Visionary Weightlifting
Transforming weightlifting an ecstatic meditation.
I started weightlifting in the era of Nautilus machines, big machines each dedicated to a single motion, with a nautilus-shaped gear between you and the weight stack. The stated goal was to match the effective capability of force at each point in your muscle’s range of motion. They gave me balloon-like muscles, smooth and without texture, that felt like wearing a fake muscle suit. There was no integration between the muscles’ actions, as each had been exercised independently, with no demand for even stabilization.
Moving to free weights started a process of integration. Stabilizer muscles were brought into play. My conception of what I was doing, however, remained limited to “number go up!”, focusing on the basic quantitative aspect of weight, repetitions, and sets.
A significant change happened when I started working with large metal clubs, like short baseball bats. These required coordination between muscles. Even more significantly, they could be swung in endless complex patterns: in circles oriented on various planes, in figure eights, or with each hand doing its own thing. Any pattern could be complexified by choosing a different stance. The subjective experience of these muscles was springy and active, ready to move wherever they needed to go.
Over the years, I explored other forms of weights, each with their own wisdom revelation:
Kettlebells, basically cannonballs with handles, focused on ballistic techniques, for example, yanking one off of the ground using your whole body with enough force that it would fly above your head.
Olympic Weightlifting, where techniques of body positioning and developing a friendly relationship to physical pain were primary.
Light clubs, similar to bowling pins, which have even more capabilities of free motion in space than heavy clubs, being able to be twirled in circles with the wrist, or be swept behind one’s back
Mace swinging, which is like working with a heavy length of pipe while holding one end. The momentum of a swing means that you must give up control over the motion at points, and trust in the fundamentals of Newtonian physics to move the mace into a position where you regain control again.
Bodyweight exercises, which challenged patience for repetition
Self-resistance, where the tension between oppositional muscles developed each other. Imagine, for example, straightening out one’s arm, tensing all the muscles in the arm, and slowly curling it in, keeping everything as tense as possible.
This was a proliferation of the outer game of moving things. The basic elements of this dance were
Moving smoothly or moving suddenly (grinding vs. ballistics)
Tempo (quick vs. slow)
Direct path or indirect path (lifting vs. flowing)
And when flowing, whether there was the question of control, like a conductor waving their baton, or whether momentum sometimes seized control, like when swinging a baseball bat.
Over time, my concerns fell to more wholistic questions.
Weight transfer and alignment: how was the whole body stacked and aligned to allow weight to flow from something I was holding in my hands into my feet? This became even more interesting when trying to be precise in weight transfer, for example, having weight flow evenly across the whole foot, or flow actively to the subtle support muscles on the inner thighs.
Balance: when it was safe, I started to close my eyes while weightlifting. Vision is a large element of balance, and it is often surprising how much balance degrades when eyes are closed. Other balance challenges were such things as standing on one leg while doing bicep curls. These worked deep internal connections between the singular, whole-body muscle with hundreds of attachment points that we call our muscular system.
And now we get to the deep inner game: breath, gaze, and vision.
There are many ways one can breathe when lifting weights: the classic “take a deep breath and grunt”. The yogic “slow, smooth and constant in-breath and out-breath”. Or, opening the mouth slightly and breath as near passively as possible. Any expansion of the ribcage causes air to enter the lungs, any compression causes air to leave. For example, if your mouth is slightly open, you can breathe merely by lifting your hands over your head and putting them back down again.
In practices such as yoga, gaze is a very important part of every movement. Gaze in weightlifting might be on a fixed spot in a room, on a fixed spot in space, relaxed and broadly engaged with peripheral vision (so called “Zen gaze”), or with the eyes closed.
And finally, one of the most powerful ways of transforming weightlifting into an ecstatic meditation is visualization. The body responds to visualization holistically, organizing around the perception as if it were real. One of my favorite visualizations is to imagine a streaming jet of light coming up from the ground, through one my feet, and jetting upwards at an angle to propel the contralateral arm above my head, where the light keeps on shooting out. Combined with weight transfer from a weight held in one arm above the head into the ground via the contralateral foot, an alternating rhythm between the feet can occur where the jets shoot alternatingly through each foot to the opposing arm, creating a dance.
Visualizing energy flows invariably improves subtle alignment. Combined with breath and gaze, the experience of weightlifting can become an ecstatic meditation.