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SFJane, I find what you write about your experience fascinating. If you get your book published let me know and I will go to the bookstores in my city that has spiritual books and ask for it and recomend they take it in if they haven`t. They tend to by a couple of versions of stuff people ask for to see if more people are intereseted. If it gets to the level where it might be published in diferent languages I can get it read by a sympathetic publisher and if it is published I can get it in the hands of a journalist or two that has some understanding of meditation. I have already tiped my meditation teacher of about you and he is soon to do a phd on the effects of long term qigong and meditation practice. I think people who belive in it, people on the bums for example, can do a lot to spread cultivation type stuff by doing what one can to spread stories like these to the right people. Aeon, one thing he can do with absolute safety to get chi down is pilates. Because one learns to move from and initiate movement from the dan tien one learns to get the mind down there and so the energy sinks as well. In general it structures the body and the movements of the body in a manner that creates harmonious flow of chi. But it does this in an almost purely physical manner. It produces very little chi so it is perfectly safe. It takes a long time though. 60 min 3 times a week for three months will do a lot. It will not help much in opening the front channel but chi will sink. Another physical method is various balancing exercises that do not focus on chi. the four corner balancing exercise that is at the end of Sonnons intuflow beginner series is a good example that I do everyday for precisely this reason. You can find it on youtube. It will get his focus down to the bottom of his feet and help him sink the chi. There are also various squating type exercises that are very grounding and I think several bums know some of those. Tips anyone? Trunks site alchemical taoism has some tips on opening the front channel. But he should get a teachers help for this though. Why not take a short vacation in Miami and see Santiago or Tao or both. Then they could tailor some stuff for him that not only helps with the front channel and grounding but other aspects of balancing and healing him that are not aparent to you or us now. They are available through skype though so you could do it the lazy way. As for wheter a male could get more balanced by having sex with females or just being arround them I belive they can. As far as I understand the theory mostly agree on this it. It has also been my experience. When having sex with women I have found in addition to the loss of energy from ejaculation I get quite a lot of energy of a very cool and balancing nature. Recently I had a sexual encounter with a girl that actually has some energy from cultivation work and can project it and that was a whole different level. I felt much more cooled of and balanced. A week later I still do to some extent. I have also found that after I started cultivating there are energy exchanges going on all the time with people arround me and that I get/suck in cool yin energy from females and they get hoter more yang from me. Especially if i sit close to a female friend or If I take a massage with a female massage therapist it can be quite strong. It gets less intense the less I practice energy stuff. I can manipulate it to some extent and increase or decrease it somewhat but don`t bother to do it. Not planning on becoming a small level Drew Hempel just yet:)

The fourth Jhana is suposedly the best. It is where the Buddha got most of his.

There are acupoints on the wrists and ancles that makes the front channel run and I have had them needled when doing acupuncture in order to help open the front. It does work then and there. I think you would need to do it A LOT for it to really open the front channel. For me pressing these acupoints myself regulary does about the same. Santiago Dobles can make otehr peoples orbits run. Maybe all healers at a certain level can? Antwat, he has done that in the KAP clases with some of the people here. If that has much of a lasting effect I am not sure but it could help. Once the front channel is open I think cranio sacral therapy can be very helpfull in balancing out someone with bipolar disorder. But because it is intense work on the spine it migh initially set of a lot of activity there and aggravate the problem if the energy can not get down the front. SFJane on this board curde herself from extreeme bipolar disorder by practicing Bruce Frantzis` system. You could PM her.

Funny image but not far from the truth I guess.

How Can you tell? Can you sense it or do you reason that it must be so? I am pretty sure you are right just asking because of curiosity. I do think that the whole crowd thing and the intensity of emotion that this setting can bring and the absorption such a reverend probably experiences during such a setting could lay the groundwork for pulling down quite a lot of "heavenly chi".

Anthony de Mello wrote a book called Awareness taht I read many years ago and loved. He really drives in the key points about awareness again and again and again in a very insightful and funny way. One thing he said that struck me was "before enlightenment I was depressed. After enlightenment I still get depressed but it does not bother me that much and it does not last as long". I think, or rather know, the same holds for when you manage to be deeply aware way before enlightenment. All the same emotions will still come but with enough awareness they don`t bother you so much and they rarely stick very long. You also find a calm center in the midst of things so no matter how bad things are you can have some sort of happiness in the middle of it that is indestructable. I also always find that when I manage to bring mindful awareness to any any issue, thoughts or emotions, the solution that after some time comes by itself always beats my planned attempts at changing things. For example if I am scared of something I might look into the thoughts that seem to cause the fear and critique them in a systematic way and this often helps a lot in removing the fear and becoming confident instead. But without fail, every time I have successfully brought awareness to the fear and been able to let go in the sense of accepting that it is in fact there and then just let it play itself out, the realease of fear and the following confidence and the perspective on the whole situation that arises is always better than when I did it in a structured manner. It all sticks deeper somehow and is a better "whole". First I had to go through accepting the fear and letting it be there for quite some time so it is not easy. But still it is much quicker usually than fighting with it for a long time. As one gets better at this one eventually starts to bring awareness to and "disolve" such negatives very fast, sometimes instantly. One also creates a space around whatever is running through ones mind that makes it much easier not to be completely cought up in it and makes it quite easy not to act on impulses. I have found that for this to be anything other than a hard struggle it is essential to build some sort of awareness through meditation, breathing etc. This level of concentration and awareness makes it a hundred times easier to do. Unfortunately I haven`t been able to practice much of these lately because of grounding issues but working on changing my cognition through rational analysis also works very well. Sometimes I have found that when my programming makes it almost impossible to "just do" what is needed it helps to have the steps clearly laid out. Either through thinking it through very thoroughly myself or having precise instructions. I just to be unable to dance in any sort of way. I was scared of it and thought I did not understand it. So I studied intently what others did and experimented until I had a clear logical understanding and then just did that. So after having danced a little bit in this controlled way I let myself go and found that I had great rythm, could dance creatively and more "advanced" than most and got complemented by girls for my dancing frequently. I find this interesting because it shows that I naturally had all the skills and they were very "close". I was just shut off because of fear. Fear did not allow me to feel in relation to dancing and it would have been this ability to feel in relation to it which would have made me just get it from the start. The fear closed me into my logical frame of mind and it has a hard time understanding dancing. But I also find it very interesting that I eventually figured it out logically once I put enough effort into it and through this could go back to feeling mode. Both ways can work but my way was needlessly long.

But how do you find sex with long term retention of sperm/dual cultivation compares to this (if you have experimented with this)? As far as I understand theory says that it is more powerfull than celibacy and it is also the experience of my meeditation teachers and several other people I have seen write about it on the bums and other places. Although it does seem more risky as many people do it wrong and get unbalanced by it. My teacher has had etensive periods of celibacy as a monk and says that in his case dual cultivation is about twice as strong and also energeticly more balanced (more yin energy) than celibacy. I have been experiencing a bit with much longer periods without ej and see that it is very powerfull and profound. Previously I have found that after starting cultivation practices I started to gain a balancing energy from the women I had sex with while also loosing a lot through ej. Celibacy (very short periods though but long compared to what I have been used to) was more powerfull and very balancing. But yesterday I had my first sexual experience with a woman that actually has some energy and can move it. This was profoundly balancing and seemed way more powerfull than regular celibacy as long as I can learn to manage internal orgasms without ej or learn to pull of the jing from the sperm or use the sort of mindfulness techniques that Mal learnt from KAP and which leaves him with more energy. reuniting.info is a very good read about how to aproach reteniton sex safely and sheads a lot of light on how all these things might work sientifcly. Oh, Adam since you have been practicing Dzogchen and Zen/Vipassana? have you found any difference in how celibacy influences shamata practice compared to insight practice? The reason why I ask is when I have previously asked people at thedharmaoverground how they feel energy practices influneces their practice they all answered it heped a lot with shamata but had zero effect on insight practice. So maybe celibacy/dual cultivation, like energy practices are only helpfull for shamata and alchemical paths but irrelevant for insight practice. Or if they helpfull are but energy practices are not then this sheds some light on what energy is helpfull (not the chi generated through qigong or yoga but the Jing or prenatal jing you save through celibacy). I also read somewhere that you thought or had expereinced that an energy path was suportive of your emptiness meditation. Does this mean you found it helpfullo in insight practice also or only in shamatha?

The KAP guys teaches some secret visualizations for the five tibetans that supposedly supercahrges the effect. YThought you might be interested.

This woman teaches a simple qigong that has a lot of sucess in helping people with chronic fatigue. She is six times world champion of tai chi, a kung fu master and an expert in medical qigong and a TCM doctor: http://www.qigonginstitute.org/listing/teachers/W_Yan.html The qigong is easy enough for her to explain it to someone with experience over the phone or skype. It is basicly just a simple breathing technique with some very simple movements. One thing that might also help is brainwave entrainment. It is very quick in taking you into desired meditative states at particular frequencies believed to be beneficial for particular things. Springforest qigong has a particulary good reputation arround her for being good at healing illness. Master Chunyi Lin, the founder of springforest, is also a renowned healer you might check out. Michael Lomax, which posts her under the name Ya Mu, is also a medical qigong expert that teaches a taoist alchemical system called stilness movement that apear to be very good at healing illness and imbalance in addition to "higher" alchemical goals. He is also a good healer. Just thought I would mention a few things you could check out/consider.

Maybe the stress eraser can help. There is a thread about it here on page on or two. It seems to do some quite profound things that regular breathing practices or meditation takes a very long time to do.

I have done a version of Rolfing: http://www.anatomytrains.com/ This and cranio sacral therapy rocks! I wrote this an a different thread about pain: Google mindfulness baseds stress reduction. It is an extreemly well reseached meditation program tought in hospitals++. It started as an atempt to reduce the pain of pasients with extreeme and chronic pain that had not found help in conventional medicine. The patients had an average of 8 years of other treatments with little effect. Within two months of mindfulness meditation the pain was reduced by arround 40-50% in addition to various other benefits such as a well researched and quite massive jump in happiness and immune function. Also the patients reported being able to cope with the pain that was left much, much better. Pain could still be there but not be perceived as much of a problem. Shinzen young has written a book about how that mechanism works and parts of it can be read on his webpage. The initial pain of life is inevitable but most of what we experience as problematic is the suffering we add to this because we resist and do not want it. Once we let go pain will not necesarilly be so bad. I have sat with horrible pains in my legs, almost unbearble at times, when I meditate and after ten to fifteen minutes I have often been able to just be present in the pain without resistance. Once I do that at least 90% or more of what I felt was a problem was gone but the pain is still there. It is just that it is more like a phenomen that I observe, there is pain but no one who suffers because of it kind of. this is not denial but the oposite. It comes from going head first into the pain and experiencing it fully without resistence. Then things just are and Suffering goes away but pain stays and we find that most of what we perceive as inevitable pain is optional suffering. Shinzen young goes into depth on the pain vs suffering distinction. In a way this is all at least budhism is about. Just be and suffering goes away. You will not be without pain (the buddha has lots of pain on old age) but suffering is the real problem and it can be let go of. Same thing with emotional pain. Even enlightened people experience emotional pain. But without attatchment they do not experience the added suffering that is most of the problem. In a way they experience more emotional pain than others because they are so present to whatever happens and is felt but it just does not bother them all that much. A lot of this is available at lower levels of meditation and mindfulness training as well. I think when I first wrote this I did not emphasize enoguh that there is a huge reduction in pain just from relaxation of tension and from the release of various substances in the brain and body that reduce pain (40-50% as mentioned). The removal of the suffering aspect of pain and the pain that is there not being experienced as so much of a problem comes on top of that. Circulation of energy, especially in the affected area, also significantly reduces pain. So any sort of qigong and yoga or energetic meditation can help somehwat just because of the circulation factor alone. In addition there are qigongs that are aimed specifically at reducing pain (don`t know any) and acupoints that can be amssaged that help in reducing pain. A point on the skin between your thumb and the next thinger releases a lot of pain reducing endorphins. I think it is called the hegu. trunk can tell you which acu points are good for pain. Also stimulating acupoints close to the affected area or acu points in different parts of the body but that influences the energetics of the painfull area can help quite a bit. I sometimes wake up in the night with horrible pain in my back behind the solar plexus. What I do is press a point on the liver meridian (I think liver 1) on the foot. That stimulates the circulation/smooth energy flow ability of the liver and so removes a lot of the tension which disolves a great deal of the pain. Then I press the endorphin point on the hand as a pain killer. It takes me about 10 minutes to do this enough to reduce the pain to a level where I can fall asleep again. If I found a point that specifically increased circulation at the back behind the solar plexus or that had healing effects on the area (the liver point has a more whole body effect) I would ge even better results. It will probably take you some time to get where you can get as much effect from acu points as I do as I am quite energy sensitive. But massaging each point 36 times etc. should give an effect. Paul Griley and Sarah Powers are suposed to be good for Yin Yoga and Yin Yang Yoga. I realy like Sarah Powers book. She explains the effects of the different asana in terms of TCM which I find very helpfull. I think that book can help you a lot in learning how to tailor yoga to help work with various medical problems. You could also consider brainwave entrainment. This technology puts the mind into meditative states and can be programmed to take you into states that realease loads of painkiller hormones etc. Many Bums can wouch for this technology being very powerfull in bringing you into deep meditation.

How about Norway? Are the energetics beneficial? Norwegians strike me as one of the least spiritual and especially the least transcendence seeking people on earth. But I have also read that we are situated on top of the worlds crown chakra

What you say sounds very plausible. In addition you have the whole martial arts connection. Seems like it is philosophy and martial arts that bring people to the TAo (in the west at least) so that should bring mroe men.

I have done a bit of it and found it very, very good and powerfull. I`d say attend. I think Winn now incorporates the inner smile into it somehow so practicing some inner smile might be a good idea.

Why so few women? any theories?

Just regular meditative mindfulness of the thoughts that control this should help a lot in stopping them/making them more rational.

Dr Wang Yan is one of the worlds most recognized medical qigong experts. She teaches a qigong for weight loss that apparently is amazing. She is a celebrity of sorts in the netherlands for helping the fattest man in the country loose a shitload of weight just through breathing; Sit and Breathe Away Fat Weight Loss Qigong Workshop –weight loss of 6-22 pounds in first week. Guaranteed or free follow up instruction to correct what you may be doing incorrectly. http://www.qigonginstitute.org/listing/teachers/W_Yan.html She brags a lot about the results from certain of her qigongs but is equally blunt about other things she teaches having more moderate results or only working some times or over the very long term. It is only about 5 of her 200 qigongs that she claims exceptional results from. That makes me believe her. I liked her workshop and my meditation teacher cooperates with her and is very pleased with her. Look at her CV, her credentials are almost unsurpassed Eventually you probably want to have him do something to balance his thyroid/throat chakra as it is highly responsible for overweight. Long term the inner smile should be superb in that it will make him love his body which will help in taking care of it. In addition it can be done very specifically for each organ, gland, the intestines etc. and he probably has some work cut out for him in that department. Secret smile could also be a good option. The inner smile confronts him much more with smileing and loving his body. The secret smile is more general in that sense but in amny ways more powerfull. I think THE priority should be to find something that he likes and wants to continue to do. Soemthing that makes him feel damn good probably has the best shot at that.

Well, I have only seen the Danish documentary but in it there is crystal clear video footage proving that his manifestation abilities are tricks. Unless there is a black hole in his sleave that he pulls stuff out of I am not impressed. A bunch of magicians and mentalists that will readily admit to having no supernatural abilities would be able to do anything that Sai Baba does. Derren Brown most certainly could. What Derren Brown demonstrated on a martial artist beats any Fa Jin stuff I have ever seen. In rality he used hypnosis and suggestion. Swami Rama fucked his female students. That is abuse! The testimony is plenty. The evidence in the Danish documentary alone is enough to convict him of pedophilia several times over. Defending the guy is, in light of the evidence, just sick and twisted. I would cut his balls and penis of.

Springforestqigong?

Yeah they have some gooooooood shit in India man

Non, your thinking about bad guys and women and nice guys are just plain wrong. Most guys get girlfriends and have, if they wish, casual sex from time to time. If they are not very attractive in some sense or keep trying a lot they will probably have less sex than they would want but mostly they do just fine. Most guys are nice guys, certainly not bad guys. Of the people I know that are extraordinarily successfull with women only a couple, not the majority, are bad guys. Sure bad guys on average do better than the average guy but who cares when you can be just as successfull at attracting women in other ways. They are also used a lot more for casual sex then for relationships. As I have said before, at charismaarts.com they can teach you to be tremendously successfull with women while being only NICE. If you look at some of the reviews of private coaching with Juggler you will see that wherever he goes he charmes everyone. People are fascinated with him and drawn to him and women through themselves at him but he is still only nice. He also has immense social power while still being only nice. I can`t remember if he was a virgin untill he was in his twenties but at least he was a disaster with women. It is all learnt behaviour. Most of his coaches have the same story. Most of the friends I have that are very successfull with women never, ever aproach strangers on the street, in stores or in clubs or bars. They mostly meet girls through social sircle stuff and various activities. If those guys aproached random women most of them would get blown out quickly despite their attractiveness. Why? because they would get nervous and would seem aproval seeking and have troble figuring out what to say. What you need to do is meet people through context where it is natural and expected of you to talk and get to know other people and where you will interact with them regulary for a long time. A martial arts or meditation group for example or voluntair work for some organisation. You already do some of this stuff. It is through regular interaction with people in these contexts that you will meet people that will give you a chance. Girls on the streets will not. If you work on your own mind and cultivation and you get therapy and you start conciously working on social skills (for example inspired by juggler) in these settings then you will develop the necesary skills in these contexts for getting friends. Once you have gotten these skills and have gotten friends only then will it be meaningfull to think about picking up women. When you have gotten that far you will be able to start having sucess with aproaching women on the street. Not before! You are trying to do kung fu before you have learned to walk. It is like you are trying to raise your kundalini before you have even felt chi. I highly recomend you read the no more mister nice guy book. It seems to describe very acurately where you are right now. It is also wrong to think that people are unhelpfull and unkind because they do not want to give you a chance when you try to talk to them. I am plenty helpfull. I spend quite a lot of time helping people. OFten I do not like it but do it because it feels right. But if some stranger starts talking to me in the streat and he seems to give of a vibe that is needy, insecure, not genuinly friendly I get suspicions and very scared of getting stuck in a situation where I have to politely participate in an akward conversation that I do not like for hours only to then have that person start calling me and wanting to hang out all the time when I do not even like them or enjoy it. I want to stop such a situation as early as possible to save me the trouble. If I had not done so in the past I would have had 10 "friends" that where not my friends that would take up all my time. Why on earht would I do that? You seem to think that these people should magicly understand exactly hwat you rsituation is and help you along in the conversation to help you improve. But they are afraid of what I just described. They also do not know you and people are vary of strangers for good reason. A lot of people are psycho or just not nice. If you want to help someone in a way that brings them into your life you need to have some assurance that this will not mess up your own life. You would also have to know that this person actually needed your help and wanted it. How are these girls to know that you are up for social training from them? Most people would be insulted by the offer. These girls that you see as so evil will often be on their way to help their grandmother instead of hanging with friends or they spend hours on the phone comforting their buddy who is depressed after not getting into the college he wanted etc. Let me repeat this: NICE GUYS GET PLENTY GIRLS NICE GUYS GET PLENTY GIRLS NICE GUYS GET PLENTY GIRLS NICE GUYS GET PLENTY GIRLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SUre you need a basic level of confidence to not seem creepy but that is something COMPLETELY different from cockiness. As I have said before, once you are in regular therapy I will gladly pay for one coaching session with a charismaarts coach but it should focus on regular friendly interaction to get friends not girls.

You probably need some guidance to do this, at least a very detailed book. It also depends upon the meditation. As I understand it some will just fine tune a bit whereas others will set in motion powerful processes. One method is chanting a mantra externally or internally that vibrates in the area of the chakra. Another is just to bring awareness or intent to the area of the chakra or to visualize a color or yantra there. They have Chakra meditations in KAP. The orbit is also sort of a chakra meditation.

Yes I remember him writing about it somewhere. As I recall it was meant metaphoricly and refered to a stage rather then the opening of a specific center as Mikealz says. Good to hear the workshop gave you such great results. I have long thought that something like Kunlun would be a great suport practice for meditation like Zen, Vipassana, Dzogchen etc. Jenny Lamb teaches Vipassana I think. Is that right?

I haven`t got time right now to write much but will give you a better reply later. Actually Shinzen Young has an article about becoming emotionless right after enlightenment and how this eventually passes. Very simplisticly he sort of says that once your ego is killed your no self needs time to learn how to respond and feel in the world. After some time it does. So maybe what you experienced was something similar. I don`t remember which article that was but this one is also relevant to this discussion as it is about expressing emotion: http://www.shinzen.org/shinsub3/artExpressEmo.pdf