Balance

In one of my previous posts I mentioned balance as one way to express the whole system. I’ve been working with this a lot lately so I thought I’d share some insights that may be helpful as we fumble through the learning process together.

For example when I open my joints, I note that the there are two sides to any joint that must be balanced. Opening and closing the joints is really about disrupting or manipulating that balance. Another way to think about it is that you are varying or changing the internal pressures. Either way you approach it, you initially focus on stretching one side more than the other. When we were learning to open our joints, Bruce taught us to fix (keep fixed in space) one side of the joint and to “pull” on the opposite side. This will open the joint. In the beginning this pull is muscular and clumsy. That’s ok.

Once we get the feeling of opening the joint we seem to forget that there are two sides to the joint. So, you can repeat exactly the same procedure, but this time, fix the opposite side and pull the other way. The joint still opens but it should feel a little different because it is opening a whole different aspect of the body. One side could be termed the yin side and the other the yang side. The point of reference being the center of the body.

It doesn’t end there. You still need to close the joint and there is also a much more subtle layer to this. First, remember that the whole point of opening and closing the joints is to gain access to the sinovial fluids. Second, the energetics aren’t that simple. This is where you start to feel and experience directly how the yang can create the yin and the yin can create the yang.

I don’t think describing this in excruiating detail will help you to find this any quicker, but this is an example of how knowing what you are looking for can be very beneficial even though I can’t tell you exactly how to do it.

You can take this really far. Eventually, you’ll need to be able to control both “pulls” for every joint in the body. I mean every joint including the smallest bones in the feet and hands as well as all of the joints of your ribs (the joints on the sternum, the joints where the ribs connect to the spine, the spaces between every rib on the front, sides and back). This is doable. You have to just start with one joint at a time. The real trick is to “get it” in a single joint so clearly that you can apply it to every other joint in the body.

This is a great example of how your training has to strike a balance between a single detail and a general, whole body approach. You focus on the details of opening a single joint but you also have to continue to learn how to feel all parts of your body. Practices like outer dissolving do exactly that.

The real magic occurs when everything comes together. You finally understand how to open and close a single joint and you’ve spent enough time trying to dissolve the gates inside every joint (feeling parts of your whole body), now you suddenly can teach every joint how to open and close literally overnight. This can happen. That’s exactly how it happpened for me.