1) I'm not Buddhist -- Meat is tasty and I like to eat it. Having said that the 5 days of vegetarian fare I had at the centre was very tasty too and I enjoyed every meal. They are not doing it tough food wise let me tell you.
2) On first glance those Tibetan buddhists look a bit like they're practicing magic, idolatry and so forth -- but they're not. You have to free your mind from the things holding it back, look past the first impressions and just listen and learn. Trust me no one is twisting your arm there. And they are funny guys. I mean REALLY funny. They love to laugh.
I had been doing a bit of tai chi with the local Tai Chi Academy (who are fabulous people) and work had been very stressful, so I thought 5 days away in some peace would be nice. Meditation sounded relaxing (but trust me it's not) and tai chi with the fun people (Brett and Fontaine) from the Tai Chi Academy always good value.
Where am I going with this. Well two places. Firstly a note about meditation. It hurts. A lot. You say "it hurts" and the Lama smiles enthusiastically and says "excellent! It has to hurt for you to be able to train your mind to ignore pain!" It took me four days to finally get enough control over my mind to be able to think "My leg is killing me but the pain is transitory and shortly after I stop meditating the pain will go." And then simply ignore it (actually acknowledge it and then ignore it) by focussing on the object of meditation. The second year I went I managed to get to that point much quicker and got a whole pile of other things out of it too. But I digress.
Here is another interesting side effect of learning about the tranistory nature of suffering. It applies to cigarette cravings too. They too are transitory. I smoked a packet of cigarettes on the drive down to Gippsland that first year (3 or 4 years ago) and haven't smoked a single cigarette since. Cravings are transitory, pain is transitory. I found myself able to acknowledge that I REALLY wanted a cigarette, but that the craving that was so overwhelming would pass. That it should have no power over me because it was transitory. I need to point out here that I had no intention of giving up smoking, no one talked to me about giving up smoking, or talked about cravings as a form of transitory suffering. I just gave up. Right there after nearly 20 years of smoking.
So suffering is transitory. And more than that, suffering is merely one view of the event of pain in my knee. Another view is, for example, the joy that my knee is adapting to the new demands I have placed upon it.
So....today I think my knee was hurting more than it ever has so far (that perspective is pretty clear today hehe). I could barely move it at all during the first interval. But I used the 'qualified round of breathing' meditation to focus my mind away from the pain and on strict control over the breath. Breathing in for three strides and out for three strides. Visualising the breath as white energy coming in through the top of my head, mixing with the red pain I imagined drawing up from my knee into my abdomen, and then expelling it as blue energy out the top of my head as I exhaled. I don't pretend to know if I was magically drawing pain out of my knee and expelling it from my body but that sort of mindfulness sure 'takes your mind off it'!
I stuck to the 8.5 km/h game plan for both the 3 min intervals this week and my perception was that I was coping better this time. Interestingly, even though my perception was for an easier run, my HRM was showing a different story.
As you can see I got WAY up into Zone 5 and peaked at HR of 174. Thats very close to "maximum heart rate" for me. Once again the 4 intervals are clearly seen. Two short ones of 1.5 mins and two longer ones of 3 mins. I was definitely starting to labour during the second one and there is a noticable trend upwards when you look at the four intervals together. I think this shows that I was not recovering fully in the alloted time between intervals. The recovery between the 3rd and final interval was pronouncably high. I didn't get out of Z4 (the anaerobic threshold zone) so it looks to me like I spent about 10 straight minutes in anaerobic exercise.
As Lama Choedak Rinpoche would say, it's all about how you choose to percieve the situation (he has a wonderful metaphor involving an old sofa - but that is for another time). I could choose to view this data as a step backwards. After all my heart rate didn't go as high last time even though I was actually running faster at 8.6 km/h. Or, I can view this as a tremendous success as I stayed in anaerobic exercse zones for 10 straight minutes with less percieved exertion than Friday's run.
So thank you Lama Choedak Rinpoche. For 'Qualified Round of Breathing', meditative running, pain as opportunity, and helping me find the success when I could have chosen to look for failure.
Oh and when I recount my time at SIBA I like to tell people I went to 'Buddhist Camp'... pretty much because it sounds funnier.
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