katsura

I have to agree with bax44. There would be no room for lay practitioners in the realm of meditation and qigong if you had to spend hours in the deepest trance to even begin. That's never been my experience. Tbh, I'm really not even meditating when I do my qigong routine. It would be better if I did, and I'm getting the impression that it's becoming more necessary to develop the stability and sensitivity I'll need to handle the energy I'm starting to get, but I don't see it as a barrier to entry. Some amount of qigong may even be necessary to sustain those deep states of concentration in the first place.

They're real. I'm a lazy student so I can't make any grand claims, but with modest practice of qigong you'll get intimations of increased sensory awareness, strength, speed, resilience. With the greater mental acuity that comes with cultivating jhana states, such as in Zen meditation, you'll begin to see how awareness and intention can be directed to get things you want without you necessarily having to do anything (magick, in other words.) There's other strange things that may manifest spontaneously, but can be eventually mastered, such as lucid dreaming, OBEs, remote viewing, psychic intuition.

One more note, I don't necessarily think we should take testosterone as the scientific equivalent of jing chi, which I think is an assumption underlying a lot of the discussion here. It may be that the testosterone hormone spikes and plateaus after seven days, but that doesn't necessarily mean extended celibacy has no relevance to qigong.

I probably shouldn't be responding to a banned poster, but Yang Jwing Ming wrote an entire book about the Microcosmic Orbit, called Qigong Meditation: Small Circulation, where he is adamant about retaining semen for 100 days during the process of creating the spiritual embryo. (Edit: And never mind the vast body of work left by Mantak Chia, which basically introduced the MCO to the west, and deals extensively with retaining semen during coitus and the masturbatory act.) I haven't been on the path of retention for very long, but I can attest to this as well. Now that I'm cycling the MCO everyday, I don't experience any of the hormonal agitation I did when I had gone extended periods without ejaculating where I wasn't doing any qigong.

I'm a huge fan of Shigurui, the manga even more so than the anime. The anime is a fine introduction, but the manga is a really exquisite artistic achievement. The author (Yamaguchi Takayuki) clearly has a sophisticated grasp of the martial arts and also a very intuitive understanding of the interplay of the subjective mind with reality. It's a deeply psychological work. Though I will add that the anime has a brilliant atmospheric soundtrack.

Occasionally, focusing on the third eye will expand the sinus cavity. It sounds like you were blocking energy at your third eye and focusing on the nose opened up the governing vessel (the du channel, as Zhongyongdaoist noted), which allowed it to disperse through the rest of your body.

I'm hardly an expert, but when I had my first serious kundalini experience, it was confusing. All I ever heard before then was "up the spine, the spine, the spine", which I naturally interpreted as 'up the back', but of course what I felt was it thrusting right through the trunk of my body from root to crown.

Anime wasn't always so saccharine and infantile. It's depressing to see the state of it now.

Chakras are a part of traditional Taoist practices though they didn't think of them in precisely the same way as the Yogis of the Hindu traditions.

There are some who equate it to the Dukkha jnanas of Buddhism. That is, after undergoing a pivotal point in your spiritual practice, you come face to face with suffering in a fundamental way. Sounds pretty abysmal to me.

I'm hoping to share in the knowledge of this vast and diverse community.

Orange you glad I didn't say Mo Pai?

Thank you for the warm welcome.