Taomeow

There's many kinds of taoists. Some of the most famous ones have never been sober in their life -- e.g. Sun Wukong. And the amount of jing he has is second only to the Jade Emperor's. There's taoist sects heavily influenced by other modalities, many of which don't support any manifestations of human aliveness, but original taoism is fully human. Nothing is off limits, but balance, non-abuse and non-squandering are emphasized. So it's not "no wine" as much as "no alcoholism," not "no sex" but "no stupid unhealthy sex," not "no money" but "no greed," not "no anger" but "no cruelty." A transportation medium is the carrier substance for your medicinals that is used to extract them from the herb and deliver them to the body, whether internally or externally. Water is one, the most widely used in preparing medicinal infusions and decoctions. Sometimes water is used to prepare a soup first, then the liquid is strained and used to extract the medicinal properties of an herb or inactivate its toxins (e.g., he shou wu is traditionally prepared in black bean soup, otherwise it's toxic.) Vinegar, lye water, oil, milk, fresh and fermented juices, wine, hard liquor or pure alcohol are also used, and it takes expertise to know what extraction and delivery medium is best for what purposes. Hard liquor is one of the most widely used substances for extraction and delivery of medicinals. It also adds certain medicinal properties of its own, but one has to know indications and contraindications. Sometimes medicinal liquids are concentrated by evaporation and made into powders or pills, which in their turn are taken with a prescribed transportation medium, water or wine or oil, etc.. The same formula may ask for different delivery systems depending on the condition. E.g. yunnan baiyao, one of the formulas I always try to have on hand for any trauma, injury, dental visit, etc., is taken with wine if there's no bleeding, but if there is, then with water. The reason is that many traditional herbal formulas are very smart. Yunnan baiyao will improve circulation and blood supply to the injured site if taken with wine, but that's not the effect you want with bleeding. Whereas taken with water, it stops the bleeding! -- very efficiently, even the most dangerous kinds, like bleeding into the brain caused by a stroke.

Oh, no need to apologize, ZYD, I understand -- my objections were more tongue-in-cheek and in real life would come complete with a mock indignant face -- "Excuse me?.." "Between Heaven and Earth" has been sitting on my shelf for a long while, I'm sure its turn will come. (Get in line y'all, unread books I meant to read, get in line! I only have one pair of eyes and two competing brain hemispheres!) I've been studying TCM for some 18 years, in the early years with much intensity and dedication, and under professional guidance, but I nowhere near consider myself an expert because I lack a vast empirical pool to complement my vast theoretical but (relatively) modest hands-on exposure. To put it simply, I'm not a practitioner who does nothing but this every day, for years, decades, seeing hundreds, thousands of people. And I don't particularly trust anyone who's not a clinician. Sheesh, with today's TCM education model that has been dragged kicking and screaming as close as they could drag it to the allopathic model, I don't trust that many clinicians either. But don't let me hijack OP's thread...

Not with mine there aren't. I only answered the actual question -- what yang means of transportation can be used with jing tonics. Never made a peep about anything else. (Though I could, I surely could! But I wouldn't! )

Me neither. I turned our situation as a life form (dragging along all other life forms on the planet) this way and that way, socially, politically, economically, philosophically and mathematically, and have come to the conclusion that we are dealing with a structure that does not allow for invertible transformations. Anisomorphic (if you go to the real meaning of the word rather than online dictionary's ridiculous example).* The fact that nothing can be done about it doesn't mean I am going to deny the fact. Having a problem doesn't mean there's a solution. But the absence of a solution may be a temporary situation (even though the time frame for the solution to show up may far exceed the lifespan of any life form on the planet we might relate to in any way), whereas the denial of a problem drives the situation deeper into the problem's maw and can speed up the most destructive trends while delaying any hope for any solution by who knows how long. Here's an example of what I mean. Before 1945, cesium 137 particles did not exist in nature, "we" created them when we started exploding atomic bombs and having nuclear accidents. So now they are part of our environment, and the implications are permanent, because everything has been changed, not just the future (due to genetic mutations) but also the past. To wit, all pre-1945 stuff ever in existence is now sharply cut off everything that came after by this one marker. Our collective past, all the way back to the source, is now a past that at this one point (as well as billions of other, unaccounted for points) ceased to be related to what came after -- it may well have been the past of a different planet, galaxy, universe -- we are not directly descended from it anymore. Cesium 137 is what they will test a bottle of wine for to determine if it's a pre-1945 collector's rarity to be sold for hundreds of thousands or even a couple million dollars, or a fake. If it doesn't have cesium 137, it's real. It is impossible to create a fake pre-1945 wine that will pass the cesium 137 test, because no matter who, where, and how might want to fake it, it will have those telltale particles. But this is not the situation with a bottle of expensive wine alone. It's the situation with our world. If it's pre-transmogrification, it's coming from the source, it's real... If it has a billion artificially created features, it's coming from elsewhere. And is not related to anything real that originated from the source. So to go back to the real world, we would have to... ...well... ...un-red the light blue (see the asterisk entry). * Online dictionary asserts that an example of "anisomorphic" terms is that, unlike English, Russian treats dark and light shades of blue as "unrelated." What nonsense. There's two different words in Russian for dark blue and light blue, it's true, but nothing about having two words for shades of a color implies that the speaker considers them unrelated. In English (as in Russian too), there's a similar situation with, e.g., "red" and "pink" -- two different words do not, by their mere existence, imply that the speaker considers the colors they describe unrelated. Now "red" and "light blue" are indeed anisomorphic. Meaning, if you paint something that was light blue red, you can't revert it to light blue by adding less, more, or an equal amount of red. And if you are dealing with a material that is absorbent, and a color that is permanent, you can't "un-red" what you've painted by reversing your steps and mopping it up.

The best jing tonics transportation medium that is seldom considered in this capacity (except by those "in the know") because it has such a bum rap, due to the fact it is so easy to misuse, abuse, misunderstand and derive more harm than good from as a result, is alcohol.

The problem with comparing flavors of shit and choosing one over the other is, it's still shit, and the eater of a higher grade of shit proclaiming his superiority to the eater of the lower grade still eats shit. Ironically both seem to be appalled by the non-eater of any shit. "We" don't carry violence inside, and neither do chimpanzees until displaced from their natural habitat and stressed out into living something else, which inevitably turns them into something else. "We" have been stressed out into something else and taught to count our blessings, so your argument is perfectly compliant with what trauma-conditioned mind control predicts: the Stockholm syndrome. A very popular modern stance of vast mass appeal. Love thy abuser, because he purportedly saved you from a bigger, worse abuser -- yourself, with your "inner violence." It is pointless to compare industrial to pre-industrial brands of evil. The only valid comparison is between humans before they had an owner and after. The owner wears many masks. The current mask is called "technological progress." The previous one was "divine right to rule." The current one hides a machine gun under the pile of red tape, the earlier one hid a musket or a sword under the "sacred scriptures," but the difference is merely stylistic.

I think it portrayed hope for a way out -- in the form of "ascension," "enlightenment," some such. Rapture. One of my early gurus used to say, hope is dope. I am addicted to this kind of dope myself, that's why I'm a taoist. A taoist's hope is based on the natural order of things -- hope for extreme yang flipping into yin is realistic, the process is unstoppable and inevitable, and the challenge is to gain control of it, not just sit and hope. The film ending's hope, however, is that extreme yang will generate still more extreme yang as the way out. I don't think so...

Ack, I thought I saved it, technology tricked me into believing I did... ;( ...but I remember the gist of it. My reasoning went, in response to zerostao's: The medical term for the state of the human heart that is undergoing jerky, uncoordinated, irregular acceleration is not "progress." It is "ventricular fibrillation." If it is not reversed, cardiac arrest is not so much possible as guaranteed. Allowed to progress uncontrolled, the condition is fatal. This is the state of humanity's heart. Calling it "progress" makes it sound so much nicer though.

Can't confirm this about China but it is likely -- my books on Chinese culinary arts and medicinal foods (where many recipes are ancient) always say something like, "cook this and that, discard this, eat that, and drink the soup," not "eat the soup." So I'm guessing they fished out the solid parts with chopsticks (or with fingers, who knows) and the liquid was just chugged straight from the bowl. Native Americans had large ladles for soup, the size of a portion, sometimes made out of the heads of cattle (which gives you an idea of the size), and strictly individual. They used this ladle to get the whole individual portion from the communal pot, dipping it once for the purpose. They were very amused when first introduced to Western spoons, thinking they are used in a similar fashion but are way too small -- "won't you go hungry if you take so little?" Little did they know about the newcomers' appetite...

The ultimate test is bypass the tongs for sukiyaki and use chopsticks all the way -- here's a friend of mine operating them with such impeccability that a halo appears around his head:

Yes, the area between my shoulders and hips is not collapsing. In real-life situation both your pics above will cause it to collapse however, not just just the first one, because the head is tilted upward by the wrongly positioned pillow. The woman is supporting her upper body with her jaw, cheek, and sideways-bent neck. Also the "give" in the surface she's on is still excessive. As for the male body vs female -- I don't think it matters, but then, I've never lived in a male body. My son is every bit as fussy as I am about his sleeping surface (and got himself a high quality coconut mattress, which is very firm and pretty awesome) while his dad can fall asleep sitting in a chair, and I actually have a picture from his army days where he sleeps soundly on two little stools like one of those hypnosis subjects they used to demo to the public -- head on one, legs on the other, nothing in between. To each their own. The feel for opening or closing the mingmen is a complex affair, and if it was possible to explain in words, my taiji teacher would starve.

You're talking Mexico, right? I had the cultural embarrassment of a lifetime there once... Went to a Japanese restaurant in Tijuana with an American friend and his local one. The local was an MD, well-educated, bright, funny, good-looking, if he wasn't married I'd certainly take a second look and a third one... until that Japanese dinner. The waitress gave us chopsticks, me and the American friend started eating, the Mexican guy started stabbing his food with chopsticks, this way and that, and getting more and more annoyed, since his efforts yielded nothing to eat. I was about to show him how to handle chopsticks (have done it many times, my greatest victory was a traffic cop I taught to use chopsticks who, once he got it, got so excited that he asked for another pair to take home and practice), but before I had a chance, he threw them in disgust and yelled at the top of his voice, "Can we get some normal human utensils here?!!" The Japanese waitress meekly fetched three forks and knives... I literally figuratively felt like using one of the knives to cut his tongue out.

I ask for a box if I can't finish a meal -- don't like to waste what I (or whoever pays) paid for. Don't like the wasteful mentality in all its manifestations, actually. But "saving" a meal by stuffing it into my own body after the latter said "enough" is even more wasteful, "health care" as we know it is way more expensive than food! In my long gone but never forgotten childhood, I was expected to clean the plate (this was strictly enforced), but now that I've long been the master of my own stomach, I hardly ever do when eating out (when eating in I know how much I want) -- the portions are nearly always way too large for me, sometimes three, four times bigger than what I need (except at French restaurants where they tend to underfeed you for the money -- but I actually prefer the underfed feeling to the overfed one). You don't have to imagine putting wood on a stove. It's called a bamboo steamer. Well, I'm not that strict with my utensils, I use good quality enameled pots that are reputed to leak nothing into what's cooking (even stainless steel "enriches" your food with cadmium and the like), or cast iron skillets which actually add iron but nothing else. Ideally though it would be earthenware all the way, but nothing/nobody is perfect. Even Taomeow.

Everything is possible to eat with chopsticks -- you just need to practice. Of course starting early helps.

I used them before I was a taoist. For me, subjectively, they were part of "turning American" because I was never exposed to them in the old country but the very first restaurant in this one I was invited to was Japanese, so I got my first chopsticks lesson at the time I was also learning how to write a check, what a credit card is, how to type, how to drive a car, and so on. An American skill.

The path of least resistance includes your inner path through your digestive tract. Chopsticks make that path easier. Eating with chopsticks paces you, it takes somewhat longer but gives you a chance to start feeling that you've eaten enough much sooner (unless you use the chopsticks as a shovel -- I've seen that in a Japanese restaurant where a hurried mom was shoveling rice into her compliant little daughter's mouth, holding the bowl under her chin and both chopsticks together as one unit, and throwing rice into her mouth at a speed that may have merited a Guinness book of records inclusion). I've been using chopsticks for so long and like them so much that for me it's out of the question to eat anything at any Asian restaurant with any Western utensils. For some dishes, however, you need both the chopsticks and the spoon -- e.g. pho (a Vietnamese favorite) can't be comfortably (much less elegantly) eaten any other way than by using both. There's quite a few other dishes like that, any soup with those long noodles that are kept as long as possible and are not supposed to break (symbolizing long life), you can't eat with either/or, only with both, if you want to use the path of least resistance or don't want to go a-splashing hot soup onto your clothes. When using a spoon, I much prefer the Asian porcelain one to the Western metal one. I've read somewhere that traditional buddhist societies resisted metal utensils for 800 years -- and that includes pots and pans. From the wuxing POV, metal "weakens" and "defeats" wood, and "wood," in wuxing, is the same as "food" (yes, animals too.)

You are describing some unbendable stick-man body. I'm an hourglass woman, LOL. I never said "straight line," the "straight spine" does not mean it's in a straight line. It's in its physiological "closed" S shape which only becomes unphysiological when maintained constantly (as is the case with spines permanently frozen into this shape due to a combination of factors, from childhood developmental adversities to sedentary lifestyle to incorrect exercise routines to wrong idea in the head coming from images dispensed by the media to nutritional deficiencies to lifelong sagging beds and sitting toilets, to name a few.) The physiological shape of the spine is not straight. In motion it alternates constantly between J shape and S shape. Note though that the "live S "is nowhere near as dramatic as the graphics of the letter, the closing momentum is much subtler, but it's there, and designed for the "rest," "pause," yin part of the cycle. Whereas the J, for the "act," "move," yang part. People with frozen S spines act constantly out of an act-move-yang intent contradicted by the pause-relax-rest yin physical shape --their intent and their physicality are in a constant struggle. That's the source of much lower back pain in the world. In the sleep position I describe, the structure is subtly S-shaped, "closed for business," and it is maintained horizontally by that conforming and supporting (not sagging) pillow in the hollow between the shoulder and the lower part of the head, the physiological bend of the legs which are not kept straight and stiff either, and the release of the psoas inside the structure, and so on, so the weight does not rest on any one or two or three points but is distributed evenly along the whole structure. It's a structure, and it's taiji-like -- soft on the outside, strong inside, soft tissues soft, bones firm. It's all about alignments, and a firm foundation makes them possible. How I know the mingmen is closed -- well, I'm taiji and my teacher taught me to use it, and to use it, I have to feel it, so I learned to feel it. On the level of gross anatomy, it corresponds to either the S-shape or the J-shape (though subtly, subtly!), so when I sleep in a "closed" position, I feel it close. Whenever I shift in bed to change position, I open it, then close again upon finding the comfortable position that allows it. Another indicator -- no more lower back pain, which I lived with for a long time before I learned. It used to hurt smack in that area where it is located. I watch it like a hawk. Any twang there at any time means I'm doing something wrong, and then I investigate and adjust. "Qi absorption during the night" -- for this, you need to close the outer gates. What you're absorbing is not "out there," you need to go deeply inward. There's gates beyond gates there -- close the outer one, the inner ones will open. Don't close the outer ones and you'll keep regurgitating the agitation of the outer world -- e.g. in your dreams. I get maybe two or three mundane/meaningless dreams in a year. These also indicate I'm doing something wrong, so I try to investigate and adjust. So if you really look closer, the right sleeping position is also the right cultivation position, for those who are into that sort of thing. I only know the right kind of sleep for a taoist cultivator -- it goes through inner gates into dimensions that won't open unless you close the outer gates. At least in my experience they won't.

There's many intricacies. I don't sleep exactly in the buddha-like pose, there's individual adjustments. I was commenting on it as a "generally good" position, not my personal default position. My default is a function of many factors, temperature being one of them. E.g., a starfish position is fine when it's hot, but never when it's cold. As for camping, back in the day I spent several summers kayaking in the wilderness, and some nights were cold, some were bitterly cold -- so some hay borrowed from a haystack to place under the tent's floor was one option, but not always available (we were far from inhabited parts and a haystack was a rare encounter). But inside the sleeping bag designed to handle extreme cold, we would also wear wool clothes if necessary, in layers if necessary. Most of the time it would get warm and toasty in no time, even though only inches away from the ground. It's true that you absolutely don't want to sleep on a cold surface -- those sturdy peasants you brought up had a kang bed-stove and mostly slept on that in cold weather, not on the floor, if they could help it.

I don't have to check, I feel it. It keeps the mingmen closed for the night, which I find as important as closing your eyes for the night. When the surface sags, it causes the mingmen to stay open all through the night, and qi to leak out all through the night. That's when you wake up with stiffness and aches. When it's closed, qi accumulates and circulates, and you wake up feeling as though you did yoga or qigong or stretches in your sleep. I don't sleep on my back. I don't have any objections against this position in theory, but practically, it keeps me awake, on any surface.

"Flat butt" is in the eye of the trends beholder, no? Balloon butt is a very new (this century's) and physiologically dubious fashion, promoted by the same fetishists ruling the fashion industry that earlier invented balloon boobs, aided by plastic surgeons who are happy to balloon-pad, for profit, everything that moves to the tune of conditioned trends. This fashion, masquerading as beauty but, to a differently conditioned eye (and, especially, to a de-conditioned one) looking ridiculous, shall pass. (When I was a teenager, a sticking-out butt carried a stigma -- now it's the opposite...) An "average" Chinese butt, IMO, is more normal and anatomically correct, and is the outcome of the J-shaped rather than S-shaped spine, the former being the "real" human spine. I've seen so many good postures in China, including in older people many of whom probably never even notice that they have a great posture, and I see so few here in SoCal where everybody is obsessed with "fitness" and with looks to the point of absolute moronity yet the whole resulting shape of the human body understood as "fit" is way distorted, unphysiological, hard on the skeletal system and the internal organs... but I digress.

You may or may not get more nutrients. A few get enhanced and concentrated with prolonged thermal exposures but some (many) degrade from longer cooking. Taste and flavor will reveal this degradation to an experienced, discerning palate. If you cook onions, carrots, parsley etc. longer than an hour, the flavor they are supposed to impart will start evaporating, and in several hours much of it (if not all) will be completely lost. Another thing you may consider: the overall optimal times for herbal decoctions, known to herbalists regardless of whether they're making a medicinal or a culinary brew (traditionally they don't even differ in many cases) are such and such for dried/fresh material, roots/twigs, coarse leaves/soft stalks, tender leaves/flowers, and all of it applies here. An hour is actually a compromise and a shortcut -- ideally, you'd add parsnip and celery root an hour before the broth is done, the onion and carrot, forty minutes, parsley, ten minutes, bay leaf, three minutes. For some recipes I also use crushed garlic, this is added 15 seconds before the broth is done. The rest of your Qs I'll try to answer later. You're doing fine investigating the "whys" and "wherefores," but don't be surprised if you come across conflicting or dissenting info on youtube. People on youtube may have learned from other people on youtube. I learned from a whole family lineage of creative, imaginative, fundamentally traditional cooking, and then from every tradition in the world I could incorporate without spending too much time in the kitchen (don't want to, so anything too complicated, time-consuming, or mediocre taste-wise and/or nutrition-wise, I won't bother making. )

3. I've been sleeping on a surface like that for several years, ever since I came back from China, where two things happened. First, I encountered the hardest bed I ever slept in and six weeks of the best sleep I ever had. Second, a local massage therapist who had "seeing hands" told me, "You should sleep on a firmer surface." Putting two and two together, upon returning home I first looked to buy, and then (failing to find it) designed and made a bed to follow that advice, and never looked back. If I have to sleep in a hotel, I am more likely than not to drag the covers onto the floor and sleep there, with a rolled-up towel under my neck and head instead of that synthetic pillow that tries to kick your head out or roll it off or fry it, and keeps whispering in your ear, "get lost, you, I don't want to be a pillow, I'm petroleum, dark and ancient, and I want to be buried in the ground!! Take your stupid head off me or I'll take it with me!" 4. No, I'm saying something like this. I sleep on my right side, and this kind of pillow supports the neck and the head but does not press on the face, does not cause clenched jaws, does not lead to developing a double chin (one of the epidemics as people grow older, which I attribute to the wrong pillows), and in general makes life easier. I'm a very fussy sleeper. Some people sleep in any position with no qualms, I'm not one of them, so all my "qualms" are the outcome of "involuntary research" into the best ways to sleep spanning many years. The pillow in the picture is ideal provided you hit the right height. If you don't, adjust. All my pillows are customized and redesigned to fit my head and neck, not some generic one.

I clicked on your video and the ticking immediately caused me to brace myself for the ring and the opening lyrics: "Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day / You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way..."

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