Ki
I had my first Aikido class today, I'm very enthused about it, but that's not really the important thing right now.
I've had a lot of personal experience dealing with Ki. While it's true that I was calling it parana at the time, it's really the same thing, it's just that I was studying something different. I learned a lot about charging oneself, opening ones chakras and the other assorted basics of Paranic meditation. Ultimately I lost most of what I gained because I got busy with the trappings of material life, but I never fully stopped.
The one thing that always eluded me when I was studying this was how people are able to project, or throw, or what have you with Ki. I tried several times to move the flow of every out of myself, but it felt very forced, as though I was trying to move through molasses. I took this to simply mean that it's hard something I had assumed from the beginning, and wrote it off as "Something I can't do yet."
As part of the first classes they introduced us to a few basic Ki techniques, my particular enlightenment came during their absolute intro to the use of Ki. It was a fairly simple exercise. It demonstrated the difference between aggressive actions and those involving Ki. The Sensei held out his arm, and his assistant tried to bend it along the elbow, not to break anything, but simply to force him to move. The obvious way to resist this is to tense your muscles and push back, but that's conflict, and hence not what we're after. After that he demonstrated the other way of doing it. He let Ki flow through his arm, projecting it out to the horizon, so that his body became part of the flow. The assistant tried again to brute force his arm, and without losing a state of relaxation, without actively fighting him he went unmoved. And that's the key. The idea that a contest of strengths took place here is a misconception, because he never forced anything, he simply did not allow himself to be moved.
There were, as always, a few false starts on my end, but as I calmed myself and let my Ki project through me I had a revelation. I saw what it was that I had been doing wrong all that time. I had trained in moving Ki within the body, drawing it in, moving it along the chakras, etc, but I had been doing it wrong the whole time. Ki doesn't move within the body, Ki moves through it, as it does all things. The whole idea of throwing Ki had always been embarrassingly Anime, but Ki projection was a known thing that was done, I had simply forgotten what it was I was dealing with. You can't anymore throw Ki than you could throw a river, or the ethereal concept of flow. Rather you can understand that we all exist within it, and that it runs through us, and we can direct how it runs through us.
I'm not sure if anyone else will really understand what I'm saying here. I apologize if I've gotten to mystic-dreamer-y for you to follow, but to me this is a profound revelation.
I've had a lot of personal experience dealing with Ki. While it's true that I was calling it parana at the time, it's really the same thing, it's just that I was studying something different. I learned a lot about charging oneself, opening ones chakras and the other assorted basics of Paranic meditation. Ultimately I lost most of what I gained because I got busy with the trappings of material life, but I never fully stopped.
The one thing that always eluded me when I was studying this was how people are able to project, or throw, or what have you with Ki. I tried several times to move the flow of every out of myself, but it felt very forced, as though I was trying to move through molasses. I took this to simply mean that it's hard something I had assumed from the beginning, and wrote it off as "Something I can't do yet."
As part of the first classes they introduced us to a few basic Ki techniques, my particular enlightenment came during their absolute intro to the use of Ki. It was a fairly simple exercise. It demonstrated the difference between aggressive actions and those involving Ki. The Sensei held out his arm, and his assistant tried to bend it along the elbow, not to break anything, but simply to force him to move. The obvious way to resist this is to tense your muscles and push back, but that's conflict, and hence not what we're after. After that he demonstrated the other way of doing it. He let Ki flow through his arm, projecting it out to the horizon, so that his body became part of the flow. The assistant tried again to brute force his arm, and without losing a state of relaxation, without actively fighting him he went unmoved. And that's the key. The idea that a contest of strengths took place here is a misconception, because he never forced anything, he simply did not allow himself to be moved.
There were, as always, a few false starts on my end, but as I calmed myself and let my Ki project through me I had a revelation. I saw what it was that I had been doing wrong all that time. I had trained in moving Ki within the body, drawing it in, moving it along the chakras, etc, but I had been doing it wrong the whole time. Ki doesn't move within the body, Ki moves through it, as it does all things. The whole idea of throwing Ki had always been embarrassingly Anime, but Ki projection was a known thing that was done, I had simply forgotten what it was I was dealing with. You can't anymore throw Ki than you could throw a river, or the ethereal concept of flow. Rather you can understand that we all exist within it, and that it runs through us, and we can direct how it runs through us.
I'm not sure if anyone else will really understand what I'm saying here. I apologize if I've gotten to mystic-dreamer-y for you to follow, but to me this is a profound revelation.
posted by Max at 3:49 AM
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