Pain in the Back

I’m the first to admit, I’m of a melodramatic nature. The refrain of my childhood was my mother saying, “Stop being so dramatic.” So when I reach some physical or mental barrier in kung fu I really do try to reign in the grimaces and groans and involuntary gesticulations of frustration, pain and exhaustion. Everyone is tired. Everyone has pain. Everyone makes mistakes.

This is what my intellect is telling me. But my emotional reactions are, as I said, involuntary, and so controlling them can be difficult. Half of the time I don’t even realize that I am doing X melodramatic thing. Still, I don’t want to look like I am trying to prove something or enlist sympathy through my expostulating, so I am trying to learn to identify and control it. I don’t want to be making excuses even if they are subconscious scowls of pain.

That being said, where’s the line from mind over matter, and when is it ok to say, “I’m hurt.”? Saturday and then last night, Xu and the Sifu both asked me if I was all right. Going to show that however much I might try, my lower back pain has reached the un-hide-able point. I don’t want to be macho and deny that I am in pain. But I don’t want to be a pansy about making excuses. My penchant for melodrama can easily lead into whining and self-indulgence. My back hurts. But it isn’t so severe I shouldn’t be able to train. And if I make the choice to train then I should train. I shouldn’t be half-assing it.

There’s always going to be something bothering me; that’s part of the cycle of building muscles and flexibility. If I’m soreness and pain free I probably haven’t been training very hard. If I am unable to push through my aches without drawing attention to myself, then I need to acknowledge the weakness in my mind or body.

Sometimes I expect too much of myself. But I can’t stand knowing that I could have trained harder but I was being lazy or scared or weak-willed. Or melodramatic. Last night, the pain was not hindering me so much as a mental incapability of pushing through. I got really frustrated and trained worse than my two week back saga warranted. And that got me more frustrated and I was really struggling just to focus on the task at hand. And when a clock is mental and not physical, that makes me feel even more frustrated because the only thing tripping me up is me. Notice the recurrence of “frustration.” It took all my energy to control the melodramatic outburst that was violently bubbling under the surface. I don’t WANT to be irrational. And I recognize when I’m doing it and still can’t seem to flatten my heart.

Tonight I am skipping training to go get acupuncture which I am hoping will benefit both my physical pain and my mental build up. Because more than pain, I am tired of psychoanalyzing myself; I just want to train.

More chi, but try not to train quite so hard....

I never was crazy about the phrase "You're trying too hard." Trying too hard? Usually people aren't trying hard enough. How can you try too hard? The thing is, it's true. After testing Sunday (which was fine overall, except for uncontrollable shaking from beginning to end that left my erluquan a little wobbly), I had all kinds of ideas in my head about how I wanted to make an extra effort of certain things that I felt were lackluster. But therein lies the problem. Training last night, it seemed the harder I tried, the more I messed up. If I trip in bawang zaikui one more time I swear I'm gonna go ballistic. My balance keeps degenerating in my cechuaihtui and biantui. The harder I try on my strikes the weaker and more incorrect they become. And as I try to concentrate harder, things fall apart. I see what I'm doing wrong but it just gets worse and worse. Gha! And then when people tell me to slow down/relax/whatever, I want to beat the living hell out of them.

Not that it is their fault. They are trying to be encouraging, and more than that, they are right. It's my anti-relaxing, my trying too hard, that is making things worse. But how the heck can you relax when you keep messing the same thing up? When you desperately want to land the bawang zakui and not stumble over like a drunk donkey? I hate gratuitous encouragement, especially when I know I am doing something badly. It just makes me feel worse. I know, I'm full of issues, but seriously, there is nothing more frustrating than someone telling you that you're doing well when you know you aren't. For me anyway. And then I try harder and get worse, and well, you can see where this cycle is headed...

I just can't relax. I am impatient. I want to get better faster and so I try to train harder, and instead I am backtracking. The sheer illogic of it all is so incredibly frustrating. Sifu has told me to let go. To breathe, to slow down, etc. and I really honestly do try. But how can you work at speed and pop and power while simultaneously being nonchalant and que sera about whatever you are doing? Man, I think some serious meditation is in order...

Hi-Chi

Last night, after about 25 minutes or so of relentless handstand-choke-fall over, I finally got the handstand somersault. On a mat, but I think it is a worthy first step. Bolstered by this success, when class started I bopped right to the front of the line and managed to stay there the entire class, even through ceshoufan, which is when usually I have to make way or get run over.

Training was great. There were at least 30 people there; and maybe it was the chi of the first really warm spring day, or maybe everyone was excited for testing, but the energy was bouncing off the walls. It was a relief after the struggle of yesterday, and I think I have just been off kilter of late because I was sick, then threw the baby shower, and my schedule was out of sync. So it was nice to have everything get back to normal and high-chi right before testing. I even got a chance to do erluquan and xiao hong quan all the way through. I finally felt like I was having fun again. I guess I probably should have taken off more than two classes when I was sick.... but what can you do? Testing is this weekend!

Fear isn't something you have; it's something you ARE!

Tonight I went to class in a pretty good mood. I decided I didn't want to work too much on anything where I could potentially injure myself right before testing, so I opted to do some mental training instead.

As we know by now, I have serious fears about landing on my head and going upside down. Well, to prepare for liyu dating we occasionally, (more often of late) do a handstand and then go into a somersault from there. I use "we" loosely. Everyone else does a handstand somersault, I just do the hand stand then lock up and either come back down to my feet or fall sideways and land like a sack of bricks. Fear. I got it. Can't seem to lose it.

So today I spent a half hour before class using a mat and trying to overcome this obstacle. It's since I know I'm lacking the upper body strength to go down slowly; I'm just waiting for a CRACK and impending quadriplegia. And as much as my brain says "DO IT!" my body simply will not respond in kind. I got a little closer as I went on, working in baby steps, but after the 73rd try or so I started to feel queasy and decided to stretch the rest of the time before class.
Sadly the queasiness did not go away. Even sadder, it intensified. I was about to ralph the entire class; I couldn't do my shuangfeijiaos to save my life. And when Han told us to do handstand somersaults, well it simply wasn't my happiest hour. At break I compounded the problem by drinking a ton of water, and I spent the rest of class trying to do my forms as gently as possible so as not to get sick all over the carpet. It's almost midnight and my stomach is still not quite right.

After class some of the other folks said they too had felt really tired and/or queasy. So at least I wasn't alone though I think I looked a mess. I'm glad thought that it was something in the air and not the handstands. Because I just found out that it is something Sifu might actually make us do during testing. So I have to keep wailing at it for the next few classes until I can stop choking, and I sure was hoping it didn't mean I would be this nauseated for the next three days.

Worrywart

Last night was the first N'ou Level 2 class I've had since coming back from vacation. I can't believe it's been over 3 weeks!!! I like Level 2 training because with different people teaching the classes are always a surprise. I like mixing it up. Being back in a class with N'ou was great, and he mixed up the order a little from the one we had settled into.

Usually we do bawang zakui after most of the basics. We hit it around 7:40 or so. How do I know so accurately? Because I kind of dread doing it and waste a lot of mental energy trying to psych myself up for not blowing my left handed ceshoufan. Lately they've been getting better actually. I've been doing a fair amount of ceshoufans before class. But for some reason I still occasionally choke. Something's off with my timing. So when N'ou called out "bawang zakui" at 7:20 in the middle of basics, my stomach did a flip flop because I was totally not expecting it.

Happily, though, I did it fine, without choking, even when we had to do two in a row. Plus, it cleared my mind from worrying about it for the rest of basics. I'm a worrier. We've established. So it was great to have that particular worry cleared from my mind. Hopefully I will now be able to let go of it in the future. I just hope I don't unconsciously replace it with some new ridiculous fear.........