Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans
Yesterday I got a wonderful letter from a FIREDANCE student, one that I am delighted to dig into. So much chewy goodness! (Identifying information has been removed)
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“I really appreciated the Week Three suggestion of focusing on footwork! That really helped the movements flow together. I just watched the week 4 video. The subtitles help a lot. I am noticing the joint mobility and chi gong addition to the morning ritual having wonderful effect all day long. It is also interesting the way resistance manifests. I have shared in the past some of my parenting challenges with a now XX year old step son. He was living with me until the end of XXX, when he broke the agreement and I had to evict him. He made a series of poor choices that lead to multiple relapses of bad behavior and substance abuse that put him back in the jail system. My mate has been hooked back into the enabler role. The Firedance Tai Chi practice is helping me navigate this minefield, and keep clarity and flow to my choices. Maintaining my own healthy boundary, and how to say “No!” without being a dick about it is a huge benefit to the practice. Much of my own resistance to doing what I must to be on my "A" game is connected to the desire to be helpful to others, but not in a way that depletes me. Interruption and demand from a narcissist son and my enabler spouse are my challenging distractions. The week four lesson helps with that. Thanks.”
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I LOVE LOVE LOVE this note, and wanted to break down the reasons why. So much to unpack here, and I will take as long as necessary to do it.
"I really appreciated the Week Three suggestion of focusing on footwork! That really helped the movements flow together."
Focusing on the footwork, the foot placement, the lower body is a route to learning more rapidly. The hand movements flow FROM the feet, but are much more complicated. Get the lower body first, and you've cracked the code!
" just watched the week 4 video. The subtitles help a lot."
Great. I got requests for this, and responded as rapidly as possible.
"I am noticing the joint mobility and chi gong addition to the morning ritual having wonderful effect all day long."
Yes. You are warming up your body CONSCIOUSLY. That conscious connection, with a commitment to joy and service, produces the motivation and energy to rock it all day long.
"It is also interesting the way resistance manifests. I have shared in the past some of my parenting challenges with a now XX year old step son. He was living with me until the end of XXX, when he broke the agreement and I had to evict him. He made a series of poor choices that lead to multiple relapses of bad behavior and substance abuse that put him back in the jail system. My mate has been hooked back into the enabler role. The Firedance Tai Chi practice is helping me navigate this minefield, and keep clarity and flow to my choices."
Look at what you've touched on, using the first three Chakras (comprising the “Belly Brain): Survival (having to eject the step-son implies he had become dangerous, a threat to the house.) Sex (conflict with the mate). Power in this sense is the ability to find your own center, and maintain it under pressure. To keep your eyes on your ULTIMATE goal (joy and service) and the short-term actions that support it requires BOTH focus and flow. It is an unusual quality of mind, but Tai Chi is the world’s most popular body-mind art and offers POWERFUL navigation tools. Focus on your ultimate and medium range goals, then flow through the day.
"Maintaining my own healthy boundary, and how to say “No!” without being a dick about it is a huge benefit to the practice."
In life, you can either have a shell or a spine. "Spine" in this sense means "sense of self", your answer to the question "who am I?" When stress, whether human or environmental, hits you you can either stand strong and resist, or you can bob and weave, like a seaweed frond. Like bamboo in a hurricane. REMAIN ROOTED, but be flexible. Tai Chi is about finding your "spine" and your “root” in that sense. Being able to fold and bend and weave, breathing smoothly under stress…to find "flow" in spite of the voices in your head or from outside, is a powerful survival trait. Heck, it is EVOLUTIONARY. And that's what Firedance is: self-directed human evolution.
"Much of my own resistance to doing what I must to be on my "A" game is connected to the desire to be helpful to others, but not in a way that depletes me."
So look at those ultimate goals (joy and service) and the intermediate goals that support them (chiefly money, health, and family). The clearer your focus on these two things, the more your intelligence, which is just problem solving, engages with the question: "how can I be of joy and service to the world? How can I support my family and community without losing myself?"
Don't you get it? Your stepson AND your mate have problems with self-love, identity, meaning. They are confusing love with WEAKNESS rather than strength. You not only serve YOURSELF when you are strong, if that strength is accompanied by real, deep love, then you are offering them a role model of extraordinary possibility: the doorway out of personal, social, or inter-generational trauma. Be STRONG, warrior. Your family needs you, and so does that little child inside you.
"Interruption and demand from a narcissist son and my enabler spouse are my challenging distractions. The week four lesson helps with that. Thanks."
"Life is what happens while you're making other plans"--John Lennon.
Deep work: meditation, therapy, journaling, self-hypnosis, yoga, or of course the wonderful art of Tai Chi are all USELESS if you leave the insights in the office, school, or on the page. They are all about creating a body-mind that is strong, flexible, resilient FOR LIFE, not just in the dojo. Can you breathe smoothly when you are shaking with fatique? Can you breathe smoothly when the negative voices stalk you at night? Can you keep your balance when moving in odd and unique ways, folding and unfolding your body like an origami, solving the daily "Rubik's Cube" of finding flow within a sometimes creaky or achy body?
Connect this to keeping your emotional balance simply by using the Five Minute Miracle, connected to Chi Gong: a power posture, proper breathing, mental focus, smooth movement ALL AT THE SAME TIME. You are training yoru body-mind to react differently. Finding the "water" that flows around the "rocks" of life.
The rocks are always there. But if you keep your eyes on the twin goals of joy and service, and use the ancient and modern tools of Firedance and other profound disciplines…then every day you are learning how to expend exactly the right amount of energy for a given task: no more, no less. Moving toward your goals one step at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time.
This is the road to Mastery, and you are walking it, my friend. So proud of you, and happy for you.
Namaste
Steve
