Alchemy" by Tara Bennett-Goleman. She applies Buddhist psychological principles of mindfulness to her practice as a therapist. We are to face life's crises with equanimity and serene composure. Being without reacting is a theme that comes up, again and again, which resonates with the principles of Taoism I've been reading about, for example verse 12 of the Tao Te Ching:
Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.
The Master observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky.
Our habits and thoughts actually become hard-wired into the neural pathways of our brain. To change, we have to practice new thoughts to lay down new pathways. Our pre-frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain and is what allows us to take all those chaotic feelings and emotions from the older, reptilian part of our brain, and act in ways that are appropriate.
This might sound mumbo-jumbo to some, but Bennett-Goleman cites the work of John Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson who have demonstrated the effects of meditation on the pre-frontal cortex. It turns out that mindfulness and meditation has a physical effect on our brains. The left pre-frontal cortex specifically generates positive feelings and dampens negative feelings. They looked at brain activity of those who practiced meditation and mindfulness and saw more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. The meditation actually made the subject stronger at controlling negative emotions.
A psychologist up the street at the Shambala Center in Washington, DC, told us in a meditation class recently, that it takes about 6 weeks for the beneficial effects of meditation to take effect, which coincidentally is how long it takes the average anti-depressant to take effect.
Which would you choose?
This week, I started listening to a book called "Emotional Alchemy" by Tara Bennett-Goleman. She applies Buddhist psychological principles of mindfulness to her practice as a therapist. We are to face life's crises with equanimity and serene composure. Being without reacting is a theme that comes up, again and again, which resonates with the principles of Taoism I've been reading about, for example verse 12 of the Tao Te Ching:
Colors blind the eye.
Sounds deafen the ear.
Flavors numb the taste.
Thoughts weaken the mind.
Desires wither the heart.
The Master observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky.
Our habits and thoughts actually become hard-wired into the neural pathways of our brain. To change, we have to practice new thoughts to lay down new pathways. Our pre-frontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain and is what allows us to take all those chaotic feelings and emotions from the older, reptilian part of our brain, and act in ways that are appropriate.
This might sound mumbo-jumbo to some, but Bennett-Goleman cites the work of John Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson who have demonstrated the effects of meditation on the pre-frontal cortex. It turns out that mindfulness and meditation has a physical effect on our brains. The left pre-frontal cortex specifically generates positive feelings and dampens negative feelings. They looked at brain activity of those who practiced meditation and mindfulness and saw more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. The meditation actually made the subject stronger at controlling negative emotions.
A psychologist up the street at the Shambala Center in Washington, DC, told us in a meditation class recently, that it takes about 6 weeks for the beneficial effects of meditation to take effect, which coincidentally is how long it takes the average anti-depressant to take effect.
Which would you choose?
Sunday, February 14, 2010
A Week of Grace
Two weeks ago on Saturday, January 30, 2010, my sister-in-law called me. She was with my brother and father in the emergency room of a hospital in Indiana. My father had fallen in his shower and suffered a blow to his head. He was bleeding in three places in his brain. The ER doctors had just told them that my father's condition was mortal: he would be admitted to the hospital, but would not leave. He might be expected to live 2 or 3 more days.
Dad had been living in an assisted living facility for 3 years since my Mom had to enter a nursing home because of dementia. Mom passed two years ago in January of 2008. Dad took it hard after 68 years of marriage and spending the previous 8 years being her primary caregiver. His health has been declining since then. After a year, he had to give up driving. In June of 2009 he suffered a stroke, which caused his speech to slur. However, Dad recovered enough from the stroke so that he could return to his assisted living apartment.
In September, however, he had another stroke, and once again he returned to his apartment. After that, my two oldest brothers flew in to spend a week with him. I planned to drive my family out there to spend Thanksgiving with him. I called him before my trip, and it sounded as if he knew the inevitable was coming.
"It seems that you kids have been discussing my demise," he said.
"We're worried about you."
"Well, I'm ready to join your mother in heaven."
That gave me pause. Normally, I would have tried to cheer him up, or change the subject, or tell him he wasn't going to die. Fortunately, I realized that would have been the result of my own discomfort and unwillingness to accept the reality of the situation and would have been even kind of demeaning to him. Before my Mom died, the dementia had made it impossible to have such a conversation with her. So I took a breath and it came to me what to say:
"I will miss you," I said.
"You know," he said. "Every time I walk into my apartment and see that picture of my parents, it still brings tears to my eyes. I still miss them."
His father died 46 years ago, in 1964 and his mother in 1970, when I was 15. He had just given me a valuable lesson. Grief and loss stay with us forever. It is a part of life. You acknowledge the feelings, you integrate them into your character, and you continue to live life to its fullest.
I asked him to forgive me for any hurt I might have caused him over the years.
"Oh, that's all part of being in a family, he said. "We both forgive each other, I'm sure."
When my mother died, I did not rush back quickly enough to arrive before she passed and I regretted that. This time, I vowed not to let that happen, so I immediately got online and booked a flight for my daughter, Simone, and me for the next day. My wife and other daughter could not leave that day and we agreed they would come for the funeral.
After we arrived on Sunday, we drove right to the hospital. The doctors had initially designated "comfort care" for Dad, which meant no food or liquids and basically to let nature take its course. My niece and nephew had driven up from Bloomington and my brother, his wife, and his son were there as well. Dad lay in bed. He looked terrible. He didn't have his dentures in and I barely recognized him. He did have a IV in his arm, and his condition had been upgraded to "do not resuscitate." My brother woke him up and Dad recognized me and Simone. We talked to him briefly and he fell asleep.
The next day, talking to doctors and nurses, we learned it appeared the bleeding in the brain had stopped and the were going to start Dad on Occupational and Physical Therapy with the goal of returning him to his assisted living facility. Of course, we were gladdened but we felt we had just gone through an emotional wringer. We had come anticipating the worse and now learned he had a reprieve.
My oldest brother had arrived the same day we had, and my second oldest arrived on Monday. My sister had been to see him with her husband earlier in January. We called her and Dad's spirits were buoyed. Every day, Dad got stronger and stronger. He was able to sit up, and use a stroller to get to a chair one day. The next day, he was able to walk with the stroller around the ward. Eventually, they started him on pureed foods and he started to look less gaunt.
Dad appeared to have had a miraculous turnaround. Throughout the poking and prodding and moving him around, he remained happy. He loved having his children around. When he was awake, he joked and watching him interact with the nurses was to watch countless acts of kindness and grace. He was teaching us how to be loving and how to live.
By Wednesday, he was released from the hospital and went back to the rehabilitative care ward connected to his assisted living center. We anguished a bit. Would he be able to return to his assisted living facility. If not, would insurance cover the costs of the rehabilitative care or use up all his savings? Would he have to be moved to the wing where my mother died and just spend his last days waiting? And if could regain the ability to take care of himself, we worried the same thing would happen again. Our family talked about these things over long meals, while reminiscing about our childhoods and telling stories about Mom and Dad. Our time together was bringing us closer. Being able to talk about these things with people I've known my entire life felt very comforting.
On Thursday, when Simone and I arrived to visit him, my older brother, who had arrived before us related something my dad had said earlier. "He said he felt worthless. That he was a bother to all of us. Then he said that tonight was going to be the night that he died." Later that day, his doctor visited. We went over the CAT scans with him to review the areas where he bled and to discuss his prognosis. He said that Dad had fallen after fainting, either because of low blood pressure or a skipped heart beat. When we related what my dad had said about passing, the doctor said, he took it very seriously when older people say things like that.
"For some reason that science can't explain, they seem to know when the hour is upon them. Your Dad has his Christian faith, which for him means he knows he is going to join your mother in heaven, which is a great comfort to him. That is a great blessing. Even if he doesn't pass tonight, fortunately, he is awake and alert and not like a good number of the people who live here."
That night we all slept fitfully, expecting to receive a call from the home telling us to come quickly. On Friday morning, when we arrived, he was sitting up, chatting and made no mention of his earlier premonition. We accompanied Dad to occupational therapy and marveled at how dextrous and coordinated he was after what he had just been through. He was present and took every new task as it came and gave it his full attention. He was living in an appreciated every moment. More lessons for us.
My second oldest brother had to leave on Saturday, so we decided to celebrate Dad's 95th birthday on Friday night instead of the actual day, Sunday. We brought in cakes and ice cream and sang happy birthday. He beamed as his great granddaughter, just 9 months old, cruised around and sat on his lap.
Simone and I were scheduled to leave on Sunday morning. Before our flight, we drove down to see Dad one last time--for his birthday and to say goodbye. He was fully dressed, having gotten up for breakfast, but lay asleep in his bed. We woke him to say goodbye, but he soon fell asleep. We left him to sleep, both feeling very blessed to have been able to spend this week with and learn from him.
Today, I picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and found the following verse, which seemed so relevant.
(Verse 50 of the Tao Te Ching)
"The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and he has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn't think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day's work."
Dad had been living in an assisted living facility for 3 years since my Mom had to enter a nursing home because of dementia. Mom passed two years ago in January of 2008. Dad took it hard after 68 years of marriage and spending the previous 8 years being her primary caregiver. His health has been declining since then. After a year, he had to give up driving. In June of 2009 he suffered a stroke, which caused his speech to slur. However, Dad recovered enough from the stroke so that he could return to his assisted living apartment.
In September, however, he had another stroke, and once again he returned to his apartment. After that, my two oldest brothers flew in to spend a week with him. I planned to drive my family out there to spend Thanksgiving with him. I called him before my trip, and it sounded as if he knew the inevitable was coming.
"It seems that you kids have been discussing my demise," he said.
"We're worried about you."
"Well, I'm ready to join your mother in heaven."
That gave me pause. Normally, I would have tried to cheer him up, or change the subject, or tell him he wasn't going to die. Fortunately, I realized that would have been the result of my own discomfort and unwillingness to accept the reality of the situation and would have been even kind of demeaning to him. Before my Mom died, the dementia had made it impossible to have such a conversation with her. So I took a breath and it came to me what to say:
"I will miss you," I said.
"You know," he said. "Every time I walk into my apartment and see that picture of my parents, it still brings tears to my eyes. I still miss them."
His father died 46 years ago, in 1964 and his mother in 1970, when I was 15. He had just given me a valuable lesson. Grief and loss stay with us forever. It is a part of life. You acknowledge the feelings, you integrate them into your character, and you continue to live life to its fullest.
I asked him to forgive me for any hurt I might have caused him over the years.
"Oh, that's all part of being in a family, he said. "We both forgive each other, I'm sure."
When my mother died, I did not rush back quickly enough to arrive before she passed and I regretted that. This time, I vowed not to let that happen, so I immediately got online and booked a flight for my daughter, Simone, and me for the next day. My wife and other daughter could not leave that day and we agreed they would come for the funeral.
After we arrived on Sunday, we drove right to the hospital. The doctors had initially designated "comfort care" for Dad, which meant no food or liquids and basically to let nature take its course. My niece and nephew had driven up from Bloomington and my brother, his wife, and his son were there as well. Dad lay in bed. He looked terrible. He didn't have his dentures in and I barely recognized him. He did have a IV in his arm, and his condition had been upgraded to "do not resuscitate." My brother woke him up and Dad recognized me and Simone. We talked to him briefly and he fell asleep.
The next day, talking to doctors and nurses, we learned it appeared the bleeding in the brain had stopped and the were going to start Dad on Occupational and Physical Therapy with the goal of returning him to his assisted living facility. Of course, we were gladdened but we felt we had just gone through an emotional wringer. We had come anticipating the worse and now learned he had a reprieve.
My oldest brother had arrived the same day we had, and my second oldest arrived on Monday. My sister had been to see him with her husband earlier in January. We called her and Dad's spirits were buoyed. Every day, Dad got stronger and stronger. He was able to sit up, and use a stroller to get to a chair one day. The next day, he was able to walk with the stroller around the ward. Eventually, they started him on pureed foods and he started to look less gaunt.
Dad appeared to have had a miraculous turnaround. Throughout the poking and prodding and moving him around, he remained happy. He loved having his children around. When he was awake, he joked and watching him interact with the nurses was to watch countless acts of kindness and grace. He was teaching us how to be loving and how to live.
By Wednesday, he was released from the hospital and went back to the rehabilitative care ward connected to his assisted living center. We anguished a bit. Would he be able to return to his assisted living facility. If not, would insurance cover the costs of the rehabilitative care or use up all his savings? Would he have to be moved to the wing where my mother died and just spend his last days waiting? And if could regain the ability to take care of himself, we worried the same thing would happen again. Our family talked about these things over long meals, while reminiscing about our childhoods and telling stories about Mom and Dad. Our time together was bringing us closer. Being able to talk about these things with people I've known my entire life felt very comforting.
On Thursday, when Simone and I arrived to visit him, my older brother, who had arrived before us related something my dad had said earlier. "He said he felt worthless. That he was a bother to all of us. Then he said that tonight was going to be the night that he died." Later that day, his doctor visited. We went over the CAT scans with him to review the areas where he bled and to discuss his prognosis. He said that Dad had fallen after fainting, either because of low blood pressure or a skipped heart beat. When we related what my dad had said about passing, the doctor said, he took it very seriously when older people say things like that.
"For some reason that science can't explain, they seem to know when the hour is upon them. Your Dad has his Christian faith, which for him means he knows he is going to join your mother in heaven, which is a great comfort to him. That is a great blessing. Even if he doesn't pass tonight, fortunately, he is awake and alert and not like a good number of the people who live here."
That night we all slept fitfully, expecting to receive a call from the home telling us to come quickly. On Friday morning, when we arrived, he was sitting up, chatting and made no mention of his earlier premonition. We accompanied Dad to occupational therapy and marveled at how dextrous and coordinated he was after what he had just been through. He was present and took every new task as it came and gave it his full attention. He was living in an appreciated every moment. More lessons for us.
My second oldest brother had to leave on Saturday, so we decided to celebrate Dad's 95th birthday on Friday night instead of the actual day, Sunday. We brought in cakes and ice cream and sang happy birthday. He beamed as his great granddaughter, just 9 months old, cruised around and sat on his lap.
Simone and I were scheduled to leave on Sunday morning. Before our flight, we drove down to see Dad one last time--for his birthday and to say goodbye. He was fully dressed, having gotten up for breakfast, but lay asleep in his bed. We woke him to say goodbye, but he soon fell asleep. We left him to sleep, both feeling very blessed to have been able to spend this week with and learn from him.
Today, I picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and found the following verse, which seemed so relevant.
(Verse 50 of the Tao Te Ching)
"The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and he has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn't think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day's work."
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Children and Imaginary Friends.
I wrote this piece about 14 years ago, when my daughter was about 9 when I was just starting Tai Chi. She's 23 now. Her mom and I have since divorced, but we remain friends.
DOG EATING LIZARDS
“Idiot. Stupid dog!” The words pierced the veil of my unconscious and I bolted upright in bed. My daughter, age 9, was cursing at our dog.
“What is it Claire?” my wife and I yelled running into her room, hearts pounding.
“Freckles got into the bog terrarium and got mud everywhere in my room.” Freckles cowered in the corner. “Then she attacked my lizard collection and chewed the legs of my tuatara!” “Bad dog.!” Claire shouted at her.
For those of you wondering, a tuatara is a very primitive lizard from New Zealand. It is the closest living relative to the dinosaurs. And Freckles is the dog we recently adopted from an animal rescue organization. Her wiry hair indicates part fox, part Jack Russell terrier, but her short squat legs recalls a Basset. Like all terriers, she loves to chew and for the third time in our marriage, my wife and I found ourselves child-proofing the house for small items left lying on the floor or on low tables that could easily end up in an immature digestive tract or, worse, chewed to pieces.
The night before, Claire had shown a friend her science project, a bog terrarium she’d made last year by scooping up mud and moss and ferns from a local wetland. She’d left it on the floor. Claire had also had taken out every specimen from her rubber lizard collection, which consists of 40 odd lizards ranging in size from one to 18 inches. She’d them on the floor, too.
My wife and I stared at the carnage in Claire’s room. The carpet was smudged in at least a dozen places with the bog mud. Mixed in with the mud were the roots of the ferns. Plastic and rubber lizard and amphibian parts lay strewn about amidst the mud. Here there was a tadpole tale. There, the claw of an iguana. Freckles had single-handedly (single-pawedly?) made Claire’s room look like a Louisiana bayou roadkill.
In her book, Bonnie Bergin’s Guide to Bringing Out the Best In Your Dog, the author states that human and dogs can feel happiness, sadness, anger love and joy. Where we bipeds and our canine kin diverge is our ability to think about the past and the future. It makes no sense, therefore, to call a dog over long after having done something bad and punish it. The animal will feel it’s being punished for coming (since it won’t remember the past event) and you just end up training it not to come.
Still, I think I speak for all of us when I say we all wanted to kill Freckles.
My wife offered to get a bucket and start cleaning up the mud. I decided just to run out too the local mega-hardware store and rent a carpet cleaner. When I returned an hour later, I heard a strange noise coming from Claire’s room. I listened. It was the sound of Scotch tape being pulled off a roll.
“Claire,” I asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m putting bandages on Hot Dog.”
“Who?” I asked entering her room.
“The lizard Freckles chewed. Look.”
She sat on her bed. Next to her, she had placed a green cushion from the living room sofa. On the cushion, she had spread a paper towel. Her rubber lizard lay on top of the towel. Claire had carefully shred and folded pieces of toilet paper into small pads which she taped around each of the three stubs of the missing limbs of the lizard. She had gotten some red food coloring and squeezed big drops of it onto the bandages. The effect was quite realistic and grisly, to say the least. She stroked the lizard’s head and cooed words of consolation to it.
I have wondered if her preoccupation with her lizards is completely healthy. She has given names to each lizard—names like Taco, Hot Dog, Hamburger, Cappuccino and Tiger. She’s fussed and fumed when I, finding them lying about the house, have picked one up and thrown it into her room. “Dad,” she yells. “How would you like it if someone bigger than you picked you up and threw you into your room. You could have hurt her.”
At times like that, I wonder whether a typical 9 year old should still personify inanimate objects. What would the great child experts say? Of imaginary friends, Spock says:
“...if he is spending a good part of each day telling about imaginary friends or adventures, not as a game but as if he believes in them, it raises the question whether his real life is satisfying enough...If children are living largely in the imagination and not adjusting well with other children, especially by the age of 4, a psychiatrist should be able to find out what they are lacking.” (Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 1985)
Of symbolic play, Piaget says, not limiting himself to any age range:
“It is indispensable to his affective and intellectual equilibrium therefore that he have available to him an area of activity whose motivation is not adaptation to reality but, on the contrary, assimilation of reality to the self, without coercions or sanctions. Such an area is play, which transforms reality by assimilation to the needs of the self, whereas imitation (when it constitutes and end in itself) is accommodation to external models. Intelligence constitutes an equilibration between assimilation and accommodation.” (The Psychology of the Child, 1966).
If I listen to Spock, my Claire needs counseling. If I read Piaget correctly (no easy manner as the quote above illustrates) Claire’s fantasy play helps her negotiate reality as she recreates her own that corresponds to the outside world.
What strikes me odd in Claire’s case is that long ago she decided she was a tom boy. When she did, she rejected, with extreme disdain, even contempt, all her Barbie dolls. But as this incident shows, she treats her lizards as if they are real, living, sentient beings.
My wife later told me that one time, she overheard Claire carrying on a conversation with two of her lizards. It involved some conflict the two of them were having. It was obvious that Claire was working through some conflict she was having with another child at school. My wife pointed out that often child psychologists use puppets in a similar way to get children to talk about events and feelings.
Like everything that happens to my daughters, this incident triggered intense memories. At the age of 6 or 7, I received two plastic 1950’s space men. Shortly thereafter, my best friend in first grade, Jerry Morton, moved away. His father, a Methodist minister, was transferred to another town. I was devastated by the loss and remember pretending that the silver space man was me and the green one was my friend. The green man was telling the silver that he was leaving and said goodbye. The silver man began to cry and begged him not to go.
Later, in the 7th grade, a turbulent year form me—a new school and what seemed like older, meaner teachers—I invented an invisible pet zebra, named Herman. I knew he really wasn’t there but acted as if he were. I would talk to Herman in front of other kids and try to convince them that he did exist. What I do remember is wishing I had someone real, like Herman, who I could talk to.
I feel proud that Claire already knows how to heal herself. But I also feel proud that she also is practicing caring for others. Her ideal jobs, she’s told me, sums up her wholeness and sense of balance: she wants to be a doctor, a musician, and an artist. Helping others; creating works of beauty for herself; interpreting works of beauty for others.
What more could a parent ask for?
.PS: I raised two children who were 3 years apart. Can you imagine raising Quads? Check out this family's blog: http://www.murraycrew.blogspot.com/
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Wind and the Way Home
One may follow the Way like a main road,
Fearing only to leave it;
Following a main road is easy,
Yet people delight in difficult paths.
(Tao Te Ching, verse 53)
It has been a cold and windy week here in Washington, DC. My apartment supposedly has thermal windows, but the wind has been howling through them all week. That sound disturbs me.
It disturbs me because of what happened on Palm Sunday, in 1965 when I was ten years old. That day, my father drove my mom, my brother, Ken, my sister Joan, and me from our home town of Mishawaka, Indiana to West Layfayette, where my two older brothers, Al jr. and Bob, were studying at Purdue University. It was unseasonably warm, and puffy, cottony clouds hung in the blue sky.
On our return, the sky began to darken. About 20 miles south of the town of La Paz, my dad told us to look, because there was a tornado. We kids in the back seat looked forward and were stupefied by what we saw. Above the horizon, the sky was divided into a white and a black band. The black band was a layer of low-lying clouds that formed a sharp squall line. On the underside of those clouds, three funnel clouds had formed. We watched as the middle one grew larger and descended all the way to the ground, and then the two smaller one merged into the larger one.
The tornado moved slowly from West to East, crossing the road severals mile ahead of us. In my mind's eye, now nearly 45 years later, I can see it hitting barns and watching them explode. It was god-awful, and we were amazed that my father didn't slow down the car to stop. Instead he continued driving straight for it. He was a volunteer fireman, and of course he wanted to get to the scene to see if he could help. We switched on the radio, and emergency weather announcements said that many tornados had been spotted.
We watched the tornado as it continued along its inexorable path, eventually going out of site. I found a map of the tornado's route. This map shows the path of the tornado that destroyed La Paz, which started in Hamlet and travelled all the way to Dunlap, just south of Elkhart. Some websites say it was a category F3 and others say it was F4, with maximum wind speeds between 207 and 260 miles per hours.
In the town of La Paz, an overpass takes the road above a set of railroad tracks. At the bottom of the overpass, a sheriff had parked his car in the middle of the road to block traffic. My father pulled up and rolled down the window to ask what the matter was.
"We've closed the road."
"Is it passable?" my dad asked.
"Yes, but you don't want to drive it. There are people smashed in cars. You don't want the kids to see that."
"How are we going to get home."
"You'll just have to wait, or find a place to stay."
My Dad rolled the window back up and said something like "forget that." He turned the car around and when he got out of sight of the trooper, he turned down a side street that lead out of town towards the East. Mom asked him what he was doing. Dad said we had to get back for work and school on Monday, so he was going to have to take back roads home.
"It's crazy," Dad said. "If he had let me go straight up route 31, we'd be home in less than an hour."
And that started what for me was the worst part of the trip. We continued to listen to the radio. They broadcast reports of additional sightings of new tornados. Many times my father would exclaim "that's where we are right now," and we would look out the windows frantically, expecting a funnel cloud to descend on us and carry us away. My brother ken, who was three years older than me and well-read on disasters, would chime in from time to time with some fact about tornados.
"Did you know," Ken asked, "that the winds in a tornado are so strong that they can take a piece of straw and embed it into a bark of a tree without bending it" Later, he told us the story of how, during a tornado, some farmer was running with his son in his arms to safety, when the winds from a tornado peeled off a piece of corrugated steel from the roof of a shed, carried it through the air and brought it down between the arms of the farmer, slicing his son in two.
I was so scared by this point, that I crawled into the back of our Studebaker station wagon, and pulled a blanket over my head. We were goners, I was sure, and my Dad was taking hours to get home.
We passed barns that had been reduced to a pile of kindling and houses that had been broken in two. They looked like doll houses with the furniture intact in each of the rooms on each floor.
After what seemed like an eternity, the rain started and with it hail as big as peas. By this time, we had fallen into a caravan of cars who were inching along the back roads. We were not far from my Uncle Earl's house and about 15 miles from our own home. The lead car turned into the parking lot of a large, brick school that was near an intersection where some friends of my parents lived. Dad followed the suit. The lead driver dashed from his car and tried to open the door of the school. It was locked. He picked up a rock and smashed the window and opened the door. He turned to give a signal and all of us jumped out of our cars and dashed through the rain and hail into the school. We found our way to the basement and huddled there for a while. Eventually, the rain stopped and when we emerged from the school, the squall line had moved on to the East and the sun was shining again as it started to set in the West.
We went home. The next day, the President declared Indiana a national disaster area. We heard from my grandmother that Uncle Earl's house had been spared as the tornado had slid behind his house narrowly missing his barn. Unfortunately, his brother, Carl, who lived across the road, had not been so lucky, and the tornado had hit his house squarely, killing him.
The pictures of the devastation in the newspapers were stunning. Here are two pictures of the tornado Pic1 and Pic2 and an aerial shot of the devastation of La Paz. According to reports, 31 people died in La Paz and 252 were injured. In the state, 138 died and over 1200 were injured. The outbreak of tornados that day also hit Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, killing a total of 261 people.
It turns out the sheriff had not been overly alarmist in wanting to shield us kids from the destruction. Here's a picture of a car that was smashed by a tornado.
My father will be 95 years old next month and we had to take away his car in 2008 because he was starting to get confused and we feared he'd get lost or put himself or someone else at risk. He had always been a good driver with an amazing sense of direction. I now know he earned that reputation, because of what happened that Palm Sunday. He was able to get us home safely by taking back roads that he'd never been on before. That journey bonded my family together, and every time I return to Indiana to visit Dad I end up driving past the school where we hid.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Resting and Clearning
"Who can make muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. Who can secure the condition of rest? Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise." (Tao Te Ching)
One of my goals for 2010 is to deepen my understanding of the philosophy behind Tai Chi. This is to help me become a better teacher of Tai Chi Chuan, of course, but it is also to help with my own personal development. This morning, my wife and I threw the oracle coins to do an I Ching reading. For more on what the I Ching is, click here to read the Wikipedia entry. Basically, it is one of the oldest texts that forms the basis of Taoist philosophy, in which Tai Chi Chuan has its roots. My coins resulted in the hexagram 29, "mastering pitfalls," with a moving line in the second position that results in an 8, "accord." I was surprised because their meanings seemed to mesh with my goal of personal development.
For many years, I have struggled with managing anger effectively. You name it, I've tried it: meditation, medication, yoga, swimming, deep breathing, and a host of other activities to try to reduce stress and make me a nicer person. I can, but won't, recount how I learned to express anger unhealthily. Suffice it to say that knowing the root cause didn't solve the problem, it only exacerbated it. Feeling victimized, powerless and resentful gave me the legitimacy to "dump" my anger on other people.
When writing down my goals for 2010, however, I saw how my anger was poisoning my relationships. And for the first time in my life, I had clarity around my anger. Perhaps it came from a line in one of the goal setting books I was reading. It basically said, "you are living the life that you have created or imagined. If you change how you think about your life, it will actually change what things will happen in your life." This is not so much different from what cognitive behavioral psychology or the new positive psychology movement tells us.
However, for some reason today it clicked. I realized that when I felt angry or put upon by someone, it was not because of what they were "doing to me," it was because I was projecting my unhappiness onto them. Moreover, I was seeing myself as an unhappy person. Believing my thoughts--that I was an unhappy person--would make me angry, and that would lead me to react in a negative way in my relationships. My personal development goals for 2010, especially around relationships, is to develop the talents and skills that I have (and do more of them) so I feel less angry and then stop blaming people around me for my unhappiness. It is about taking responsibility and being accountable for my own feelings and actions.
In this morning's I Ching reading, Hexagram 28, "mastering pitfalls," seems especially apt. Now that I know what my pitfalls are around anger, I can go about overcoming them. Doing that internal work will allow me to improve my relationship with others. I can't be an effective Tai Chi Chuan teacher if I haven't mastered the form and understood the philosophy behind it. As I improve myself, it will improve my relationships with others and result in the "accord" of Hexagram 8.
I like the quotes at the beginning from the Tao Te Ching. You can't force clarity. You have to be still and meditate and practice improving yourself. Only then will the natural forces be allowed to operate and we will understand.
How many people have written about having revelations, finding the answer to a problem, or coming up with a great idea only after they stopped thinking about it and let their mind work it out on its own? These people have done the ground work and been self-disciplined enough to study the problem, but the "aha" moment comes when they got out of the way. We need to balance the inward with the outward. We need to live in harmony with nature. When we impose our wills too much or make others the excuse for justifying our own behavior, well, we end up with a world like we're living in right now: terrorism, global warming, pollution, poverty, ignorance and needless suffering.
Tai Chi Chuan is an inward, soft martial art with a strong meditative component. It is all about bettering oneself and beginning a dialogue with one's body. It will lead us to find peace within ourselves, which is the only way we will ever find peace with those around us.
One of my goals for 2010 is to deepen my understanding of the philosophy behind Tai Chi. This is to help me become a better teacher of Tai Chi Chuan, of course, but it is also to help with my own personal development. This morning, my wife and I threw the oracle coins to do an I Ching reading. For more on what the I Ching is, click here to read the Wikipedia entry. Basically, it is one of the oldest texts that forms the basis of Taoist philosophy, in which Tai Chi Chuan has its roots. My coins resulted in the hexagram 29, "mastering pitfalls," with a moving line in the second position that results in an 8, "accord." I was surprised because their meanings seemed to mesh with my goal of personal development.
For many years, I have struggled with managing anger effectively. You name it, I've tried it: meditation, medication, yoga, swimming, deep breathing, and a host of other activities to try to reduce stress and make me a nicer person. I can, but won't, recount how I learned to express anger unhealthily. Suffice it to say that knowing the root cause didn't solve the problem, it only exacerbated it. Feeling victimized, powerless and resentful gave me the legitimacy to "dump" my anger on other people.
When writing down my goals for 2010, however, I saw how my anger was poisoning my relationships. And for the first time in my life, I had clarity around my anger. Perhaps it came from a line in one of the goal setting books I was reading. It basically said, "you are living the life that you have created or imagined. If you change how you think about your life, it will actually change what things will happen in your life." This is not so much different from what cognitive behavioral psychology or the new positive psychology movement tells us.
However, for some reason today it clicked. I realized that when I felt angry or put upon by someone, it was not because of what they were "doing to me," it was because I was projecting my unhappiness onto them. Moreover, I was seeing myself as an unhappy person. Believing my thoughts--that I was an unhappy person--would make me angry, and that would lead me to react in a negative way in my relationships. My personal development goals for 2010, especially around relationships, is to develop the talents and skills that I have (and do more of them) so I feel less angry and then stop blaming people around me for my unhappiness. It is about taking responsibility and being accountable for my own feelings and actions.
In this morning's I Ching reading, Hexagram 28, "mastering pitfalls," seems especially apt. Now that I know what my pitfalls are around anger, I can go about overcoming them. Doing that internal work will allow me to improve my relationship with others. I can't be an effective Tai Chi Chuan teacher if I haven't mastered the form and understood the philosophy behind it. As I improve myself, it will improve my relationships with others and result in the "accord" of Hexagram 8.
I like the quotes at the beginning from the Tao Te Ching. You can't force clarity. You have to be still and meditate and practice improving yourself. Only then will the natural forces be allowed to operate and we will understand.
How many people have written about having revelations, finding the answer to a problem, or coming up with a great idea only after they stopped thinking about it and let their mind work it out on its own? These people have done the ground work and been self-disciplined enough to study the problem, but the "aha" moment comes when they got out of the way. We need to balance the inward with the outward. We need to live in harmony with nature. When we impose our wills too much or make others the excuse for justifying our own behavior, well, we end up with a world like we're living in right now: terrorism, global warming, pollution, poverty, ignorance and needless suffering.
Tai Chi Chuan is an inward, soft martial art with a strong meditative component. It is all about bettering oneself and beginning a dialogue with one's body. It will lead us to find peace within ourselves, which is the only way we will ever find peace with those around us.
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