I ended up staying up late talking to my wife so I slept in until 7 this morning (that’s become very late for me).
I was still able to get everything on my list done.
I’ve been reflecting on this cycle as it’s almost over and I had a couple of experiences last night.
The first was getting an introduction to the difference “sinking” your breathing makes. Instead of breathing up high in your chest, you not only expand your belly, but you push the breath down farther into your pelvic floor. This helps to “root” you in place. Really it causes the whole of your core to become engaged thus creating a much more rigid bridge between your upper and lower body.
Yeah starting with some static breathing in a horse stance, then moving to a front stance with reverse punches, then stepping into reverse punches. Wow – that’s a massive difference. I was leaving really deep fist sized impressions in the pad – stuck stuck around to the point where the holder had to rotate the pad 180 degrees to continue.
Something else that came up last night was a visualization of my emotions – ripples on a pond. I let myself feel the emotions and acknowledge them, then let them go and the ripples become smaller and less frequent. I kept doing that and eventually the pond became a mirror to the sky. After which I fell asleep pretty easily.
I took that visualization into my mediation this morning and also tried to name each emotion as I was feeling it and also paid attention to physiological reactions and where the emotion localized in my body. I also visualized each of my emotion as a different being and that I was simply getting to know them. There are no “bad” emotions after all – they’re all simply telling you something you need to learn how to listen to them.
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