I have grossly neglected my blogs lately, for which I am heartily sorry. I feel like I work from one wonderful newsletter to the next and my brain shies away from more writing. So today I’m not actually writing (sshhh!), I’m just rambling on a keyboard.
In terms of training, the big buzz word in my mind is bowing. I participated in a big (for me) 21-day 1000 bows per day training recently, I seem to be writing one short article a month on it, and BEST Life Media‘s bowing book will be coming out next month. (A couple of advance copies are in the office and they are so pretty! Informative as well of course 
)
Despite the fact that I am not doing 1000 a day at the moment, I am still in love with bowing. In fact, that training made me love them more (ok, it was a love-hate relationship–I hated the anticipation of them but loved how I felt afterward). I love that I get to move my whole body and sweat a lot after sitting around all day, and I love how open, clean, and stable I feel after I do them.
One interesting side effect from doing all of those bows, at least at the time (no not a lot of pain in the knees), was that I became less patient with extraneous fluff and more blunt. I was less tolerant of any internal or external dissension about anything, possibly because I less tolerant about any dissension about getting the 1000 a day completed. I became more confident about what I want, although that didn’t help me learn how to work with others harmoniously to create it.
For those of you who are interested in the long-practiced moving meditation of bowing, here’s advice that has been given to me by various trainers, teachers, and friends:
- Relax your body, only using those muscles you need to.
- Focus on your feet or lower abdomen (dahnjon/dahn tien) to help bring your energy down and/or stay grounded (if I don’t do this, or if I have too many extraneous thoughts, I tend to lose my balance and fall over)
- As with other meditations, don’t focus on or attach to things other than your bowing. If you have other thoughts, see them, accept them, and then let them go. Then go back to whatever you’re focusing on during the bow (this can vary). In other words, just bow.
- Smile!
- Just take one bow at a time.
- Don’t forget to breathe. Your breathing pattern will develop a rhythm, which you can create consciously if you want.
- Bowing can be done fast or slow, while focusing on your physical body, the energy flowing inside you, or bringing in spiritual energy/light from the universe (even all of the above).
Ilchi Lee, founder of Brain Education and Dahn Yoga, performing a bow
To me, bowing is one of those all-encompassing practices that can teach you about how to live life in general. It can all come from bowing, and we can extrapolate those lessons to other situations.
Has anyone else had experience with bowing meditation? What has your experience been like?
Michela