Astral_butterfly

What Dreams May Come https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come_(film) And Les Misérables with Jean-Paul Belmondo is really amazing and deeply human https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Misérables_(1995_film) (story about World War II)

Is there anyone else here who gave up the need to confide or didn't have it much to start with? At one point I thought I needed to share my whole life story with my partner one day but with my husband I haven't done that and it is still wonderful. I don't even need to tell him if I have had a bad day and neither does he by the way. Sometimes it just comes up as a piece of information related to something else. Talking has become a need-to-know thing for me. This thing of needing to be understood is overated in my opinion. Anyone share this view? Even talking about stressful things that have no bearing on what will happen is not happening. Of course there are necessary chats about things that need addressing but no "venting" as such. Maybe I am just lucky to have someone that feels me on a deeper level than conversation...We seek each other for comfort and like spending time together just to feel each other. Is this common or am I a freak ☺? In this context the needing of a specific type of spiritual or other type of person becomes irrelevant, it is just a matter of having the right energy in the home.

Basically at the core we are all spirals of love, source qi moving as one and the peaceful waves smooth out the stormy waves or otherwise get influenced by the storm. The point is to shed what we think is our personality which is often a bundle of coping mechanisms acting like mini storms and become more aware of the peaceful inner core in others no matter how far and deep it may glimmer from.

It is what I call "outcomes-based behaviour". No use doing anything unnecessary, just focus on the result of your action or inaction. What Lao Tzu would call "moving like a cat". Basically saving your qi for what is absolutely necessary and not applying it to waste, like a cat who only tenses the correct number of muscles. Fantastic point.

Hahaha for sure she adoooooores the swimming pool, so much so that she gets extremely distressed when we have to leave even after having spent half the day there!

A very belated thank you for all this that you shared with me. She is now four years old and far more stable, thanks again!

You know I am very spiritually minded and my husband is a pragmatic man of very few words. He has no wish to discuss concepts and has a blunt, confident and practical approach to life. Yet he makes me so happy because with him I have a very peaceful and loving household. I "chose" him for his decent and upright character, his very affectionate nature and his sense of devotion and loyalty. What more could one need? There is enough debate and adventure in my own head! Yes you can be happy without including your partner in your explorations. Think about this; less noise, more peace. Less analysing conversation, more grounding. I think the most important though is we share a desire to be better each day and we encourage each others' character development. The rest is noise.

Thank you very much Roger. My background is that of the ultimate victim snowballing one persecution after another. Sexual abuse for example followed me from childhood. Culminating in a brutal and highly traumatic experience in 2009 that resulted in 3 months of hospitalisation for severe PTSD. In a foreign country with no friends or family. Looking back now I can honestly say that this event was the turning point in my life. Everything I was before was defragmented and rebuilt. I look back at the person I was before that happened and I can hardly believe it is me. And this is a very good thing. It is incredible that something so horrendous has been the single best thing that has ever happened to me. Of course I am not condoning assaults but I do believe everything we are exposed to is a result of what we are trying to improve on or an opportunity of some sort. Some of us never recover and need intervention therefore we can never say all suffering is useful to everyone but on the whole everyone who has hurt me in my life has addressed something I needed to deal with or detach from. I look back on people I used to cry over, people I gave my best to and "took me for a fool" and now I see them as being just like me, souls on a rough path trying to reach for the light. Even one who was borderline psychopathic. It is amazing to no longer regret having done my best and I can say with conviction that whatever you do with love honour and respect is absolutely never ever to be regretted. Never stop giving but use your experience to gage when enough is enough as you cannot justify depleting yourself (I love the saying "if your compassion does not include yourself it is incomplete"). The hardest is definitely the forgiveness of the self but that happens when you start having true love and compassion for yourself and respecting your own journey, caring that you come out whole at the end of it all. You cannot be healed if you don't look back on your old self with compassion, like a child you are bringing back to your bosom. Give him/her à safe space to return to and re-integrate. Because you need back that innocence and candour.

Forgiving is not an action it is a state of being. When you realise that people are instruments in your life. Even when it is gratuitous and very cruel, just the act of surmounting the trauma sends you to new heights of understanding yourself. Everything can become a gift and we come to a point where we say thank you for everything including the worst. Sometimes, especially the worst. When a certain understanding happens, one can detach one's self from seeking either reward or protection from new relationships. You also realise people are wired just as they are and you encountered them and you triggered each others' weak points. They are who they are. It is not personal. Whatever we need to work on gets served to us on a silver platter. Always be grateful and you will never need the action of forgiveness.

Thank you for this reassurance. The heart has indeed been my main focus for the past two years

Hi Everyone I am back, and wanted to say I have not given up on Flying Phoenix. Some of you may recall that I had a serious issue with tiredness that made it hard to wake up to the only "free" time I had in the day; the early hours of the morning. This was linked to a terrible daily chronic pain in my abdomen which really exhausted me, that none of the plethora of doctors and specialists I had seen could diagnose. So I have been seeing a practitioner of TCM for the past few months and this has gradually reduced my abdominal issue and increased my energy level (and brought me back to my normal low weight). I have done no type of work on my energy body whatsoever and to save energy I have stayed away from intentional "vibrational" work though as has happened since my earliest childhood, I have had spontaneous "visitations", but just a few. I am at the stage where I feel getting up at 4am is not going to encroach on my precious existing stock of qi as badly anymore. At the moment I am having disrupted sleep because of Ramadan so I am excited about starting again in July. I just wanted to say thank you to all of you who have been responding to me, I so enjoy reading this thread and find the people in it extraordinary. I have one question that has been bugging me for a long time that is not really related to qigong but that maybe someone can answer...I am very observant of my behaviour and habits and very keen to clean out my negative patterns or wrongdoings (spiritual cleansing is main reason I want to practise qigong) and am bothered by "sweeping the house while the wind is blowing in more dust". Meaning, as I heal, I am weary of picking up new karma as I go along. Is this not really a never-ending cycle of old wounds healing and new scratches or wounds forming? It would be so exasperating, taking a few steps forward and a step back every time is somewhat annoying. I am saying this as I have recently discovered that though it has been years that I have been mindful of my beliefs about myself and my place in this world, I had created a new self-deprecating belief not too long ago "in spite of myself". It makes me feel that with all the will in the world, I am having to work harder at being more conscious and with my limited knowledge I cannot always catch myself in time before creating more harm. Somehow I do believe that I can drastically advance in this lifetime but I am going to need to find ways of diagnosing myself within my subjective reality and that is not easy. Sometimes I feel that even the will to advance is something to unlearn as it is clearly a symptom of my being too demanding on myself, something that has always created stress for me (people are always surprised that I expect more from myself, even at the office). But this need is even harder to shrug off when I see my toddler modeling herself on me every day...these years are so formative for her. I worry about it and it is always a relief when I see that she is full of joy every day and when people make flattering comments about her personality (she is very loving, considerate, assertive and expressive). What kind of specialist do I have access to (via you) to help with this strong desire to assess my karmic health ? There is a strong need also to differentiate between what are reasonable expectations for progress and what is just a case of being too hard on myself... Thanks for any insights Astral_Butterfly

Wow I am going to check when I get home, as I have that type of foot! You have hit the nail on the head, when she started walking, she would walk on her toes and the creche used to accuse me of training her with a walker, something I have never done as I believe nature is the best teacher. She must be transferring her weight wrongly. I have already checked out her ears. I am very grateful for your advice, thanks a million.

Thank you! It's amazing how many things I learn about on this forum! Interesting stuff.

This is very interesting thank you very much. I will see what I can find to treat this. Pity she's a bit young for acupuncture...

I can attest now that no matter the state you are in, FP works its magic! Here is a very basic question. I did use the standing position before but I want to make sure: how do you know your posture is correct? Which muscles are supposed to be felt? How can you test if your back is straight? Since I cannot feel qi it is hard to tell. All i can say is I do feel a tingling in my upper arms and hands and I feel hot for long after the session. Is this a good sign? I assume that the vacillation means that the energy is ciculating? Till now I used the swaying as a test for the posture. thanks

thank you, her creche motor coach had advised us to make her walk bare feet and we have done this at home but what do you mean by uneven ground? Outside? Going to a nature spot where she can potter around? I wonder if we would be able to do that often enough to make a difference (there is a wood behind our place but it is winter now...)

Thank you very much Cihan!! very good to know this! Are the 30 minutes inclusive of the warm-up or should one do the warm-ups and do the bending the bows excercise for 30 minutes?

Thank you very much for this, I am really grateful for any help. I will pm you!!! A_B

Thank you all for the encouragement. I will forge ahead come what may!

Hi Sifu Terry Just another one please. I have a problem with tiredness. I had done one week at the office at lunchtime in a meeting room. It went very well. But after that I couldn't make it because I was snowed under with work. At home, I get up at 5:45 as it is, to get my child and I ready for the day and if I want to do FP at home I would have to get up at 4h30. In the evening I cook and clean and look after my child till I collapse (my husband works from 6:30am to 8pm on average so he can't help me). You did say it is not good to do when tired, but will it be of any use at all if I get up extra early every morning? Or will progress just be slower? I do recall you said to do it at the same time every day so I have to make up my mind because for me it is FP or nothing. And I can't stand the idea of nothing, I have to progress!!! I have so much to wrap up at work because I have to close all my projects what with it being year-end and all the invoicing going with it! No way I can commit to doing it at lunch every day under these circumstances! So can I do my 4:30 wake-up and still succeed? Thank you! A_B

Thanks for this clarification Tao Stillness it helps me understand and not feel like there is something wrong with me for not feeling it! Yes I am happy with FP too

The entities that lurk in these threads are just as much of a pestilence

Well there you go Tao Stillness. Whilst I may have great results from Flying Phoenix, the yigong posture did zero for me. I even went to workshops and practice workgroups but zilch happened. I tried it because it had dramatic results for lots of people but despite repeated attempts it did nothing for me! I tried it from Max Christensen's teaching, through an instructor locally. Apparently it is the same posture. Incidentally apparenty he is good at working out entities too but I cannot certify this.

Dear Sifu Terry Could you please explain what are all the stages required to make it up to such a level, how many people actually get there and how long on average they take? Also, is it okay for me to focus for as long as I can on one exercise of Level 1 at a time for a prolonged time ? (with warm-ups of course) I was thinking of doing each of the 5 for a month or so before moving on to the next one. Keeping the previous one(s) but for a much shorter time and doing the next one for long for another month, then the first two for a shorter time and the third for longer for a month and so on until I have concentrated on all this way. Or should I just do the whole DVD each time. I have another question. I had never thought of healing and martial arts being learnt as one wholistic practice in the long run. Forgive my ignorance, but thanks to you I have been reading a lot and it appears to me that kung fu is not just about self-defence and fighting, it is complete? I read somewhere that it is all a question of learning to recycle energy and one completes the other. Does this mean that the martial aspect is inevitably to be learnt by an aspiring healer if (s)he wants to get very far ahead? Even if one day I practise healing, will it be in my best interest to eventually take up kung fu? Or am I getting mixed up with definitions and it is so broad that the line gets very thin somewhere along the path and all exercises ultimately aim at one (broadly speaking) final ideal result - mastering of energies? I am just trying to get an idea of this because I also read your words making a distinction between healing chi and martial chi, it is all slightly confusing. I guess if one makes it that far, one has all the time in the world to ask questions from a clearer perspective and it is no use trying to understand too much right now, is it? Like what you said about knowing through practise? I guess another scenario is that people may "branch off" once they are satisfied that they have found the exercises that feed their aim and don't necessarily need to go further than a certain point. Funny, yesterday I saw a thick, impressive blue aura and today nothing. But no worries, it is only the 4th day thanks and best wishes

Thank you Sifu Terry for the encouragement. I am very happy about this and really didn't expect it just a few minutes into my first session! It is lovely and makes the practise all the more magical it is so weird!