Two Suns Rising

Foundations — getting them right

After farming (and fighting — not the paid kind) my next career was engineering. A displaced metric engineer in Albuquerque, then Atlanta and then Alabama, building things, big things by Irish standards.

I remember, in the spring of '88, designing the foundations for a kiln. That's a very big rotating oven (how big? — about 80 feet long and 8 feet in diameter) with ferocious gas burners at the lower end. The foundations were large, tall and wide, concrete piers supporting this giant steel tube on its incline, with room on each pier for motors which would keep it turning about its axis — proposed "temporary" perpetual motion for the next 20 years or so. More temporary than perpetual it turned out.

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The local contractor, Mister Jim, who had been around since before the beginning, decided that these piers would "work every bit as well" built of solid concrete rather than my design of hollow piers.

I said, with my boots in the mud, "Mister Jim, if you build them like that, they will sink" — as we were already deep in the marshlands of the Sucarnoochee River… from where the mud came that we were about to get busy cooking into lightweight clinker.

Not all men are created equal on remote building sites.

The concrete flowed — I moved west — and the foundations gradually moved south — as in towards Australia. I was already onto "B" as in Boulder and on my next career as a Rolfer when I got my former head office query — "What on God's earth were you thinking?" etc…

Paul Reynolds

• Engineering
• Building
• Rolfing
• G'Day

Get the foundation wrong and everything above it never rises — or it sinks, slowly, towards Australia. And if you're already in Australia, of course, it sinks northwards.

Like the physical body, our energy body has rules governing how life-energy gets built. Its foundation is the lower energy centers. These come first and keep us grounded, safe and secure, and allow our knowing, wisdom and love to stabilize higher up.

Albuquerque, 1986

I learned Tai-Chi in Albuquerque in 1986, with Patricia, in her living room, with the furniture pushed back to the walls and the saguaro cactus looking in the window. She was my teacher and a beautifully heart-centered practitioner. She had been practicing Tai Chi daily for twenty years and had developed a field of love — like roses.

I also briefly worked with a teacher who, over a similar period, had developed terrifying power — more akin to malevolent storm clouds — through focus on his lower chakras.

Similar movements. Different inner orientation. Divergent outcomes.

Paul Reynolds

A Path — Not a Menu

And then there's the foundation of a practical (adapted) Tai Chi practice that builds awareness day after day — as the Two Suns Rising practice does.

Two Suns Rising makes progress natural. And because the shape stays the same, the practice becomes stronger and more effortless as we keep practicing.

1. Buildlife-force within our seven energy centers through movement with attention.
2. Stabilizethat life-force with the seven containing seals.
3. Connectthe centers to restore our human inner technology.
4. Rememberthe heart-coherent feeling that becomes our energy signature.

Why 63 days? →

Wexford, 1977

During the 70s, 80s and 90s, I learned Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Chinese Wand Exercise, Rolfing and Life Energy Fundamentals. After that I practiced each, some for years, some for decades. Each contributed to the development of Two Suns Rising.

Kung Fu was my early days — ages 15 on, at the Friary Hall in old Wexford town. Yes, the same venue where Cromwell hanged seven of the Friars' predecessors in 1649.

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The blood had well dried by my time — but there was fresh blood occasionally, as our instructor Dennis Davis, originally from the West Indies, was a former heavyweight world kickboxing champion who believed in the 'learn or perish' school of martial arts. This was long before any parental involvement, so injuries raised no eyebrows. Dennis' martial art was 100% martial and 0% arts. I fought a lot of battles, won some, lost others, was knocked out a few times, but still managed to bicycle home.

Dennis was a big strong man with long arms and long legs who leaned back when he was fighting and slapped opponents around with his hands and pushed them away with his feet. He was impossible to get near. So that was part of his magic. He had probably been invited over to teach, and had stayed, as it was virgin territory, and David Carradine and Bruce Lee had set the table. He had an old Mercedes, really old, that carried him to his various church halls around Leinster. Leinster is an oversized quarter of the country that includes Dublin and Wexford. But there are 12 counties in there, and he had small classes going in six or seven of them, where he'd pass the reins along to one or two of his original students, and he'd turn up once or twice a month to collect the tithes or for special occasions. It was always great to see him. He was a very different cat in the Ireland of the 70s.

I have my membership card somewhere — showing I paid 50 pence twice a week for extreme training and sparring practice. When I find it I'll post a picture. It's one of my oldest personal relics.

My friend and Wexford football colleague Billy Walsh spent those same years at St Joseph's Boxing Club — not much of a step up from the Friary, but a step with higher steps available. By the time I moved to Boulder, Billy was fighting in the Seoul Olympics. Much later he arrived in Colorado himself, and he's still training some of the world's best boxers at the US Olympic Training Center.

Paul Reynolds

What to expect

The Same Simple Shape, Every Day

First a dedication — an intention with legs. Then three steps at each of our seven centers, root to crown — like dropping a colored pebble into a well deep inside, we recognize and awaken each center. We finish with the seven seals.

An earlier kind of body drop

Willie's Ring

When I was a young lad, my dad’s best friend was Sean Turner. They both worked at Johnstown Castle, which was just a few miles from our home place, and was the headquarters of the Irish Agricultural Research Institute. Dad and Sean were lab technicians at the time. Above them the chain of command was pretty loose. Their direct boss was a man named Peter Murphy who, like many at the institute, had a PhD in agriculture. At another time I may recount how the PhD became a requisite precursor for early demise in Johnstown of the 1970s, but let’s leave it at that for now. Around 1973 Dr. Peter decided that he was off to the US to do post-doc research, so he took a fellowship for two years in Kansas. He disappeared without giving the two boyos in his charge even a goodbye, let alone any instructions, and so, for that two-year period, the two were basically left to their own devices — footloose and fancy-free as Dad would say.

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Besides practical jokes which were elaborately planned and carried out like a TV production, they taught themselves Italian, specifically to write an Italian Opera. Which they completed and tried to produce for the Wexford (light) Opera Festival — unsuccessfully it turned out. But that didn’t greatly impact their enjoyment of a truly relaxing work life — 9 to 5. But not so relaxed before and after work — at their real jobs as farmers on small farms and fathers with not so small families.

The reason I recount the story so far is because Sean Turner, in his younger days, was a very fine footballer — and was one of the few Wexford men who ever played for Leinster and in a prestigious tournament between Ireland’s four provinces: Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught, known as the Railway Cup. And in those days, the Railway Cup final was played on Saint Patrick’s Day, and always in the rain.

Well, in their day, the other Wexford man who was selected a Railway Cup player was Willie Goodison. Willie was not a friend of my father’s — as my father was not a sports participant, having a mother who highly valued labor including his — but still an acquaintance. And Willie, as successful sportsmen of the day ofttimes did, had a Public House of his own. This was Goodison’s Shop and Bar — The Sportsman’s Inn, I think — in Bishopswater. Bread by day and Brews and Boxing by night. Bishopswater was and still is an older section of working Wexford town, just up the road from Pierce’s factory where my grandfather worked when he ‘retired’ from the British Navy a few years after WW1.

Pierce’s, long gone by the time of this winding story, was the town’s big employer back in the day. It was a cast shop as well as a forge, and made crude — in contrast to refined — machines and specialty parts, all the way from farm equipment such as plows and harrows to hubcaps for lorries. Incidentally — and because I’m off on a tangent already — my grandfather ended up building his own furnace in the back garden of 17 School Street, which was about big enough to swing a cat, and butted up to the Wall of Wexford. The town wall first built by the Vikings around 850 AD and rebuilt by the Normans around 1200 AD — it didn’t much slow down Cromwell or for that matter any later invaders, but being about 12 feet high, it was still formidable to a pig. And my grandmother kept two sows and a fair few chickens back there, where the chickens kept watch and the pigs ran security.

There, in his furnace, and after work at Pierce’s, my grandfather made hubcaps for cars and small trucks — when hubcaps were still a thing. His furnace would only handle brass and bronze — softer metals. He couldn’t get the heat up to work with cast iron without burning down the shed and probably roasting the pigs in the process.

I’ve got so many tangents running now. I need to get back on point with Willie’s pub.

Well, as some pubs did — at least in boxing towns like Wexford and Drogheda, funnily enough both christened in blood by Cromwell back in 1649, the town walls of both being an inadequate deterrent — Willie’s place had a full-size boxing ring known as ‘the ring beyond the bar.’

So, now you have the larger context, I have a body drop story about Willie’s pub. I must’ve been 17, and there was a fight I needed to participate in — set for Willie’s ring on a Saturday around five. For some reason I didn’t ride the bike, and my dad dropped me off outside the pub and asked me what I was doing. I said well, it was just a Kung Fu thing. He said — right enough — and headed on. The parents thought I was mad anyway, as I’d be training and stretching in the kitchen from about ten to midnight every night, the AGA cooker keeping the temperature up almost to Bikram levels.

Kickboxing events in our day were elementary. We didn’t have belt or grades or body-weight categories or age categories — none of that. So I was up against some lad from Carlow or Kilkenny. I don’t remember too much because it was long ago — and he definitely knocked me out to end the contest — because I remember waking up, or you might say reviving, out back of the pub beside the rubbish bins, where the boys had pulled me out to get some fresh air.

Anyway. That’s one of my earlier body drops — a very different type of body drop altogether.

Paul Reynolds

On your own, or with Paul

The 63-Day Challenge