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In General
Unifying Mind and Body
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#21
 09-05-2003 01:31 PM |
Thursday nights after Jo practice, we have been doing more Ki-building, rooting, and centering exercises as of late. Sensei wants to make this a regular thing, which most of us are quite happy about, it being something we all need a lot of practice doing.
While trying to relax our muscles during the three breathing postures we cycled through, I wondered how much of a fine line there is between ascetic mind-induced numbness to pain, and the placebo-like visualizations we had to use to keep our muscles relaxed while suspending our limbs in awkward, upraised stationary positions.
There came a time when it felt like my mind drifted away into some other place, detached from my body, which was experiencing some discomfort. It was as though I was aware of the presence of pain, and yet it did not bother me --- I was somewhere else completely. Is this what ascetics feel in deep meditation? Like they have somehow gone above the realm of the physical?
But this distance between mind and body troubled me --- in combat, it would be a very hazardous thing. And one of the main principles of the art is to unify mind and body, not to separate them with emotional numbness to avoid pain. This seems to me far above simple asceticism. To unify mind and body in such a context, then, must be to become relaxed in one's body to the point of going beyond concern for physical discomfort while at the same time keeping a completely sensitive awareness to one's environment and the interactions and contact one's body comes into.
Great. I can articulate it. Well, maybe... Now, if only I can actually do it! 
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