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As it turns out, I’m finding it’s not a “problem,” nor even a distinction.

I’ve been sick all week, with the symptoms getting worse and worse. Usually there’s an uptick by now, but it doesn’t seem to be kicking in. Bleh.

Okay, so one interesting thing: I am gauging my condition via how my mind feels as well as how my body feels. You know, like it’s ONE system.

I was brought up hearing “listen to your body.” This always baffled me, because my mind has always been a LOT louder than my body. That was my karma (habit). How in the world could I make my mind quiet down so I could hear my body? How could I be convinced it was my body talking and not my mind pretending to be my body? Gah!

I took up lots of physical practices to try to sort this all out: zazen, weightlifting, tai kwan do, climbing. Note a progression here? Yes, the “sport” got progressively more scary. It had occurred to me that the only way to circumvent my loud mind was to scare myself enough that my mind couldn’t fool me. If I could freeze my mind, I’d see what my body did on its own. Climbing was definitely the apex of my scare-yourself-until-you-can’t-think experiment.

But I don’t think that experiment worked, at least not the way I intended. I didn’t manage to turn off my mind, as distinct from my body. All that happened over 100 feet was that my mind didn’t noodle around with extraneous things. So my mind never shut up or went away. But what I did get was an opportunity to pay lots of attention to my system (body and mind) under different stressors. At least 10,000 hours, I’m sure.

So now Ashtanga is in the picture. The zen practice has had time to kick in. And I am sick as a dog.

What’s interesting is that I can feel “how I am” in the moment as a MUCH more integrated system. This integration is super-obvious at work (and yes, I do think of work as a sport and as a practice), where my body has to be still so my mind can see what’s going on in different situations. Kind of like zazen, where it’s really cool if the body can kind of pipe down and the mind can get really light. But it’s not a denial or disappearance of the body, so much as a coordination of body-mind. A specific configuration that doesn’t blot one out while favoring the other.

***

What got me thinking about this is a story on a friend’s blog, about a yoga newbie who was watching him do dropbacks. She watched carefully, then arched back further and further until she dropped back (one-handed, no less!).

Reminds me of my climbing buddies. Advanced climbers, natural athletes. Ex-gymnasts and martial artists. I say mind/body, they say body/mind. They definitely were super-gracious to lay out the path for me. All I had to do was exert myself and not allow my mind to freak out and doom everybody else.

In my next incarnation, I would like to be a body/mind person.

***

I went into work for one meeting yesterday, and it was utterly fascinating. Every single person I spoke with (and these are people outside my department, who did not realize I’d been out sick or that there was anything unusual about my state) reached out at some point and touched me on my shoulder.

I’m seen as a friendly, warm person at work, but I am not seen as a “touchy” person, so this touching was very unusual. I assume people were just subconsciously aware of my system being weakened, and they reached out to share some energy. (Oh my, I can totally see The Cop rolling his eyes when he reads this post!)

Check out your blog’s personality type at Typealyzer.

Is this lame? I don’t care. I’m sick. About all I’m good for is entering my URL into a text field and clicking “Typealyze.”

Here’re my results:

ISTP – The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as driving race cars or working as marrying policemen.

Last night I dreamt I was in urdhva dhanurasana and walked my hands in until I touched my feet. It was nice. The end.

LOL!

Okay, it’s… um, 3.5 years into practice and I am losing the inclination to pine for poses. Is this why people quit around kapotasana? Because the pining, driven feeling diminishes and it’s confusing and you figure it means you’ve lost interest?

Luckily, I’ve had lots of practice carrying on with projects regardless my immediate feelings about them. The project of raising My Gift, certainly. I always loved her, but the day-to-day (and minute-by-minute!) requirements and logistics and ups and downs, etc., etc., etc., taught me to carry on regardless whether it seemed possible to carry on. [Moment of single-Mom self-pity. Okay, that's done!]

Writing, same deal. I focused on it as a daily practice (i.e., was madly driven) for a good 10 years. Pined to publish. Published. Was happy. Published more. Was happy some more. Realized I was just going to keep writing, regardless publishing or happiness. All my worries, all my ups and downs over progress and publishing? Uh, yeah, didn’t make anything happen or not happen any more quickly or slowly.

It’s all about the means, not the end. I’ve learned that lesson over and over in a variety of situations. Good karma, I think — it’s a very pleasant, freeing lesson.

Alrighty, so I keep practicing. And I’ll use the vow I used for writing and zen practice: In 20 years, I’ll take a moment to consider whether it was worth it.

That seems reasonable.

***

I’ve not practiced since Sunday. Have a pretty awful cold. Used the usual gym rat rule for exercising while sick: once it goes lower than your throat or gives you a fever, you knock off (i.e., okay to practice with head cold or headache or sore throat, but not with a chest cold or cough).

Woke this morning and lay in bed, feeling like a log. My brain has been cut off from my body! LOL! Seriously, that’s what it feels like. Like my body is opaque to my mind. Like on “Heroes” when the Haitian is around and the mind readers can’t read other people’s minds.

Yeah, I’ve been watching “Heroes” too much.

***

One hilarious thought when I signed up for Matthew Sweeney’s workshop in July. “What if I’m still not dropping back?” (said in horrified tone). Because, you know, he’s been travelling the world teaching hundreds and hundreds of people, and in July he’s gonna travel to Minnesota and single me out to say, “Really, Karen? You still haven’t figured this out?”

If today wasn’t a moon day, I’d repeat my experiment with the binaural track before I said anything about it. But moon day it is, so my report will be based on just one use.

What did I find? Well, I guess a little context is in order: I am on the waning side of a deep, easy yoga phase. I imagine this happens to everyone — phases where asana feels very clear and easily accessible? They come and go for me — generally practice is comfortable, so I can’t complain, but the deep phases are particularly marvelous.

For the past week or so, that easy accessiblity (where I just lock into tristhana automatically as soon as I raise my arms for the first surya) is diminishing. Not too sad — I know it’ll be back. But it makes for a good time to experiment with the binaural track.

So what did the track do? Well, it seemed to help me wipe my mind clear really easily. If something about an asana wasn’t what I wished, I just went on. When something went really well, it didn’t cause much internal celebration. I felt like I was experiencing everything, but not “sticking” to any of the particulars of the experience.

I know this idea makes non-Buddhists nervous. What, no highs or lows? No vividness to life? No desires? Whatever. I’ve had my fill of vata sensibility: flying off into fits of inspiration, getting jangly with too much energy, rebounding into judgment and loud inner monolog, etc., etc., etc. Sure, those things still happen, but to a much less intense degree. And I’m happy for the smoothing out, which I definitely attribute to practice, both zazen and Ashtanga. You know what feels really freaking good? Peace. Stillness. Presence. We are enculturated to desire thrills and joy and drama and all kinds of emotional acquisitions. Sheesh. Who made that decision?

So binaural practice was… meditative. Just as promised on the package (6 Hz for theta waves & meditation).

***

Well, Matthew Sweeney starts his half-year of continuous world travel (seriously, look at this schedule!) in March. And he will be in Minneapolis July 10-16. As will I! Woohoo! I’d been mulling over the idea of going for a while (would it be too repetitive? should I go somewhere else? would it be better to experience a different teacher?), but when I got a note from Gracious Yogini, who lives in MN, that 9 of the 15 Mysore spots were already spoken for, I decided to go for it.

***

I can’t read on planes, trains, or in cars. For my recent flights to and from DC, I entertained myself with TV shows on my iPhone. At My Gift’s suggestion, I watched the first few episodes of Heroes. And was instantly hooked.

The Cop laughed and noted that I am now an iPhone addict — I watch TV shows on it, and read books via ereader in bed at night.

Remember those big huge “entertainment centers” people fell in love with in the… was it the 80s? the 90s? Anyhow, the entertainment center is now handheld, which amuses me no end.

Okay, so I’m a problem-solver and tool afficionado. This week’s challenge was a three-day meeting (yes, all day, every day!) with a global consultant. I told The Cop at the end of the ordeal, I mean, meeting, that practice really reveals itself most clearly in challenging situations. In this case, I was able to sustain my focus quite effectively for three 10-hour days.

There was a bit of a lull during the couple of hours we discussed rules around VAT (value added tax) in Europe, but the lull felt more like a little bit of relaxing, rather than exhaustion or boredom. And there was a bit of hyper-focus when we talked about IP strategy, because that’s the kind of thing that really captures my imagination. But the point is, my attention was on and my mind was processing well for three very long stretches.

This is good news because I generally do so many things in the course of a day, that I wonder if I still possess the ability to train my attention on a single problem in any kind of sustained manner.

So after the three-day meeting, I felt kind of crispy around the edges. I’d spent so much time in the high end of the beta state that it was hard to kick back into alpha. Well, until I found BrainHack for my iPhone.

BrainHack is a little app that offers binaural beats that can be used to entrain the brain. (The concept is that if one receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency moves toward the frequency of the stimulus — a process called entrainment.) This is one of those things that cause me to feel two things equally strongly at once: 1) crazy hippie stuff! and 2) there seems to be some good research backing this up.

When the perceived beat frequency corresponds to the delta, theta, alpha, beta, or gamma range of brainwave frequencies, the brainwaves entrain to or move towards the beat frequency. For example, if a 315 Hz sine wave is played into the right ear and a 325 Hz one into the left ear, the brain is entrained towards the beat frequency (10 Hz, in the alpha range). Since alpha range is associated with relaxation, this has a relaxing effect.

>40 Hz Gamma waves = Higher mental activity, including perception, problem solving, fear, and consciousness

13–40 Hz Beta waves = Active, busy or anxious thinking and active concentration, arousal, cognition

7–13 Hz Alpha waves = Relaxation (while awake), pre-sleep and pre-wake drowsiness

4–7 Hz Theta waves = Dreams, deep meditation, REM sleep

<4 Hz Delta waves = Deep dreamless sleep, loss of body awareness

(The precise boundaries between ranges vary among definitions, and there is no universally accepted standard.)

Okay, and the app costs .99. At the very least, it’s a fun experiment.

This morning I’m going to try a 6 Hz theta binaural beat. It sounds like a thunderstorm, which is appropriate, as it’s raining today in the desert.

Malcolm Gladwell‘s new book suggests that proficiency/virtuosity/mastery is something that requires time and effort. 10,000 hours is held up as the quantitative dividing line. Or ten years.

Apparently this applies both to the hockey stick and the violin. (I had an impulse to do some Googling last weekend, and found myself reading and reminiscing about Bobby Orr — best hockey player ever, and if you argue with me about that, it’s because you are too young to have seen him play.)

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast from Buddhist Geeks and someone mentioned the oft-repeated metric for success in zazen. Yes, 10,000 hours or ten years.

And, as always, there’s “the 10,000 things” — representative of individuated reality (“the relative”) as opposed to “the one” — representative of the ground of being, or the empty field (“the absolute”). Now don’t go being all dualist and think these are different. Or the same.

10,000

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

- Eihei Dogen Zenji

Today feels like it’s all about abundance. Tyler in the backyard, lying in the sun, chewing a nylabone. The Cop sleeping in after a week of long shifts, thanks to the FBR and the bad behavior of its attendees.

And me? A nice practice at a leisurely pace, then a new GTD app for the iPhone. I am Pavlovian about my GTD practices at work — closely managed by Outlook mailbox and calendar promptings which are pushed to my iPhone & make a ding every time an email or appointment arrives (I can switch the sound off, and do, when I start getting insane). So I am accustomed to thinking of something, identifying the next step, and documenting it ASAP. Very efficient. Keeps my mind nice and clear. But then there are all those “real life” things. Buy Tyler a new chain collar (26″). Ask My Gift if she followed through with her eye doctor appointment. I don’t want to put stuff like that on the Outlook system. It’s a boundary I am loathe to cross. So I was happy to find Things for my iPhone. Now real life can be as efficient as work. Yes, I say that with irony.

And then eReader for the iPhone. I love accessing books immediately, right from the ether. And since it’s a trial run, I can read something trashy and amusing. Twilight. And have I ever admitted my perverse love of historical novels? I’m rather ashamed to admit it, but a lot of the things I know about the French Revolution, Tudor England and the Black Plague (God, I love a good plague novel!), I’ve learned through historical fiction. (Note to Patrick: I don’t believe there are any historical novels about the Dadaists. May be an interesting niche. Just sayin’)

And last, but not least, a diary app for the iPhone. For practice notes. You thought you got the practice notes on this blog, didn’t you? Well, not so much. I tend to write cryptic little notes-to-self in a notebook I keep in the yoga room. We’ll see if having it in the iPhone is useful.

Happy SuperBowl Sunday to all. I’m not particularly interested in the game, but I like the National Holiday aspect.