That's Rule Number One:
Human beings make mistakes.
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About Me
- Mike Cross
- From 1982 to 1997 I worked on the translation of Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, and understood the primary importance in the Buddha's teaching of full lotus sitting. Until 1994 my attitude to this sitting practice could be summed up in the words: "Don't think. Just do it!" Then in 1994 I returned from Japan to England to train to be a teacher of the FM Alexander Technique, and experiences with Alexander work woke me up to the opposite standpoint of "Don't just do. Think it!" Far from smoothing my path, however, Alexander insights (or reactions to them) caused a lot of trouble between me and my aging teacher in Japan. Then in 2008, seeking clearer water further upstream, I found a new lease of life in the extant Sanskrit works of the 12th ancestor in Dogen's lineage -- the great Indian teacher Ashvaghosha.
8 comments:
Rule number two: There are no mistakes.
Rule number two is Marjory's Law:
"Being wrong, in this work, is the best friend we have got."
Hi Will,
As the old saying goes, "To err is human, to forgive... the action of a well integrated human" -- or something like that.
It really does all come back to the vestibular.
Ernst Moro, who gave his name to the baby panic reflex, is said originally to have described it as a clasping reflex. Actually the Moro reflex has two parts, an opening up part and a closing/grasping part. The infant palmar grasp reflex is closely related to the clasping aspect of the Moro reflex.
The point is that the clinging/grasping as described in the old Sanskrit & Pali texts need not be understood as a purely psychological phenomenon. Clinging/grasping has its original roots in the vestibular system.
P.S. I meant to clarify, but didn't, that clinging/grasping/holding on may be seen as the antithesis of allowing/forgiving & forgetting/letting go. And so, yes, forgiveness also can be seen as at root a vestibular problem.
Will -- what people (including me in past lives) have called "right posture" or "proper posture" is just a vestibular tendency to clench.
From these last 14 years in which my sitting in lotus has been informed by Alexander's wisdom, what have I really understood?
I have got further and further away from the right seated posture. But the wrong tendency to clench, rooted in an imperfectly functioning vestibular system: that has become more and more my area of expertise.
Yes, to tend away from what we know, from our familiar habit, from our entrenched ways of thinking, can be very unnerving.
That unnerving process is itself, at root, at brainstem level, a vestibular problem. So sometimes we allow ourselves to fall back on what we know -- the familiarity of a football match on TV and a hot drink, the old routine of brushing the teeth, putting our head on a comfortable old pillow... zzzzz.
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