Bearded Dragon

You want to really focus on sinking chi in tai chi. It's so important. You only have the up and down flows of energy and the up is created by rebounding the down. So in a sense there is only sinking. The down creates the up and the combination of up and down creates all the movements. Trying to move chi around in any other way isn't probably going to help too much. You can do it, but just have a proper reason and don't get too hung up on it. The way it's done in tai chi is kinda idiot proof and very balanced. More than enough for a beginner to worry about imo.

Wu wei is probably easier to understand if you use the full phrase "wu wei wu". Emptiness, action, emptiness. It doesn't dictate what kind of action you make, as long as any action returns to emptiness. If you make the right action then I guess you will undoubtedly return to emptiness.

I see that wing chun is in your interests. The way that we train our wing chun helps immensely with this sort of stuff. Think of energy going up through your spine, and at the same time relax the muscles around your spine. You want to feel that your spine is elongating. I find that while sitting down it works well to think of inflating your spine like a balloon. Do it either from the bottom or in parts. Eventually you can just do the whole thing. The effect is that the space between your vertebrae gets larger, and the load gets taken off your muscles because your posture allows your spine to do all the work. Play around with it.

The energy gates book is very good. Posture has a large part to play, and opening the gates helps achieve that good posture. For example if you sit at a computer for a long time you want to have an upright spine for a number of reasons (compressed organs partially shut down and make you sleepy. energy flow is restricted). If you work on a computer at work you can try just sitting tall all day. The difference for me was quite dramatic, however you have to have the structure to support it otherwise your muscles will fatigue. This is where the energy work comes in. You learn how to create a proper relaxed structure.

I almost spat my drink out when I saw this thread

I'm not sure how many people picked up on what I meant. You would expect a 2nd part to the joke but there is no 2nd part. A Taoist just is, or at least strives to be.

Have played around with doing this in martial arts. Rotating someone else's ldt. Didn't seem to do anything beneficial in any regard. Move your intent a few inches back to the sacrum and people start moving. Not sure if there is any point other than refining the size of it smaller. As has been said this happens naturally as has been told to me by quite a number of people who are quite experienced.

A Taoist walks into a bar.

If the authority on Taoism taught how to stick a sword down your throat, would you want to learn that on the internet? Would you do it just because he did it, without knowing why he did it or whether it was even that important? Consider what you're doing and the effect it could have on the natural workings of your body if you mess it up. I would say that there is less than a 99.9999% chance that you won't do it exactly right if you're learning from a book or the internet. Everyone can think of the colour red but nobody will be thinking of the same shade as I am. Don't presume you have anything right. I would not presume that advanced practices are all that important. Anyone who was ever good at anything has been immensely good at the basics. Consider it a basic everyday meditation to forget about a Taoist fantasy of advanced esoteric practices. I felt like mentioning this because there's a lot of this stuff on TTB. People want instant fajin. People want instant kundalini. People want instant enlightenment. Forget about it. Work on what is easy first. Work on stuff that a local qualified teacher can help you with. Don't waste what little time you have. In martial arts: Do you have decent physical structure and relaxation? This is the basics which never ends, which you can work on at any time. In meditation: Can you let go of superfluous thought and emotion in an ordinary every day sense such that your mind is clear? This is the basics which everyone can work on at any time without being so formal about it. All that aside, probably the best advice is to not believe a word anyone says. Including me, and especially masters who you trust (if for no other reason than misinterpretation). Believe what you know to be beneficial and true. Those qualities, again, are usually found in the basic material.

^ Yep, totally agree with all that as well. It's really no different than anything else you learn. I look at it as a triangle where as the top gets higher the bottom must get wider. You need to keep watering the roots if you want to take that analogy. It's very easy to forget this stuff. For example when I was learning piano I stopped practicing scales and doing drills because it was boring. I really have no hope of playing more difficult things unless I go back and reform the groundwork. A while ago I actually abandoned the idea of progression and relaxed into it more, much like I had been doing in kung fu. In terms of improvisation it made quite a difference. Using the previous analogy, watering the roots made the branches grow by themselves. You just need to set up a direction much like the wire around a Bonsai tree. It's not always necessary to meticulously mould the branches. I'm not saying that will always be the case. There is a bit of a problem in that regard when you speak so generally. In any case it's always good to have in the back of your mind such that you don't lose sight of the groundwork required to advance. Knowing what is required is sometimes difficult, but if I were to assert an opinion I'd say a lot of the stuff we practice is not even necessary. Back to the title of the thread. Just know why you're doing it and whether it's worth your time.

Yeah it's good to find people on the same page. I like a lot of the things you listed but I'm not attached to them all that much. I find it quite easy to let go which is the point of difference between a lot of people. If you indulge in non-attached pleasures then it is not a deviation from the path. Same thing with the ego. Most people consider that if you are seen to skite about yourself then you are effected by ego. In fact if talking about yourself in an overly positive way does not bare any effect on yourself then it's hardly egotistical. I used to be in a trap where I would intentionally not talk myself up. That was actually having a greater effect on my ego as I was trying to impress myself rather than impress others. The reason I mentioned that was that the idea of not doing all those "pleasures" can negatively impact your progress if you don't understand your true motive that sits behind logical reasoning. I'm not implying that you are impacted in this manner. It's just food for thought for anyone reading this thread.

I had something similar in my arms where the chi was rushing back and forth between my fingertips, through my body and to the other hand. I stumbled a bit when I tried to walk around as I had created an imbalance. What I put it down to was that my mind had drifted to one side, then overcorrected, and so forth. It became perpetual. Kundalini is really the last phase of Taoist energy work. It's the integration stage. I would suggest anything from Bruce Frantzis merely because things tend to happen more naturally and in an integrated and grounded way. I think that's what you need. Even if you don't do his practices but follow his principles then you should be better off.

That's Albert Chong. We've had him teach us a few times at weekend seminars. He's ridiculously good. One of the top guys in Australia. He wouldn't call himself a master but I think he's too modest. The most senior guys have all left Jim Fung's school but they are still around, and all would obliterate most people in a fight. You really have to feel the force. It's like muscular force you might not be able to stop but you can feel that if you were stronger you'd be able to. The force that these guys have feels like there is very little there, and as such you have no ability to fight against it because there is no platform to do so. That would be how I would describe the internal and external thing. External is like pushing against a wall. Internal at the highest level is like pushing against air. I was doing chi sau with someone in Hong Kong and her arms felt like they weren't there, and her force was like these 2 spirals of emptiness coming out of her arms and rotating in alternate directions. As such the effect on my body was that the top of my body was buckling one way and the bottom was buckling another way, and there was nothing that I could do about it. She was hardly moving at all. Bizarre stuff .

It's more simplified in terms of learning it, but I think at a high level it becomes all the same. The basic idea is just to raise energy up your spine and allow it to come back down by itself. There is no MCO per se as you just raise up and relax down everywhere. You try to do this all the time. There is a lot of work with body alignments, correct joint rotations, relaxation, expansion, and especially with the mind and how you think about things. You do the form a particular way not because that is the right way, but because it is the best way to achieve a state in your body. Once you have the state you can do things however you want. You quickly learn that even adding a bit of raising your spine can also help if you're doing things quite physically. So in that sense there is no internal or external but a continuum. Everyone in our lineage has a slightly different take on it. Some do more standing practice, some do more drills, some like to take things from a practical approach. All follow the principles though. You'll find that Yip Man taught each student a bit differently. That continues today. If you want to see the internals just PM me. There is a video that I don't particularly want to post.

Don't get caught up in all the traditions. By all means follow them, but the best thing you can do for yourself is... 1) Find something negative (you already seem to be able to do this) 2) Make the decision to let it go AND STICK TO IT. It's a creation of your mind which will dissolve in time. Be patient. It's that easy, however it will take time and dedication to the idea of letting it go. I have been doing this my whole life and I'm not typically bothered by anything, or at least not for very long. The issue that most people have is that they don't WANT to let go. They try and either blame it on someone else or they take the responsibility away from themselves and ask for someone else's help (like what you're doing). The truth is that you don't need anyone's help. You already know what to do and you just need the courage to do it.

Wing Chun is an internal art if you find the right teacher. Look for Chu Shong Tin lineage. Most people just teach external Wing Chun, which by itself is still brutally effective however if you add the internals and get good at it then you'll be able to crush almost any normal person. I know plenty of people who can throw the biggest guys around like rag dolls.

Ratiosynchretic seems to be a made up word, but I gather it would be to do with being particular in relation to the balance of yin and yang. Synchretic being something to do with the relationship between different or opposing things, and ratio relating to the balance of the two things but eluding to the idea that they don't have to be 50/50 to be balanced. You could probably say "A function of balance which sits upon open awareness" but it's not nearly as descriptive.

Well, since nobody has answered the question I will try. There are people in martial arts who claim to be able to have an effect on people without touching them. I have not experienced this myself, however I have heard accounts that you certainly can feel it, but you are free to resist it quite easily. In other words I would not waste my time. This is different to injecting chi via touch, which is very doable but quite hard. What you want in martial arts it for your body to more or less open onto the other person. The relaxation and opening can feel quite magnetic as that's the only thing we really associate with having an empty force creating expansion. I'm yet to be convinced that having your arms float up has anything to do with magnetics, however I do use that idea to create it. Just because it feels like something doesn't necessarily mean that's what's happening. When my arms let go and felt like they were elongating to maybe 3 metres long they certainly were not doing that. It's an internal process expressed physically. Don't get caught up in all the mystical stuff. You CAN inject chi into a person for both healing and martial arts but I don't know anyone personally who has the kind of control to pull it off. You can also stimulate the chi of another person via touch which is quite easy and can be mistaken as injecting chi. You can also transfer relaxation via touch which is surprisingly helpful for relaxing someone's muscles. I'm not at all sure how the transfer of relaxation works but I have done it and had it done to me and it's very effective.

I don't particularly like the word compassion by definition. It binds the awareness of the issue with the desire to resolve it. As Harmonious Emptiness mentioned, practicing compassion can rob someone of living their own life and learning from their experiences. I would much rather ditch compassion and have a profound awareness of the suffering of others, and maintain the position to act if I believe it to be in the best interest of the person or situation. Semantics are a pain in the butt. "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it." - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/compassion "Sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." - http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compassion

Romantic love is not a term unto itself, or at least I don't think it should be. You have romance and you have love. You can combine them but they are inherently separate. Also, there is a difference between attachment and connection. A strong connection does not necessarily predicate a binding attachment.

It has been really good to read this because that process of self refinement was what actually drew me to Taoism in the first place, and I had kind of lost track of it amidst a plethora of energy work practices. After reading a bit about Taoism I felt like I was already Taoist without actually doing anything. Thanks for all the posts, deci.

Everything furthers

Yeah I would say experience in general. It's not a particularly spiritual thing. If you do something good then you create evil by outdoing others. If you do something bad then in the same way you create good. Considering the continuum of good and evil is a playground of differences of potential it makes sense that your point of reference is the key more than anything. In the realms of self you are referenced to yourself. You are a good person in your mind, so you are better than the other guy who is bad in comparison. If the reference point shifts then you start to think in any number of ways depending on where your point of reference is. You can pretty much take away the continuum of good-evil and see things with respect to the situation rather than a predefined dogma. Perhaps some food for thought.

I know what you mean by point 1. It's that point before sleep where your body seems to completely let go. Don't look for the energy, look for cultivating relaxation. Anything like tai chi or meditation will do it but don't expect fast results through any worthwhile means. Also that vibrational state before sleep happens to me before lucid dreams if I happen to hit an REM cycle so be critical of what you're experiencing no matter how real it is. Point 2 I can't see any logical reason why you would want to do it. I'm not saying not to do it but be sure why you are doing it and what it takes. You would basically not be able to do anything because doing something would expel energy and hence require replenishment. Considering nobody has been confirmed to be able to do it I think your ability to do good in the world would be better spent on achievable goals and better time management. Point 3 I guess is right but just be critical. It could be energetic garbage feeding you crap. Even seemingly worthwhile things like compassion can be used to elevate you above people so don't think you have all the answers and throw away what you have without fully understanding what you're doing.

Sing (升) is just Cantonese for raise/ascend. The mandarin term would be Sheng. If someone was telling you to raise energy up your spine then they would use this term. Nothing too fancy here but it's also used to define a state where the raising and relaxing really kicks in. Those who have experienced it have described it as a profound awareness and a continuous expansion from the spine outwards. You can't really get it until you get the "song" idea of letting go, but then again you need a certain amount of raising to have the structure to allow the letting go to take place. I was told that once you can let go it's like everything drops to your feet and you feel really heavy (sort of getting there myself, slowly and in disjointed parts), then after that you can take it somewhere such that you feel like you're really light or floating. I believe that part is balancing the sinking with raising. If you skip the first part you won't have a whole body connection which is absolutely required. There are no shortcuts but there are some things you can keep in mind. Firstly, don't pull your head back. This will just create tension. You can slightly draw your chin in, but most of it is done through raising the spine. If you have a piece of string in an S shape and you pull it taut it will go straight. Same idea to get your neck in place if it is not already. Secondly, don't force your tailbone forward. The tucking of the tailbone is done through the momentum of a wave of relaxation coming down your back. It drops down and then curls forward slightly. You can think of sitting on a bar stool or just imagine your hips reverse rotating. Your whole pelvis actually drops which creates space around your midriff area (while your head stays in the same place of course). You can think of the front of your hips as pretty much staying where they are. A lot of people just squat (which is not what you're looking for) but you can do it standing upright without bending your knees much at all, and in fact it's perhaps better to do it this way as you have better feedback as to whether you're doing it right. Either that or start with a bit of a squat and try and stand up straight while staying relaxed with the tailbone dropped. The hard part for most people (me included) is the thoracic part of the spine. This kind of wants to draw inwards while the chest also wants to draw inwards. I haven't really figured this one out just yet. THEN once all that is set up your spine will perhaps be open enough to raise energy properly. I know when my instructors get me in the right alignment I can raise a lot more and do things rather effortlessly. Can't do it by myself yet though. Hope that helps.