The Plan for after You Get Punched in the Face (Part 10)
Your Jedi training starts today
And just like that, it’s time for the tenth and final part of our plan for after we get punched in the face.
Number Ten is a doozy, but it’s also easy, so let’s go.
Let me kick us off with one of my very favorite Fight Songs, Dolly Parton’s “I’m Gone”:
Some chewing gum and candy
Some magazines and snacks
Some starting-over money
That I’ve been holding back
A change of clothes, a notepad
To write a letter back
To say so long
A one-way ticket saying
Goodbye to everything
Threw my wedding band
Out of the window of the train
All I want’s my freedom
Reclaim my maiden name
I’m moving on
‘Cuz I’m gone
Two verses in, the song already has a lot of what I love most in a fight song, including a suitcase full of candy and a clear statement of freedom, the plain fact that someone is outta here.
Plus it has that crazy banjo or maybe it’s a mad mandolin!
But the chorus is what really makes this song the perfect song for today:
You can tell the truth or you can lie
You can say I left you or I died
Say I’m in the Himalayas on some spiritual quest
And could spend years looking for the light
Say I’m in the witness program with the F.B.I.
Say a U.F.O. abducted me from home
You can say what you choose
But I’ll tell you the truth
You can say for sure I am gone,
‘Cuz I’m gone
Every word of this is sublime.
The part I will draw your attention to is this:
Say I’m in the Himalayas on some spiritual quest
And could spend years looking for the light
You heard the lady. This is Ms. Dolly Parton, y’all. Here she is naming the spiritual quest as a made-up excuse that her ex can give for why she is suddenly outta there. But because Dolly Parton is a subtle genius, she is also covertly revealing a step on the path to today’s way to avoid despair: you must go to the Himalayas on a spiritual quest and spend years looking for the light.
And I, Genevieve, also a subtle genius, am here to tell you that there is no need to go to the Himalayas to start your spiritual quest. And I have reason to believe you won’t need years to find the light. With any luck you will see a glimmer of the light by the time you are done reading this post. Let’s do this thing.
Ways to Avoid Despair (10/10)
10. Find your center
Folks of my generation usually have a visceral response to seeing this scene from Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).
Ben Kenobi introduces Luke Skywalker to the concept of the Force:
LUKE: The Force? BEN KENOBI: The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.
Now, without getting into a big religious discussion, I want to say that the Force is the closest thing I have to an appreciation of God. The Force has been at the heart of what we could call my faith ever since I was a tiny little child watching Star Wars: A New Hope with my brother an ungovernable number of times. When Ben tells Luke that he should skip the harvest and learn the ways of the Force, I in little kid format was thinking, “I’M ALL IN.”
Then somehow I grew up, and life intervened, and my plans to study the ways of the Force and become a Jedi knight were disrupted.
But in 2021, a bout of ungovernable pain and anxiety struck me. After trips to the E.R., the CAT scan machine, my GP/PCP, the ear-nose-throat guy, a massage practitioner who can release your jaw muscles from inside your mouth, and a new GP/PCP, I found myself in a studio with one of the world’s best acupuncture practitioners.
Within a few minutes of meeting me, she said, “Genevieve, you are hemorrhaging vital resources.”
Hearing her make this frank and terrifying statement, I had a sudden flashback to something I had wanted to do just before Covid hit and changed everything.
I live in San Francisco. This is a great city for “geriatric moms,” prenatal yoga, and all other things prenatal and post-natal.
When I was expecting my first kid, I had the good fortune to stumble upon a qigong class offered for expectant moms. Our teacher, Elena Tolpygo, described the titular “qi” (AKA “chi,” the same “chi” as in “tai chi”) in terms that made it impossible not to make the connection back to the Force.
I can’t tell you how much I loved swimming in the air, stirring qi around with my arms and hips in figure 8s, and shaking little pieces of qi off my sparkle fingers.
When the baby came, my time filled up with baby life and I (foolishly) ceased to practice qigong. But some little glimmer inside me filed this away as the means to pick up my Jedi training when the time came.
In 2019, my kiddos were finally old enough that I felt I could add some pure “me” things back into my schedule. I looked for a qigong or tai chi class and came upon the website for the San Francisco Hunyuan Tai Chi Academy. This special place on Bryant Street offered daily morning practice. I went on a flight of fancy in which I reorganized my entire life to be able to attend that practice in person every morning.
And I can’t even remember which life crisis struck then and derailed my plan before I even went for an orientation session.
So when the best acupuncturist I’ve ever met told me that I was hemorrhaging vital resources in 2021, the little glimmery part of my brain remembered the San Francisco Hunyuan Tai Chi Academy and found my way back to their website.
And that’s when I learned that, also due to Covid, the entire academy had migrated up to Washington state.
Was that it? Was I out of luck again? Was my Jedi training going to be indefinitely postponed?
And because the forces (hee hee) behind the San Francisco Hunyuan Tai Chi Academy, Malcolm and Annie Dean, are subtle geniuses, my Jedi training was *not* postponed. Instead, I was able to start training with them using everyone’s favorite technology from the Covid area - Zoom. I love their new name for their studio since they moved to Washington state - Luminous Ground.
And slowly but surely, after daily practice, sometimes twice a day, I could feel my vital resources starting to return.
And now, after four years of qigong study over Zoom, I am no Jedi knight, but I have found my center, and about 75-80% of the time I can find it again when I lose it.
And this is today’s way to avoid despair:
Find your center.
You can start right now.
I want you to notice the hand gestures Ben Kenobi uses as he describes the Force to Luke for the first time. I particularly love this one, in which he looks like he is holding an invisible ball:
In qigong and tai chi, we use a very important concept to describe your center. I believe that is what Ben is holding in this screen grab.
The magic word for your center is “dantian.”
Pronunciations differ, but you can think about it as your center, both of your physical body and of your mental/energetic/spiritual bodies.
In physical terms, I visualize a ball like Saruman’s Palantir:
But instead of sitting atop a creepily etched table, your dantian is resting inside you.
Picture a Palantir-like sphere sitting in the basket formed by your pelvis.
You can also picture it as the lacrosse ball inside the basket:
Malcolm Dean, the teacher at Luminous Ground (formerly the San Francisco Hunyuan Tai Chi Academy), describes the dantian as a “universal ball bearing” that can turn in any direction. The movement of the dantian is what powers the rest of your body. And the energy (qi or chi) that flows in and out of your dantian powers all of your actions.
Let me introduce Malcolm in the flesh (well, in the Zoom) to describe the single most important thing, not even just in qigong and tai chi, but in your whole life:
It’s about centering yourself.
In every sense of that word.
Physical, energetic, mental, spiritual.
The center of each of those four bodies is the same center.
When you’ve learned to center yourself, all the bodies integrate because they all have the same center.
All you have to do is go to your own center.
You don’t need to do anything else.
And notice this gesture he is making with his hands:
Yes yes yes yes yes Malcolm is holding an invisible ball as he describes your dantian, your center. The Force that Ben Kenobi described with a very similar gesture is indeed the qi that we work with in the qigong practice. And this mystical ball is indeed your own center.
And what do you need when you get punched in the face?
You need to get centered.
Stay on your feet.
Avoid the knockout.
Get punched again, get back up again.
In Hamilton lyrics, I’d go with this one: “I'm Hercules Mulligan, I need no introduction, when you knock me down I get the f*ck back up again.”
If you are intrigued to find your center, join Malcolm and Annie and me and my mom for morning qigong every day at 8am PST.
Or just place your hands on your own abdomen right now. Imagine the dantian as a sphere resting in the basket created by your pelvis. Take a few deep breaths, imagining the dantian expanding on the in breath, contracting on the out breath.
Don’t worry if you don’t feel anything - just pretend you feel it, and slowly but surely you will be able to feel it. Meditation practices are wonderful when you are communing with your own dantian.
Please take at least a few minutes today getting acquainted with your center. It will get you through the weeks, months, and years to come.
Conversely, if you don’t find your center, you will just keep getting punched in the fact, and your ability to recover from the punch will falter. You don’t want that, and neither do I.
Today’s Way to Cultivate Joy
It feels incredible when you start to be able to feel and visualize your own center.
In addition to all the other benefits I have experienced from my qigong practice, my imagination and creativity have grown immeasurably, including after two bouts of proper burnout and depression. I believe I broke at least one official terrible writer’s block by starting to scribble down the ideas I was having during the daily qigong practice. Having ideas and seeing concepts in my imagination during qigong reinvigorate my connection to my own body and that feels so good.
This is when we get to see “the light” that Dolly Parton mentions in “I’m Gone.” No Himalayas, you don’t have to spend ten years looking for the light, you can just start to see it today, even if you’re just pretending to see it.
Annie Dean, one of the subtle geniuses behind Luminous Ground, taught me the most about using your imagination during qigong. She splashes invisible golden liquid over her head, describes the feeling of warm honey inside after a good practice, and compares the feeling at the end of a nourishing practice to the feeling you have after you eat a big meal. She also creates art that reminds me of things I see when I picture my center.
Like a mandala (its center is your center):
Or like the everything bagel from Everything Everywhere All At Once, but less evil:
Try it today! And leave a comment or Message me, I’d love to hear what you feel and see when you start to imagine your own center.
Thank you for joining me on this ten-part journey to bounce back after we get punched in the face.
And I’m not going anywhere - stay tuned for even more ways to manage despair and cultivate joy, more trans advocacy, more fight song spotlights and songwriting tips, and more opportunities for civic engagement.
May the Force be with us.
And don’t go it alone,
Genevieve