3 minute mastery
[Started writing it back in 2016 at some point…]
So, something to consider: is your practice making daily life easier (if you’re into that)? Is your baseline ability rising (what can you do at your lowest point?) Mentally ready to kick ass?
If you only had 3 minutes to train, what would you do?
What is most important… Most effective… Most enjoyable.. How do you choose?
During our session on Friday, while we were loosening up, I asked my student this question. He took about 3 minutes to decide on an answer (I’m so funny). Ultimately he went with some push-up variations with an emphasis on awareness and quality of movement.
He walked me through his decision process:
- Initially, he thought to do a “micro-session”; compressing a typical session; but he decided against that because it’d be rushed.
- He briefly considered stillness/standing postures, or qi kung.
- And finally settled on the push-ups because he could benefit from it in that time, come away with something new or building on something.
At this point I was grinning like the Cheshire cat (or an idiot depending on how adorable one finds me). His reasoning followed what I had hoped/expected for what I had in mind for this educational moment. Firstly by process of elimination, he choose what he could handle and judge as time well spent. Secondly, his reasons for rejecting what is considered highfalutin deep work:
He decided against the stillness/qikung work because the limiting factors that came up were:
- Awareness “critical mass”¹
- Time/intensity needed for a sensation to become observable and to adjust
Awareness:
Most of us don’t walk around constantly being one with the universe/ having your mind where your ass is; we need a bit of foreplay to get there,² a process or algorithm, time mainly.
As such, much like the first pancake of a Sunday morning, the first moments of meditative work is usually an implausible Chimera of burned and raw batter, wrinkled and bunched like week-old laundry.³
We need time to settle ourselves, cast out thoughts of “what will happen in the next season of game of thrones?”, “ do I look cool doing this?”, “did my phone just vibrate?”, “ yeah, I totally look cool doing this”… Get down to the wordless work.
Observation & Change:
In hope of bringing clarity I’ve cleaved awareness, and observation and change in twain. It’s a false paradigm,⁴ because what we observe changes our awareness and our awareness affects what we observe; they are like Batman and the Joker… I digress.
My student talked about how much time is needed for qi-kung and standing postures to notice things. Even though a discomfort will probably be present from early on, it is not intense; below a threshold of observation, noise basically. This is particularly apparent in standing positions where the arms are elevated in some mystical, and hopefully cool, way. In the beginning, a good quality position* is not relevant. The discomfort in, for example, the shoulders and back are little motes of discomfort, some would say a careless whisper… OK, OK. I, I would say a careless whisper. Eventually, these motes start to grow into a big-ass knives repeatedly stabbing you. As the intensity gathers, it’ll eventually pass a threshold that it gets noticed… “OK, this is definitely not comfortable/Owowowow.”
Then one the stimulus (“Owowowow”) becomes large enough we start to adjust and fine-tune to reduce the discomfort.
This approach needs time. In general more than 3 minutes.
It was certainly the belief I held to for a long time. But more and more, I’m questioning that for myself.
Master Chee Kim Thong (or so I’ve been told), Jozef and Linda from Fighting Monkey (it’s actually a fundamental premise in their work) Yuri Marmerstein, Emmet Louis, farmers and manual labourers around the world believe you should be ready to work well without warming up. Hell it’s fundamental tenet of self- defence.
Developing the mentality/body that you need to prepare and work up to taking care of business, means there’s a block in place to bringing your “A game” (or at least B game) at the drop of a hat: Lifting up someone that has fallen, running away from a dog, tumbling and roughhousing with kids — a habit of warming up, needing time to get ready creates a hesitation, a step back “I’m not sure I can do this…”
Variety being the spice of life, long training sessions is essential, but making a few moments meaningful with attention and intention gives one a deal of freedom and flexibility.
Update 2018
Two years later this remains relevant.
And looking at how I’ve developed over the time, as well as my student, how we’d answer the 3 minute question has changed too, as it should. Now he’s gotten to a point where qikung and postures can be fit into 3 minutes.
In general, even in this time our way of training has changed. Re-Reading the description of the standing postures has reminded me of how differently we train that now. We look more at holistic sensations/ structural/ connective, e.g.
- a sense of elastic loading across the back and hips (cultivating the sensation that my body is a bow, from finger to scalp to toe, I’m drawing back the string, and if i released it, something will happen… needs to be covered in an separate post)
- how would i feel if someone pinched me now — indifferent? I should figure out how to be resilient in the position, not hypersensitive
- Or if someone is there, have them push and pull, check and understand how the force is absorbed and transmitted to the ground through the meat and bones: for example:
+++++++
¹Everything sounds cooler when paired with the phrase “critical mass”. Everything… Well… Except for feces, or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or bombs… On the upside: critical mass of puppies.
³My awesome oneness with the universe is demonstrated by my most recent batch of pancakes (buttermilk, stevia and oats in the mix, yum yum) where the first pancake was pristine; indistinguishable from the others
⁴but really, aren’t all paradigms false? Doesn’t the universe keep happening regardless of how we intellectually package the patterns and dynamics around us?
⁵where the head, chest and hips stacked over feet/base, the arms are driven and supported from the torso not held at the shoulders ball and socket, etc.
