Alchemy Without Tears

Whether qi-skeptical, qi-curious, or qi-frustrated, you don't need to focus on qi in Daoist neidan and traditional Chinese martial arts practices.

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Kafka’s one of innumerable cultural giants whom perished without seeing a drop of deserved worldly success, let alone a crumb of the eventual massive cultural significance of their own work. It’s devastating that such individuals (Melville, Lovecraft, Jesus, Mozart, the Confederacy of Dunces guy) don’t get to lead at least a reasonably comfortable life, but instead eke out their time in poverty or illness, while later generations like ours freely harvest their souls for our own existential and other needs. And that’s only when works aren’t lost to anonymity or mis-attribution—such as when a person happens to be a woman during most eras of human civilization.

At the same time, it’s healthy—desirable—to never become culturally prominent within one’s own lifetime. Whether or not accolades are deserved, to become a heavy-handed icon with a following of sycophants is a path to personal derangement. Its onset is unnoticeable to the person experiencing it, their fame and self-importance gradually changing their sense of self. Look at anybody who suddenly becomes super wealthy or famous or simply highly attractive in their teens or younger decades: their values and priorities dramatically change, and in the major cases simply go kinda batty. It’s important for people with such a heavy social reach—as it is for all of us, as we might be losing it ourselves anyway—to devote themselves to practices that have no worldly value, and are kept away from the world or its praises, and which also do not depend upon having such things. It’s part of what Zhuangzi was instructing by avoiding fame and influence. Sitting-and-forgetting, baybee!

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You’ve gotta wonder if Kafka wasn’t tuned into the same contemplative current as Zhuangzi, only whilst emphasizing beetles instead of butterflies.

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When doing neijia, and neidan, the initial phase of practice is to properly learn fangsong or relaxation/unclenching of the body’s tension. There are layers to this process, and it occurs on its own in other meditation systems as well. But this skill of being able to consciously let go of conscious and unconscious tension is the powerful foundation for lifelong development. It is through this process of fangsong that the mind and breath are able to sink naturally down to the lower abdomen, gradually engaging the dantian. This must become a daily and default exercise, so that without any force, the mind and breath sink to the lower torso without any forceful effort. It’s necessary to feel this way throughout each session of practice, and perpetually through all future daily practice.

Doing this for a few years will gradually and naturally "awaken" the dantian, which will begin to move noticeably, first as brief partial sensations of it shifting, and over time with constant practice there is a clear sense of spherical motion (yes, really, it happens, and it’s not even a big deal). When the surges of turning sensations are clearer, the qi will then on its own begin moving throughout the body. This is also where I think some people get stuck, either by lack of practice, or by scattering their efforts in one or many wrong directions. It's a mistake to try and think about qi, or visualize it, or imagine it, or to do stuff like focus on meridians or points around the body—to feel it “actively” as “a thing you are doing”. Keep relinquishing, letting the mind awareness sink to the bottom of the torso.

The qi is not going to be explicitly moved by the mind, or else yi, the “mind intent”, until it is unmistakably a process and factor that is recognized as a bodily sensation, to where a developing “subtle body” awareness starts to emerge. The qi becomes active and enriched interdependently with a concentrated-yet-expansive awareness of the body, as well as the sense of space immediately around the body. Even if the qi circulation and so-termed orbits around the body are active and no longer just a “trickle”, the cognitive brain itself cannot focus upon any sole single point of it directly without obstructing the process (all vacuity is filled by one thought, or whatever).

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When the qi is activated and tangible, the mind experiences a full, simultaneous awareness of the entire body and also its immediate surroundings.

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Training in other kinds of meditation or martial arts or perhaps some other disciplines like live music and improvisational skills (jazz, Indian classical music) may be a good reference or similar experience here. As Ueshiba described the ideal state of mind to foster as a martial artist: “maintain total awareness without letting the mind dwell on any one particular thing in the surroundings and environment”. Many know the Zen saying, “think the thought that is not-thinking”. But it’s more than just non-thinking or “observer” meditation awareness, but a broad and lucid experience of the mind and the body and its immediate surroundings (physical, mental, and ???) while fully perceptive and actively attuned to it all.

To dial up to this awareness, at first try to remain simultaneously aware of two disparate but adjacent or respective places in the body or the traditional qi orbit meridians at once: the dantian but also the niwan, the huiyin but also the baihui, the jiaji but also the solar plexus, the bubbling well but also the wrists, the armpits and also the inner thighs. Instead of thinking about each single (or physical) place; instead of focusing on any area, be peripherally lightly aware of each location/sensation simultaneously. It is as though your mental and experiential awareness is a broad surface area of a lampshade casting down a large circumference of gentle light, as opposed to the impulsive type of conscious focus which is like a direct, dense flashlight beam of light targeting only one thing. The two areas of awareness are just both spots under the shade of awareness your mind casts softly around it, just as a broad tree canopy's can effortlessly contain multiple creatures within its shadowy shade.

Possibly you?

Continually experimenting with this with two alternating, adjacent places around the body, it will seem like a normal expansion to become aware of the entire body, and increasingly subtle aspects in which it seems to exist outside the conventional biological senses. This light, sensitive mind awareness can observe the body and its immediate surrounding sensory (and not sensory?) phenomenon all at once, being in no one place to the exclusion of any other; recognition of the entire human apparatus and “experience” taking place. It's calibrating this type of bodily awareness which will then at some point begin to recognize the traditional Chinese martial arts qi process happening on its own, and suffusing the bodily experience as it deepens automatically from regular ongoing practice.

Practicing this kind of awareness should result in the mind becoming much more skilled at engaging and maintaining deeper states of concentration during seated meditation (Daoist or otherwise) as well. As a beginner to meditation, we scan the body actively, unravel tension, focus on posture, and so on in order to work our way towards this kind of concentration eventually. Gradually, safely the qi should suffuse the orbits of the body, and be a clear phenomenon as it does. But even if it doesn’t, this is a useful skillset for the martial arts, life in general, and Buddhist meditation traditions and practices.

Physical Tension is in the Mind

Yoga does not typically unravel the body's unconscious muscle tension, but it can do so through deep relaxation of the psyche

Someone recently suggested I take up Ashtanga Yoga, that it might dispel some of my excessive thought processes and general habitual overthinking. I’m not sure that Ashtanga or anything else can single-handedly pacify this unique ancestral inheritance, but then again why else am I so engaged in the cultivation methods discussed here? So, for the common cause of good psychic health and also blog content, I plan to responsibly wade into the world of Ashtanga next month.

Yoga practices seem to develop a comprehensive full-body structural strength, limbic and bodily isolation and control, remarkable balance, a thorough curriculum of breathing regimens, overall health improvement, and meditative and spiritual attainments for the dedicated student. Yet perhaps surprisingly, the unraveling of bodily chronic unconscious tension isn’t a probable outcome of the practice. Internet forums for yoga discussion tend to have threads with beginner-ish students asking about dealing with this sort of tension. Some people have pointed out that, actually, if you have issues with chronic muscle tension or myofascial pain, doing yoga can even make such tension issues worse. 

This is the sort of thing internal Chinese practices like Yang Taijiquan (Tai Chi Ch’uan) are uniquely effective at resolving. I’m not saying here that one is better than the other—that’s not at all my point. I’m simply contrasting these systems and how they engage the body uniquely and not at all similarly. The dynamic relaxation, or fangsong, is among the reasons Taijiquan and some other 19th century Chinese martial arts became popular vehicles for health and exercise in the 20th century. This dynamic relaxation process also takes continual engagement to fully get rid of the years and years of unconscious tension in the body, hence why I emphasize standing practice so much (and also because I think most students of Taijiquan and related arts don’t actually stand enough, or haven’t spent years doing consistent rigorous foundational training of this kind). Standing practice, more so than seated meditation, is where the deep unconscious, chronic tension really melts away.

Unfortunately, 99.99% of the Taijiquan out there is pretty bogus or flimsy, very sorry stuff, to the point where it’s hard to even recommend as a pursuit! I’m not even sure what the best protocol is for verifying the quality of teachers or groups practicing it these days. I trained under people who emphasized the necessity of pressure testing real martial skills, but then at the same time plenty of people can do lousy Taijiquan, but still otherwise be good at fighting, so… I don’t know if that approach is always accurate. I do think teachers should have demonstrable martial skills to some degree, but again, it’s hard to set a clear line for this stuff. 

Originally I took up martial arts because it was so difficult to conceive of hurting others, even within a completely ethical scenario of self-defense. I still can’t really engage in using force by thinking consciously about doing it! The skills I do have come from training continuously a system that removes personal intent from martial reaction and reciprocation. For people who are naturally incapable of harming others, or cannot consciously do it effectively, such an approach is the only way to develop assertive martial capacity. Yoga is certainly not about any of that, though.

Regardless of what I’ve said above, I do think for some people, Yoga does lead them to letting go of unconscious tension, because tension and relaxation is a process that is rooted in the stresses of the mind. To remain consistent with a bodily practice until it has reached a deep, spiritual level, tends to relax the psyche—where the unconscious tension of the body is encrypted.

How can we relax and learn to do it well? As is often the case, for the answer we have to look towards the animals; or to those humans less disturbed by the tumultuous world, namely our children. When a child sleeps it forgets all problems. When a child sleeps it really sleeps, if it plays then it really plays and when it works it works. There is full intensity in the activity at hand. Adults have the habit of mentally working when they sleep and play, and of sleepwalking when they work.

So one basic rule of relaxation is to shut off thoughts on a conscious level about things that you have completed. Don't dwell or brood over problems. Your subconscious mind actually has great powers to solve problems without any need for the thought processes to be at a conscious level. When you have fed the necessary data into the mind about any particular topic, forget it. The mind will churn out the answer when it is required. Your conscious brooding on the problem in an effort to aid the process does not help. Have more trust in the capabilities of your mind.

—Swami Satyananda Saraswati
A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya

but doctor, I am Pagliacci

One Step Towards Slipping the Shackles

“Everyone is fighting an internal battle you cannot see”, and yet those fighting cannot see it very well either.

A first skill of meditation is observing the arising and passing of thoughts. Another skill is to actively let go of thought processes: we notice ourselves thinking; we return to the focus of the meditation method (typically the breath and/or bodily posture). Recognizing and disengaging thought and internal narratives becomes a familiar, regular reaction—we soon notice our minds gnawing on habitual thoughts throughout each day.

The mind increasingly fosters a sense of "mental space" through regular practice. An expanded, more lucid awareness regularly developed gets more space and time to perceive phenomena and make decisions in response. The mind will sense in advance when certain types of thoughts and mental processes are stirring. This upcoming “mind queue” is experienced and discerned even more clearly as a quality of deep developed concentration states.

One thought process that is good to recognize—and dispel—is comparison of oneself to others—and alternatively comparing oneself to a past or imagined future version of oneself. These are not helpful thoughts in any practical way. But also—they are miserable to think about! They’re stirred up by all sorts of mundane and profound stresses or unresolved feelings buried a bit further down in the psyche. Conflicting, churning feelings about the personal health, wealth, and relationships of mine and thine—and all the while simmering in the background is a blurry awareness that the only guarantees in life are aging, illness, and death.

This is all very obvious stuff, it would seem. But who among us does not endlessly catch themselves yet again going over this same sort of patterned narrative drivel in their head? It’s quaint how predisposed all of us human creatures are to being shallow and petty. We can’t stop comparing privately and aloud the most superficial externalities: wealth, beauty, mental and physical health, career or status, privilege and luck. If you have aversion towards how “fake” these things are in your youth, you find out soon enough that there is no real escape in the world from vanities and the measurements of vanities. These are the tangible, allegedly verified, conventional distinguishers and meaning-signifiers of life’s quality in premium which we are socially and biologically evolved to consider.

Most particular it is indeed then that these mental fabrications—and the personal compulsion and collective determination to evaluate and compare ourselves by them to others—happen to make our human lives pretty miserable! This subject matter relentlessly bores its way into our empty personal narratives in perpetuity, gifting us with regular psychic damage major and minor—which has the added absurdity and irony of being dealt out to us most often by our very own mind. The roving oscillations of our human minds act like a double-end boxing bag we keep trying to make our business to train with. It keeps snapping back and whacking us in the nose.

Even though comparing ourselves to the particulars of another, or to an ideal past or future fantasy, is such a remarkable waste of time and dumb thing to do, we’re a sick species, and can’t help ourselves. We need an effective psychic self-defense! It seems that with proper meditation training, we can examine and pare down the true motivations and purposes driving such habitual thought-forms. All this even before confronting the broader, deeper issues in the psyche which enhance and motivate them to bubble up.

First, let’s recognize this: when comparing ourselves directly to others, we are obsessing over mundane and only externally visible (and even then only fractionally, partially) conditions resulting from innumerable unknown, uncontrolled factors and variables of life. Might as well realize the mind completely, gain total omniscience and insight into all karma—because that’s what you need to understand all the conditions of another’s life in its entirety and how that relates to you, the protagonist.

But more important and foundational to meditation as a practice and skillset: when we compare ourselves to others directly, there tends to be something *questionable* motivating the very thought process. This particular pattern of thinking will always subtly or overtly make a person miserable, but also does not bring any solutions to the dissatisfaction experienced before, during, and after. It does leave a person more stressed out and upset, or a bit more emotionally deluded. A process of becoming dumber.

What fiends are behind these thought processes, sabotaging our own very souls, tormenting us with our own mental fabrications? Why, it’s but the self in shadow—it’s myself when I do not (realize I do not) lucidly perceive my own mind!

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A seemingly similar kind of thinking which can be to our benefit instead: thoughtfully cultivating a sphere of people with qualities which bring healthy peer influences. There is a difference between direct value-oriented comparisons to others and consciously giving some attention to the quality and substance of peer influences. Instead of thinking what specific details, statistics, or minutiae glimmer dimly in the lives of others or our own at other times, it’s better to pay attention to what general qualities, habits, and momentums of those in our life are perpetually engaged and subtly influencing us as well.

The qualities of the people you want around you is a whole different topic. Without idealizing healthy behavior for ourselves and others, we’d all optimally move through life like a sociopath or moist automaton accumulating a circle of friends/peers/colleagues/mentors with S-rank habits, values, and personal qualities, coldly dropping anyone with flaws or bad luck (so, like the entertainment industry). People are human beings, nobody is perfect, you can’t systematically organize a perfect portfolio of friends or romantic/sexual partners, you can’t successfully assort human beings with the approach of a neural network. That certainly never stopped or stops people from trying, though.

It’s not the stats or numbers or specific achievements of others which you ought to think about or match, it’s the habits and values and qualities you want to reinforce in yourself and maybe others that should be considered. Don’t compare yourself to me as someone who has “achieved” things, but instead keep my influence and correspondence as one of many in your energetic spirit investment asset portfolio.

A lot of people in recent years have taken up meditation as a solo practice/process without necessarily encountering the traditional ways of engaging and questioning the mind processes as the practice develops. Not only when beginning meditation, but later if the practice wanes a bit, we find ourselves frustratingly controlled by deep stress once again because: life. It’s ideal to internalize helpful tenets especially for such times. Maybe all of this is kind of for naught if it isn’t gleamed by experience of personal insight or minor revelation or small satori. Which I guess means, practice is what matters. But practice without clear or broader instructions will have unclear results or usefulness.

The ultimate (actually real) conspiracy is that every person is being lied to—by their own selves. Without observing and questioning the motivations behind our habitual thoughts within and beyond meditation, we’ll endlessly compare ourselves directly to the hollow and arbitrary and uninformed partially visible minutiae of other people—fantasies. The mind concocts endless fantasies with no substance; total illusions, stolen time. Perhaps there’s a functional evolutionary reason the mind does this, but who cares about that?

No bodhisattvas allowed, etc.

Civilization's Basement

What does it take for culture to go underground?

Recently I’ve been going outside to engage in more of that classic tree communion practice which is all the rage with young people these days. Yet as you may have heard (from your own screams), North America’s summer has been in full-on beast mode. The midday heat around here during this season is usually quite punishing just normally, but this month the temperature even before sunrise has been absolutely mental. At least there’s still no bright direct sunlight until 9:00 AM? Truly this is nature’s mercy, as the addition of daytime sun to this kind of heat tends to, um… regularly kill people.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain, since it’s not as intense in my zip code as it is in say, Karachi or Delhi. But those places have always been in much warmer regions, so if it’s this hot around here 24/7 in summer, then various other places are approaching uninhabitable. It’s not just humans being squeezed for livable environmental locales going rapidly forward either, of course, as the oceans are acidifying not only near the surface but apparently in the deeper depths as well. The habitable range depths of the ocean where most life exists there is thus gradually going to be sandwiched and squeezed by layers of acidification.  

For now though, the early morning sunrise hours remain ours to optimize for productivity! Indeed, I wasn’t the only one exercising at the park. Why, there were populous, frenzied swathes of gnats and flies rocketing around in furious circles, caroming off of me, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by mistake. Birds paused and stared at my motionless sweating from the trees’ shade wondering what the hell I was doing here outside if I didn’t need to actively forage for food. Very powerful and passionate ants were enthusiastically finding excuses to check my backpack for crumbs at various different locations, not entirely admitting to themselves that well-stitched knapsack shade was the real target of their appetite. There were even some other human beings around as well. They didn’t even stare at me as much as usual because, well, it was so damn hot they couldn’t spend a single extra moment dawdling outside.

I mention all this because in places with hot or humid weather (like Taiwan, for instance) typically outdoor cultivation or martial arts practice is done in the earlier morning hours before the sun is in the sky. It’s good to casually gauge how feasible and conducive regional climates or weather is to regular martial practice, or some meditation under a tree. But the heat in the mornings here lately has been at least like Taipei gets in the summer—intense enough on some days that I’m not sure it’s healthy to be practicing outside at any hour. The park I practice at is a pretty quick walk from my place (under 15 minutes), and if I didn’t chug a 24oz water bottle mixed with electrolyte powder, I would have been feeling heat exhaustion walking back home after an hour of exercise. I was also wearing a lot of polyester and… I’m actually not sure what effect that has on a person. 

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New housing in big cities tends to be sky-rise condo and rental apartment towers. A lot of us are gonna be living in those. Still, it’s ideal to regularly do practice standing or martial cultivation training while directly on earth or at ground level. Given the intensifying heat all over the planet’s surface and oceans, I wonder when urban planning and development will instead switch to constructing buildings and housing downwards into the Earth. Maybe this is nonsense speculation, but I assume climate issues later this century will mean humanity ends up living in underground expanded shelter systems. Much cooler would be an artificial "geofront" urban environment, as imagined in the iconic mid-90s anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion. 

Unfinished artist concept rendering of a mid-21st century American (USA) geofront (the sky and clouds in final version will be replaced by stalagmites and stalactites, whereas the orientation will remain the same for some reason)

That other internationally iconic anime series of the mid-90s, Cowboy Bebop, has among the most familiar and believable near future civilizations in science fiction. The 2071 human population’s middle and upper classes dwell in a single international domed megacity on Mars, after a major technology project disaster has left the Earth (and the impoverished stuck there) with a damaged and unstable atmosphere. While there are new technological advances that are impressive feats, humankind remains frustrating for its familiar vices, weaknesses, and self-destructive impulses. The off-world settings are intentionally fantastic for the sake of story and imaginative catharsis, but outside of that it’s pretty akin to our own forthcoming reality. Just relocate the series’s domed Mars megacity to somewhere on Earth, replace the planet’s atmospheric calamity of the earlier 21^st century with ongoing unaddressed climate corrosion, and replace the ideal independent local solar system space travel with some near-future terrestrial communal or self-maintained technology.¹ 

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When traditional arts and culture are no longer valued or have conventional necessity for a society, they become exclusive, niche, or go "underground". Such are the reoccurring cycles of cultural influence—artistic or aesthetic movements will wane in mainstream relevance and relocate out of the spotlight into periods of hibernation—and are then abandoned or transformed and/or resurface. Recognizing reoccurring themes in culture and history helps people to recognize recurring reasons to maintain and (the inspiration to) transmit over time traditional martial arts and countless other cultural traditions. Traditional practices aren’t meant to be ultimate skillsets across every circumstance or context of human existence, nor are they impossible methods which only ancient geniuses could possibly grok properly.  Within traditional practices are aspects which will become important in later generations, or amidst specific contexts that aren’t apparent to each generation.

Any human future will continue to be some order of dystopia. The real concern is if humanity becomes so negligent as to no longer be doing civilization. When neither you nor I go outside to practice in nature or in public due to the heat being dangerous before the morning sun has even risen, there is the brief recognized scent of civilization itself going "underground". Should civilization go underground, metaphorically or literally, it could only re-emerge after experiencing a new transformation.

1. Like say, the upcoming pipeline of robotics manufacturing, diverse independent digital information networks, right-to-repair tech en masse leading to new unique engineering/tech tools, hybrid transportation or transit systems which travel deep underground or are additionally submersible underwater, etc.

Night is the New Day

Afternoon activity is a fake idea (11am to 4pm is a time best ignored)

I am not really a "morning person", but with age I realize it’s more that the different parts of the day bring with them a distinct kind of psychological engagement. These days I think both "morning people" and "night owls" are adjacent for gaining mental focus and energy from ranges of hours which are not late morning through late afternoon. It’s healthiest for our circadian rhythm to follow the hours of the sun and not stay up all night, but I also think the hours when the sun is strongest are the most ideal for sleeping. 

In that recent post about standing cultivation done in proximity to trees, I mentioned traditional Daoist cosmology contains various metaphysical correspondences, and that different tree species have affinities which align them with such categorizations. This is certainly not news for anyone who has already read a bit about any practice derived from the bagua sequences. The 24 hours of the day are divided into 2-hour segments between the odd numbers of the clock (1-3, 3-5, 5-7, 9-11, 11-1, …). So a new day beginning at 00:00 midnight is in the exact middle of the 11pm to 1am interval.

When practicing meditation cultivation practices in particular, depending on on the lineage and teacher, certain specific 2-hour segments of the day are not used for practice due to the overwhelming negative effect if practiced chronically. These are explained by their yin/yang emphasis being the most extreme windows of the day, and having a negative effect on a person practicing within these hours consistently over time. One example is the window from 11am until 1pm.

I tend to take that even further: the times I find least appealing for practicing meditation or standing cultivation are from around 10-11am until 4-5pm. Some of us are "morning people" and some of us are "night owls", but none of us are "11am-to-5pm people". Yes, most of us have to work and do activities during the daytime hours, but do we really like this arrangement? Outside of far ranges of northern/southern latitude or the winter months, we only use these wasteland hours because it seems rather abstract to question them like this. These are the least appealing hours of a day, and not even because of the association with the eternal grind of “productivity”, but because from 11am until 5pm naps are particularly fulfilling: they hit naturally, truly refreshing. It’s difficult to nap earlier than this, while waking up later will interfere with nighttime sleep. 

Oh sure, you shouldn’t sleep too long, because you also need to sleep at night—but this window is when you’ll naturally crave that high grade day sleep, especially during the hotter seasons (which we’ve all come to accept lately as nearly every season of the year for the rest of our time on Earth). Usually we spend afternoons physically slogging through the sun’s heat and rising temperature of the environment absorbing the sunlight, or sitting in a room and clicking and clacking digital inputs into digital software for some digital product or digital media. Maybe not everyone lives this way (landed gentry), but the point is these are unacknowledged low-quality hours. 

Entirely without controversy, the best hours are during early morning, early evening, and the middle of the night: 5-9am, 5-9pm, and 11pm-3am. These are premium hours. The best sleep would be from 10am to 4pm during the day, 9-11pm at night, and then at 3-5am. What’s pertinent is being awake and doing cultivation practice throughout a portion of the 5-7am and 5-7pm windows. Sitting in meditation and standing during these hourly blocks of the day is gonna optimally develop qi, with assistance from the processes of the planet itself, and the sun and moon. Concepts like "earthing" and "sun gazing" also derive from the quality of the energetic response of the entire environment and planet at sunrise and sunset, especially during the brief periods when the sun can be observed by a person directly without ocular harm. 

Early morning and early evening energies gives more mental energy than any other hours, and shouldn’t be missed if you like that sort of stuff. Sleeping through sunrise and sunset will usually cause that dank, sluggish feeling. I once spent a university semester abroad in Sweden in Uppsala, and the lack of sunlight from November through early January increasingly had this effect: gradually it became a perpetual fatigue, and at some point bordered on the moribund. That part of the country isn’t even halfway up Sweden’s latitude, either. Up north, going crazy is just normal.  

Speaking of crazy, consider: humanity hasn’t been doing nearly enough to prepare for, let alone mitigate, the exponentially worsening climate, so perhaps it might be sensible in the future to limit daytime activity in favor of evening and night-time and early morning periods instead. Sounds eccentric perhaps, but this is how people have often exercised in tropical climates. If training or practicing outside (or without A/C), it has to be done during the early morning and early evening hours. It becomes too hot by 9-10am to do stuff like standing cultivation or slow-paced form practices—and now it’s become considerably hotter still all over the planet.

As for myself, I’m not even in the southern USA, yet where I live is a cruel and sweaty dimension from April until September, all during which it’s a Book of Job devotional madness to do outdoor standing or form after 10am (unless you’re in some quality tree shade). Night is the new day, this is the way!

This is the new picnic weather