Brush and Sword - Craig Thompson: Alexander Technique and Mindfulness

this is a little video about having fun with swords; bokken; sparring with rubber swords

This is a little video talking about two great samurai; Musashi and Hideyori; practicing with the two swords. The 2 books mentioned are "Musashi" and "Taiko" by Eiji Yoshikawa.

San Angelo, Tx water gardens

This is talking about a sword and brush program I am proposing.
Dear Friends,
I propose a weekend workshop.
“Alexander Technique, Meditation, Brush and Sword”
I might not have to say so much about how working with the brush helps a warrior’s education but that goes just as much for the sword.
Alexander Technique
This is just a little essay on the Alexander Technique, Posture (Poise), and the Shambhala Teachings or perhaps one could say a Nalanda approach to understanding Chogyam Trungpa’s and Sakong Mipham’s teaching.
I think all of the dharma is a way to convince us to practice mindfulness-awareness. It is obvious what the benefits are when we are on the cushion but why are we not able to carry that same situation more effectively over to the post meditation period?
We are so bound by habitual patterns. They are in our body as well as the mind and they are most subtle. Knowing the key is not the same as opening the lock. Trungpa, Rinpoche says the key is good head and shoulders. How does one achieve this virtue of the higher realms known as good head and shoulders? How did he achieve it?
He really paid attention to how he moved. He slowed things down and refused to be in any kind of a hurry. To him it was all about good head and shoulders.
Alexander is trying to teach us the same skill. He is trying to get us to slow down and see what is going on.
The technique teaches us that for all beings with a head and a spine, the spine will follow what the head leads.
The head leads and the body follows.
Whatever you do with your head will have profound effects on the whole body. It seems too obvious to us (but do we really get it on this level?) that thinking is controlling everything. It is saying the same thing, really.
So it becomes clear that a warrior must make a real study of how he uses himself and how, in particular, he uses his head and shoulders.
The result of such a study leads directly to the higher realms. One is convinced to plunge into such a study because of the tremendous sense of well being that one experiences. One feels unblocked. One feels one’s winds and channels are straightened. One feels a tremendous feeling of ease and lightness. Absence of struggle. Drala. Lungta. One feels that one has overcome aggression. One feels that one has found a golden key. Maybe it is only a silver key but it is a key and a catalyst.
It makes us want to change. And for the better.
It is a skillful means for following the way of our teachers. It is a contemplative art, in the formal Shambhalian sense.
It leads us to relaxation in mindfulness and to awareness.
The study of the Alexander Technique in alliance with the Shambhala Teachings is a great boon to a struggling humanity.
Brush
The warrior's main weapon for learning nonaggression is the brush. Calligraphy and training in the use of the brush has been the primary training of an educated, refined person in the East but also in the West until recently. The principal disciplines of an educated person in Asia are calligraphy, painting and poetry.
My hope is to help people with their brush practice. I think that the more one understand’s the principles of working with the brush, the deeper one will be able to go with one’s connection to this transformative practice.
Sword
Warrior’s from immemorial time have been training themselves in the art of the sword. Just holding the sword properly and taking one’s stance is a revelation. I think it is how to take one’s stance in the world. How to be gentle but also ready for the challenge. It is a dyad. It is taking a warrior’s seat.
In both the brush and the sword one is learning good head and shoulders and a warrior’s seat. There is stillness and movement. Sometimes the best way to learn the Alexander Technique is to apply it to movement. This is that also. The subtleties of the brush. The gentleness. But also tremendous groundedness in reality. The forwardness of the sword. The potentiality. The totality. The life and death; awake nature of the weapon principle. I approach the sword a lot like chi kung. I think it’s even more powerful than chi kung.
Yours in the Dharma,
Craig ThompsonAbilene, Tx.
512 914-2082
craigtom@aol.com