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Tao te Jing 22.

Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places.
Get on your knees
if you want to stand tall.
If you want wis­dom,
empty your mind.
If you want the world,
renounce your riches.
Push your­self until you’re exhausted,
and then you’ll find your strength.

You can go far
if you don’t have any­thing to carry.
The more you acquire,
the less you can really see.

A Mas­ter takes this to heart
and sets an exam­ple
for every­body else.

She doesn’t show off
so peo­ple take notice.
She’s not out to prove any­thing
so peo­ple take her at her word.
She doesn’t brag about her­self
but peo­ple know what she’s done.
She hasn’t got an agenda
but peo­ple know what she can do.
She’s not out to get any­body
so nobody can get in her way.

“Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places.”
That’s not as crazy as it sounds.
Get in touch with Tao,
and you’ll see what I mean.

Ron Hogan

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So, you likely know about the Injured Work­ers Groups Dar­bella and I have been running.

I’ve also men­tioned our “under devel­op­ment” web­site, which fol­lows the same pat­tern. There will be at least 8 weeks of daily videos, falling under seven themes:

Med­i­ta­tion
“Yoga” stretch­ing
Qi Gong
Breath­ing
and 3 cat­e­gories of “Zen living.”

We’ve been asked to take the project for the Injured Work­ers big­ger than local, and we’re strug­gling with “how.” Ontario, after all, is a big place (it takes 2–3 days of dri­ving to go from where we live (South Cen­tral) to the West­ern exit — pro­vid­ing ser­vice Province-wide is going to be interesting.

I was talk­ing with a Health Team Leader today, about run­ning a group in her facil­ity, and she asked for a 1-page sum­mary of our pro­posal. I real­ized that I didn’t have one, and was also going to write the blog arti­cle — so why not do both at the same time?

This arti­cle, then, will be about how we see life “work­ing.” We’ll be talk­ing a bit about Injured Work­ers, and also explain­ing how the same method works for all of us.

For the blog, I’ll ref­er­ence another sec­tion of the Tao te Jing, the one above.

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In 2008, Dar­bella and I did a lec­ture / demon­stra­tion about Alter­na­tive Pain Man­age­ment. Some of the senior staff of the Work­place Safety and Insur­ance Board (WSIB) were there, includ­ing the CEO, who has been very sup­port­ive.) We devised an 8-hour Work­shop, com­plete with a DVD-Book package.

Then a year and a bit went by. In the Fall of 2009, we were asked to do a pilot project. We designed an 8-week pro­gramme, includ­ing a 4 hour Intro­duc­tory Work­shop, to help the par­tic­i­pants develop an Alter­na­tive approach to man­ag­ing their pain. That group ended in March of 2010, and we’re estab­lish­ing more groups to con­tinue the trials.

Here’s a typ­i­cal com­ment from a par­tic­i­pant in the first group:

[This group was] sur­pris­ingly help­ful. I went in with an open mind, (“I’ll try any­thing once”), but I really didn’t expect much out of it. My source of pain is nerve related, so I can not be sure if my pain has actu­ally decreased or it’s just the nat­ural fluc­tu­a­tions. How­ever, my suf­fer­ing has def­i­nitely been reduced by a sur­pris­ing amount. Some­how, Wayne and Dar have man­aged to alter my entire out­look on life in eight short weeks. Absolutely amaz­ing, con­sid­er­ing that I have always seen myself as hav­ing a rea­son­ably good han­dle on myself and my life. I think this is mostly due to the open and flex­i­ble nature of how they teach. Everyone’s pain has been caused by sep­a­rate injuries and a rigid course would help some I am sure but could also hurt oth­ers if their indi­vid­ual needs were not acknowl­edged. Allow­ing the par­tic­i­pants “to “pick and choose” how much,how far to go and even what exer­cises to use makes this course uniquely flex­i­ble and appro­pri­ate for everyone,of all ages regard­less of what the pain source is. This course has been pos­si­bly the best thing that has hap­pened in my world since the day I hurt myself at work 2 years ago.

The above Tao te Jing quote from Ron Hogan’s ver­sion of the Tao te Jing points to the “plot” behind our group, as well as our view of how life actu­ally “works.” We call this part Zen Liv­ing, but you could just as eas­ily call it “liv­ing accord­ing to the Tao.”

Notice that almost all of this sec­tion presents “conun­drums.” How does stand­ing still get you some­where? How does kneel­ing make you tall? What about wis­dom and an empty mind?

Our approach to the mem­bers of our first group was to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where each could explore their injuries and their lives from an entirely new per­spec­tive. Most had expe­ri­enced such West­ern approaches as drugs, phys­io­ther­apy, and some had gone “under the knife.” They were in the group because they were not happy with the results.

Now, we value West­ern approaches, and we also think that look­ing at other, less intu­itive approaches pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity to shift things around. In other words, we think it is essen­tial to explore such things as:

• how our minds con­tribute to our suffering
• how pain is inevitable for all of us, and how to make suf­fer­ing optional
• how sim­ple stretch­ing and Qi Gong leads to more flex­i­bil­ity (both phys­i­cal and men­tal) and cre­ates a deeper flow of energy
• how a mind­ful med­i­ta­tion prac­tice pro­vides the ground and core of a shift in all aspects of liv­ing
  and
• how “Zen based” liv­ing helps us to drop blam­ing, wait­ing for res­cue, and allows us to come into the full pres­ence of this moment

Need­less to say, we’ve been writ­ing about this approach here for a decade plus.

While all of this seems log­i­cal and sim­ple, imple­ment­ing it can be daunt­ing. You see in in the Tao quote — logic, “right and wrong,” duality—all get stood on their heads. You have to be will­ing to totally open your­self to a counter-societal approach to every aspect of liv­ing. If you do, you sud­denly dis­cover an inter­nal expe­ri­ence that is both deep and rich.

Med­i­ta­tion

Every­thing cir­cles around the estab­lish­ment of a mind­ful med­i­ta­tion practice.

For starters, our par­tic­i­pants agree to “sit” at least 20 min­utes per day, for 56 days. There are decades of research (Google Jon Kabat-Zinn) demon­strat­ing the utter effec­tive­ness of this reg­i­men for devel­op­ing calm­ness, insight, and phys­i­cally, less­en­ing of pain symptoms.

Our approach is to teach the par­tic­i­pants to “sit” prop­erly, and to learn to focus their atten­tion either on their breath, or onto the cur­rent expe­ri­ence (mindfulness.)

Over the 8 weeks, we help them to fine tune and cus­tomize their expe­ri­ence, and to “unpack” what emerges for them.

Qi Gong

This is Darbella’s “wheel­house.” She’s been “play­ing” at Qi Gong since 1990.

This group work has served as an inspi­ra­tion for deep­en­ing her prac­tice. She teaches this easy-to-learn prac­tice with kind­ness and com­pas­sion.

Qi Gong is also counter-intuitive. Not much seems to be going on, and yet there is this sub­tle shift in both the flow of energy and one’s abil­ity to “move your body.” In a sense, the move­ments teach our body how to func­tion best, and we thereby elim­i­nate wasted move­ment and improve bod­ily efficiency.

We see the same thing with body­work. Pres­sure leads to pain, leads to expres­sion, leads to plea­sure. Once the block­ages and bag­gage are out of the way, we begin to sense our nat­ural “Tao state.” You get out of your own way, and all you expe­ri­ence is the free flow of your own, core energy.

“Yoga” stretches

This is an inter­est­ing one, pri­mar­ily because we teach these stretches for one rea­son — to help par­tic­i­pants gain flex­i­bil­ity so they can “sit” with lit­tle or no pain.

We have designed the stretches to be easy to do — many can be done sit­ting in a chair.

The inter­est­ing part is that our gen­tle approach (as Dar­bella says, “Push to 80% or so, and hold there”) flies in the face of the “shake it ’til you break it, “No pain, no gain” approach to “fit­ness espoused by Health Club Amazons.

The stretches open body, mind, and spirit. Par­tic­i­pants are amazed at what hap­pens when they work hard at 80% — parts that have been frozen for years thaw out.

“Zen” Liv­ing

We really don’t teach Zen. We teach what we’ve called, for decades, “self-responsibility.”

Our per­sonal approach to this is “Zen-ny” in that Zen prizes sim­plic­ity, direct­ness, and moment-by-moment focus.

So, we explore the idea that we have to start from where we are.

Most of our par­tic­i­pants want to be where they were before their injury, and we sim­ply do not have access to the time machine! So, we help them to expe­ri­ence what hap­pens when you crave what is not avail­able to you—your body tight­ens up, and your pain increases.

We help our clients to gen­tly let go of cling­ing to hope that time will go back­wards, of cling­ing to hope of a res­cue (that some­one or some thing (a pill, an oper­a­tion, etc.) will ride in on a white horse,) and to let go of cling­ing to their belief that things are bad now and des­tined to get worse.

We help them to “get there,” not through force of our “wis­dom,” (we have none!) but through daily expe­ri­ence — sit­ting, stretch­ing and doing Qi Gong. Over the course of 8 weeks, they learn by doing and observ­ing the only thing that mat­ters — their own lives and bodies.

This is what it means in the Tao — to go places by stand­ing (or sit­ting ) still. We shift through the mind­ful appli­ca­tion of still­ness, stud­ied and care­ful move­ment, and full pres­ence with what is hap­pen­ing right now. We open our­selves — our minds, bod­ies, and spir­its — to the moment by moment flow of expe­ri­ence, all with­out judge­ment or resistance.

By doing this, we find our­selves, as one of my clients outs it, “All flowy, all the time.”

This 8-week pro­gramme sim­ply works. Of course, there will be a range of responses — based upon the injury, lifestyle, and com­mit­ment of each per­son. Our expe­ri­ence is that amaz­ing things hap­pen in 56 days. We just have no idea in advance what the result will look like.

Of course, our goal, through our new web­site, is to make this process avail­able to all who are inter­ested, and you don’t have to be phys­i­cally injured to imple­ment it. You might be notic­ing that your life is stalled, or mean­ing­less, or bor­ing. You might notice that your rela­tion­ships are stale. You might notice a long­ing to ful­fill your path of pur­pose, and want us to walk with you.

I’m hop­ing the videos will be done and the site will be open this Sum­mer. Amaz­ing how much work 56 videos are. We’re about 1/3 of the way, and we’ll keep you posted!

We invite you to think about whether this 8-week Group is some­thing you wish to imple­ment in your area of Ontario. If it is, make con­tact, and we’ll share more details.

Make Con­tact!

So, how does this week’s arti­cle sit with you? What ques­tions do you have? Go to the top of this arti­cle, click on the title, and leave a com­ment or question!

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Work­shops, Retreats!

Dar­bella and I can help you to find a new, vibrant, rich path. We offer day-long and week­end events —just you and us—and we will work with you, to be the change you want to see.

Read about it here:

Day-long Inten­sives
Week­end Residentials

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Incom­ing search terms:

• alter­na­tive pain management
• learn how to stand still if you want to go places get on your knees if you want to stand tall if you want wis­dom empty your mind if you want the w

Related posts:

1. Man­age Your SELF Instead of Your Pain
2. Have your feel­ings. Act respon­si­bly in spite of them.
3. The Shift
4. Tak­ing Action
5. Clear­ing the Gunk Out of Your Head

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Tagged with: Bodywork • Health • mindfulness • Self-responsibility • Zen • Zen Approaches

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