*Transcendental *Logic

I learned two important things at Super Xtreme Yoga Class last night:

One has to do with mudras.  One of the coolest thing about this particular Yoga class is the "monk forms" — the traditional kung fu we do to "warm up" for the Yoga.  (The sick thing is, this Yoga actually does merit using kung fu to warm up.)  Three of the monk forms were reportedly taught as a set, by the Yogi Bodhidharma who, according to history/legend, essentially kicked-started the Shaolin tradition by showing proto-kungfu to the monks there.  (One of those three is san zan, about which I’ve spoken before.  The other two are a lot harder!)  The truth of whether there was an Indian Monk (the Chinese call him "Da Mo") is fuzzy, but what strikes me is that this happened around 600 B.C.E. — a very special time, when Gautama Siddartha was on the scene and early Greek philosophy was just getting started with Thales.

I swear, if I could visit any time period in the world, it would totally be 600 B.C.E.  Whups, edit – the "birth of Shaolin" is actually estimated to be about 600 CE — so I was about a milennium off, there!  I would still totally visit 600 BCE if I could, though. ;)

Anyway, all three of these forms contain mudras — spiritually-significant hand-positions, many of which are still used by Hindus today — and yesterday I learned cool stuff about two of them.  There’s a very neat move in the kung fu where the hand is thrust out a little bit, palm up, and paused; then snakily turned over and drawn back in the next motion, until the palm and wrist are perpendicular.  It looks totally Uma Thurman (maybe because I think she does Crane Style too), but it’s actually two mudras:  The first, the palm-up "Varada Mudra", signifies offering to sacrifice oneself to compassion and the betterment of humanity.  The second, the palm-down "Bhumisparsa Mudra", is a copying of the motion the (first) Buddha made at the moment of his Enlightenment:  He put his palm down on the Earth, to "call it to witness", which in my mind is a combination of saying, "Look!" and "I’ve got your back now".

I get the shivers when I do that little hand-flip now, heh.

By the way, I don’t have the patience for all the accents that should properly be in those Sanskrit transliterations, and there’s a lot more to learn about mudras than is relevant to this post…the Wikipedia entry on mudras is actually a pretty good, general summary, if you’re interested.

The other important thing I learned, or had reinforced in my brain, is that lots of heavy exercise will tire you the heck out.  By midnight, I was positively retarded with sleepiness.  Super Extreme Yoga Class is no joke for me, though — five or more kung fu forms, all but one of which I’m totally a beginner at, and then yoga brutal enough that by the end of it I’m holding myself up by sheer bloody-minded refusal to look like a wimp in class–!

I think it’s important to restate now and again that polyphasic sleep is a restricted schedule.  It appears to meet the needs of the average human in average times without any shortfall or side-effects, and that’s wonderful — but it isn’t intended for recovery from strenuous exercise, or illness, or any other circumstance where lots of sleep is kind of necessary.

The good news is, yet again I find that the Everyman schedule, at least, is really quite friendly to the occasional need for extra sleep, as long as you keep taking your naps.  That, I think, is how you avoid falling back into a monophasic schedule, when you happen to need extra sleep due to a nasty headache, emotional turmoil, coming down with a cold, or Super Extreme Yoga, for example.  On Uberman, it’s a bit more complicated, and to be honest I don’t know if it would be better to insert a controlled-length core nap or simply to sleep until one woke up, and then get right back on the schedule.  Way back when I did Uberman, I remember sleeping all night once, I can’t remember why, and being vaguely horrified about it and getting right back on my schedule.  (I was probably a little tired the first night, but it wasn’t memorable.)

At least on this schedule, I find that, if I actually need the extra sleep, then getting it won’t interfere with my naps at all.  If I sleep extra and then can’t nap, then I probably didn’t need that extra sleep; but if that were to happen (it hasn’t in a while), I would still lay down for the full 20 minutes at the right time.  I try to avoid skipping naps no matter what, since, even if I make up a missed nap with an extra 1.5 hours on my core sleep, I still end up tired for a little while, probably because I’ve gotten off my schedule.

I’m probably going to be saying this a lot in the coming weeks, because it’s on my mind, especially as I chew my way through writing the polyphasic book:  It’s very important to BE ON A SCHEDULE.  Not being on a set sleep-schedule can really hurt you!  So once you’re polyphasic, even if you’re on a flexible schedule due to work or "life", you still need to keep to that schedule as closely as you possibly can, even when you need to break it for some practical reason.  (Actually, that’s probably true for monophasers too, though because their schedules are not typically restricted, they seem to have more leeway.)

…

Also, P.S. - I’ve set up a thingy(tm) that’s supposed to automatically cross-post these entries into my LiveJournal account.  This is step one for preparing for the eventuality that LJ may go "tits up", as Warren Ellis puts it, now that it’s been sold to a government-controlled Russian media company.  (LiveJournal was actually one of the only non-government-controlled media outlets left in Russia.  Was.)  If it screws up somehow, apologies to my pals on LJ while I iron out the kinks. 

Heh.  My website is kinky!  I think that means I’ve arrived in Internet terms…

This entry was posted 12 months ago on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under nifty things, polyphasic, tai chi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.