I’ve been sharing this with my oldest because she’s so interested in explorations of the mind and body. Things I’ve noticed in list form:
1. The control and other issues became noticeable when I compared standing versus sitting. That gave me the idea that standing, which all a boy does, might give me a different perspective. It’s not that sitting ‘caused’ but that I realized I can look at the problem from the two positions. (I mean I had begun this because I felt my pee stream was getting weaker and sometimes reduced to dribble. As background, with a house full of females it was easier to sit and pee than remember to put the seat down each time. When one of those females tumbles into the toilet because I forgot … )
2. I found the pain point deep in guts was actually not ‘rectal’ but seems to be just around and somewhat behind the very point of the coccyx. This seemed very closely related to a hard band that I found was contracted or knotted only when I did my steel bar rollouts. Those are when I suspend a straight body bar across two others – or a thick battle rope – and force my body on to it. When I rolled deep into my butt, that forced release of a lot of deep attachments. The band I’m talking about was found when I rolled across the crack up high on the back and then down toward the middle. The muscles resisted a lot and it took multiple repetitions to get them soft enough to explore the space that opened. (As background, many years ago I developed something that’s pretty common but no one talks about because it’s so intimate: a deep cramping way inside the pelvis. The doctor said it can’t be treated and that sometimes a relaxant cream applied to the anus helps when the pain starts. They appear to believe the cramping is rectal because there can be spasms, though it’s unclear to me what exactly is spasming. I now think they’re related to the structures I sort of describe in this paragraph.)
3. A process also has a start, middle and. I had been concentrating on setting the action of peeing into motion and then trying to modulate control of it so I could maintain the pressure and flow longer. That meant I was focusing mostly on the middle and end, that after release, I worked to control the flow as that went to its end. So I did what I do and flipped to the front end of the process. Key there: realizing I have two hands. We all have habits. So I reversed mine, which merely required looking at which hand I was using and switching roles. The other hand had different capabilities I had ignored. In this case, it naturally stretched the penis and held the end somewhat closed. This built up pressure and tensioned the flow tube so it was straighter, and a little bit of straightening matters if the tube isn’t very wide and/or if the stuff flowing is in any degree viscous. The other hand – my left – naturally released the stream and controlled it like when I was a kid.
4. I couldn’t have jumped to the end of that; I had to relearn the bits along the way to get back to a reasonable approximation of my ‘original’ state.
The basic lesson: look at both ends of a process. Like referred pain involves two ends. Yesterday, I was explaining to some friends at the gym that I was working on quicker hard strikes by focusing on reducing the mental activity at the front end: I see a target, evaluate, make decisions about which hand to use and how, etc. Reducing what I call the ‘overwatch’ of those decisions means trusting my body to choose, which makes my reaction time approach the best possible. I then talked about this same thing with a guy at the gym who is a jazz musician: same thing as getting into the flow of music that comes from somewhere else through you. You can hear it in the music. You can hear it when you’re writing – and can see it come out of your fingers – and you can experience it athletically as the movements of your body become the movements that fit the physical need. Like music, like thoughts, the requirements of your physical nature fit into contexts so you play along with the band or sometimes you lead it.
I took out the personal letter parts.
jomi: playing with perception 