Work’s been a little tough lately. It’s our “busy season”, a period lasting approximately 6 months where the days vary between “plenty to do” all the way up to “expletive deleted!”. Sometimes the slower days are the worst as the adrenaline rush of the previous “killer day” is gone, leaving only weariness in body and spirit. Such was today.
You try to rouse your spirit to fight back, even glad to get a bit angry with the world and with yourself. But that isn’t real energy and an hour or two later, you’re dragging again. Sayang, as we say in the Philippines. What a pity.
But I try to use taiji principles to improve my workday and that includes the mental as well as the physical. I have a kind of awesome “chansi jing elevator” now that I use to get boxes from down low (including floor level) up to the shipping scale or table or wherever the hell I need them to be. It’s a twisting rising move that would make most Ergonomic analysts and other health advisors’ hair stand straight up. But, I’ve been in this game for a long time and know what I’m doing. With my new turning pivot lift, I avoid a lot of Manual Labor Ding Jing even better than I did with my old lifting tricks. And my back is fine, and I don’t go to the chiropractor any more. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this move to others. But I see see people lifting stuff like idiots every day. They’ll learn the hard way… like I did.
OK, cut to the chase: I was tired and fuming and trying to keep my mind on taiji instead of waiting for the day to end. I had a thought why can’t I use taiji intention to help myself even a little, even in this sorry state of affairs. And then I thought of resistance. Usually we mean resisting another: “avoid the fault of ding jing”. But then I thought, how am I resisting myself, that keeps me from being sung, that keeps me from making effective use of intention. So I thought of mental ding jing.
The thing is, we usually think of sung as the opposite of stiffness. But what if we think of sung as the opposite of resistance (our own resistance that is). What’s the difference? Stiffness is seen as a condition. Resistance in this case, could be more of a habit. Conditions need be remedied through various painstaking corrective measures. Habits can be transformed mentally.
So, another note, another long-term project of investigation.
Tonight I googled “taiji mental ding jing” and encountered Neigong.net and http://neigong.net/2007/01/11/4-ounces-deflects-a-1000-pounds/. Good stuff involving Master Dong Bin. Oh yes, there’s a good bit about “think of the whole body as the dan-tian” which ties in to my previous post. Like I said before, I’ve read a lot of articles over the years and maybe even this one before. But if your eyes are closed, you’re not going to see anything at the time… sayang.
