Mama G.

Meditating this morning, looking for my heart light, I ran into a ton of muck. Exhaustion muck. Ah! THERE’S the fatigue I should have been feeling for the past month! I must have just gone into emergency mode and shoved it away. Wow. Lots of cleaning to do.
The usual meditative progression: listen to heartbeat. Find heartlight. Coalesce it into the image of my own infant self. Create a mirror-image that transforms into Jason. Listen to see if there is anything he wants to say to me. Expand out into Nicki, Tananarive, Joyce (my darling sister). Out into my closest friends, and other family. Spend five minutes visualizing my heart goals. Condense back into an undifferentiated light ball again, and drop it down to the base of my spine. Visualize a perfect physical specimen (with specific skills that are none of your business. I call this image the “Golden Man.” If he is clear and strong, I spend five minutes visualizing my physical goals. Let the light magma erupt upwards to my head. Visualize my mental/career goals for five minutes. Condense the light back to my heart, project it out into the next year. Pull it back to the next month. Back to the next week. Then the day to come. Am I clear on what I must do? Any blockages? If so, clear them up. If not, cool. Open my eyes.
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I mentioned that I was working on Coach Sonnon’s FlowFit II (“Ground Engagement”) in combination with running. While on the road in Florida, I decided that I spend too much time traveling to depend on running for basic health and fitness (although I still enjoy it), and looked into jumping rope. Leading me to the Buddy Lee system of athletic enhancement through jumping in the anaerobic zone. So I tried combining those two: 100 jumps at top speed (I still catch my feet too often) with sets of FlowFit. The beautiful thing about FF is how it moves your whole body through the Six Degrees of Freedom-every basic human motion. Every major muscle group where emotional/Karmic tension is stored. Combining these two exercises is REALLY interesting, and comes closer to a whole-body burn than anything I’ve ever felt. Seems to max out everything except limit strength. I mean, every muscle from toes to neck. Pulling and pushing. Stretching and twisting. Coordination, endurance, speed, agility…frigging everything. And the whole thing can take as little as 7.5 minutes. Now, at the clumsy level I’m working at (anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first!) it takes me 28 minutes to get through five reps. That’s about 50 seconds for 100 jumps (like I said, my feets is tangling. And once fatigue sets in, coordination drops like a paralyzed parakeet.) And about 3 minutes per FF rep. (Again, working to control breathing, dissipate accumulated stress, maintain balance and poise…I have to move slowly.) Add some time for sucking wind. Jeeze. But we’ll see how it feels in a couple of months.
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By the way, I’ve come across the “ropeless jump rope” ads, and have to chuckle. Oh, on a gross motor level, it doubtless has some use. And jumping up and down definitely gets the heart moving. So it that’s how you define “fitness,” Good On Ya. But there is so much more than the body, and you enter that realm through sophisticated levels of proprioception, timing, coordination. Breath control. Trust me—you CANNOT jump rope unless everything is coordinated, lending a grace and agility to motion that is akin to actual athletic performance. And that is like opening a Third Eye. One of the benefits of martial arts is the development of grace and poise under stress. Even separate form self-defense situations, this translates into a sense of poise in life that most people will never experience. I can’t help but feel that the “ropeless jump rope” people are treating their bodies like sacks of meat. We’re so much more…
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By the way, while I was at the African Martial Arts Conference in Detroit, I met a singular woman: Cultural Anthropologist Dr. Germon "Mama G' Miller, one of the most powerful and beautiful human beings it’s been my honor of meeting. When she chooses to switch it on, she is pure feral Goddess energy, terrifying and hypnotic and utterly deadly (for what it’s worth, she has hundreds and hundreds of MA trophies—but that’s irrelevant). I watched her teach a women’s self-defense class. Except, nope, that’s not what it was. It was a class in how to bring out that pure female killing animal to confront any male with the bad sense to fuck with you. Lord God, Billy Bob, I’d never seen a human being shift energetics quite like that…well, maybe once, when Dawn Callen FELT my intent to attack her, and she turned and looked at me with a hungry gleam that wilted my nuts, I kid you not even a little bit. Mama G. is about the size of a peanut, and if I wasn’t married, I would have courted her on the spot. I told her as much, and she told me that most men who see that side of her run like hell. I get it, but it’s sad. That means they aren’t really men, because this is a real, no b.s. female of the species. Your children would be SAFE with her. Hell, YOU would be safe with her. Trust me. Why would a healthy man want less than the most powerful woman he could have at his side, or in his bed? If you’ve never experienced the correlation between power and sensuality, you haven’t lived, brothers. And sisters…any man who wants you to be less than the most you can be is still a boy. Pat him on the head and move on…Only adults can encourage children to become adults. And God knows we need all the adults we can get.