Living on the edge.

         I continue to attend to the bodies health scrupulously and the rewards are that physically when I am not combating the side effects of various drugs I am in excellent shape. This morning I went for a 2 hour hike in the local park. It is a mountainous park so there was much climbing and I walked over two of the mid-sized peaks without getting particularly strained. After hiking up these peaks I met a man in his mid forties who was affected by his heart and a blood clot that had been formed. He wanted to hike with me and I told him that where I was going would not be easy. He had to rest and I pushed on.
         I am now getting up in the morning at between 4 and 5:30 when the drugs do not stop me, and am doing a type of meditation that is an amalgamation of what my yoga teacher is teaching me about movement and what I am recalling from walking in the Upaya Zen Center and the graceful and completely focused walking that we do between sitting sessions. In the Zen center we stand bow to our cushions bow to the center then turn into group to form a line and begin to walk. The steps are taken with amazing slowness and the concentration is put intensely into the practice of watching the body move while the feet are moving. Because the concentration is so intense the motion is almost imperceptible it can take as long as 30 minutes to walk 30 feet.
         My yoga teacher was unfamiliar with this walking meditation but what she teaches and calls unconscious yoga lends itself to the same process with hand in glove ease. By concentrating minutely upon the muscles of the body as the yoga posture unfolds, the sensations of the body are intensely observed and relaxed into. The result is that this morning I awoke at 5:30 and started with the usual mind chatter of dismay and hurting. By doing an exercise of rolling slowly through the muscles of the back and stretching each of the ones that I could observe with great deliberation and gentleness. My body felt good and so did my emotions. The equivalent of laying in the sun on a winter day. I did this one exercise slowly and deliberately for over an hour and watched as the nature of the mind changed. Very gentle and loving.
        After breakfast went on a very long hike in Squaw Peak and found myself walking and learning to love my body as it complained of the various aches and pains that emerged. Send loving to ones hip seems a bit odd intellectually but the hip loved it. I had the image of how a mother would care for her newborn when it would cry . The gentleness, kindness, and love are what the child responds to with joy. Each of our bodies would respond just as positively as that child would so why not treat the body in the same way. Abusing my body seems a very counter-productive way to promote it's health.