S2 Episode 69: Handstands as an Awareness Practice

Transcript of Episode 69: Handstands as an Awareness Practice

EL: Hello and welcome back to the Handstandcast with me Emmet Louis and unfortunately this week my coffee and hatred filled co-host Mikael Kristiansen is not with us because he is currently setting up for his show Vault with his company Right Way Down. So, I’m rolling a solo show this week. As usual I think I really need to record Mikael’s “How’s it going?” How’s it going? But anyway, “How’s it going Emmet?”

It’s going okay. We are in the middle of a heatwave in Ireland. So, for those of you who don’t know, that probably means the temperature is about twenty degrees. I think it’s actually thirty at the moment. So, my Irish constitution is not handling it too well. Basically, sitting here in my underwear sweating, absolutely sweating all the time. My dog Albus is functionally just basically finding the coldest spot to sleep in. He’s sleeping on the bathroom tiles. Other than that, it’s pretty good. The evenings are really nice. Walking and doing other things which is that. Some things bad, some things good. It’s the rule of Ireland anyway. No matter what the weather is you have to complain about it. Really nice and temperate: “Oh, it’s fierce mild!” Cold and raining: “Oh, my God, it’s raining in Ireland, ah, it never happens!”

So anyway, I thought I would diverge from our normal content although not really. I’m going to do a bit of my own specialty, I suppose. Or one of them anyway. And talk about handstands as an awareness or meditative practice. This is one of the things I’m very interested in. It’s one of these things a lot of people say, “Handstands is a meditation practice and other stuff.” And it’s like “well, yes, no and maybe.” And I think I would say, handstands, are very good as a vehicle for an awareness practice. But at the time same, they are not in and of themselves, a practice. So, we can actually look at the technical key points that we want to do.

Meditation in some ways is a very free practice but at other times, it’s a very technical practice. And in the school I’m a teacher in – I’m a teacher in a school of Daoism called Ba Men Daxuan, eight gates leading to the great mystery it translates as – with my teacher Serge. We are searching for this thing called ziran, in Daoism, called natural. We have this idea of wuwei, and non-acting, or, and it’s kind of wrong the way it’s presented. It got presented a lot and muddled up by Adam Watts a lot in the west and that trickled down. We have this idea that we want to be natural and spontaneous but at the time it’s not just natural as in I flopped out and I’m a child running around, and I have nothing. It’s more a trained natural that we’re taking apart all the parts of the human, making them as best we can, and then letting them infuse into our life so we get rid of a lot of things. It’s a practice of… – if you look at the greater traditions and other stuff – in Daoism, we have this idea of getting rid of all the stuff and then just letting the best come out. And in Confucianism they have the idea of perfecting your moral virtues to allow things. Same end goal but different ways of going about it. And then we also have Buddhism as well which I’ll get into later on. But we find that to find this naturalness we have to have a very technical practice to start with that allows, that gets rid of all the things in the way of our naturalness. Lets us experience it. And then we let it infuse in.

There’s a good story I like by one of the Daoist sages, Zhuangzi. I’m going to have to paraphrase it. I’m not reading here. He’s talking to someone, a fisherman, I think. When you have caught the fish, the net or the fishing bowl doesn’t matter anymore. When you have grasped the meaning of the words then the words are not important. Now the funny bit. There’s always a funny bit in Zhangzi: “Now, find me a man who has forgotten all his words so we can have a good conversation!” So, this is what we’re getting at in today’s work. We’re going to craft a very technical form of practice that we can use as a handstand practice and then we can have some experiences from this and then we can hopefully try and replicate it in our day-to-day life. And this goes to this idea of four postures of meditation of the Buddha: half-laying, sitting, standing, and walking. Yes, you can meditate in these things but also what it’s getting at is you could eventually be in a meditative state, concentration state, all the time in your daily life.

So, this is what he’s getting at. That we can practice them in these ways and then transfer over. And if that makes sense. We already have these four postures in our handstand practice normally. You know we have laying on the floor for alignment drills, we have sitting down between our handstands to look at images on our Instagram or TikTok. We have standing on our hands, obviously. And then we have walking over to get rid of our phone when you have checked the video you just shot. So, they’re already there in some ways you’re probably just not actually paying attention. Now this is a bit tongue and cheek obviously, but paying attention in this involves a few things. So, we’re going to get some definitions first, and then we’re going to try to pull it together.

So first we have two modes of attention. Two big modes: we have focused attention where we are focusing on an object, some thing. And generally, we can only really hold one object in our focus, in our attention, at all times. We see this in multi-tasking and in research and everything. People who multi-task switch tasks very quickly. We have the same thing in handstands where we could be focusing in on one detail. Like am I focusing on my placement of my hands or focusing on my foot, this kind of thing. Then we also have our peripheral awareness. Where we are aware of our surroundings. The atmosphere going on. Basically, we can think of these as focus vision and peripheral vision. So, in handstands this general peripheral awareness is one where we are generally aware when balancing but not doing anything else, if that makes sense?

So, we already have these states of concentration. Then, for us, in mindfulness, if we’re talking about technical mindfulness, and not neural mindfulness. Technical mindfulness is the balance between these two concentrations. Where I am fifty percent of one and fifty percent of the other. If I can find that balance, then it will allow an awareness to come up. Awareness we could think of, is, how to describe it. Awareness is basically the screen that you are taught comments, judgements, visualizations, memories and everything are practiced on. It is the space between these things and it is ever-present. It is present when you are awake and present when you are asleep.

We can think of this as a room. We could have a room and we could put all our thoughts and chairs and tables, our experiences, our memories, all the furniture in the room, but there’s still something else in the room. And in this room the awareness would be the space in the room. So, we have this kind of thing and what we’re trying to get is this state where we reach stillness. And stillness means that our thoughts are not jumping from thought to thought, comment to comment, judgment to judgement, judgement to comment, all this kind of thing, scanning around. That we’re trying to make everything become still. And let’s see what’s there. Now it’s simple. But it’s very misunderstood. We see it as a mindfulness practice. More neural mindfulness I suppose. Which is the western secularized version of mindfulness. A lot to say on about that but I’ll probably hold off on doing it. Where most of the time they mix these concepts up and they’re like:  “Oh, focus on your breathing. Pay attention to your breathing.” Well, that’s not really mindfulness on our terms, that’s focused awareness. “Go for a walk in the woods. Be aware of the wind in the trees and just general ambience.” Oh, that’s peripheral awareness. What we’re trying to do is find a way to balance these two awareness-es in our practices.

So, we can turn our handstand training into a chemical Olympic to allow this state of mind to make itself clear. The way I would describe it it’s like turning a radio to a certain frequency. It’s always kind of there. Some people would say we’re shifting from thought to other thought, maybe ten times a second or something like this. It’s those kinds of gaps that we’re looking for. At the same time, we’re trying to find stillness. One of the interesting things. The way meditation has a lot of static seated postures and very formal postures is… We can use these postures, this stillness of the body to artificially restrain the mind. That if we can find this perfect moment of stillness in the body where everything is kind of not moving. Then we can curb the disillusion, and the disillusion will also help cause space in the thoughts. So, it’s one of those things if you were to sit down and sit completely still. It’s one of the things we do as a meditation practice. Literally not move anything. Sit down. Completely still. Tongue is not allowed to move around. Your feet are not allowed to fidget. Your eyes have to stay completely fixed where they are. It’s incredibly difficult. And you’ll find the body gets incredibly uncomfortable with it because this static stillness begins to create a tension which forces things to start popping out to disturb this state. So, we can try and find this for a brief time on our handstand. And what we found is that you are already there. It’s like sharing a radio: You’ve heard the song you want to find now you just have to play with the dial a bit. So, it’s that kind of thing we are looking for. It’s what goes back to all of these meditation masters who say “you are already enlightened, attained, perfected, one with God” – whatever your preferred terminology is – “you just don’t know it.” And that’s it. We make this state appear and then we try and replicate it.

So, I hope everyone is following along so far. What I’m going to talk about now is how we turn our practice of handstands into either a technical meditation practice to let this state make itself apparent or how if you’re already trying to make it, you could probably find some tips and tricks and other stuff that will help you, or find it again, or enhance what you’re already doing.

The first thing we need to do in our practice is get rid of our distractions. This means put your phone away for the time you’re going to do it. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, whatever your foot thinks. So, no phone! Get rid of the phone. That’s the first thing. The phone basically robs your attention. Distractions. Books. They rob your attention because they make you do something that isn’t trying to find it. And in between all your sets, you’re just going to sit down. You could sit in a classic meditation posture. You could sit in a chair. You could sit on the floor. It doesn’t really matter. We’re just trying to get rid of distractions and just get rid of it.

The next thing we need to do is notice what we have in our head – we have this voice. It may manifest as an audio voice. A subtext when you’re reading, you hear yourself reading along to yourself in your head. Or it might be a more general thing that presents images. Everyone thinks differently and it’s not just the same for everyone. But in this voice, what we call “the narrator,” it comments on stuff and it judges stuff. This is what we would term “the mental mind.” The mental mind is not the true self or the true thing and is not the awareness. It’s just the thing that’s very useful for living in the world. And you don’t want to get rid of it because you need to be able to logically dissect things and comment and judge. But at the same time, we need to begin to note when we are commenting and judging. And we can hijack this when we are sitting between our sets. When we judge our set good or bad. We can go “a judgement!” Label it as a judgement, note it as a judgement. I can start commenting, narrating. The narrator also narrates things like “now I’m doing my handstand practice and next thing I’ll go shopping, I’ll buy this and I’ll buy that.” Blah-blah-blah. So, we can label these and the labelling of them will stop them quite quickly. Because it’s an acknowledgement of it. Oh, I’m judging. Boom. It’ll stop. Something else will pop up. It’s not going to be completely still. But at the same time, by doing this, we break that thought tree or thought chain that forms out of this.

So, this is what you’re going to do between your sets. You are going to – obviously if you’re doing this you probably need to be able to hold handstands for twenty, thirty, sixty seconds quite comfortably. If you’re still struggling to balance and not getting there it’s going to be harder to do but at the same time it doesn’t mean it’s going to be impossible. So, you know this is the first thing. Between our sets. We’ve gotten rid of our phone. We’ve gotten rid of our distractions. We are also beginning to label our thoughts and other things that come up. So, we can also begin to label our comments just to slow down when we have a physical sensation as well. Let’s say, “Oh I’m sitting down and I notice my foot.” Physical! So, we have this thing: comment, narration, judgement, physical. And you can see how fast you’re taught or presentations to the mind will be occurring. And it can be very quick or it can be very slow depending on what sort of state you’re on.

So, the first we need to do, what I would call Step Minus One, is you need to engage with this practice with sincerity. And sincerity means you just do the practice as I’m presenting, and you don’t want to comment or compare because this is a form of mental ownership and obviously you have to treat the practice as the practice and do the practice and see what happens. Whereas if you’re already performing this mental ownership: “Oh meditation doesn’t work for me.” “Oh, this is just like this I have seen in a yoga class.” Maybe it is. Maybe it is the exact same. But you don’t want to do this because this mental ownership will depower the practice and create expectations of what you think may happen. If you are thinking it means you are into this commenting, narrating, or judging. And this is what we want to avoid. So, this practice is incredibly technical. And you want to master the steps as you go on. As you get through the steps then you can add in a next one, and a next one, and a next one. Hopefully, you will attain an experience from this that you can then translate to when you’re sitting or when you notice that you’re in this state. Then, you can be like, “Oh, that was that state.”

So, it’s nice because the handstands are so brief, but the practice can force it to emerge or make it very clear that once you have it then you can be aware of when you’re in it and aware when you’re not in it. It’s probably more that you’re aware when you’re not in it. Because if you’re really in this state you obviously can’t comment because you’ve lost the ability to comment, not lost it but it doesn’t really exist, or it doesn’t really come to the forefront. It never really goes away: “Sit down and stop your thoughts.” The classic. Ok I’ll just sit there – done. I’m thinking but not thinking, blah! Anyway, it’s not going to stop but it’s the un-involvement that we’re looking at to see that these things get projected as something behind it.

As I said, basically we want to get rid of our phone, we have no music on, no filming, just you and the floor. Your favorite piece of floor. Lock the door. Don’t let people come in and have a chat while you’re doing it. So, in Daoist philosophy we have this idea that human is situated between heaven and earth, sky, and earth. The material and the immaterial. And what this means on one level is that we are – the human body exists as a physical body obviously and then we also have our thoughts and all these things that are immaterial. We can’t dissect the thought out of someone as of yet.

So, we have this idea of the equal importance of the body, the breathing, and the mind. And with this, we want to emphasize the verticality of our line and what this means at the beginning is we want to make a gentle but consistent stretch across the whole body. We want to make it as long and as tall as possible. But at the same time, it has to be stretching in two directions at once. So, this is the thing: I’m pushing my shoulders up to where my line would be but at the same time, I’m also holding them down. I’m reaching my toes up and they’re going as high as possible, but my hands are sinking into the ground as hard as they can. You’ll notice you get this. You can practice this by itself by stretching your fingers away. Just standing up and holding your hands up at chest level. Stretch the fingers away as far as you can. And then stretch the arm backwards from them. You’ll notice that you’ll generate a stretch from the fingertips all the way to the back of the shoulder and all the way along the sheet of the arm. It’s the same thing we want to get for this because by connecting the body in this way it begins to help us fill in the gaps of our sensory awareness. So instead of having a general sense of the body that might have some gaps and things, we will be able to connect the body and find that it’s a holy unit. Using the fascia and connective tissues and sinews as a means, by putting the stretch on them it gives that awareness and allows our awareness to sink into the body more.

The idea we know because we’re situated between heaven and earth in this practice. We could also think that our intent to stretch goes all the way to the ceiling if you can focus on that, putting the ceiling at all the way center of the earth, all the way to the moon. That will help give that expansive intent we want. You can relate this in performance as well. This idea of filling a stage with your presence. It’s not just “I’m holding my arms up or my legs out or I’m making body geometry.” I’m going beyond that to try and draw the audience in.

The next thing we want to do it has to be coupled with the least amount of tension in the body in the form of contraction as possible. So, this means we obviously need a certain degree of tension to maintain our balance but we don’t want to be contracting hard. We don’t want to be squeezing our muscles hard. Squeezing our glutes. We want to find the minimum amount of tension we need in the formal contraction and the biggest degree of spreading out of the shape, to fill the space and establish our verticality and this verticality, it will take some time to find but it’s very, very clear when you find it. It’s a very clear sensation. And it’s not something vague or un-general. When you hear it – “hear it” is actually a good thing. When you hear it into the body – a quality we will call listening, you will feel it and it’s very clear. It’s not an abstract thing. Ok I can feel this stretch all over. It’s on the back of the body. It’s on the front. When you get the minimum amount of tension with this you will feel your skeleton. You will feel the periosteal fascia constricting around the skeleton slightly and you will have a very clear awareness of all your bones. So that’s one of the clues. It will take a long-ish time of trying this out to find it. But that’s what it will lead to.

The next thing in the handstand is we don’t want to fight for balance in the handstand. If you lose it that’s fine no big deal. We are relying on the verticality and the structure to hold you still. I’d even say you can’t balance the handstand consciously. But you have to stay on balance and let the corrections happen. It’s this wuwei. We are allowing our practice that we have fought for. We’ve done all the rebalance drills. We know our alignments. We know all the stuff we want. Now we are just in the pure doing. This is the ziran. We are letting the natural of the handstand that you have trained go from a trained, constricted, commented, judged, correct practice to just something you do. You have to get out of the way of the body and let the natural balance you have trained and worked on emerge. Just ride the balance wave. Let the verticality and your positioning emerge.

So, a goal in this is now that we have set a structure and allowed a formal way of ziran to come out. A form of naturalness. A trained naturalness come out. We want to find a moment of perfect immobility. And, what this means is like, nothing is moving. The first thing you want to do is lock the eyes on a spot on the floor. And you could even mark a dot on the floor, have a piece of dirt, your favorite piece of dirt on your favorite handstand spot, that you will then look at. And you will not move the eyes. You will try not to blink. You won’t look from side to side. You won’t look at your hands. You won’t move the eyes around with the balance. They will stay still. Same time, your tongue, mouth, jaw, and face are also going to be still. It’s easy enough to find this and this will be infused into the rest of it. So, with the tongue. You can put the tongue on top of the mouth, bottom of the mouth, back of the teeth, whatever you want. I don’t want to give too much rules here. Nothing wants to move. Literally, nothing. And, there would be a moment in this where you are not balancing the handstand. You are perfectly vertical, and you’ll feel this moment. It clicks into place. There’s just one moment – it will only last a split second. If we think about it we generally correct our handstands between one to five times a second.  That means that you could possibly have one second of doing this or you could possibly have a fifth of a second doing a twenty percent of a second doing it. So, it’s a very short amount of time. It’s very hard to do in practice. It’s not easy. Well, it’s happening all the time.

Here’s the thing. We’re always rocking between the balance point. If we think of a pendulum swinging from side to side. There’s a moment as the pendulum reaches the very end of its swing on one side and it comes perfectly still before it begins to swing back the other way. It’s the exact same thing in handstand. It happens at one moment when the balance is altering from over to under balance or perfectly vertical in the middle. And at that moment you are perfectly immobile as your arms, as long as your tongue, eyes, face is also still. So, we’re trying to find this perfect stillness. So we’ve done our first three steps. Find the verticality in the structure. Once you really have a clear feeling of that. Move on to the next thing. No fighting. Rely on the verticality and let the balance emerge. No commenting on that I’m losing it. No judging the shape. This is the other thing. With this idea of the verticality, we’re not looking for an aesthetic of the handstand. Because if we are looking for an aesthetic and we feel we are not in the aesthetic, we are judging. And we want to get rid of the judging, and we want to get rid of the commenting. This practice will take a while. It’s going to take a while to actually get used to doing it. You will need to correct it. But at the same time, you need to get away from the corrections, the judging, the commenting, and just do it.

So, the fourth step, is interesting where we are trying to balance the two systems: the peripheral attention and the focus attention. And, what we’re looking for, we have the balance system. But what we need to do is because we are focusing to encompass the whole body, we want to think about that. If I start focusing on the whole body and then, it shifted in and then I’m focusing on my knees. Okay we have shifted our focused attention from using our peripheral awareness to move it onto our knees. So, what we need to do is focus on our visual point. That point on the floor we’ve put and use that for the focused attention and hold that still. Then, we are maintaining this…using our sensations in the body as a stretch to basically experience the body in its totality without focusing in on a detail. Or the general expanse. We could also think of a thing like an aura, that whole egg shape around the body that we’re holding onto. So, we’re trying to balance these and it’s very. It is very difficult. And it takes a while. And you might need to focus. You might need to hold the body, the peripheral awareness first. And let the things emerge from it but not focus on them. Or focus on holding the visual thing and just ignore the body completely. Until you have a good balance of these. Then you can begin to combine them. So, it’ll take a while. There’s three steps in there. Find one, find the other and then find the conjunction of the two.

Step five is we want to breathe silently. If we are completely immobile then hopefully there should be no sound coming in or out of the nose or mouth. The breathing should be smooth. Relatively deep without being forced or constrained. Breathing itself as you know will shift the balance of the handstand and move you around and do all these things. So, we are trying to do it as minimal as possible.

We could also expand this. If we wanted to focus on the breathing so the breathing will become the object of our focused attention, we could just pay attention to the stages of the breathing, the inhale, the retention, the pause between the inhale – see this is the thing, we get into technical breathing methods in Daoism. We have a lot of them. We have five stages of breathing in Daoism. We have the inhale, the retention at the end of the inhale, the stillness between the retention of the start of the exhale and then the exhale and then the same on the other side of the breathing. So we’re looking to find that still point where we neither inhaling or exhaling. Because that is the point where if we are perfectly vertical, we have our attentions balanced between focused attention and peripheral attention and the breathing point is that we now fuse the body, so these are the three treasures of Daoism: the body, the breathing and the mind or ci,  jian, xian for those who know those terms. They’re all the same thing really or different manifestations or different descriptions. We have made the body still. We have made the attention still. We have made the breathing still. And then it’s this idea. They all, if you get lucky, they all coincide. There will be a moment of awareness contained in that where you will be aware and then the second – “Oh, I have it! I commented on it!” Boom. Comment, gone! So, it’s holding that without that commenting or judging or dropping out of the balance of attentions. Down it goes.

The nice thing on this practice because we’re using the breathing to finish the practice I suppose – it will – every time you take a breath – if you have your structure set first time your attention set, then every time you breathe it will give you a chance of finding this state and experiencing it. It’s something that I’m not trying to describe. It’s easy to describe if you’ve experienced it but because if I’ve experienced it, it will give you a lot of things to comment and talk and judge on. And then the thing is, it will – that’s the thing.

So, my teacher, Serge, always compares this stuff to, making a salad. And what he means at that is, a salad is a very simple dish to make. It is very simple. It’s just chopped vegetables in a bowl with maybe a sauce. What makes a nice salad is having good ingredients. Having fresh vegetables and a nice sauce you made or bought from a store that you like. Combining them in the right proportions. And this is the idea. If we had wilted vegetables and a sauce that was gone off, we don’t have a nice salad. If we have fresh vegetables, we put them together and we have a very nice salad. So, it’s this idea that we’re looking for in all these steps leading up. We want to treat them as a whole step and then put them together into our salad. Once you have found this state, it’s one of those things – how to describe the indescribable. It is a state of possibility. It is a state where time doesn’t exist but time is a construction of the mental mind. It is a state of absolute stillness. But at the same time it is containing all. It is the easiest way to describe it. It makes no sense but obviously I’m describing it now. It gives you loads of things to think and comment about.

At the same time, now basically we have our radio. We built a radio that’s capable of finding the state and now we’re trying to watch it, basically. One of the things – the analogy I would use in this: we’re trying to watch a bird hidden in the bush. We’re trying to creep up to it. And the more of the steps we have, we’re hiding in the bush and we’re trying to watch this bird. We’re doing our bird watching and the steps that we have and the more combined they are, the better the coverage we have, and the less chance we be seen by this bird. When we can have all these steps, or if we lose one, we shake the bush and scare the bird off. And, you have to hide again and wait for it to return. I like that analogy because it gives a hint that it’s fleeting. Me changing. So, this will combine itself and put it together will allow it to merge.

Now, that we have hopefully had a taste or we’ve heard this thing by tuning our dial, or we’ve seen the bird. In between our handstands, we’re going to basically do the same steps. We’re going to sit down however you want, nice and still, no fidgeting about, with our awarenesses. But all our steps combined. And then see what happens. We’re not going to try and do anything we’re just going to try and settle nicely. And then see. See what’s there. See if we can identify it. See if we could – I don’t want to say hold it because we can’t hold it – but see what’s there between our thoughts, see what’s there between our sensations, see what’s there between the comments, the judgements and everything else.

So, this is how I would suggest and how I have done a lot in the past of shifting to this idea of basically transforming handstands to a technical meditation or awareness practice. I’m always hesitant to use meditation because it’s a bit of a catch all term. And it means a bit of everything. There’s a lot of practices all pointing in the same direction. But at the same time, they’re not all the same. So, for this practice to work. And how to work quite well is we need to have a balance between correcting and working on the details and then just doing it. If you’re doing this for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, I would suggest that you would split the time up fifty-fifty. You would have a section of your practice where you work on the steps individually. You try to do them as best you can. They will get deeper and richer the more and more you do them. And, you will find more things you need to work on and then on the other half of your practice, you just do it. You let go of all the correcting. You let go of all the technical stuff. The critique and the judgements. The planning. All of this. You just let go of it and you just do the practice.

When you feel you’re ready to do a handstand, do a handstand. Do the steps as best you can but in the same time, try not to go: “OK, now I’m doing step 1, now I’m doing step 2, step 2 complete, now I will do step 3.” Once you’ll be able to get better at the steps. Once you have done them more and more, then you will be able to just do them and then it’ll allow the state to emerge.

So, this is a way of transforming your handstand practice into a vehicle for an awareness or meditative practice. As some of you have probably experienced like when you get into the handstand, you’ve probably had a taste of this state already. You’ve probably had some experiences. This is one of the things that’s addicting on handstands – is – this flow-state. Which occurs when you’re just doing it. That’s also one of the things we’re looking at and it’s that formal Samadhi. I don’t want to use too much technical terms. But that would be a state of it and you know, you hear a lot of athletes would experience this state or tattooists oddly enough, obviously because they have to be very focused. And it’s that state that we’re looking for, where we’re perfectly doing the thing, or where we’re perfectly balanced, where there’s no interference from the mental mind or the mental creations. So that’s what we’re looking for.

I think I’ve covered most of the steps and it is an interesting practice and I guarantee that it will give a lot. Obviously, you need to be able to hold a handstand for some time but at the same time, it can happen anywhere. Like you could try this against the wall. You could try it in a less balanced state. There’s no reason why it can’t because this state of mind we’re looking for is not dependent on form in some ways. It’s not, it doesn’t – you know, meditation and all these things is a state of mind. It doesn’t rely on wearing the right clothes and all this other stuff but at the same time we can cancel the noise out as much as possible. And that’s what this practice is, it’s a form of noise cancelling. To let the state be – turning the lights off in the room so the candlelight is more attractive – that idea.

So, other than that I am going to wrap up the podcast here. If you have any questions or anything about this. It’s more my zone, you can DM them to me on Instagram. I’d suggest just doing it basically, like everything. Just do it. And then try it out. Other than that, I’ve been Emmet Louis. I’ll be joined next week by Mikael and we’ll get the full run down of his show. I’m going to try and abduct some of his co-show people and try to get them on. It would be awesome. I can’t promise that’s going to happen because everyone’s super busy. I’m looking forward to having Mikael back and hearing how the show went from destruction to repair to desperation to oh-shit-we’re-on-stage-now. Other than that, I’ve been Emmet Louis. This has been the Handstandcast and enjoy!