Watching how mindfulness disappears and reappears II

Tags

awareness, kitlaughlin.com, losing attention, mindfulness, paying attention

Today I thought I would share a few tips that I have found to be extremely helpful to maintain mindfulness in daily life.

The first is an easy one: as soon as you find yourself experiencing any sense of rushing in your life or any kind of busyness; as soon as you check, you will see/feel that mindfulness has gone. It comes back as soon as you pause and (in my case) drop the awareness into the belly. This is the process: pause, take a breath in, and let it out, feeling the sensations all the while. Now you are present.

When driving: bring your awareness to your hands on the wheel, and your bottom on the seat, and feel these parts—when you do, there you are!

And for me, washing up: if I am making a noise (clinking of cups, dropping spoons, even if onto the right part of the dish rack), then I am reminded that presence has left the room. As soon as gracefulness returns to my movements, presence returns. For me, movement is key: if walking, walk silently—as soon as I hear my footsteps, I know I am moving carelessly. I am reminded of Miyamoto Musahi’s advice in Go Rin No Sho: “Make your combat stance your everyday stance.”

And (returning to the theme of morning mindfulness), last night I fell asleep on Olivia’s couch, in her house (our two houses are separated by about half and inch; just enough to get by one of the absurd regulations regarding building standards that constrain what we can do here in the nation’s capital; I may elaborate on this in another post). So, this morning, I woke a couple times to put more wood on the fire and, once awake properly, decided to make a coffee. To avoid waking her, I went to my place (10m away!) to grind the coffee; there will be a Nobel prize, I am sure, for the inventor of the silent grinder.

On returning, I boiled the kettle (a lovely glass number from Sunbeam; watching the currents form, then the bubbles, then the movements of the bubbles as the temperature rises is entrancing) and spooned the coffee into the AeroPress, stirred, waited, stirred again, and pressed the coffee. Now the interesting part: conveying the still-dripping (only four or five drops, it’s true) to the composting bag: I remind myself that no drops shall touch the floor or cupboards. Why? Olivia has exceptional close vision and sees all losses of awareness, always. So, I pay attention to the little things (all things are composed of many, many, little things, after all) and in so doing, watch what is happening in the mind.

As soon as I see or feel irritation with what’s happening (precisely how did that drop escape my cupping hand???), I know I have lost awareness; I pause, breathe, and immediately it returns.

Putting wood on the fire is another wonderful method of staying awake, and the firebox itself will alert you to losses of awareness by burning you, immediately (only one tiny burn this morning). I am reminded of Rudi’s commentary on this: in the process of waking up, you do not need to go looking for opportunities to test your awakening awareness; what the Universe presents you in every moment will do that, if you pay attention!

Finally in this brief note, Dave has asked me to write a book review of Spiritual Cannibalism, but this is a truly daunting task—it is an exceptional book written by an exceptional man, but his theme is directly relevant to what I am writing about here, so I shall attempts this in the weeks to come.

Watching how mindfulness disappears and reappears I

Tags

awareness, how we see, kitlaughlin.com, mindfulness, Walter Murch

I am finding that the first cup of coffee in the morning is the ideal time to experience how quickly mindfulness vanishes, if in fact it was ever present. Mustering mindfulness first thing in the morning is quite a feat in any case: if you can remind yourself to be fully aware tomorrow morning, just watch what happens in the mind as we move from being asleep to being awake and then getting out of bed.

Walter Murch wrote a brilliant book on film editing called “In the blink of an eye“. Without doing too much violence to the beauty of his ideas, he found that film cuts work best in a scene when (were you in the scene yourself) you would blink. As an experiment, just put your gaze on what ever is in front of you now and then turn your head to look at something to your left or right and you will see immediately that you blink in the process of turning the head. More: when you blink, you literally do not see the sweeping movement your eyes make moving from the forst object of attention to the second, even though your eyes are still open before and after the blink, and still capable of ‘seeing’ all of this movement. This is one kind of a reflexive brief ‘going to sleep’.

A wonderful teacher with whom I worked for many years, spoke often of the mind’s habit of “checking out”. The more closely I watch my own mind it is clear that checking out happens with remarkable frequency and rapidity, and often the checked out periods are astonishingly short. And there are a number of phenomena that can point us to the rapidity and depth of this checking out. In my own case, it is obvious any time I find myself being even the slightest bit clumsy. After bumping or dropping anything, a quick replay of the memories of the immediate preceding seconds will show me that I was simply not present in the instants before the “accident”. This is one kind of example where mindfulness has simply disappeared.

Another, perhaps more familiar, example is the experience of driving a well-known route and becoming aware at some point that the previous ten minutes are simply not part of your memory. Reflecting on this, it is amazing that accidents are not more common but what happens is that there is a lower level of awareness operating which is taking care of the driving requirements. Reflection and introspection suggests that driving is very much a physical skill set and one where most of the skill resides in the physical body as a set of extremely well-known habits.

But let us return to first thing in the morning before the morning coffee. You will find that your awareness is much less present than usual and that the phenomenon of blinking has a much longer lasting period, relatively speaking. To put this another way, our bodies are moving through familiar routines but the mind is in a different space only returning occasionally to the task at hand. Where is it? I must watch more carefully but normally it is just in the future, considering matters like what will I do once the coffee is actually next to my bed and whether I will write a blog or not.

Another great teacher with whom I worked over a fairly long period of time claimed that the development of a second attention was one of the solutions for avoiding the mind’s many reflexive habits. For me (and this took a long time to acquire) having a quantum of attention in the abdominal region around the navel and inside the gut itself has been enormously helpful. If I have sufficient awareness in this area I can literally experience the body reorganising itself to become angry, for example. And if the awareness is strong enough and quick enough, I can introduce a pause and follow that up with a conscious decision whether or not to repeat this action that I have repeated 10,000 times before.

One of the reasons I am so keen on a regular stretching habit is that it simply makes us that much more aware of what is going on inside the whole body at all times, not just when one is stretching. In fact I am thinking these days that the activity of stretching itself is simply a platform to a whole suite of increased awarenesses which lead to increase mindfulness in all activities. This works by simply having more of the mind in contact with what is going on in the body at any given time.

So, to use a mundane example, if you have been stretching trapezius and levator scapulae regularly, the next time you are working at the computer you may be able to  actually feel your shoulders rising towards your ears—whereupon you can make a decision to let them relax again. My contention is that if you do not have a regular stretching habit for this part of the body, you will simply find one day that this area is painful and tense most of the time. Increasing awareness of the sensation from the body to the mind simply increases awareness of the body’s internal state and this is gold. I feel that awareness of what’s happening the body is simply the fast track to mindfulness in daily life.

I returned to writing this blog having just been to the toilet and having had a shower. What extraordinary experiences! When I am at home I always use my squat toilet, so to begin with there was the activity of getting onto the squat support. Squatting down is experienced as a marvellous stretch for the lower back and the ankles; likewise, my feet in contact with the cold surfaces of this support was a very strong sensation. If one is present in the moment of voiding one’s bowels, one becomes aware of the extraordinariness of something being part of the body and no longer being part of the body. The sensations of the experience are something to marvel over, I find.

Then the suite of sensations of: turning on the shower; the coldness of the handles; the sounds of the water; the sensations of removing one’s clothes and then stepping under warm water—all are indescribably attractive. And in that moment I was reminded of one of my teachers who said, “If I ever start a spiritual school, it will be called the Being happy for absolutely no reason at all school. How wonderful and how perfect.

Revisiting the Sony NEX 6 as a dual function (stills and video) device

Tags

Air New Zealand "Space Seat", kitlaughlin.com, nex 6 video focussing, second system sound, sony nex 6

Having used one of my pair of NEX 6 bodies in Vanvouver, both for video and stills, as well as to make a self portrait of the front of my pants when I experienced a true ‘wardrobe failure’ (see HERE, bottom of the post), where the extendable screen made  that image possible, I am able to update my earlier NEX 6 POST with a few comments and observations. As an aside, none of my former pro. Nikon DSLRs, D3 and D3s, would have been able to make that shot, with accurate framing, because they lack any swivel screens).

I can attest that the NEX 6 is capable of making clean images at 12,800 ISO; this is a remarkable performance—I will write a short piece on the Air New Zealand Space Seat’ soon; I mention this because I took a few non-stabilised hand-held images of this seating before the cabin lights came on, and I needed 12,800 just to get an exposure. More on this in a later post.

I must mention a failure here, too: while shooting a video of my Canadian host, Linda Winterton, I had Auto focussed (AF) on her face while setting up, but in getting herself in a comfortable position, she must have moved just enough for the camera’s AF to lock on to the background momentarily (this form of AF refocusses continuously, but subtly, but the position she sat in must have resulted in the Flexible spot being just off her face; what I would not give for an assistant, occasionally!); and hence she is out of focus. However, her voice has been very accurately recorded via the on-camera mics, so when I cut this video, I will use her voice over footage I shot earlier in a voice over; I think I can recover the shoot.

My error was one of method: I should simply have set up using AF, then reset the camera to MF (manual focus) where it would have stayed—I plead pressure (we had very little time to shoot, on the morning I was leaving). But lesson learned, for sure. My biggest surprise was listening back to the audio recorded from the camera: excellent and as I had forgotten to push the Record button for the second-system sound recorder (the excellent Roland R-05); again (clearly!) I must not have been concentrating completely on the process). I have to say, though, that this is a continuing problem for director/performers: it is difficult to keep one’s mind on the many necessary technical details as well as the substance of an interview or performance—technical excellence means bugger all if what you record is simply not interesting.

(Note to non-Australian readers: the work “bugger” has many meanings, and is used here as a term of emphasis—e.g., “hot as buggery” and “cold as buggery” are used often in Australian English and, no doubt, very confusing to non-English speakers.)

General

There are many aspects I like about the NEX 6 interface. As I mentioned in the earlier post (but worth re-mentioning) is that once you set it up, no menu-diving is necessary. Only the Format card command lives there (and the camera can be configured to rerurn to the last-used Menu setting, so is always there). So, to be specific, the following is how I have both of mine NEX bodies set up (and I note that there is no separate video setup, apart from choosing recording format and frame rate; I shoot 1080p/24 at 24Mbps; extremely clean video that future proofs anything I shoot AND the resulting files are only about twice the size of the 720p files I used to use.

Lenses and Picture Style

I use one of the “Sigma twins” Art series lenses (the excellent 30/2.8, or the 19/2.8, with effective fields of view of 45mm and 28mm, respectively). Internally, I am set up to shoot Raw and jpeg, with Picture style set to -1 Contrast, 0 Saturation, and -1 Sharpening (this affects both video and the jpegs).

Function (‘Fn’) button

The front Fn button is set in the menu, and there are many options  that can be set for this button. My setup chooses between WB (and I note that any of the presets can be adjusted on a two-axis colour array, Green–Magenta on the vertical; Blue–Amber on the horizontal; and I usually have a +1 on the warmer axis for nice skin tones); AF area (I use Flexible Spot), Focus (I use DMF, Direct Manual Focus, which together with Manual Focus aids set in-camera, magnification and peaking; works brilliantly—I can check exactly what the AF has locked on to and alter immediately if necessary, in a magnified view), and  Flash (I chose Fill Flash, which means it always fires if the Flash is manually deployed, its own button on the back of the top plate, and the Fill amount is set to -1.3EV), and Exposure (Multi, like Nikon’s ‘Matrix”).

Soft Keys

‘A’ brings up the Menu; Soft Key ‘B’ brings up the Flexible Spot which, in an undocumented feature, stays active while you are shooting, so (for example) if I am shooting portraits, I can move the spot anywhere directly without pushing any bottoms; and it stays this way until you push the OK centre button. This is an immensely practical implementation that is simply better than any other camera I have ever used. I note that while this mode is active, none others can be set, so to return to standard operation, one needs to press the OK button.

Video button

And video mode is available on its own button and will simply follow any setting you have for jpegs re. colour, sharpening, etc., and whatever you have selected on the top Mode dial (I always shoot Manual (M) for video: shutter speed is critical, especially for movement and especially for avoiding strobing under fluorescent light, and you can see this clearly on the LCD or the ikan field monitor—how useful is this?

AEL button

is just what the name says, in my setup: exposure lock, and it toggles (set, off). Very helpful in bright light, or backlit situations.

That’s it, really, the other critical controls (ISO, Display Options, Drive Mode, and Exposure compensation) are on their own points on the rear dial (RHS, Top, LHS, and bottom, respectively).

I will follow this up with the Air New Zealand seat review in the next week or so, with the high ISO examples I mentioned above.

The 90-day blog challenge and the 50-year test

Tags

50 year test, 90 day blog challenge, Facebook "friends", kitlaughlin.com, Mac OS "Siri", stretch therapy, stretching

I am extremely grateful to my friend and colleague Dave Wardman for challenging me to 90 days of continuous blogging. And as an aside let me say I loathe the word “blog”; just why I cannot say. Perhaps it’s the redolence of the word ‘blag’; perhaps it’s simply dis-euphonic—why not e-log, or some other term?

One benefit I have found is that I have trained the Mac OS Siri dictation system to the point where I can dictate most of my posts now. Extremely surprisingly to me is the fact that the Siri system is way more accurate than the most expensive of the specialist software that are designed for this purpose (I worked with both of them, and spent two weeks once trying to train one to the point where the total time involved, dictating and correcting, would be faster than my 25-30wpm error/typo-laden typing, and it failed). Furthermore I am only using the computer’s microphone today. I will be trialling a very light USB microphone board especially for this purpose (dictation) in coming weeks and I will report back in the technology section of this blog.

What I have found has been for me the most important effect of blogging every day is both the new thoughts that emerge on the work that I’m doing while on the road, and the increased precision with which I am able to express what I think it is that I’m doing. This resulted recently in the “What is stretching, really?” video that I’m quite pleased with, and which has had such a wonderful response from my YouTube channel viewers (which now number nearly 2000). Now I suppose that one’s subscribers could be regarded similarly as one’s anonymous “friends” on Facebook: they can only be significant if they are actually learning something from the videos that I make. Presently, with the way that it all works, this is in the lap of the gods.

Having said that, I made a note about this in another post, if there are any videos that you would like to see, please let me know and I will consider it. I do not imagine that I’ll be teaching and presenting for much more than 10 years into the future, if that, and I want to get as much of this information out there in the public domain where it can do as much good as possible.

I have noticed recently a trend for people in my business to try and monetise all exchanges but, for me, when making decisions about this kind of thing I apply the 50 year test: “Who will give a #$%* in 50 years? So far no decision I have had to make about anything has passed this test! I mention this because I have every intention of releasing as much of my material on the free YouTube channel as I possibly can. having said that, I am knee deep in the technology I need for the next multi-media product; stay tuned.

Heading back into the arms of America

Tags

Astral Travel, ESTA Visa waiver, jet lag, jetlag, kit laughlin youtube channel, kitlaughlin.com, Los Angeles airport, Robert Bruce

This will be a quick one today: I am travelling back to Australia via Los Angeles today. Thanks to Olivia I now have a current ESTA Visa waiver in addition to my US O1 work visa. I am hopeful that I will pass through Los Angeles in transit to my final destination with grace and ease. Watch this space!

There is another curious phenomenon, one that I am about to experience; I leave Vancouver on Wednesday and arrive in Australia on Friday local time even though the journey itself is only one day long. For me the most persuasive theory on what jetlag exactly is was offered by my friend Robert Bruce who wrote the extraordinary book Astral Dynamics, among others. He says from his own direct experience of spending thousands of hours travelling astrally that the human soul’s maximum speed is only about 250 miles an hour—accordingly, the detached dopey hazy experience that we call jetlag is simply your soul taking its time to catch up your physical body.

Now I have no understanding of these things, but that is a beautiful and poetic description of what jetlag feels like to me. And although we are told that ‘West is best’, for me returning home always produces the strong physical and mental effects that we label jetlag. I have tried every suggestion I have been able to find to reduce the effects of this including one long alcohol-free trip which was thorough hell and none of these things has any effect on the phenomenon.

So, with ESTA Visa waiver in hand, I am hopeful that my passage through Los Angeles will be a lovely one, and I am posting this in advance of my arrival in Australia because I doubt that I’m going to write anything once I get home, for a day or two at least.

Finally please keep your eye on my YouTube channel. I have come back with a wealth of material that I’m going to cut into at least two new clips and I would be very excited to hear you about what you think of these. And as I said in a recent email-out to our member list, if any of you want to see me make a video on any other subject, I’m happy to consider it. Off to pack now.

Frozen shoulder treatment, supraspinatus impingement, and poor practitioners

Tags

"basket" category, Frozen shoulder treatment, poor practitioners, supraspinatus impingement

Yesterday I had a wonderful opportunity to work with a woman who came to see me because she had a “frozen shoulder“, often re-described as ‘adhesive capsulitis’. One of the many interesting things about this condition is how many potential causes it has. A quick review of the literature on the subject suggests at least half a dozen different causes. The problem that I have with the term frozen shoulder is it appears to be a “basket” category (where you put something when you do not understand its cause). In my 30 years as a practitioner and having treated many examples of this problem (many of which appeared to have different causes) I am wary of this term; it is a descriptor at best (that is, it describes the problem, but does not suggest a causal perspective).

So after talking to each other for a while, I asked her to show me how each of her shoulders moved. The right side moved normally through all planes of movement but not the left. When she tried to abduct her left arm the initial movement was trapezius and levator scapulae elevating the scapula; only when this movement was over 50% complete did the arm abduct from the body. My first thought was perhaps there was some impingement of supraspinatus or its innervating nerve.

I also noticed the position of the left shoulder girdle on the rib case; it suggested tight pec. minor and possibly tight external rotators (infraspinatus and teres minor). I gave her a very gentle external rotator cuff stretch and then followed this up with a different supraspinatus stretch.

I shower her how to use latissimus dorsi, serratus anterior, and pec. major to maximally  depress the L shoulder girdle. I asked her to gently press her straight right arm out to the side directly away from the body, while holding the shoulder girdle in the depressed position. Lo and behold, supraspinatus fired and produced the desired effect (pressure on my hand in the part of the ROM that supraspinatus classically is supposed to control (the first 10 degrees of abduction, roughly).

Immediately, I asked her to raise her arm gently and slowly; this subsequent attempt did not involve trapezius at all until the arm was almost horizontal. Visual inspection showed that supraspinatus was doing the job it was supposed to do (that is, abduction the first 10°). End of the first 10° was achieved with absolutely no shoulder elevation meaning that supraspinatus was doing what it was supposed to do.

After a little rest I asked her to move the right and left through the full range of movement and she was able to move both easily and without pain. Further questioning revealed that the frozen shoulder had presented itself immediately following an extremely traumatic emotional event.

The key to understanding this effect of innervation and activation is the reciprocal inhibition reflex. In this example, watching her initial attempt at abducting the arm revealed that trapezius was doing the job of elevating the shoulder girdle to the point where deltoid’s mechanical advantage could be used. This meant two things: one, that supraspinatus was for some reason inactive and two, as a solution, the body had employed a fallback pattern of using trapezius to raise the shoulder girdle.

A partial solution lay in asking her to activate all of the muscles which depressed the shoulder girdle which meant necessarily that trapezius was both stretched gently and momentarily inhibited. Then, maintaining these conditions, I asked her to press her arm directly to the outside (abduction). The brain immediately realised that only supraspinatus could do this task and it switched it on immediately. Speaking to her today, the shoulder area is a bit tender, but everything is working properly.

Stretching of the external rotator cuff muscles was only done to ease this process in the sense of getting her shoulder blade to sit flatter on the rib cage and more vertically. It also had the secondary effect of increasing her awareness of the position of this part of the body. Another benefit is that a more vertical positioning of the scapula means there is less likelihood of the acromiom abrading the supraspinatus tendon, another potential cause of this problem.

The longer term follow-up will involve stretching her rib cage backwards over a passive support, stretching pec. minor (so that the shoulder girdle sits in a more mechanically sound position) and some strengthening work. An RMT colleague will also do some abdominal release fascia work; there is a slight ‘head forward’ posture there, too.

The last exercise I gave her to do was a floor lying scalene stretch, shown HERE. Her scalenes were very tight to palpate and my concern here was that perhaps some impingement of the supraspinatus nerve may have been happening via the TOCS phenomenon. Regardless of the diagnostic/causal story, once again restoration of a normal movement pattern appeared to have solved the problem, and the total treatment time was about 15 minutes.

Today’s Vancouver airport experience

Tags

clusterfuck, obesity, security ineptness, Vancouver airport, wheelchair, YVR

Clusterfuck is the apposite word to describe the totally inept people wrangling I experienced at YVR today. I note that this is the worst example I have experienced here (my many past experiences were relatively pleasant), and I want to stress that the usual difficult passage, US Immigration, was quick and almost friendly. More on that below, as what I learned today plays into an earlier post on LAX Immigration experiences recently.

Opening the show was the Air Canada check in counter: no signage indicates that one must use the external kiosks to check in and—worse—an unhappy middle aged man, an Air Canada official, asked me my flight time, then informed me, “Well, you have to check in”, and gestured me directly to the busy line (about 40 people; this all 3.5 hours before flight time).

I shuffled my bags through the tape cattle barriers (which sadist thought that up?), and then another official told me to get my bag tag from the kiosk and then to return to another area to be ingested by the system more quickly; I agreed. Despite a higher degree in science and a more than passing familiarity with both logic and the English language, navigating the kiosk was a nightmare; not only did it ask me for a street address in the US (what is LAX’s street address?) it would not issue a bag tag, despite correct entry of the critical variable in the relevant screen: the integer 1. OTOH, it was able to burp up three baggage tags; things were looking up!

I returned to the indicated ingestion point, whereupon yet another official, this one looking like a harried, and simultaneously baffled, aerobics instructor who had done way too much of it in the past and whose body was clearly unhappy about this told me that I had to return to the end of the first queue, now swollen to ~100 upset people. I gave her a brief précis of the circumstances that brought me to her, and further indicated that I would not return to the end of the line. An operative became free, and I walked to her. She was able to coax a tag out of a sulky machine, and I was past check point 1.

I dragged my check-in bag (smoothly rolling despite the carpet) to the bag drop-off conveyor belts; interesting and inexplicably, the lower ends of the belts, where anyone else would have thought to be the best place to actually load heavy check in bags was blocked off by more of the blue cattle wranglers. So, as a direct result, the elderly, the overweight, and the infirm, had to lift their bags up ~800mm, over the 300mm edges of the belts, even though the actual ends of the belts (sensibly designed to allow bags to be simply tipped over on to them) were not accessible. Both belts were set up this way. Check point 2.

Like any decent game, the next barrier was more challenging: security. After I showed my boarding pass and passport to a 100% asleep official (I believe I could have shown her my MasterCard), I was pointed left; and the woman in front of me the “Exit–Sortie” gate to the right, which opened directly to a security belt—one of only two operating. Lucky her. I joined a queue of approximately 75 unhappy people; this queue snaked its way all around the perimeter of the security area, a demented Conga line, where eight other, un-personned, security belts waited, their blinking lights a mute presence. I asked another official what criteria were applied to the streaming of the lucky ones directly to the closed belt; she offered three or four inconsistent possibilities, before saying, “That’s a different company”. She had zero idea; her job was simply to control the Conga line.

Time passed; I was waved through to the second belt. I did the usual: the MBA was placed in its own tray, and my other items put on this belt into the machine. Then I waited, again, for about ten minutes. I glanced past the metal detector and saw the holdup:

A gigantic overweight (OK; total frankness here: obese) woman in a wheelchair, was wheeled past the metal detector, and then was asked to stand with her arms outstretched; she could do neither. So, one of the other security staff who was thus taken away from her job of getting bags into the X-ray machine left her post, stopping this process, and she and the first official worked heroically to lift the passenger into an unstable, upright position, whereupon the most lengthy, and thorough, frisk that I have ever witnessed occurred: no fat was untouched.

It gets better: the same official (Lilli) then patted the wheelchair down: the crazy thing (in addition to the obvious general craziness) was that this was a YVR official-and-stamped wheelchair. When I asked an official (not a worker; a lurker with no clear function) why Lilli was patting down the official airport wheelchair, she answered, “Well, something could be packed in there”.

But Lilli was only brushing the chrome and vinyl of the exterior surfaces of the chair, so it was not immediately clear how this process would uncover contraband. If you can tell me Lilli (if you are reading), please do, I’d like to know. Check point 3; one to go, the big one: USCIS.

But total anticlimax (and I was ready, I can tell you, ESTA visa waiver in hand). The official (friendly, within the no-doubt prescribed official limits) told me that my “O1 visa trumped all other requirements; exactly what the Embassy in Sydney told me. But the LA official, on the way in, was not going to let me pass the barrier: his supervisor overrode him, readers may recall. A classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing? Security requirements? Need to know? Noentheless, he told me that with both an ESTA Visa Waiver and an O1 work visa, I was “covered”, and with that blessing I stepped onto US soil. I took a deep breath, and relaxed. The fourth and final barrier had been passed; I am on my way back home.

Man plans; God laughs—no sooner than I finished this, the zip on my pants has broken: this is the new look:

The process of making video pieces to camera (“vlogs”)

Tags

NEX 6, Sigma 30/2.8 lens, travel video kit, vlogs

Some of you may have seen some of my recent YouTube videos that have been promotional pieces for upcoming workshops (For example, the Mike and Misty promo, for a forthcoming Stretch Teacher workshop) or explanation pieces,  so background to the work that I do (like the What is stretching, really?).

What I want to discuss today is what equipment I use for this. On the hardware side, I use a NEX 6 body, with either the Sigma 30/2.8 lens, or the Sigma 19/2.8 lens (these have an “EFOV” (equivalent field of view) as 45mm and 28mm lenses, respectively.

I set the camera up on the tiny–mighty Benro MeFoto travel tripod (silly name; great tripod), and then fit the amazing ikan 5″ field monitor (this runs out of the HDMI port on the NEX 6), and the ikan sits in the camera’s hot shoe. It is powered by one of the many small Panasonic batteries I have for the HMC-152s we used for our “real” videos.

And last but very definitely not least, I record ‘second system sound‘, which has been how film has had its sound recorded for the majority of its existence (and this is what the slate or clapper board is for: to sync the sound to the vision). I use a hand clap in vision for this; more on editing below. To record sound, I use either a Roland R-05 or a Sony PCM-M10 recorder. Both are tiny and excellent. This is an image of the setup:

2 Kg video kit, including tripod

The coins are there for scale: this setup is tiny! (The coins are loonies and toonies, the Canadian one and two dollar coins, smaller than our 20¢ coins).

I set the Sony NEX 6 up to auto focus, Manual shutter and aperture, and get the exposure I want via the ISO control. This latter only allows single stop exposure changes, so I refine exposure for the look I want by making 1/3 EV changes to shutter speed, usually. I record in 1080p/24 AVCHD format. I have ordered the Sony remote control which will mean I can lock focus and start recording from where ever I am sitting to make the video and that will make the process even simpler.

After I have finished shooting I ingest the files onto the Macbook Air (and LaCie ‘Rugged’ USB3 HDD) and then convert to Apple priories 422 LT using an excellent program called ClipWrap.

Editing is done in the excellent Final Cut Studio suite. This is where I make any colour or exposure changes, add the typewriter effects at the beginning and the end-title effects at the end, and any titling in between. FCS is overkill for this kind of work but I know the program fairly well now and I am simply disinclined to learn a new software.

When I am travelling, I usually pack the sound recorder in the checkin bag, and carry the NEX 6 with one or two lenses in a very small pack that I take on board with me as hand-carry. The tripod which packs up into an extremely small bag fits in the same carry on bag.

What this all means is that I now have the capacity to do broadcast standard video and sound where ever I am in the world and the entire equipment including the tripod only weighs a couple of kilograms. Compare this to the Panasonic professional video camera I used to own which weighed 9 kg and needed to be packed in a Pelican hardcase—the whole thing weighed over 24 kg. This single bed alone made travelling difficult and more expensive than it needed to be—imagine wheeling the 24 kg hardcase and my check in bed at the same time through a busy airport like Miami. This has more than a whiff of dukkha about it!

Setting this tiny kit up the first time did take half an hour, and I still need to calibrate te ikan field monitor, but I am now confident that I can get excellent results and as I become more familiar with the rig it will be very fast to deploy.

I do have a second NEX 6, too, and will write about the elegance of two-camera shoots another time.

Working the sounds of an excavator scraping rocks into your meditation

Tags

excavators, free relaxation script, irritation of sounds at night, meditation, vairagya, Yoga Nidra

I always do some kind of Yoga Nidra practice before I get up in the mornings. In North Van this morning, today’s soundscape included an excavator slowly scraping its bucket  across  huge rocks on the building site about 100 m from where I’m staying. Now, normally these sorts of sounds are not experienced by the body as ‘attractive’ or, to use a technical term, euphonic, and in days gone by before I learned how to relax better, my sleep was often disturbed by outside sounds, to the point of being woken up.

So with my body in its present state, allowing the sounds of the excavator scraping rocks (which are about as attractive as chalk across a blackboard) the experience was simply that: an experience, with no residue of aversion or irritation. As well, paying attention to the sounds and allowing the body to remain deeply relaxed changes the mind’s relationship to external sounds. This is a subtle and important refinement of the idea of non-attachment. I wanted to attach a link to these critical Buddhist term but all of the links that I found in a quick search confused detachment with non-attachment; these are not the same things at all.

Instead I found a decent definition of the Hindu equivalent which is normally rendered as Vairagya in Roman script. In the context of an excavator scraping rocks that idea of non-attachment is the simple allowing of the experience of the sound meeting the body, to continue this experience as long as it lasts, and letting go in the instant of its ending and—this is the absolutely fundamental part—not allowing any kind of story to form around the sound. One of my teachers once uttered what were for me pivotal words when he said, “Pain is a sensation; suffering is the story we tell ourselves about it”. If you are so inclined, the truth of this can be experienced the next time you hear the sound is that ordinarily would be irritating to you. Instead of asking yourself questions like,  ”Why is that excavator working so early in the morning?”, simply dive into the direct experience of the sound itself.

I recorded a 22 minute relaxation script in a dance studio last night and I attach a link to it for you HERE.

If you would like to know a bit more about the content before clicking on the link, read my short post on forums made this morning HERE. I am attaching these links here because this particular script does contain a number of suggestions for the process of allowing sound to be simply experienced. If there is interest in this topic I can record a script which has a greater degree of specificity in this regard.

The Schroth Method

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Schroth Method, Schroth Method book, scoliosis

The Schroth Method deals with scoliosis, with physical treatments that use the breath to  change the shape of the rib cage, and use stretching and strengthening exercises to help the spine and hips achieve a more efficient alignment. The images on their home page alone are an eloquent testimony to its efficacy. There are literally hundreds more of similar images in the book itself, which I was introduced to by a friend and colleague, Malcolm Boulter.

I wish to study this method, and I have written to the headquarters in Germany a few times. I received up-to-date email addresses from the publisher of the Schroth Method book, and the head instructor replied to me this morning.

The possible sticking point is that the Schroth method is only practised by “PTs” (Physical Therapists; here in Australia, the term for the same profession is physiotherapists). Further, the headquarters will only accept students who are physicians or PTs. I have asked the head instructor if he would consider waiving the entry requirements in my case. We shall see.

I have read the book cover to cover; it is extremely dense (the present edition is written by the daughter of the woman who originated the method). The head instructor told me that the present edition is 16 years or so out of date, and that all the developments of the last 16 years will be incorporated into the 8th edition. The photographs and illustrations alone make the current edition worth buying, though, in my view—even if recent developments are missing, the photographs show actual patients who have benefitted immensely from the method as described.

I hope the headquarters does relax their entry requirements which were described thus: “The problem for to attend this course is the professional precondition. The course is just for physical therapists and physicians.” We shall see.