AS I TYPE…
BEEN RIDING A TADPOLE FOR 7 YEARS, 30K+ MILES
Am 65 years old and have what feels like a 2nd chance at using the physical facilities that had before been taken for granted. Prior to a hip implant 5 years ago, there were a few years of muscular atrophy buildup in my left leg due to favoring it with an arthritic hip. Non-weight-bearing and quite painless trike riding 9 months prior to the operation, made rehab more of a snap.
Having graduated from IU Bloomington in business management, 4 years of snow ski patrolling and 5 years of instructing. Taught skiing while acquiring a 6th Dan in Tae Kwon Do and originating and running 4 different sub-chapter S corporations to retire at 55 years old to write a book and blog site, being co-owner of a trike shop fits right in.
With plenty of free time to ride a trike, it’s possible to appreciate the resulting mind and body benefits.
Trying to stay focused on the light at the end of the tunnel. Do a lot of recumbent trike riding … a true magic carpet ride. Great time to relax and allow inspired thinking to congeal and surface into the type of “aha” wisdom that helps make sense of things … sift things into perspective. Pulling over anywhere to grab laptop/iPad to develop a suddenly appeared seed-of-an-insight beats the devil out of scribbling it on the front or back edges of a pocket-ready folded page of 12 free internet Sudoku puzzles to later only scantly remember the enriching logistics of the inspired insight.
EDUCATION …
Graduated high school in ’75 – New Castle IN and from Indiana University in Bloomington with business BS in ’82. Real Estate broker/investor and appraiser for 25 years until 2013.
TEACHING …
Enjoy seeing the “aha, I think I’ve got it … I can do this” satisfaction in the eyes of individuals when helping them learn something they want to learn. They’re intrinsically realizing that “aha wisdom” when their mind and body coordinate to master the mind-body harmony that represents the “art” in martial arts or an effortless posture in downhill snow skiing.
Am Currently teaching martial arts as a 6th Dan master instructor for Grand Master Chung Park. For several years, decades ago, taught snow skiing and was a ski patrol slope leader at two small southern Indiana ski resorts that opened just after the 1979 blizzard. Taught black market style one winter at Steamboat Springs CO. Will never forget the faces of two students amongst a dozen friends/family in a Nashville Alps beginner class … life-long friends in their 70’s. Could envision what they looked like back in their pre-teen years as their inner child joy peeked out through their squinted eyes surrounded by aged smile lines on their beaming faces.
MY CONNECTION…
Being so thankful to still be alive after a two-week coma following a near-fatal car crash in my early 20’s, I developed a dead-on strong desire to know what the essence of ticking life itself actually feels like to get a clearer conscious understanding of exactly what was really there that I felt so thankful for. By just reaching out with conscious awareness into the different parts of my living flesh to feel life as it manifests, I serendipitously discovered what years later was realized to be the self-trained mind-controlled “right concentration” phase of Siddhartha’s self-discovered “eight-fold pathway to enlightenment” soul-cleansing technique. It was self-discovered, detailed and taught by Siddhartha to be carried on in Theravada Buddhism and is called the Vipassana meditation style mind-into-body scan.
It’s become clear that this place of life force awareness that I wanted to sensually find to gain conscious awareness of to be thankful for is the same present moment theater of life manifest where Jesus put his conscious awareness when he prayed for 40 days and 40 nights. It’s the same present moment mind-into-body arena of life-in-action where Siddhartha self-trained himself to sustain his conscious awareness to gather self-knowledge while he meditated in “right concentration” under the Boda tree the night he assimilated his collective self-knowledge to inspire the right thinking to consciously generate the insightfully enriched Tree of Life wisdom that let surface from his deeper consciousness the understanding awareness that decoded his ignorance that had caused his suffering to bring to his conscious awareness an enlightened understanding of his prior miscued perception of how this impermanent reality’s pattern-setting principles interrelate.
It’s the same present moment place we all live in at this very moment, but have sidetracking priorities too preoccupied in some form of conditioned ignorance to be aware of and appreciate. Anyone can do this. Today, humanity’s just low on knowing teachers.
With a mental focus too spot-on while trying to sensually register an understanding conscious awareness of what the “live” part of alive is to be thankful for, it didn’t occur that such a real-life effort could share any sort of relationship with all the untethered unbacked intellectually tendered do’s and don’ts, this and not that’s … the rites and ritual dogma generated from the loosely defined intellectually gendered “save your soul” notion of God-sourced God-ordained wisdom that theology claims ownership of. My conscious awareness wasn’t preoccupied in an eddy of worded prayer with thoughts stuck swirling in an outer less emotion-related section of my brain searching to push-conjure up the best fitting intellectually filed English words that best represented the emotional feelings felt from the windburn sting from the emotional whirlwinds of rumination still jacked up from some unresolved emotional battlefront.
Any lasting inflammation from any unresolved emotional scarring will later find its relief in the “aha wisdom” realized from self-training the primal mind-into-body harmony between the relaxed mind and willing available body needed to inspire the right thinking to free up that “aha, I can see that” understanding awareness. It’s the collective results of this sort of mindfulness that will with time and focused application eliminates those disruptive emotional vortexes that many so hopefully pray for relief from with attention focused upward into the mentally suspended cognitively sketched rendition of the still-to-life reality where its male source lives that’s alleged to have promised a plan to save their frustrated emotionally spent soul from its ignorance-inspired suffering.
When focused, my attention wasn’t devoted to anything my conditioned guilt was apologizing for or to wishing the best for a friend or maybe for something to be blessed. I wasn’t looking up promising any god in the sky that I’d start going to church every Sunday if only the answer I was dead-set on realizing would appear to me in some heaven-sent sign. My focused intent on the right path to my answer afforded no time slot for mind-joggling cognitively spun linguistics.
My focus was all about helping my very grateful-to-still-be-alive human condition gain hand-shaking sensual insight to better understand the touch of life that it should feel so grateful for during its time-ticking human experience. There was no spare mental change to tip any middleman.
It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that maybe I was leveraging all my mental capital into the payoff coming from sensually witnessing the essence of the same uncontrollable, unpredictable coming and going force of life itself that religious theology credits for having so much life-giving/life-taking power. Maybe I was trying to make a conscious connection with the sensual incarnation of what the Christian Bible hashtags as #holyghost or #holyspirit?
The natural law principles of impermanence that assume their pattern of relational truths from the coming and going impulses of life energy felt as life manifests from within filter up through this world’s material architecture to steer the relational outcome all cause/effect interactions in this reality. They’re better understood as a truth seeker crosses over the bridge between intellectually rendered to sensually realized conscious awareness. An individual can control how they prepare to approach this reality, but it’s the principles of impermanence that determine the outcomes of all those decisions. How they perceive those results determines their emotional health.
Siddhartha teaches how this same, available-to-all method worked for him. After being adequately self-trained, the insightful “aha” wisdom can surface from the deeper consciousness at any time … usually when relaxed … just as some of the prior paragraphs came to me as first thoughts after waking up at 7:48 AM, 8-15-17.
For the 25 years following the car crash, until hearing the end of an obscure radio commercial on a high-number SIRRUS radio station, my self-fashioned method of self-searching was forgotten. First hearing the commercial’s description of the very same technique I’d discovered years before rang a distant recognition bell that inspired finally making the connection. Realizing this connection between the method I had long ago devised, its newly recognized spiritualist tilt and theology’s cognitively drafted intellectually-stilled time-suspended world and by finally being able to put the relative significance of each in its place, tendered a due-diligence perspective on using this sensual-speak technique to find the same peace and freedom from emotional suffering as detailed by Siddhartha and dreamt of and promised by theology.
This resulted in my first book, HOOSIER HEAVEN. It considers what finding the pathway to an enlightened understanding of the principles that set pattern to tbe impermanent personality that defines this reality is like when growing up constrained by the Christian theology that corrals Hoosier social unrest.
CALL TO ACTION… Logistics hopes to inspire readers’ thinking to help them generate insightful “aha” wisdom-enriching insights to help them climb their personal ladder of altruistic compassion and while helping others climb theirs’, realize a higher level of emotional bliss.