Zookinesis: Snake Wisdom
By Robert Klein
This is the third and concluding article about spirit breathing.
One very exciting Zookinesis exercise which
has been “borrowed” from some tribal cultures, is
snake staring. Zookinesis
is my name for the approach to Tai-chi training I was privileged to receive.
Our school has a collection of over 100 live reptiles used for
ecological education in local schools. We use the large pythons and boas in
push hands practice, essentially doing push hands with a creature which is
stronger than any human.
Surprisingly, the snakes love push hands and cooperate.
While doing the form, we may also allow a large snake to crawl around
our body, compensating in our balance for the snake’s movements.
Snake staring consists of simply staring at a snake. They love this
exercise as well and will remain immobile, staring back, as long as your
concentration is constant.
Snakes are great teachers
Sometimes we use snakes which are known for their quick biting
behavior. Should your concentration
waver for only a moment, the snake will hiss or strike, an unnerving
proposition when the snake is merely a foot or two from your face (goggles are
mandatory).
The only way to maintain such a steady concentration is to create a
flow of circular energy through your and the snake‘s eyes.
Snakes are great teachers and are considered highly spiritual beings in
most tribal cultures.
The snake stare can also be used with other people. In fact, we
practice staring in the mode of many types of animals, each with its own
quality of energy.
However, this is not an appropriate subject to elaborate in public as
the practice can be used to manipulate and control people. A teacher should
only introduce this teaching to those he feels would not misuse it.
You must learn to duck
It is obviously also useful in fighting, especially so because you
don’t really need to use the flow of energy through the eyes. The same
principles can be used to control the flow of energy through any of the
chakras. You can remain connected to the
sparring partner, feeling what he is about to do before it manifests in
physical movement.
Another useful result of snake staring is that, if the snake does
strike, you must learn to duck quickly.
This is easier than it sounds because, after a while, you can tell when
your concentration has wavered and when the snake will strike. You can feel the
strike emanating out from the snake‘s energy center. Its flow of energy almost
pushes you out of its way.
By connecting to the snake so intimately, it can no longer hurt you.
At some point, the student goes through a transition. When he actually
feels the snake’s energy pushing him out of the way, it is no longer an
“imaginary” game.
The student’s very self-awareness, his self identity, drops away and is
replaced (temporarily) by the snake’s energy. It is
this creature that is moving him out of the way. You can keep the feeling of the snake’s
energy patterns inside you while practicing your Tai-chi form so that it will
really be the snake, doing the form through you.
Then the student begins to understand the full implications of
reconnecting to nature through Zookinesis training.
His identity becomes fluid and the world around him becomes fluid as well--no
longer caged by the bars of a rigid thinking structure.
Push hands partners spirit breathe
He can no longer “know” something merely by calling it a name.
Everything in his experience is in a fluid relationship with him. It is the
dynamics of these relationships that then constitutes his “knowledge.” And push
hands trains the student in that type of knowledge.
Our push hands partners’ two separate identities merge and the
energy dynamics of push hands becomes the only discernible identity.
With eyes closed, you can no longer tell where one person’s energy ends
and another begins. Such a criterion is meaningless.
According to many cultures, at this point a strange thing happens. Just
as the student tries to maintain harmony within him (or at least not to disturb
it), something else begins to work from the “top down,” bringing harmony to
him.
The balanced energy of the earth itself is able to flow through the him
and align his or her innumerable energy beings in its
harmonious pattern. The work of the student then becomes easier.
In acupressure, we do push hands with each muscle and nerve. The muscle
is then our push hands partner and there is a non-verbal, energy communication
between the muscle and your fingers. The muscle’s responses to your
manipulation alter your response to it. The muscle then recognizes that it is
being communicated with and through this communication,
it recognizes its own existence.
In this higher state of awareness, the muscle can then heal itself. It
is a similar relationship as with any teacher and student. The teacher’s
purpose is to stimulate the student’s own self-awareness.
The one being massaged directs his breath to the muscle being massaged.
He thus communicates with his own muscles and nerves and, through them, with
the masseur.
This places the muscle in a similar situation as a child listening to
adults talk. The child may be only dimly aware of what the adults are talking
about but gradually gets a feeling for the subject.
The muscle tunes into a method of energy communication which is natural
to the body. This gives our “person awareness” and the “muscle and nerve awarenesses” a common language and so unites the two levels
of awareness.
All parts are united
With this and other exercises, the student unites all the parts of himself
as he has united his individual being with that of nature.
But as rational creatures, most of us must, at some point, test whether
all of this training has any validity.
For me, the test came when I accidentally poured a pot of boiling water
on my hand. I knew that “breathing into” my hand (a Zookinesis
healing method) would neutralize the effect. This consists of sending a
circular flow of internal energy into my hand.
If it didn’t work, I would wind up with a burned hand. But I had to
stand behind my teaching or why learn it at all? There was a tense second of
decision and I decided to go for it.
The practical use makes it real
The Zookinesis worked then, as it has many
times since. (Please don’t try this on your own). I now help a friend of mine put
on fire-walking workshops.
It is the practical use of Zookinesis that
makes it real for me. But even more importantly, it has opened up a new world
for me because it brings back lost senses, the sense of chi and attention.
This energy sense is a birthright of all people and is taught to the
children of many nature-oriented cultures.
The fact that these cultures abhor even the slightest destruction of
nature (because it is part of them) may help us to understand why Zookinesis is not taught to our children.
Just as the push hands partners’ identities merge, so does that of the
individual and his whole experience. Not only are his body, mind, emotions and
will, part of himself, but his senses as well and all that the senses sense.
The spirit breathing student soon feels that his field of energy is not
limited within his body but extends into the environment. He learns to direct
his energy in several ways.
The energy can be expanded spherically and then condensed into the tan-tien. This allows the energy field to grow while keeping it
centered.
While practicing the form, swirls of momentum and energy are created.
This is usually centered in the tan-tien but it can
be made to center and condense into other individual chakras.
Energy can be transformed
This “puts the form” into the chakra similar to the winding of a
mainspring. After much practice, the student can then let the chakra unwind and
allow his form to emanate effortlessly from the chakra.
Advanced stages of Zookinesis allow the
student to interchange and transform one form of energy to another (alchemy).
If a student is troubled mentally, for example, he
can unblock the flow of mental energy and “swirl it into” the flow of momentum
as he does the form. Such mental or emotional troubles are often a
form of imbalance of energy.
Another practice helps to eliminate the barrier between the waking and
sleeping states.
In the first step, the student is aware of his body, lying in the bed
as well as the dream. Zookinesis is used to connect
the two awarenesses and merge them.
The waking/dreaming barrier is one of the main underpinnings of our
mental grasp of the world. It helps us define what is real (within the mental
framework) and what is unreal (outside that framework).
The false wizard is exposed
Once this barrier is dropped, the rigidity of our experience is open to
our creative manipulation. This rigidity then becomes the exposed Wizard of Oz,
no longer able to hide behind a curtain.
The world is once more experienced as a living creature as it once was
in childhood. Our magic of turning life into dead objects is seen as just
that-magic-and of the blackest kind.
I have just barely hinted at the meaning of Zookinesis.
It would require at least one thick book to describe it more fully. It is not a
superhuman, secret skill but rather the natural working of any living being. It
is a shame we have to learn that which we are born with.