In Which I Take the Boy to Church and then Dig Up Books about Internal Styles

[walkitout]

This past week, T. asked to go to church. I thought about trying to find out who brought church up, because it was probably someone at school, and then Having Words with them, but then I thought, hey, let's just roll with this. So T. and I assessed the Concord and Acton/Stow UU churches for this Sunday and decided we'd try our own parish which had a Tai Chi service. I mean, seriously: how cool is that? I get to restart martial arts AND go to a UU service AND satisfy my kid's curiosity about what this whole church thing is, in one compact hour, traveling a very small number of miles.

We had a great time. We knew a couple people there from preschool pickup/dropoff. The service was pleasant and T. was very patient. And now I had some energy to think about finding a teacher out here, which I have meant to do for ... years and ... haven't.

I eliminated one possibility, because whenever reviews of a dojo emphasize how tight the "family" there is, it makes me nervous. This is because I am on the autism spectrum.

I eliminated another possibility, because the woman instructor there does great outreach ... that involves references to fitness boot camps. While my sister-in-law luuuurrrrves them, I Do Not. Actually, that is an understatement. I have great injury paranoia and boot camps trigger it. BJJ instructors who do boot camps make me tremendously avoidant.

Which left me with a scattering of hard styles, a couple of kenpo shops (tempting only when I am at my most mindlessly aggressive, which I honestly try to avoid) and a very traditional operation which, if it weren't _so_ traditional kung fu, I would go for in a heartbeat. I probably will give them a try, because they sound like the right kind of people with the right kind of attitude and a very good pedagogical style. In the meantime, I got out a bunch of books I haven't looked at in a long while. I started with _The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & QiGong_, which I apparently bought in August 1999 from Amazon.com (about eleven months after I left and right around the time I started wing chun do). The first part of the book is motivational: Tai Chi is great and will fix Everything!!! This has better support in reality than a lot of things, but the tone and lengthiness of the rah rah is a little exhausting. Part 2 is about why you need a class, how to find a compatible instructor, what to expect from a class. Around about chapter 9, in part 2, he's (Bill Douglas) talking about the Dan Tien:

"Now tighten your sphincter muscles, as if you were pulling up your internal organs from within, and then immediately relax. Repeat this over and over, until you experience a subtle tugging sensation inside, just beyond where your fingers are pointing in to your upper pelvis or lower abdomen."

I don't really know anything about Dan Tien, but that sounds a lot like a kegel to me.

http://www.webmd.com/women/tc/kegel-exercises-topic-overview

So then I googled Dan Tien kegel. You should give this a try. It Is Hilarious. If it were just tantric sex websites, it wouldn't be that funny. It's the combination of tantric sex websites with post-pregnancy advice, with advice for postmenopausal women. I mean, that is _excellent_. And it gives a whole new meaning to the martial arts jargon "internal style".

Excuse me while I giggle helplessly for a while. It's been a really great day.

ETA: Oh, meant to say that I debated for several minutes (a long while for me) what to wear to church and discarded the skirt as too JW and the shorts as inadequately respectful. I went in capris. Every woman there was wearing capris. When we arrived, there were a half dozen cars there. Three of them (including mine) were Honda Fits. I _so_ picked a good church for us to go to.

ETAYA: This particular one that showed up on that google search is spectacularly awesome. I've never had this problem, but I think I know people who did/do, and it really sucks because it tends to get dismissed.

http://www.jmweissmd.com/pdf/Brown_Bag_Lecture_UCSF_Myofacial_Pain.pdf

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Hey, just because they have a sex abuse scandal and a homophobic viewpoint doesn't make them a religion :-) I admit it does chap my hide a little bit that Boy Scouts by long tradition get subsidized space at schools while an outfit like the Northwest Boychoir would have to pay market rates. But my objection's not really due to religious content in Scouting materials (of which there is relatively little). Girl Scouts get the same kind of special treatment, IIRC.

Anyway, the Boy Scouts do not, as far as I have ever heard, have a plan to undermine secular education. They're not nearly as centralized, either -- quite a lot of leeway is tacitly allowed to troops that don't want to exclude atheist or gay scouts. I still have hopes that scouts brought up in that tradition may prevail, and their organization may eventually at least match the Girl Scouts as far as reasonable principles go.

Crap, I don't have anything for supper. Must go shop.

I hope supper was tasty

[walkitout]

BSA dis-affiliated UU based originally on their Religion in Life badge program including anti-discrimination against LGBT material. UU removed it, re-affiliated, and BSA disaffiliated them again, because UU retained anti-discrimination against LGBT in other material. Agnostics and atheists are not allowed to participate in BSA as scouts or as leaders.

That's a religion. That's a religion that is wildly incompatible with my values. I do not see any appreciable difference between BSA and the Good News Club/CEF, from either a values perspective (since I despise both to a point which I can't really go further), or a practical perspective, since I don't think either one is really going to succeed at convincing the general public to move in their direction.

I'd be happier if they all had to pay the same rates for use of public space. That would seem much fairer to me.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I can see that BSA and GNC both pass a certain threshold for you (and I agree in the sense that I didn't want my son in Scouts for the same reasons), but that doesn't make them equivalent in any but a particular decision-making sense. One has a lot of good stuff about it and could in theory be fixed, and one has no good stuff at all and should be dumped, seems to me. (Do you have any problem with the Girl Scouts, by the way?)

I mean, my good friend's son recently made Eagle Scout. Would you necessarily think that particular kid had been horribly indoctrinated? Would you think nearly as badly of him as you would if you found he'd been volunteering at a Good News Club, telling kindergartners they're going to hell if they don't love Jesus? I hope not.

Moreover, mainstream fundamentalism is a huge force in modern politics, and I haven't exactly seen it getting less influential lately. I do see CEF as an arm of that influence, and I don't think it's unrealistic to worry about the return of religious education to public schools (as is their express aim).

BTW, some good news on the schools-and-BSA front: http://www.glaad.org/blog/seattle-public-schools-end-affiliation-boy-scouts-america

I'm not asking you to agree with me

[walkitout]

I'm just telling you that I don't seem to agree with you. BSA, CEF, Catholic, WTF, I don't care. If a group says they think that atheists, agnostics, LGBT, etc. are bad people by definition, which is what BSA, CEF and Catholics all do, then I think that group is bad by definition. Period. End. I don't actually care too much what they _do_ about that belief; I want nothing to do with people who hold those beliefs. Remember, I was _raised_ JW to do exactly all the things you find so shocking. You are hoping that people can come out of BSA and turn out okay anyway, and some of them will, just like some people quit being JWs and manage to become decent human beings. Yay, etc. Do I think BSA indoctrinates people as much as CEF? Probably a lot more so -- because so many people think that what's going on over at BSA is innocuous and fixable. Which it manifestly is NOT. You don't go to the Supreme Court over picking on LGBT kids and scout leaders if you've truly abandoned your Nazi heritage, and it's pretty damn clear the BSA hasn't really left Baden-Powell behind and over time they've really crawled into the LDS camp as well. As for all the wonderful people who keep their beliefs about not discriminating against atheists, agnostics, LGBT, etc. to themselves so their kids can have the benefit of scouting with insurance through BSA? Turns out that people who are willing to crawl into the closet for that reason also vote for people like McCain and Romney and worse. It isn't the fringe we should be worried about. It's the _mainstream_ religionists who are the problem.

It is by accepting organizations like BSA as less toxic than organizations like CEF that we tacitly allow religion a strong, negative influence in our national politics. We need to clean it up, and insist that people behave better. Either leave religion out of public life (and pseudo-public life like clubs that meet in publicly funded buildings), or adjust our religious beliefs to our more important, democratic values that do not accept the kind of bad treatment of women and minorities that religions have historically reified, inculcated, taught, etc.

I am happy to hear that BSA's traditional relationship with Seattle Public Schools has ended. That's a step in the right direction.

ETA: Obvs, I would respond differently to different manifestations of Hating Atheists, etc. So for example physical attacks, stalking, etc. would be responded to through the criminal justice system. Speech is responded to with speech. Social pressure met with social pressure. Etc.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

If more than about two of the people at my friend's son's Court of Honor voted for McCain or Romney, I will happily dig up Baden-Powell's hat and eat it. Otherwise, well, now I see better where you're coming from. We should talk about this sometime in person.

Please do not eat any hats especially old, mouldering ones belonging to Baden-Powell

[walkitout]

I actually _have_ friends who ran a fabulous BSA troop that went through BSA for insurance purposes. I didn't find out until _much_ later the McCain, etc. voting pattern. I was a little stunned myself; it seemed to be wildly at odds with what else I thought I knew about them.

We should talk about this sometime (December? When I visit) in person. I have some fairly rancorous feelings towards BSA completely independent of their anti-inclusive policies that directly derive from how my husband's troop handled a multi-day trip they took him on when he was young and that almost killed him. My husband has positive feelings about the adventure; the story of it just makes my hair stand on end every time I think about it, and the context (parent was supposed to be along or the kid wasn't supposed to go; his dad failed the physical but R. went anyway; parents were divorced and mom was not notified that dad wasn't going on the trip; fell off cliff, etc.). And then there was an Eagle Scout in Mayberry that did truly heinous things . . .