*Transcendental *Logic

"The object of the Koan (riddle) is not to encourage clever or amusing answers, but to promote personal insight.  Often, the key lies, not in seeking an answer, but in understanding the question.

"The object of Shaolin empty-hand art is not to provide clever answers to actual combat (warfare) problems, but to provide the basis for understanding how to deal with a physical force, without resisting (aggression) and without giving in and allowing that force to disrupt or hurt you….Through such a process of harmonizing, it becomes possible, through the art, to enter the Tao."

-Barefoot Zen, by Nathan J. Johnson

I’m really liking this book — the writing is a little clunky and the BUDDHISM!! a little ham-handed at times, but it’s talking about a true subject — the Shaolin Temple origins of both karate and kungfu (and taiji, of course) — and it generally has good and informative things to say.  If martial arts is your practice, hobby or a topic of interest, totally go pick it up. 

(If you do, give a little "woohoo" for my Sifu, who’s in the credits.)

(Image swiped from qigongmedicine.com.  Isn’t it great?)

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…

I learned two awesome things in taiji this week.  Wanna know what they are?  Sure you do.

The first concerns  "Ride the tiger".  Yeah, you used to think it was just a horrible phrasing of Ronnie James Dio’s, but no more.  The main Taiji form, known to practitioners as "the 108"**, has three sections, and they all end with the same two moves:  Ride the Tiger, and Return to the Mountain.

**Are you asking yourself why a study/art/style/somatic aesthetic that uses names like "Ride the Tiger", "Repulse the Monkey", "Lion Shakes Its Head" and "Fair Lady Weaves the Shuttles" for individual movements has names like "The 108" (and "the 88" and "sword form") for its major forms?  Because I am.

Anyway, Taiji is a lot like Breakfast of Champions, in that there isn’t a damn thing in it without at least one submerged meaning, but you’ll go crazy if you ever try to find them all.  Some of them, however, you get lucky and your Sifu has managed to scrape them out of tradition for you, meaning that his sanity took the hit for yours.  Yay!  In this case, I won a whammy.

The Tiger, in Chinese mythology, represents the events, trials and lessons of life, seen as a whole.  Like life, the tiger is big and fast and way too strong for you to control in any way.  It can be beautiful and terrible, painful and playful, exhilarating and torturous.  It can be good for you or bad for you, but one thing that can’t be denied is that it IS, every minute, like it or not.  To accept the varied nature of life, the good with the bad, the gifts and the lessons, to literally "go with the flow" in the big-picture sense, is to "ride the Tiger".

The Mountain, in the same symbol-system, represents the spiritual world, the world before and after that of material form.  It’s too big to conceive; it disappears into the sky.  We come down from the mountain when we’re born, figuratively speaking; we "Return to the mountain" when we die.

So basically, these two moves, which end both sections and the whole form, are a simple, direct, and beautiful metaphor for the right way to approach living and dying.  Ride the tiger, and return to the mountain.

Gods I love this art.

Then we come to Hips & Shoulders.  This is an interesting one, at least if you’re a nut for this stuff like I am.   I read recently on a Taiji blog that it’s a "popular myth" about Taiji that one should move the hips and shoulders independently.  In other words, the hips and shoulders should just line up.  I ran this by my Sifu on Monday, and he had a very interesting answer, some of which was unfortunately visual so I can’t relate it here, but suffice to say that the independent motion of hips & shoulders is quite important to the form.  It’s also, when you get a good hard look, absolutely beautiful, and a big part of why it looks so graceful when someone does the form properly.

Thing is, the hips lead the shoulders.  (This is similar advice to another post I read about the elbows leading the hands — and yeah, both are a little hard to do at first.)  So, in many moves, there’s a turn of the body, which you think is the waist turning the shoulders, but it’s actually the hips turning first, then the waist pulling the shoulders along behind.  Same general idea as when a dancer spins, and leads with their head, only much more subtle.

It’s also hands-down one of the most mind-blowingly sensual movements I’ve ever seen the human body produce. 

I’m not sure I can create it for your imagination, what it looks like when someone turns their body by leading with the hips, but for reference, I was standing in a room with three other people watching a 70-ish-year-old man do it and I still felt my hair blow back.  Zow.  It also looks amazingly powerful, perhaps because, or related to the fact that, the d’an t’ien (roughly speaking, the womb area) is considered the power center of the body in Chinese physiology.  (The movement we’re discussing here also uses many oblique back and abdominal muscles which, from my experience with Pilates, I know are a big part of where the "power" in a movement comes from.  For example, if you know how to use these muscles, you can lift about 3 times as much as someone who doesn’t — I’ve experienced that, too.)

On a previously-unrealized-related note, there’s also an exercise we do to get "warmed up", Qi-wise, where you stand with your hips straight and turn your waist back and forth, letting your arms come back and forward, slapping your abdomen with one hand and lower back with the other with each turn.  It really works.

It also makes you look just like the little flippy-drum from The Karate Kid. 

And believe it or not, that’s not accidental either.  (The drum came second to the motion, and it got to Okinawa through China.)

You know, I bet schizophrenics LOVE Taiji, or would if they got into the authentic stuff.  You can develop a hell of an "everything means something!" complex just from attending a few classes–!

Before I go, I’d like to point out that if I had to sell my DVDs, my books, my blood, or whatever, in order to afford that \$50 a month for Taiji, I would totally do it.  That said, though, Sifu always looks pleasantly surprised when I pay him, and I get the sense that he differentiates between "students" and "customers" and may not even mind if I couldn’t pay for a while.  Which just goes to show, that if you really need it, the Universe buys it for you.  ;)

(Quick, somebody get me the phrase that would mean "Sleep Yoga" in Hindu.  Lacking authenticity, I’m going to call it…um…pranasoma, or something equally ugly.  ;)

This is a post about flexibility, which has been on my mind a lot lately.  No, not just because my Sifu makes us do yoga every class (Yoga and Taiji are remarkably intertwined, historically, and you can see it at my kun**).

This is a post about flexibility of one’s sleep schedule, which topic I will now actually get around to, I swear.

Here’s my dilemma:  Everyone who’s ever asked me for advice about starting a polyphasic schedule (and you’re a mighty voluminous company of people; you should get t-shirts or employee benefits or something) knows that I usually go on and on and on about how important sticking with your schedule is.  You can’t adjust without rigid adherence, without building a strong framework upon which your brain can form new habits; you need at least a month without any variation, I usually tell ya’ll. 

And I wasn’t lying, really I wasn’t.  My adaptation to Uberman, nearly a decade ago now, was remarkably smooth compared to many other attempts you (and I) have read about (and probably experienced, if you’ve gone there), and the WHOLE reason for that, I maintain, was that I made NO mistakes for several weeks, and only one or two very small ones in the first few months.  (When I tried it later, under much less ideal circumstances, and made more mistakes, I found only a miserable experience and no progress in sight, which is the story on lots and lots of blogs out there.)

Similarly, adapting to Everyman required no small amount of preparation and iron will.  I did make mistakes, but not very many, though it was probably more than an adaptation to Uberman would have tolerated.  I strove not to allow myself even the slighest variation in schedule for the first  90 days, though I may have fallen to the temptation to mess with my core timing a little bit before that deadline was up.  (I haven’t waded through my old jounals that far yet in the course of slowly putting together The Book; I’m still back in Uberman territory.)   I tend to be the gung-ho type, if you haven’t guessed, and I’ve been very successful with Everyman, whereas I’ve also read many blogs and accounts of people who haven’t; so my theory remains that in the beginning, for at least a few months (more or less probably depends on how quickly your brain & body adapt to change — mine are pretty pliable), strictness of scheduling is SUPER IMPORTANT.

On Uberman, my schedule started strict and stayed strict — I’ve spoken before about the devastating consequences of missing a nap on Uberman, about how tired it makes you (almost as though you missed a half, or a whole, night’s sleep) and how tough it can be to recover without falling into a series of overcompensations that eventually lands you right back where you were, whether that was monophasic, insomniac or whateverelse.  And I’ve basically babbled all this time to make it clear that on Everyman, the rules are the same — in the beginning.

And by "beginning", I guess I mean roughly six months.  Things got loose for me here and there before that, but it was troublesome, and I fought it all the way up to a year in. 

Now?  Er.  Here’s what this week has been like.  I’ll start with Monday, because that’s when my Local Plague finally let up for real.

Monday:  Up at 4, snooze-buttoned until 4:30, snuggling.  20-minute nap at 7:30, 2:30, and 8:45.  Bed at 1 a.m.

Tuesday:  Up at 4, 10-minute nap at 6:00 (snuggling again, heh).  20-minute nap at 7:30, 4:00, and 8:45.  Bed at 1 a.m.

Wednesday:  Up at 4:15 or so.  25-minute nap at 7:00, 20 minutes at 1:30.  Missed evening nap.  Bed at 11:30 for long core to make up.

Thursday:  Up at 4, 20-minute nap at 5:45, 2:30, 8:45.  Bed at 1:30.

Friday (today):  Up at 3:45 (don’t know why; just happened to wake up before the alarm).  10 minute nap at 6:15 (yeah, snuggling), 20 minutes at 9 a.m. & 3:30.  I’ll aim for the usual at 8:45, and go from there.

…Now, please, for all the gods’ sakes, don’t use that as a template to write your schedule on!!  I’m only posting it to illustrate what my sleeping has gotten like, after 14 (or is it 15?) months on Everyman.  Except for a little here and there, before bed, and in the evening on Wednesday, I haven’t been tired.  I’ve been basically taking naps when I felt I needed them and could fit them in, aiming for my schedule but not freaking if I don’t hit the bullseye; and to my many-fathomed shock, it seems to be working just fine.  Moreover, I’ve now had several periods of shake-up (like moving) and illness (nothing serious), and I seem to be able to sleep however I want during those periods (usually some bastardized version of my current schedule, usually involving up to 6 hours’ sleep a night, depending) and recover just fine.

In other words, it’s a "schedule", but not any moreso than most people’s monophase is a "schedule":  It has rough bedtimes and wake-times, but variations of up to half an hour a day are common, and some shuffling and moving things around–way more than I expected–is easy to reconcile later.  And I’m not building a sleep-debt doing it; I can tell.  I sleep in on weekends sometimes, but it’s a comfort/emotional thing mostly (a good long sleep–for me, meaning 4-6 hours–really feels like it wipes the ol’ slate clean, and sometimes I need that after a hard week); if I skip it I don’t get tired.  I just had another checkup at the chiropractor and all the vital signs and whatnot look good; plus my typing speed and reaction times seem fine.  So it would seem that this is just what Everyman looks like after more than a year, after "good solid adaptation" takes hold.

But what does The Web think?  Is this a natural evolution, how Everyman is supposed to work, or have I wandered into You’re Just Weird territory (again)?   Does anybody know anyone else who’s at or near a year on a polyphasic schedule, and do they wobble around like me or not?  Info will be hugely appreciated, since I don’t want to put something like this in The Book without some kind of supporting information or at least some opinions.

Thanks and have a great week(end)(or whatever)!

PD

**I’m using a half-spelling for a word that’s usually spelled "kwoon" or "gun" in English, though both pronunciations are wrong.  It’s not pronounced "kun" in the English sense either.  (It’s the Chinese word for "school", the equivalent of the Japanese word "dojo", which even us students of Chinese arts sometimes use because it’s easier to say!)  Here’s how to say it:  In English, the letter "k" is always aspirated — air comes out after the actual sound.  Right?  Right.  In Chinese, plosives like "k" are often unaspirated (when they are aspirated, we write them with an apostrophe (most of the time) in English - hence "t’ai chi" as a popular romanization).  Try saying "k" without letting air come out at the end — you get something kind of like a "g", but with no vocalization like an English "g".  Now say "kun" that way.  Now make the "u" sound long, but not as long as in "moon" — you want to keep your mouth open, not purse your lips.  Think more like "kuun" or "kuwn" if you’re thinking in English.  See why most people spell it "gun" or "kwoon" now?  …But you’ll have to forgive me, because I’m going to continue to spell it "kun", because that’s the easiest way for me to remember how to say it properly.  ;)  …You can go here for even more discussion of this word, if you’re a language nut.

Hey world!  I’m so brainfried that even work doesn’t expect me to be working right now!  That’s quite an accomplishment, I think.  Thank various banks and title companies for royally screwing up my attempt to buy The House, possibly irreparably.

::*bangs head on desk for a while*::

So, I wasn’t planning on a polyphasic update for a little while, since you all know how hashed and random my schedule got/gets/is due to massive stress overload and whatnot — but, it turns out I have something to report after all.  I’ve actually been doing remarkably well this last two weeks with getting my schedule back on-track, and I thought I’d share that.  It turns out that the most valuable things to do have been:

*  Take extra naps, rather than longer naps.  This is hard since I’m only oversleeping due to stress and wanting to hide from the world, but it turns out that I can motivate myself to get up for an hour (and usually stay up for two) if I promise myself an extra nap.  I often can’t sleep for the extra nap, but I do get to hide in the blankets or car for another 20 minutes, and that’s worth something.

*  Limit snuggle-time.  I get this powerful urge to snuggle with my boy before I go to work in the morning, when he’s still sleeping (and, remember, there’s not a lot else for me to do).  If I nap at all at this time, I’m going to oversleep or hit snooze and end up running late for work; it’s a guarantee.  But I can set an alarm for ten minutes, which isn’t enough time for me to fall asleep (between naps), and get my snuggles in without penalty.

*  Take shorter naps / watch for best nap-length.  Don’t know why, but lately my ideal nap has gone from 23 minutes to 21 (or rather, from 22 to 20 — that’s 21 on the timer, since it takes a minute to settle in).  I’ll sleep to 23 if I set the timer for it, but I’ll feel groggier on waking.  Just goes to show that it’s a good idea to keep an eye on yourself while polyphasic, no matter how long you’ve been doing it and especially when life-circumstances go wonky.

*  Make damn sure to exercise.  I don’t feel like it (or much of anything) lately, so it’s a challenge, but if you’re me, such challenges are relatively easily resolveable by making them interesting.  So rather than abandon my usual routine altogether, I’m switching it around frantically, trying to keep it fresh and able to convince me to get up and move at least once a day.  Knowing six different taiji forms and a yoga routine has really helped…!

*  Be forgiving, and don’t give up.  Even when I deliberately throw an alarm across the room and go back to bed for two hours grumbling curses upon all of humanity, I try to let it go and move forward.  This is actually a piece of general advice-for-depressives that I’ve picked up over the years:  Don’t dwell on mistakes, because it just pulls you further under.  A bout of major depression can mean that you spend half a day or more in bed (or crying in the closet or whatever), but when that passes, you can either drop it and get up to salvage what’s left, or spend the next half a day hating yourself for wasting the first half.  But it turns out that this little brainhack is great for poly-schedules too — when I screw up, I just forget about it and keep going as though nothing happened, unless it’s to make some obvious adjustment to my naps so that I continue to get them about every 4-5 hours.  (I try to move only one nap whenever possible and get right back on my normal schedule asap.)  And even then, I forbid myself to think about the adjustments in terms of failures. 

(It’s funny — forbidding oneself from thinking negatively is notoriously difficult for people like me, but when it comes to sleep I can do it.  I think my brain is rather used to being bossed around about sleep!)

…So, all that, and this morning I realized that I’m actually back to making hardly any mistakes at all for the last couple days.  I feel like a zombie emotionally, but that’s understandable since I was running on empty last week and at the moment there’s still no end to this ordeal in sight.  But at least I’m not tired, and once again, being able to take frequent breaks for naps, and having extra time to myself to just zone out on a movie or sink into a book, have all been real sanity-savers.

Also, thanks to everyone who answered the poll about the future direction of this site — the vote was evenly split between "Just polyphasic stuff" and "Freaking everything", so I’ll aim for half and half.  ;)