Getting Warm and Being Warm

Warmups bring me to a place, the “warming up place.” How many times, in my life, have I warmed up? Beyond count. I have done so many kinds of warm-ups, for so many kinds of reasons. When I am there, I notice, I am always the same. There is no time here. There is the thought “I am warming up.”

This morning, I am playing through the first 20 Hanon exercises, at 108 beats per minute. This is a two-handed exercise, where both hands play in parallel. A cross-hemisphere workout, for sure. As I play, I hold my body like I’m doing a Tai Chi form, and allow my shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers, to flow. I listen, attentively and non-judgmentally to the sounds the fingers produce on the keys.

I hold a light attention to the sound, like a parent keeping an eye on their child in a safe place. I hold light attention to the way my body feels in space. Sometimes, there is a missed note, a tense muscle. I acknowledge it, and flow back into the practice.

Sometimes, often, other thoughts arise. It’s possible, after years of practice, to play note-perfectly while lost in thought. I often find daydreams about what to write emerge, in the early morning, bound by the rigor of metronome and Hanon.

This, too, is part of the warmup. I acknowledge it, and flow back into the practice.

This morning, I am halfway through the second realization of the 24-step Yang Tai Chi form. I’ve decided I’m going to do three passes this morning, trying it different ways, to see the difference in feeling.

The 24 step form is the “easiest” form I know, and was the first taught to me. It holds hidden depths, and as I move through the form I find myself feeling like I am making music, an elegant music with my body that I cannot hear, but feel. I feel my center of gravity shift, the points of my hands and feet slide constantly through spacetime, the bows of my body open and close. The form ends, and there is a feeling of, while having gone somewhere, returned, transformed.

Like the Hanon, there is a non-stop flow, both of movement of body and mind. Attention — the same attention — is paid to form and feeling, the same attention is paid to thoughts and feelings that arise.

With three years under my belt, I’m relatively new to Tai Chi, and it allows me to be more playful and open. I’ve watched my own perceptions expand. I can feel *more and differently* — with my feet, for example. I truly did not know what I could not feel. And I see the door opening for so much more.

I move, I flow from one position to another, easy as water. Something arises — a wobble, a pinch, a stray thought. I acknowledge it, and flow back into the practice.

I am chanting, in Sanskrit, an ashtakam to Maha Kala Bhairava.

An ashtakam is an “8 pack” — 32 lines in 8 verses — a hymn to the “Protector of the Field” of reality, the great Shiva in his ferocious wild form. He is the dual of the great Maha Kali, the wild Goddess.

This work is a treasury of imagination, a chance to focus the mind and heart on the various descriptions of Bhairava, in his guise as the Protector of the Field. There’s wild imagery: long tongue, red eyes, naked, grotesque face, braying like a donkey. There’s images of wisdom, dividing poison from nectar, regulating activity and rest, the essence of the supreme. There’s genuine lightness: playing like a child, tickling the world, laughing, riding a swan.

The Ashtakam is a journey in itself. The physical act of reading and sounding the precise phonetics, and the deep symbolism of the dozens of references, well, it works on you. There’s a lot of Bija (seeds) in this, sounds repeated (”lam lam lam lam” and “bhoom bhoom bhoom” for example) so the poem has more the flavor of hip hop than anything else. The sound is the meaning. It sounds like it is. A feature of Sanskrit poetry I find fascinating.

I started adding chanting into my warmups a year ago, as part of my Hindu studies. It’s a great bridge — the chanting asks for the same attention as piano and tai chi. There’s a musical component, a communications component. The body and mind move, there is an expression that can be attended to, and room for the mind to do its thing.

Chanting, at this point, is just on the verge of “not hard” — the tongue slips sometimes, and I’m still in a phase where I’m connecting vocabulary words and concepts together, but I’m feeling I can start to slip into that current of ease. But not yet, not always. I can really feel myself working.

This, too, is part of the warmup. I acknowledge it, and flow back into the practice.

Sometimes I go all the way and chant while playing piano, to a chord progression. The intention is to hold myself, easy as I am in the opening step of the Tai Chi form, as it all unfolds. Sometimes, I cannot hold it all, and I come collapsing down with the wave, and a good laugh.

This might be the end of the warmup, and into… whatever is after warmups. But I know, both in the diagnosis and gnosis sense, that I am warm when I can do this. Whatever emerges from me, from that state of looseness, has a particular quality. It is a glow, both inside and out. Standing on the threshold between the two, I can say — “I am warm.”

Often, as I conclude my warmups, I think about what all three of these embody — the practice inside the practices, invariant across them. What is it?

Let us strip away the details of each practice, and gaze at the invariant center.

At the core, there is a simple little loop. Most abstractly, a three-part unfolding. It takes on character depending on the labeling:

• beginning, middle, end

• receive, transform, express

• attack, sustain, release

• input, process, output

• gather, plan, execute

• listen, breathe, play

All three stations together make a single gesture. A segment. The three stations can expand to four, to five, to six — mutations of the basic unfolding, the same shape with more inner articulation. Segments chain together to create segments of segments, like notes making up a phrase, phrases making up a line, lines making up a piece. There is a fractal, self-similar nature to this shape. It does not care what scale it is operating at. It is the same shape at every scale.

Alongside this — or rather, inside this — is the attention. Constant. Sustained. Keen. It is the attention that perceives the flow of the now, subtly shapes the practiced expression, and hears what is expressed as it is added back to the flow. The attention is not watching the loop from outside. The attention is at every station of the loop. It is what makes the loop a loop rather than a sequence of three events. Without it, three things happen. With it, one thing unfolds.

When I practice anything these days, I am doing two things in superposition. I am practicing the surface skill, and I am practicing this.

The surface skill is the loop happening. The practice inside is the attention being present to the loop happening. For years I thought these were two practices and the inner one was more important. That is not quite right. They are one practice with two aspects, and neither aspect is real without the other. A loop without attention is mechanical. Attention without a loop has nothing to attend to. The two arise together, or they do not arise.

This is the thing that is invariant across Hanon, across the form, across the chant, across everything else. The particular surface does not matter. Fingers, feet, tongue, pen, breath, voice — all of them carry the same loop at the same fractal depth, and all of them invite the same attention. The practices are not three practices. They are three doorways into a single room.

What happens in the room is harder to say.

Something gathers. Something moves through. Something releases. And then, without a seam, something gathers again. The releasing and the gathering are not separate events connected by a transition. They are the same event seen from two sides, and felt from the inside. The end of one segment is the beginning of the next. The loop does not restart. It never stopped.

If you’ve been in this room, you will understand at once. If you haven’t, no amount of words can bring you there. Words can only entice you to enter yourself, the way a musician entices a listener.

As I’ve learned, I’ve come to see warmups as “practicing warmups” rather than “warmups to do before, then practice.”

Looking at it this way allows me to integrate — the warmup and the work are not two things. The warmup is the loop at one scale. The work is the loop at a larger scale. The day is the loop at a larger scale still. The life — yes, the life too. Wheels within wheels.

The fractal does not stop at some boundary where ordinary life begins. It goes all the way up, and all the way down. Attention holds it together at every level. It stops when attention breaks down.

The practice — always the same. Something arises — a wobble, a missed note, a stray thought, a lapse in awareness, a whole year that felt like it was going sideways. I acknowledge it, and flow back into the practice.