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The walking meditation I've employed during my mostly lackadaisical exercise routine on the wide sidewalk in front of the strip mall shops has become more complex in the last few months. It takes a few months and sometime more to give added value to an established habit. The new part to this walking meditation is consciously letting my belly flop to inhale.
The fact that I gotta perform this behavior consciously or it doesn't happen is the rub. Voice teachers often indoctrinate their students with the notion of "belly breathing". The idea is that instead of chest breathing (which is a lotta un-necessary work) that to sing with a lotta control you have to bring that control into play from the lower part of your stomach.
Somebody taught me a way to make myself aware of when I was belly breathing is to lay down flat on my back to practice, and then place a small object like a small stone or one of the larger coins like a quarter just below my belly button. The goal of doing it this was is not to breath correctly so much as to use your breathing to raise and lower the small weight on your belly.
When I'm sitting or standing erect I consciously let my belly sag in order to create a vacuum in my solar plexus the "pulls" my inhale of air into my lungs rather than "sucking" the air into my chest.
I've been practicing this during my walks. As long as I pay strict attention to consciously letting my belly drop to pull the air into my lungs I can do the counting I employ while inhaling when I place my left foot down, and exhaling when I put my right foot down, yet taking two steps between each endeavor.
Doing this is more difficult for me than rubbing my belly at the same ti-me I'm patting myself on the head with the other hand. If a shopper walks out of one of the stores unexpectedly there is a good chance that I'll lose my count and forget to let my belly pooch to inhale, or I'll discover that I'm inhaling on the downbeat of my left leg instead of my right or all of the above simultaneously.
Infrequently I lose count because I suddenly become aware of another person on the sidewalk that definitely ain't no shopper going about they business. Many times I'm not walking along the storefronts because I'm shopping either. There are several walking wounded who hang out where people are every time I go there, but who am I? Am I walking there because I'm wounded.
Nobody I know of knows I'm not just an old man walking to get some exercise. This is the same dynamic I described earlier where I practice reciting a specific poem I composed for a very specific reason, and the criteria for me realizing I had accomplished my goal of internalizing the intent of the poem was to know it so perfectly that I could recite it all the way to the end in a casual conversational tone before any of my listeners realized I was reciting a poem.
I'm walking the walk AND talking the talk in at-one-ment, and nobody knows but me. It's not that huge of an accomplishment. It's not like what I'm practicing is hidden or a secret. I have to ignore the other people around me to keep my count and belly-flopping in synch with my cadence. When I'm doing that I'm too busy to give the other something to goof on like I normally do. I be-co-me invisible in plain sight. That's an old road trick I learned I couldn't live without.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a great place to practice this trick. Hiking 10-15 miles a day up and down some steep climbs and descents on rocky paths naturally pulls all the breathing techniques above into the way you have to act to get over the sheer physicality of it. There is an element of real danger hiking the trail that's not there on the sidewalks of a strip mall in a sleepy Southern village too, that can amp up the already good results obtained locally.
I've had a few friends over the years that got into long distance bicycle riding. They talk a lot about breathing and how it follows a certain pattern depending on the terrain they encountered. I've tried to ride bicycles for exercise purposes myself. I liked it okay. Especially when I'd get a second wind. I didn't like having to share the road with other vehicles. I hated getting flat tires ten miles from home even worse.
The rheumatologist at the VA Hospital in Durham still hasn't renewed my old prescriptions. Anything could have gone wrong. I suspect I'll be taught a lesson in pain. In the last couple of days since I was informed by the nurse in the arthritis clinic there that the doctor agreed to renew them. I've realized I'm pretty much at their mercy, but I still have to be true to my own vision while I'm letting them think they're getting over.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
