This is a well known quote from the late Bruce Lee. He was talking about the ability to adapt to the immediate situation and blend with it so as not to add to a conflict, but rather bring it to a peaceful conclusion. How beautiful, how poetic. So we used this basic idea in the sessions last week and watching people normally in pain finding the sensation of water was something to behold.
We started with our usual sitting and standing meditation practices as these are staples of the sessions. They are the ground from which these seemingly esoteric exercises such as “Being Water” are built so virtually all our methods will contain the skills learned in sitting and standing. We started with learning how to generate the feeling of what it would feel like if one was a wave. It started in the feet and would flow up the body, culminating in the hands expressing the crest. The way the muscles are used to create this sensation are quite specific and would be very complicated if we tried to analyze then learn them as purely physical movements. But by using the imagination to generate the sensation of wave in the particular way we teach it allowed the group members to perform the movement quickly and with obvious effect. One moment in particular was the exclamation from one fellow. He uttered a simple “Oh, yeah!” and the others sighed in acknowledgment.
In Mindbody Training, water is our symbol for “adaptable strength”. It is the ability to flow and change with circumstances without losing one’s sense of control and inner resources. It can be thought of as maintaining one’s potential for strong decisive action while choosing to adapt to the circumstances at hand. This sets one up for accepting moments of pain while retaining one’s feeling of being powerful. That sensation is what elicited the simple expression, “oh, yeah!”
Imagine being adaptable and powerful at the same time. Imagine being able to move the muscles in ways that emulates the potent force of a wave. Imagine what it might be like to be water, my friend.
