Temple of the Tiger Body

Reminiscing about the closing of the Monkey Gym in Canberra; and the recent, final, Monkey Gym Workshop that I presented at a fortnight or so ago - I am actually quite looking forward to the possibilities of what could be; if a similar 'crucible' (or, hopefully, crucibles) was established in Sydney..  I am going to try to make this happen as much as I can.. though what I want to focus on is physical cultivation and bodymind training methods - fusing Natural movement, flexibility, breath freeing, strength, deep relaxation, body-mindfulness, agility, speed, soft tissue health, etc. - pretty much the 'Tiger Body' from a few posts back. I will elaborate in a future post in much greater length, for now Tiger Body will do fine. [See Craig's recent Cultivation post HERE]

So, at the 'Temple of the Tiger Body(™)' (as I would probably call it), if things went my way, I would love to attract all types of physical cultivation and bodymind dabblers; teachers and serious practitioners - as well as beginner and continuing students.  What Kit has talked about before is having an 'advanced class', which is pretty much a workshop/experimental flavour, where all types of things get trialled and tested - and disseminated if they pass the Saftey, Efficiency and Effectiveness gates. 

For Dave's ideal workshop-advanced-class-thing (crucible), I would love to have all types of yoga and qi gong practitioners; martial artists (soft and hard styles - and anything in between); strength and conditioning peeps; movers; somatic explorers; all types of bodyworkers and somatic practitioners - as well as just freaks of nature in terms of physical capacity. All with open and curious mindsets, and unique skills to show and tell. What an awesome thing to have on one night each week! 

Not my chosen style of physical training, but worthy of massive respect - I recently read THIS article about (The Great) Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell fame.  Now THAT is a crucible of amazing physical training!  You can see, too, that through constantly striving for the best in training - and constantly trying anything and everything (and whittling out the stuff that doesn't work), they end up with a high-minded simplicity.  In this case: Max Effort; Dynamic Effort and Explosiveness.  Beautiful.  Of course these can be elaborated on ad infinitum.

For me, the physical cultivation (sensory and motor elements; health and performance; yin and yang; Having deep body-mindfulness and embodied Awareness, whilst having amazing physical skills and capacity) crucible is what I want to have a part in creating and spreading.  This deep reasoning I will omit for now (you could read 'Coming to Our Senses' if you want a sneak peek).

"Here in this body are the sacred rivers, here are the sun and moon, as well as all the pilgrimage places. I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body." Saraha.

p.s how awesome is the tiger picture at the top!