Orion

How do you not let it get to you? You unplug from it. American elections are fixed from the start these days. Trump never really stood a chance of getting into power. This has all been about the Clintons and their sick association with the real power running government.

The prices have a really wide range. All of the bowels I have, you hold in your hand. They're not huge, but because they're high quality they were about $200 a piece. I also have brass ones that were about $30 each. The big ones that some healers use to resonate the whole body can be $500 and up. Giant crystal bowls (which are totally different IMO) are easily over $1000.

Stretching is good, not enough people do it. I live on the west coast where there's the opposite problem. People stretch so much that they become hyperflexible and start to lose joint stability. In some of the bodywork groups I've done with physical rehab patients, there have been more than a few people who were recovering from yoga, believe it or not. Often when people watch videos or take classes, they compare their mobility to other people. Most of the people who are "good" at yoga and take all those awesome photos in coffee table books have over-extended tendons and ligaments. Very few people can sustain that into old age. If you do that much stretching you really have to do some muscle building to balance it out, otherwise you get what we industry insiders call "linguine joints". But normal everyday stretching is awesome. I just learned recently that the spinal discs are vascular until you reach puberty, then they become avascular. That's why kids are so much more flexible, because their spinal discs are constantly nourished and wastes are taken away. I've been studying medicine for over 10 years and somehow this fact escaped me. So you actually HAVE to stretch to get new nutrients flowing to the spine.

Interesting about letting it stand for a while. I tried to web search for info on that but couldn't find any info. Is it something to do with the oxalic acid content? I removed beet yesterday, and then re-added it today just to see. It's definitely the main culprit for why I feel this way. Today I made: celery, beet, carrot, kale, peppers (3 different colours), lemon, green apple. It came out to about 16 oz total. As mentioned previously, I can't do fiber due to the state of my bowels. In fact, I might have to stop eating the small salads I've been making because today there was blood in my stool... bummer. Good idea, adding avocado or banana... I suppose I could do the juicing part and then add it to a blender with the fatty fruits. As for demulcents (slimy things)... they wreak havoc, so I avoid them. Flax is a no go, as is kefir due to casein in the dairy, and even water kefir has too much sugar. I guess I could do coconut kefir but the probiotic content just isn't the same.

Right now I can't handle a lot of fibre because my bowels were damaged by a serious illness. I'm juicing the veggies I can't eat whole in order to get the nutrition, while eating others that I can handle as salads. So I'm still getting some roughage in my diet. Beets and carrots having a higher glycemic index makes sense. That would mean I have been starting my day with an insulin spike followed by a crash. Oopsies... Beets are so nutritious though

I'm doing carrot, beet, kale, lemon, ginger, and parsley. I considered that maybe it's a blood sugar thing, but I don't see how the sugar content could be that high. If I do one carrot, half a beet, and half a lemon, that's barely any sugar. Although... I do it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. That's how they say to do it, but maybe that causes a blood sugar spike right at the start of my day. Glad you at least know what I'm talking about. I'm going to try it for about a week or so just to see if that weak feeling passes. If it does then maybe it's some kind of cleansing effect.

I think I need to go cleanse myself after reading this. Gave me flashbacks to my time in China, and why I decided to leave. I got offered a 4 year scholarship to a TCM school there and even though, materially, it looked amazing, something in my heart said to get out and go study in North America. That year enriched my capability to understand the culture of TCM and read some of the classics on my own, but man... if I had to stay one more year in China I would've lost it. I'm talking eastern China, mind you. I liked western much better, would've even settled for Chengdu because it would give easy access to all the stuff I wanted to experience. But in the end I just decided to move out. Kudos to you for actually having the grit to do TCM school there.

The more metals in it, the more rich the sound will be. The bowls I have had 8 metals in them, and they cost me a pretty penny. Some bowls have pictures or symbols painted inside for you to gaze into while you play, if you like to meditate with eyes open and fixate on something. But all that aside, the bowl should activate you in some way when you play it while meditating. The sound will tap some part of your body, your energy field, or your consciousness in a way that is gently altering. For this reason, the "quality" of the bowl is irrelevant. Its quality should be determined by how well you can play it and what it does for you.

I would not use TCM herbs and formulas unless your body shows signs that it needs them. If you aren't using syndrome differentiation to determine what you take then you're no longer using TCM but modern biomedicine. Just saying.

Fortunately I don't eat red meat, and the meat I do consume does not come from animals housed in this fashion.

I'd like to contribute my experience to this thread. It's a mix of positive and negative. I realized in my mid-20's that I'm a healer, so I better learn some modalities. I combed over the different things out there, and opted on TCM. I had the greatest heart connection with it. I also chose it specifically because I did not have to endure years of obnoxious training in western sciences. Although I did a lot of biology and biochemistry in university, I do not value biomedicine as much as I value medicines with a spiritual bent. I almost became a Naturopathic Doctor, but after realizing they are basically the natural version of biomedicine, I opted not to. (To this day I don't understand why, in most districts, NDs can practice acupuncture with only 200 hours of training or less. It's kind of a joke.) I'm also a registered western herbalist. The western schools of herbalism have their own traditional, non-scientific approaches that are really amazing. It's also harder to control western herbalists because our plant medicines grow here in this country, and the government can't stop us from formulating them. You eventually learn, the more and more that you get into these practices, that you have to become a little subversive in order to do well. I have been a licensed TCM practitioner for 4 years now. School was very difficult. Our dean was corrupt and a lot of information was withheld for the purposes of greed. Our school was middle rung, but mandatory in order to gain access to the board exams. In my opinion, the entire TCM system in North America, from the schools to the boards, is corrupt as hell. There is very little respect for this sacred tradition in the SYSTEMS that the western world has created. But... it is what it is. I had a great passion for the medicine and such a depth of personal learning that I got a lot out of school. I suspect I have a past life connection to this medicine that drew me to it. I also lived in China and learned Mandarin. Where my classmates performed in a mediocre way, I excelled. It was all my own doing. If I did not have that passion then I would have nothing to show for it. I am meant to do this. I am a healer. TCM education in North America is generally abysmal, with a few exceptions. There are some top tier schools. I disagree that TCM is just old stuff recycled over and over. There is a lot of tradition but there is also a lot of research. It is an evolving modality. You can trace the evolution throughout the centuries. Some of the content taught in schools, like San Jiao theory, 200 years old or so. Texts are constantly being translated. There are some authors and professors who are more trustworthy than others. Mostly, the technique is going to come down to a personal understanding of the foundation, combined with your personal energy practice. Most western practitioners aren't very good because they are too focused on the intellectualization of the practice. They don't see a connection between the refinement of their own being and their practice success rate. The PRC is to blame for this disconnect, combined with western schools of thought being inserted into TCM. I had classmates who did better than me on the exams, they tested well. They are all licensed practitioners now. I would never let any of those people work on me because of their sewer level energy bodies. I have seen miracles performed with TCM. I have performed some of them. I have taken hopeless people who had no other recourse and made them better. I have also failed miserably in other areas, which were learning curves. Over all I feel that TCM is something that deserves a place in the modern world and has powerful applications. People accuse TCM of being "too traditional", but actually what most people are practicing isn't even traditional, it's modernized. The PRC modernized it and then the west took that and added their new agey mumbo jumbo and scientific jargon. It has become a chimera of sorts. The Canadian government is currently in the process of further limiting TCM herbs. In my district, the registrar of our licensing board is a Registered Nurse. She became a DTCM in school before the license even existed. She practiced for 1 year and then the government handed her control of the board, because her husband is a big pharma shill. So the most important position of my TCM board is controlled by someone who doesn't really know TCM, and her position is permanent as long as she wants it. Within the past 5 years she somehow got the TCM board to pass an allowance which lets midwives and nurses practice acupuncture after 50 hours of continuing education. I had to go to school for 2.5 years and do 1,000 clinical hours, AND take a two-part license exam before I was allowed to insert a needle into anyone, unsupervised. This should give you an example of how corrupt things are. (I ended up doing a 4 year program to complete the herbal component.) People say TCM is ineffective, yet biomedicine is constantly stealing from this tradition... which is typical. We have chiros and physiotherapists doing "dry needling", using all the meridian points but calling it trigger point therapy. They puncture people's lungs and insert needles in dangerous ways because they get to do "dry needling" after a weekend course. MDs do intramuscular stimulation and trigger point injections. The point selection by all these copycats was taken from TCM. Biomedicalists are no different than colonialists. They usurp ancient traditions, claim they invented it, and then actively discredit their sources. My challenge as a student and later as a practitioner has not been that the medicine is incomprehensible. I find it rather straightforward so long as I have been able to relinquish my western epistemology and upbringing in order to learn a whole other paradigm of perceiving the reality and the human body. My issue has been sifting through all of the contamination due to modern thinking and political corruption, in order to get at the gold. If you practice from that gold standard, you will always be of service. A factor that would considerably aid the North American process would be to allow apprenticeships. We are currently denied this tradition in Canada and the U.S. You *HAVE* to go to the shitty schools and deal with the systemic corruption because it's a giant cash grab. It's also a means to limit the field. I know many gifted healers who would become leaders in society if they could apprentice; but they will never be because they cannot afford the enormous amount of money required to go to school. That, or school is not their learning style. A lot of healers are more right-brained and academia would suck their soul. I have seen it. People who are already talented try to get qualified and then they abandon healing altogether because they can't play the game. The last thing our systems of healthcare care about is healing. It's about money, power and control. People should be able to apprentice for their training. It would allow North Americans to begin establishing their own TCM lineages, and over the course of many years we could have a very rich system. But biomedicine doesn't want that. Big pharma is just too powerful here. My own city has a very large East Asian population, and in the 1970's a hospital here experimented with having an acupuncture ward. I found this out just last year and couldn't believe it. Patients were given the option of acupuncture or biomedicine, or both. The program was eventually shut down because patients began to decline biomedicine in favour of TCM. As far as I know it was the only hospital in Canada to try a fusion system. One of my colleagues was part of a funding program that was trying to open Canada's first TCM hospital in a neighbouring province, but both the Federal government and Provincial government wouldn't allow it because the medicine was "unaccredited". So the government will give us student loans to go to school on the one hand, but on the other they won't acknowledge that what we're studying is real. Figure that one out. They won't even allow this education to be on the degree system. In the USA I would have a Masters in Oriental Medicine. In Canada it's just a college vocational diploma. Not that I care because I am still doing what I want to do, but it's just an example of the kind of insulting, corrupt behaviour in the upper echelons. They don't want us having equality with biomedicine. I would say, with great heartache, that the main obstacle to being a successful TCM practitioner in North America is the licensing process itself. You have to dish out so much money and put up with so much crap just to get permission to practice that our field has a very high abandonment rate... something like 70% I believe. It's because by the time people get their licenses they are so leeched of passion and so burnt out that they forgot the reason why they even started. It's really depressing. This could be easily remedied with a system of apprenticeship -- real clinical practices, real traditional knowledge, real real real. But that's the last thing biomedicine wants. So, we are stuck with what we have. The reason why I kept with it is because I had additional outside training with a Japanese master who was a lineage practitioner, and taught me about fully utilizing the spiritual component of the medicine. The PRC completely obliterated the spiritual component of Classical Chinese Medicine because of their fanatical ways, but the knowledge is still preserved in other countries. I was only able to work with this master for a short time, but it was enough experience to completely blow my mind and my open my eyes to a whole other reality of not just medicine, but of seeing the world. Humans are only tapping into a tiny potential of what they are capable of. Even though the ancients had their problems, their view was a lot more holistic. Not only do I feel this knowledge is relevant to the modern world, it is completely necessary to save modern humans from destroying themselves. Even if I were to stop clinical practice tomorrow, I would never regret what I've learned. It has greatly accelerated my personal progress in this life and probably beyond. If I had to do it all over again I would. My final words... it's up to you to look inside yourself and find your true inner virtue. If your true inner virtue is calling you to a certain modality, then throw yourself into it with all your heart. Money and career are practical concerns, but they are ultimately temporary. Everything we do on this planet is. My trajectory before TCM was international business. I was headed for the corporate world. I would have hated it and probably had mental health problems. Fortunately life detoured me in a major way. If you are worried you're doing the wrong thing, then take a break and try something else. If you are really meant to do TCM or another healing modality, you will not be able to ignore destiny. Part of what drove me to get into medicine was that I was on the wrong path, and ignoring this fact brought me terrible illness. When I got into TCM my health improved greatly with the knowledge I learned, I made life long friends and connections, my personal energy got a lot stronger, and I started to attract everything into my life that was part of my path work. There are too many people in this world not being true to themselves. Don't be one of them.

I get what you're saying but those images setup a duality of conditions. Arguably someone living in the latter location has sufficient temptation to develop a very thorough understanding of desire. I've known people who have cracked from the chaos of civilization, only to awaken due to its pressures. I met a Buddhist nun who spent 7 years in a cave like environment. When she returned to human society she became angry within the first 24 hours. Just giving examples to demonstrate that the best path is not always what we think it should look like. Awakening and enlightenment are spontaneous after all.

English is clumsy because we only have one word for love. The love/hate level is a different kind of love than the love of realized compassion. One is based on temporal conditions while the other is a spacious state that is a simple result of freedom. I don't know how else to put it. If you can conceptualize love into linguistic terms then you aren't talking about the love that arises in the presence of the ultimate. It's not higher or lower, it just is. It's not something you reach for, it's merely a condition that becomes apparent when all else is relinquished.

In Nepal I visited with a man who had 6 big singing bowls. I was sick with pneumonia. He asked me to lay on the floor and he vibrated the bowls, placing them all around me and on top of me. He then held one in his hand and moved it around my body. How he kept them all resonating at the same time is beyond me. Anyway, the whole thing not only strongly energized me and shook my meridians loose, but when I got up I hacked up a ton of phlegm and recovered within a couple days. Of course he tried to sell me some bowls, and as impressed as I was I didn't have the money or the ability to send them half way around the world. I use quality singing bowls in my home to clear space, and for meditation. I also use a vajra bell for some of my meditation practices. The bell and the bowls have a different quality but they serve similar purposes. A couple of years ago at a music festival there were these traveling artists who put huge gongs in a circle and had a small group of people sit inside the circle. They would then hit the gongs. They each had a different frequency but they all intermeshed. My experience of being inside that sound vortex was that my body was a lot less solid. It makes me think about something an acupuncture teacher once told me... that centuries from now we will probably use complex sound technology to resonate illness out of bodies. Seems like the more advanced medicine gets, the less it deals with the dense physical.

Humanity will survive just not at the current numbers. Expect major die offs in the next 50-100 years, probably on a catastrophic scale. Either our survival limitations will greet us, or the collapse of worldwide ecosystems will. The writing is on the wall. But will we go extinct? Doubtful. I'm inclined to believe some of the more ancient scriptures that talk about how humanity is stuck in a cycle. I think we need to slough off this horrible paradigm we're currently stuck in, and once we do that we will return to a more equitable way of living. I just hope there's an actual planet left to thrive on. For instance according to the Vedic calendar, the Kaliuga (which we are currently in) involves a zenith period where it is very hard to find food and water, and there is great suffering.

Super interesting. Thank you I can see why taking 3000% the RDA would do something like that. I think some people are genetically predisposed to having more testosterone sensitivity in the hair follicles too. My diet is high in zinc which inhibits aromatase (which breaks down DHT) and I've often wondered if dietary zinc can play a role in hair loss for this reason.

Could you elaborate a bit on hair loss and vitamin K2? I haven't heard of the connection before.

You see it without looking. It's a passive thing. Direct looking takes a lot of practice and like I said, unless you really need this skill for your life path then probably best not to invest much time in it. Third eye stuff is for sure distracting. It's one more stop on the path that can really hinder people if they get too much into it.

I was in several car accidents as an adult that did subtle damage to my SI joint, damage that I didn't become aware of until recent years. Combined with sitting at desks for 6 years for academia, it did a number on my hip alignment. Assuming there is no structural damage, like disc or bone degeneration, you can recover. Even with mild degeneration, it's possible to regain a lot of function. One thing that happens with improper posture or unresolved physical trauma is that, over the long-term, it causes inflammation, and then the inflammation turns to scar tissue as the body attempts to reinforce the posture. The scar tissue then holds the poor form, which reinforces more inflammation as misalignment cascades to other areas of the body. I'll spare you years of research and trial and error by saying you should use supplements containing collagen, hyaluronic acid, and MSM together. While taking it, the first thing you'll notice is that skin surface scars start to become soft again, and then gradually disappear. It has the same effect deeper in the body. After a few weeks of taking it, you can begin a practice of deeper stretching, especially in areas of poor mobility. The stretching may cause discomfort but there should not be alarming pain. (If you know the difference between productive pain and bad pain, that's what I mean.) Each day the stretch will give gradual access of the soft tissue supplement to the scarred area, and soften it. It's like peeling an onion and you have to etch away at it over time. In the mean time, you'll experience a lot more smoothness in your joints and your skin will glow with qi. Another thing that can really help is the application of castor oil packs, daily, to SI area. Google it. I used this method earlier in life and it repaired a lot of scar tissue around my spine, such that I was able to eventually correct 90% of a spinal curvature. In terms of kidney reinforcement... in addition to zhan zhuang and ba gua, I find leg workouts in generally really powerful. Not necessarily heavy weights, but using the body's own weight for resistance. Deep leg stretching is wonderful for making sure any blood or fluid stagnation is pushed out, keeping things clear. Contrary to popular culture, I don't think stretching for the sake of stretching is necessarily a good thing. Over stretching aggravates the liver qi and can cause an insidious kind of weakness that I notice in a lot of people who do yoga.

I believe the underlying principles are true but I don't see how machines can replace something like a forest or being by the ocean. There's more happening in those places than just negative ions, and living energy is more than just mechanical ionic exchanges. Not saying there's no point in investing in this technology, just saying I am dubious about the health claims. Some of the world's oldest people ever recorded in modern times have lived in totally chaotic places devoid of a lot of natural energy. If you're already doing inner cultivation, leading a healthy lifestyle, and keeping stress at a minimum, then a negative ion generator might be a good cherry on top. I don't think it should be a primary concern.

Good read, thank you

Funny you brought up infrared saunas... I have been wanting one for years. My current dwelling is too small for one, but as soon as I have a larger living space and can afford it, I'll be getting one! There's a Korean spa near my home that has an entire room (think dance hall size) that's a giant infrared sauna. I love being in there, meditating, stretching, doing yoga and other body work. It's so great! How much did you pay for your portable at-home one?

Yeah... it's normal, and being able to see it is just another siddhi that can arise. Being able to see energy has its uses, like being able to observe people's energetic imbalance so you can help them, or avoid them out of self-protection... but on the whole it's best not to focus too much on it. It means that whatever you're doing is working.

Sometimes it just happens, other times I make a conscious effort for it to happen. It's just a skill that some people have, maybe from multiple lifetimes of development, I dunno where it really comes from honestly. I've had this since I was a kid. It's good psychic training I guess because it teaches you about different dimensional levels and how your present consciousness can affect your experience. But on the nights I astral project I don't wake up feeling rested, so in some ways it works against you IMO it's not a worthwhile goal to seek out this skill. It's more of a manifestation of other spiritual activities and refinements, and only in certain people. And if we're talking about unity consciousness and dissolving illusions, it can confuse matters. I generally advise people to not seek out psychic skills as a goal. They appear on the path but they aren't the point. I've met psychics who are obsessed with being psychic and experiencing the endless entertainment of their third eyes, and they never seem to evolve past it.

The main benefit of psychedelics is neuroplasticity and heightened creativity, which can indeed create breakthroughs. I am wary of the notions that you can "go somewhere" through these experiences, and it's dangerous to explore other forms of life in that state. If the goal is to work with the voice of a plant spirit, you can do that with many, many non-psychedelic plants. My over all impression is that people really enjoy these seemingly traditional paths because it absolves them of their guilt around getting mind-altered. I've done ayahuasca with a group and solo... not much difference to be honest. This is totally subjective but I've also noticed in my clinical practice that anyone who comes to me and says they've done ayahuasca many times tends to have this particular paleness about their skin. I don't know how to describe it. It's not a blood-deficient pale... it's a pale that is unique to ayahuasca and I can spot it a mile away. Their pulses also tend to be a lot finer.