2.1 - Autoception
Warning! The following section contains exercises that, whilst seemingly innocuous at this point, should not be undertaken without explicit permission from a medical practitioner. The reader proceeds at their own risk.
Helpful prerequisites: 1.3 (on priors), 1.4 (on centring, posture and breath)
Ask any of Pan's students at the start of their training and they'll tell you that enduring image of a ki-user is an old man meditating under a waterfall, hovering three feet in the air. Sometimes he has birds whispering in his ears and deer bringing him berries. To get to this proficiency took him a lifetime and he is full of ancient wisdom, speaking in riddles to those acolytes who seek him out.
If you were to ask my family to paint a picture of a ki-user you'd hear stories of mischief, explosions, footprints on ceilings, winning fights with startled traffic, and overall a group of lovable miscreants trying their very best to muddle their way through life. Without a doubt, Pan's school marks a level of organisation that leaves me uncomfortable in its unfamiliarity.
The true life of a ki-user can exist at both extremes and usually lies somewhere in the middle. With enough patience (or exposure) anyone can learn to utilise their ki. There is no requirement to live a cloistered life, nor partake in a boisterous routine of gruelling physical activity and grand tournaments. Although, to start, we will begin with a number of activities mostly resembling the former. Please be assured that by chapter three you will be more active. For now, you can stay in your reading nook - centred with good posture of course - and we shall get to know our genki.
For an ability that tends to be seen as an outwardly projected one - affecting great speed and strength, creating ranged attacks, sharing energy and thoughts with others, flight - ki-use is remarkably reliant on our inner lives and senses to work. As we have discussed in section 1.3, genki is responsible for helping maintain homeostasis in the body, and if ki is going to be used elsewhere, these messages embedded in genki must be read, understood and then hijacked.
To use ki then one must first be on top of everything we're feeling internally. We must be connected with ourselves and understand our body's changing needs. We must attune ourselves to a little-known set of senses - autoception.
When the blurb of this book said I'd be teaching you to attend to the sixth sense, I made sure the copy-editor used quotation marks. I do wonder if this seeming oversight in saying "sixth" was picked up by savvy readers. In truth we naturally have far more than five senses. Depending on how you divide them, they can be almost too numerous to bother counting.
First we have the more familiar exteroceptive senses; vision, sound, touch, smell, taste - the basics most people have and what we're often taught as our only connection with the outside world. Combining all these does not give you a full picture of yourself in the world, however. For example - tilt your head. What sense is telling you your world is now on its side? It certainly isn't taste, smell or sound. Vision? Well no - if you close your eyes you still know your head's tilted. Is it touch? Again no, there's nothing 'touching' your skin to tell you where your head is. Your sense of balance (equilibrioception if we're to get technical) allows you to perceive your orientation in space, direction of motion and acceleration. The sense is governed by the inner ear. Three loops (the semicircular canals) contain fluid and this fluid moves, like water sloshing in a bucket, triggering hairs in the canals. The movements of the hairs are interpreted by the brain to tell you which way up you are. Like all senses, balance is sensitive to disruption; you can make yourself dizzy by spinning, and an infection in the inner ear can leave you with severe vertigo as these tubes become inflamed and unable to function normally.
The sense of balance is important in battle - allowing you to right yourself when hurtling towards the floor. Sometimes though being able to put this sense to one side is very useful, lest the spinning and quick changes in direction cause you to feel ill. Dancers and ice skaters mitigate this effect by keeping their head as still as possible and whipping around at the last moment, though this takes some skill. Even then, with the ability of flight, many ki-users still orientate themselves as though standing to reduce their balance warnings. A smart ki-user can suppress these warnings, manipulating messages embedded in genki to trick the body and mind to being comfortable tumbling. Being able to engage an enemy whilst upside down equally well can put you at an advantage, ensuring you are truly unpredictable and difficult to counter.
Another quick test - hold your hand out to the side, close your eyes, then bring your hand in to touch the tip of your nose. Could you do it? Most people can. How? You can't see your hand, nor are you using your sense of touch until the very last moment. Again this is a further sense, proprioception, the sense of where our body is in space relative to itself. Teenagers are often extremely clumsy because their growth spurts throw out their sense of proprioception. They literally believe they are smaller than reality and are therefore more likely to trip.
Other exteroceptive senses include detecting changes in temperature (thermoception) and pain (nociception), again both of which can be manipulated (against advice) with ki. The adrenaline rush alone would not keep me upright and on task with a shattered arm!
The result of these senses are very conscious and immediate. We can have subconscious reactions to them (picking up something hot results in a quick drop governed by reflexes, the signals only reaching the spinal column instead of the brain to speed up the reaction) but on the whole we have a vivid, conscious experience of them. They are noisy, and as such tapping into the genki messaging associated with them is very difficult for a new ki-user.
The autoceptive senses are a different ball game altogether.
Remember when we were discussing priors in 1.3? The idea that your body holds some kind of internal understanding and expectation of what its optimum state is supposed to be? This ranges across a number of systems including internal temperature, carbon dioxide levels in the blood, blood pressure, sense of hydration and sense of fullness. Occasionally these will come to our conscious attention (a sense of suffocation, a need to go to the bathroom) but mostly they are ticking in the background. They're not as loud as the exteroceptive senses, but the genki messages are there all the same, freer to detect and be read in the quiet. Understanding the autoceptive senses then is a good a place as any to begin to detect genki.
Tight priors govern homeostasis, the balance the body wishes to return to and is most comfortable functioning at internally. Briefly, for the body to maintain homeostasis our senses must record observations about our body's current state, compare them to the prior, and then calculate the difference - the surprise - between the observed and expected value. The direction of the surprise guides what action needs to be taken for the body to return to homeostatic equilibrium, and the magnitude how rapid that reaction must be. For an exteroceptive sense like pain this could be a command to reduce the sensation, such as dropping the hot pan. The same happens with the body's internal senses - autoception.
To be consciously aware at all times of autoceptive senses would be a huge cognitive load - can you imagine having to manually remember to quicken your breath when you're doing exercise? Or momentarily pump your heart faster when you go from a sitting to standing position? I don't know about you but I would very quickly be a puddle on the floor (also, apologies if talk of breathing manually made you conscious of your breath. Also, sorry if that apology did, instead! Or blinking! …I should stop).
Most of these sensory inputs travel from the body to the brain via the vagus nerve -a nerve running from the head, following the jugulars into the chest, branching out to all the organs and finally reaching down into the lower intestines. The vagus nerve gathers information about how full your stomach is, how your liver's doing, the carbon dioxide levels in your blood, your blood pressure, how your kidneys and bladder are feeling and so on, and delivers the information to the insula in the brain (a region which also governs your emotional responses). Genki, of course, takes this same information to pass around the body laterally, loosely following the flows of e.g. breath and blood, regulating priors and coaxing the changes that cells must undertake to keep those individual building blocks working as a unit, as a person.
[ Figure 1 ]
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Some individuals can manipulate those priors and this is known to science. There have been documented cases of yoga practitioners willing their body temperature to change by a fraction of a degree by nudging that prior written in genki. Now, a fraction of a degree doesn't sound impressive, but body temperature is a tightly controlled prior, with a very narrow precision in terms of how well-regulated it needs to be and how well it is measured. Thus, to move the prior by even a little is a feat in itself. This ability to consciously change homeostatic priors is far more than we need right now - we "just" need to be able to tap into that pathway to find and hijack free genki for other purposes.
Autoceptive sensations will come to conscious attention at some point to enable us to act, but the threshold for when we have that awareness, and how well we can consciously choose to attend is dependent on the individual. As these senses are linked to genki, we will work to enhance that autoceptive awareness and begin to get a feel for our genki - for its flow, messages and the manipulatable blank space it contains.
We have, in section 1.4, covered the concept of centring. In that case, we were defining correct posture and breath, physical aspects of our body that - shape and ability willing - we can improve to heighten our ability to access the centre of our genki. If you recall I reminded you to practice that over the course of the last few sections to be ready. So. Let us finally begin.
There are three areas of autoception we will be attempting to improve: Insight, precision and discernment, which I shall define as we go.
Exercise 2.1.1: Assessing and boosting autoceptive insight
Insight is exactly how it sounds. How in tune are you with your body naturally? We want to improve your ability to tap into those senses, the usually subconscious messages, as this will open up the pathway to ki manipulation.
A note - you may consider the following a form of mindfulness or meditation training, and that's true after a fashion. Do not skip this section if you are proficient in mindfulness, however. There is a subtle difference to be, ah, mindful of, and I shall get to that later.
First, please centre yourself and sit in good posture. Is this essential right now? No, a very good habit to develop. This exercise can also be undertaken lying down when trying to sleep or as you wake in the morning, so there is no excuse not to start.
Consider your body as a whole. What internal messages are currently piquing your attention? Are you too hot or cold? Thirsty? Hungry? Exhausted? Are you out of breath or is your heart thumping? If there's nothing that's okay, too - maybe you don't need to attend to any needs at the moment.
Now to start actively attending. Starting at one end of your body and focussing on one part at a time, ask yourself the following kinds of questions - effectively, hunt for symptoms of change in the body that indicate a changing status. For example:
How do your eyes feel? Are they dry? Itchy? Watery? Aching? Are the lids heavy? What could this mean in terms of tiredness and dehydration? Or eye strain? Should you rest?
Ask the same of the inside of your nose and mouth when breathing and your lungs. How is the air for you? Too dry, too humid? Can you bring the air all the way into your lungs or does it get stuck in the chest due to the position you're in or an illness? How deep are you breathing now and what do you default to - clavicular or abdominal breathing? How much can you inhale in one go? What nostril is your dominant one right now? Is your mouth too dry? Your lips? How easy is swallowing for you? Are you salivating because there's food nearby and you're hungry (even if you don't feel the need to eat) or should you being feeling hungry if you haven't eaten enough today?
Continue down and down. What about your heart beat? Is it fast? Slow? Pounding? You may not be able to feel your heartbeat without touching your chest - please attempt this exercise without searching for a pulse! Just ask yourself what you can sense naturally. How does your stomach feel? Full from a meal? Empty? Causing queasiness? What could that mean? How full is your bladder? Do you need to go to the bathroom?
Laboriously attending to these symptoms of needs can help your brain interpret them as they float near the surface of your consciousness.
Now, to perform a second pass. This time actively centre yourself and breathe in such a way to begin detecting that internal flow of genki drawing upwards and around the body. Using the square breathing method as outlined in 1.4 will help, though you need to ease off to a more natural breathing pattern eventually - holding your breath for long periods of stillness doesn't help when trying to get on with your day! Then begin making those same observations again, paying mind to the filamentary flow of ki through the body, how it diverts with purpose with your request for information, how the wider free aura is recruited to take on this task. Think of that genki as a bubbling or wave or burgeoning sense of information, of intent, of vibrancy, that turns to clarity as you grasp the genki, and you'll find the messages.
The second pass is difficult, but taking the time to make these observations will be the start of improving your autoceptive sense. By linking these observations to genki you will be taking your very first steps in ki-control.
An important final note - if at any point you find you are concentrating too much on your bodily sensations to the point of distress, please stop. The goal of increasing autoceptive insight is not to be aware of all parts of your body at all times, but being able to access this information should you need to. Please stop if you are finding the exercise too salient - you probably have enough insight already.
Exercise 2.1.2: Improving autoceptive precision through the breath.
With autoceptive insight improving, the next area to work on is precision. How accurate, objectively, are your insights? This could be hard to determine from the first exercise alone - only you have the ability to judge whether you truly needed to make okonomiyaki at midnight again (and not offer me any, Videl). But there are a couple of things you can try outside of a clinical environment to assess how good your insights truly are.
The first is a breathing exercise, and the actual test will need a good friend who either knows what you are trying to do or is used to your many eccentricities and is willing to help. To test, you will need a thick straw (like a milkshake straw) and some filter pads, or anything you can use to apply resistance to breathing - something as simple as gripping the straw tighter in a repeatable fashion would work. Breathe out through the straw once without any resistance to gauge the difficulty, then ask your friend to add resistance. You must guess how much resistance they've added. Do this around ten to twenty times at the most.
It is important your friend gives you no feedback at this point. Instead, after each trial, rate how confident you are - from "I'm sure I know how much resistance was there" to "I just guessed". I beg of you, do not try this exercise when breathing in! You don't want to starve yourself of oxygen! Make sure you catch your breath in between. Also, be careful should you have any general breathing issues. Please ask your medical practitioner before attempting any of this.
On your own, run this exercise yourself. Learn the different stages of resistances, the pressure on your chest and your lungs' expansion, testing yourself each day for ten minutes at the very most. Then, maybe a week or two later, ask your friend to perform the same test. Has your precision improved? How about your confidence?
The breath is the largest, conscious control of flow we have in the body and therefore understanding our breath is integral for learning ki control.
Exercise 2.1.3: Improving autoceptive precision through the heart
Our next task is similar, though a little harder in my opinion. In this case you will be monitoring your heartbeat, a more subtle sensation as there is not the same strong physical movement as with breath. This exercise you can perform on your own. It will require a high precision sports watch that can count heartbeats over a set time interval (in this case a minute). Capsule Corporation does indeed make a watch and chest strap with this function included. Suggesting you patronise a company I am tangentially involved with may seem a little daring of me, but I assure you that Capsule Corporation has the best on the market for this task - by design, in fact! Also, be cautious of the accuracy of some sport watches - they can under- and over-report the heart beats per minute, so check reviews. Getting an accurate reading is imperative, and a chest band will help with that. Ideally you'd use a medical device, but I don't believe many other people have one to hand for idle tinkering.
First, sit still and quiet for a time to relax, then set the timer and counter running over a minute. In this time you need to count the number of heartbeats you believe you've had, then record your guess and how confident you are. Perform a few more trials then check your results to gauge your accuracy and whether your confidence was warranted.
The idea here is not to feel your pulse, or sit in such a way that you can physically feel your pulse beating in your legs or feet or hands or ears, but to guess from your own internal clock (tapping into that genki flow) to detect when your heart is beating. This is difficult. That's the point. As with insight some people are good at this off the bat, others terrible. That's okay, the important part is to try and improve.
To get the ball rolling on improvement, perform a little light exercise to physically feel your heartbeat in your chest or ears and run the counting task, recording your confidence, again. This should be a lot easier. As your pulse fades to normal use your fingers on your neck or wrist to help this training portion of the exercise. Like when breathing, you are trying to marry up the beat that you know is present to the sensation in your genki telling the your brain and the rest of you your heart is beating. After a few weeks training - again for only a few minutes a day - you should find your ability to tap into the heartbeat at will greatly improved upon repeated testing.
These exercises have the dual benefit of improving both your precision and your awareness of your accuracy - otherwise known as your autoceptive discernment. The discernment is just as important as the accuracy in some respects; you need to have confidence in your abilities, and your repeated training will enable you get an honest sense of how well you're truly progressing at developing your conscious autoceptive senses. Being terrible at autoception at first is perfectly reasonable - as long as your discernment quickly adjusts!
Autoceptive discernment was the reason I stressed individuals with previous mindfulness or meditation training should not skip this section. Whilst these techniques focus on gaining insight in particular, they do not emphasise ensuring discernment matches precision.
But surely similar previous training can help? Well, yes and no. You may notice I did not go out of my way to suggest a calming, music-filled atmosphere with candles and cushions and incense when discussing these exercises, instead keeping it rather clinical - almost cold. This isn't my background in science dictating a preference. I'd rather be under the trees in the quad outside my office, listening to the breeze pass through the leaves and let that dictate my pace. You are welcome to add that sort of decoration to your training if you so wish, but do heed my warning.
For those that have previously undergone mindfulness training, whether that is through counselling or yoga or martial arts, there is a perceived ability to be better at autoception than the average person. After all, practitioners of martial arts and yoga do a lot of centring, breathing and attending to the body, so must be better at understanding their autoceptive senses by default, correct?
In these 'experienced' groups there is a propensity to over-report confidence in precision in these abilities. The initial training does make the task easier to understand and the person feel comfortable and relaxed performing such tasks, but when starting autoceptive work these individuals are not statistically better with their insight than the rest of the population. Do not be caught out by your own expectations!
Having bad discernment is positively dangerous for ki-work, and why it is important to really reflect on how accurate your self-reporting is across all exercises, and to work to correct for it. If you believe that you are better at autoception than you truly are, you will move onto the next sections before you're ready. If you are unable to read, and therefore write intents onto your genki correctly, this at the luckiest will lead to ineffectual ki-work - using far too much genki to produce the same result - and at worse will leave your ki muddled and cause you great harm.
Sounds far-fetched? One intent we will be relying heavily on is push. If you are unable to direct push correctly, believing you have (a reasonable for a new user) 99% accuracy in directing the intent rather than the true pitiful 90%, that 9% mismatch backfiring could begin to tear you apart on a cellular level.
Without you knowing.
Until it's too late.
Please do these exercises.
Many of Pan's earliest students accepted her offer of ki-training because they have an interest in meditation and mindfulness from martial arts training. Others were complete novices, only taking to the Pan Fighting Network for fitness reasons and by chance attending a local workshop where Pan spotted them. With few exceptions in either direction, she repeatedly found her novice students were more diligent learning autoception - the concept being so alien to them. Her more 'experienced' students were impatient, more likely to do the wrong thing, skip out on training and, when she tested them herself, found they had been over-reporting their abilities. Such is the importance of adhering to honesty for efficiency and safety, no matter their age or stature within their respective traditions, she would send them back to the first session. They only argue once; when disagreements come to a head and Pan must assert her expertise and authority, she can summon her Grandmother's temperament.
[ Figure 2 ]
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Finding your twenty years of meditation experience may not have been subconsciously helping to develop your autoceptive senses can be upsetting, I understand completely. Remember however that meditation, drilling in martial arts and mindfulness all have slightly different goals than specifically developing your autoceptive sense and you will find other tasks simpler. On the plus side for everyone else, this means you do not have to have twenty years of mediation experience to be good at ki-work and to develop your internal, then external, ki-sense. How lucky!
What level of autoceptive sense can you expect to reach as your ki-sense grows over the years? If I wanted to I can accurately count my heartbeat even when on the move, give a rough estimate of my elevation above sea level by monitoring how subtly out of breath I feel, can tell you how drunk I am even when drunk (a very rare event for me to be in that state I assure you), can tell if I'm developing a fever… and I can definitely decide whether I am going to need to use the bathroom before leaving the house. Should I be attending to my body, I know exactly what it needs and can consciously pre-empt these things. And, because I can access that information through reading my own genki, I can shout that information down. I can effectively suppress sensation more than non-ki-users ever could to the point of danger.
To expand, genki maintains homeostatic equilibrium yes, but it is an allostatic system, allowing deviation from the optimum state to preempt upcoming change. For example, when in danger my heart rate rises to force oxygen and glucose to my muscles to help me escape. I also feel fear, which is detrimental to my ki-use, and I'd like to stop that. How? Ask yourself, when we run from danger, do we run because we feel fear, or feel fear because we run? The truth is both; emotion and physical response go in tandem. If I can intercept my heartbeat messages then I can counteract the response and slow my heart even when in danger, and suppress that fear. Without genki interception we usually slow our heart rate by consciously slowing our breath, but with ki I can remove all facets of the fear response entirely. This restores yuuki and allows me to access those higher levels of ki ability again.
I can even expand this ability to ignore exteroceptive senses like pain and temperature - however be aware you are blocking only the sensation and not the effect. I could ignore the fire I'm walking through, but without a barrier against flame I would still burn. I can ignore pain to stand and fight but my bones would still be broken. I could use this ability to stare at the Sun without need to squint, but I would still destroy my retinas. But we will discuss how to do this in a measured fashion in a later chapter.
The breath and the blood are the two fast-flowing systems in our body genki has an affinity with and are therefore crucial to understand to begin to read and talk to our genki. By being able to read these two changing flows and understand the associated triggers in ki, we can in turn influence them back. Soon we will be completely hijacking genki for our own purposes.
In the next section we will be looking around us to sense other people's ki. By reading this, especially finding and seeing the flow in the aura of others, we will gain a greater understanding of our own and the steps we will need to take towards manipulating genki outright.