I didn’t feel wholly present in my body when I did tai chi early this morning. In fact, I felt so much outside my body and unrooted in myself, that I did it again this afternoon. It didn’t help. I still don’t feel present in my body. It’s a very strange feeling, as though I was a spirit-body going through these motions, these patterns in space-and-time, rather than a physical body.
The feeling has not eased. In part, it’s caused by not eating today. I knew I was going to have a dental appointment a little after 1pm. And eating before dentistry, for me, always seems to leave me queasy. It makes it more likely for the novacaine to wear off early in me, for some reason, and I’ve known this since I was young. So I don’t eat before dentistry.
But. I hadn’t counted on not being able to eat after dentistry. Because I’m wearing a temporary crown, I should avoid most food and drink until the novacaine has mostly-completely worn off. (I can drink fluids, but my lips are numb enough that one side of the glass, the right side, is real and wholly present to my mouth. But the left side feels nothing: it is though I am holding half of a cylinder or tube of glass to my mouth, and letting liquid disobey all normal rules of physics to flow into the right-side of my mouth alone. My tongue is starting to tingle, so it may be another hour or so, but I’ve gone through two hunger cycles, and come out the other side definitively not-hungry for now, even though I’m going to want to eat eventually.
It still made tai chi today a very alien experience. We’re human beings. We do these exercises in muscle and sinew, in bone and cartilage, as well as in energy. To move through space and time doing tai chi without feeling present in the body was like watching a character in a first-person martial arts video game. In the training sequence in the first level. Boring.
On the other hand, I was able to run this level reasonably well. Maybe I’m about to hit a save point, and advance to level 2.
