Heart or Hara? What comes first for the Samurai – and for you? – Misha Sakharoff
Misha Sakharoff
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Heart or Hara? What comes first for the Samurai – and for you?

Heart or hara?

Don’t forget about the heart?

It happens often on forums on Facebook. When we talk physiology I used to hear people saying “Don’t forget about the heart”. I admit that I had a little “problem” with the heart – when people use the heart to correct problems with the same heart.

Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”.

I am not forgetting about the heart. The heart is the house of feelings. They take you away from your roots – body sensations and sensory  awareness.

 

What about the belly?

I am an engineer and a practitioner. I practised martial arts and tennis for many years and all kinds of music styles and instruments. All these actually for 35 years. I know by experience that by relaxation of the belly you can learn to sense and estimate your heartbeat.

What happens when you practice active meditation with open eyes while moving somewhere else? If you train to do it every moment of your life? What happens when you practice active relaxation while somebody attacks you in martial arts? What happens when you learn active relaxation in tennis playing long series of shots? Something that most of all reminds of hard interval training. But also stressing your mental side big time.

 

The value of active relaxation

Well, then you know the value of relaxing the belly. And YES – the heart responds! It responds to active relaxation. Not another way around. At least not in the life situation where external stressors are staring at you in the eyes. To concentrate at the heart area in this situation will be deadly. Concentrating on the belly in this situation will save your life.

2000 years years ago Chinese monks compressed the 4000 years old 7 Indian chakras into 3. Japanese warriors and monks compressed the three chakra points into a single one – Hara. It happened for 1500 years later. The latest chakra system contains only one point to work with. Why so?  Because the Japanese were unable to count to 3?

No. They did so to get help to survive. To get help to not to think in the situation of acute stress, not to feel anything like anger or fear or aggression. They knew that thinking and feeling, the domains of the head and the heart, would shut off the sensing. They would do it immediately. And that would be deadly.

 

The hara point – and the fear of death

For you, not for your opponent – if he learned the same tradition of Hara. The Samurai trained their children sensing from the Hara point starting from the age of four. And it takes many years to learn sensing from the belly – the Hara point.

Why? To remove the fear of death when they grow older and become samurai. And to react immediately to sensing the opponent hesitate or acting unsure a millisecond.

Why the fear of death was so dangerous? Because the thought or feeling about death would tighten your muscle. In other words, the dominance of the heart and the head would ruin your movement. Already before it would even start.

 

Unforced errors and stage fright

In other words, it would ostracise the trajectory of every joint in your extremities. Resulting in the body movement different then you – and your brain expected. This problem has different names in the realms of different activities. In tennis it’s called unforced errors and double faults. In music it’s called stage fright.

I work with both and I know that we can deal we that problem. Not with the heart. But working with the belly will do.

What happens when we add the awareness about breathing to all this?

 

Cell oxygenation and belly awareness

Dr. Konstantin Buteyko formulated the technique connecting relaxation of the belly with cell oxygenation. If you train right, cell oxygenation can optimise both your physical and mental state.

If we connect Buteyko principles with the awareness of the belly we get a powerful mixture. A real synergy – in this word’s most concrete meaning.

The awareness of your belly is the sheer power of Now. Is it heartless? Not at all. It is the place from where you can communicate both your thoughts and your feelings to another person. You can both be compassionate and empathic – just from your belly. It’s called consentience. To communicate thoughts and feelings via the world of senses. Consentience is a unity that someone experiences as a result of sensation. Rather than by the use of intellect. This unity lies within a person and it is not based on their thoughts or feelings.

 

Consentience and U-shape

From one belly to another belly – which is only possible if both bellies know how to do it. If they have trained it through months or years of everyday practice.

That is what I call U-shape communication based on consentience. I coined this concept and use it for my cancer clients, as well as training it in my 50-weeks online courses.

Learning this can help many problems. From erectile disfunction, “frigidity”, marital problems. To astma, cancer – and a wide range of lifestyle diseases. Because they all offspring from the malfunctioning communication. Remember, consentience also works on the physiological level.

 

Paradigm shift for physical beings

Does this sound “alternative”? Well unfortunately it is. Just to start practising it 100% the person has to understand and accept the need. The need for paradigm shift in his or her own consciousness.

To shift completely from patching thoughts and feelings. Towards work with sensory awareness as the basis for everything in life. Because we are not ethereal but physical beings. Aren’t we?

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