Taomeow

And for those who can't tolerate not being full, whether of stomach, mind, or posting space, here's some food: intermittent fasting is great. For the stomach, mind, and posting space. Empty your cup. Then fill it again. Off to guiltless night munchies.

I think you may want to look at the position of the baby. That's where "horseback riding" in MA would come form naturally, and that's what "civilized" babies are deprived of. The ass is not meant by mother nature as a sexualized toy it has been turned into. It's meant for a human mother to help carry her child on her upright body. If she gets it at the gym to wiggle at interested males, both she and the males are way off. And that's where other normal developmental postural peculiarities of a human must come from. Now you're saying they still carry babies like that in China? I haven't seen it. Although I know they used to, I remember reading a book by the great American participant in Chinese life, Pearl Buck (who won the Nobel prize in literature for her novels about China, where she grew up), one of whose female protagonists, a matriarch of a large family, was feeling out of sorts when she "didn't have a child on her thigh." I remember this line puzzled me -- until I saw the above picture. Oh. That's how they used to give children correct postures.

Ain't it the truth. To deprive even one xenophobic wanker of his orgasms would be so cruel. What will other xenophobic wankers think? They will cry censorship! They will beat their heartless breast and scream freedom of speech! They will shake their brainless heads and accuse you of political correctness! They want bloody diarrhea all over the forum, and they want everybody to lap it up, and it's hard to please them any other way! Yes, I remember.

You need to hold off on beets in your juice. Beet juice must never be consumed right away, unlike all others. It has to be left standing in an open container for a minimum of an hour, or longer. No time to explain, but try it and see if it changes anything.

Ask away. http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/08/412314701/lost-posture-why-indigenous-cultures-dont-have-back-pain

Thanks for the robot version, Cheya! I had the original instructions in Russian, but figured the Japanese version is where it comes from. Yes, it was posted as a weight loss method! The idea was that when your spine adjusts into its proprietary J shape (instead of the deformed S shape you find in Western anatomy books), the pelvis adjusts too, and the room opens up for the stomach to get "sucked in" naturally, instead of bulging out the way it does in so many people. In some it definitely bulges out because misaligned pelvic structures sort of push it out. So it's not so much about loss as redistribution of weight, the stomach gets flatter, is all. However, I've noticed that prolonged and intense stretches (and this one can be made intense if the roll is thicker and if you stay like that longer) jump-start deeper breathing, perhaps increase metabolism too, so maybe there's other weight loss effects from doing them too. This one is great for working out any "kinks" from the lower back, e.g. from sitting too long in front of the computer. Which brings me to the next point. The kidneys don't work well in the sitting position. Chairs are not part of how we evolved. The filtering system is not designed to go on a bend. You have to either be standing or lying down or squatting for the kidneys to work properly. When you're sitting, the don't. That's one reason any good taoist cultivation routine always combines sitting meditations, however prolonged, with some type of qigong engaged in for at least an equal amount of time.

Not the floor, since I also follow certain classical feng shui rules and it's considered bad juju to sleep on the floor, subconsciously you won't feel safe and won't relax completely. A Japanese style hard futon is good, or a mattress of coconut fibers on a platform bed, in general no springs, no slats, a platform type foundation with either a hard topper or a thin soft one that does not sag. I bought a plywood board to put on top of the futon slats and a thin topper on top, resulting in a bed that you can't plump onto without hurting your butt, or throw yourself onto without bumping your head. It was experimental, I thought maybe I'd buy a Japanese or coconut version if the prototype works well, but it proved to work so well that I don't plan to replace it. Sleeping on your back is the best of course, but I am not a back sleeper, although the neck pillow might eventually help reprogram for that. Not yet. The pillow is a "sausage" stuffed with buckwheat, which I tied all over with a ribbon for structural integrity, it does not sag or give. A tightly rolled towel can be used to create the same effect. I also have a traditional Chinese neck pillow which is wooden, but it's not the right height for me (too high), I might be on a lookout for one that is, since this is the only thing that occasionally facilitates sleeping on my back, but would need to be adjusted for height to be perfect. I also use that buckwheat thing for a Japanese stretch that works amazingly well. Here's the instructions. It's in Japanese but everything is shown so it is pretty clear what to do. The pillow has to be positioned exactly at the level of the bellybutton.

Let me add my absolute favorite stretching routine. I sleep on a hard surface. That's all, folks. Several years ago, when I discovered the miracle, it only took me a couple of days to adjust, and I feel I've been reaping the benefits ever since. I used to wake up stiff and achy as though sleeping is hard debilitating physical work, and everybody past their teenage years, twenties, thirties tops, would cite the same pattern. It just didn't make sense. Well, on a soft surface it was indeed hard work. Your body can never stretch out and relax properly if your back is sagging, your neck is cutting off circulation from your head, and parts of your body press on other parts of your body with their whole weight in search of support. The hard bed is like a stretching routine engaged in all through the night. Your all joints open and your all muscles truly relax and your bones gain the breathing space they need. Think developmental history. There's no memory foam in my genetic memory. There's no metal springs, no down toppers. There's two memories the body has of how to relax and recharge during sleep. A more recent one -- of the way we slept for some 400,000 years -- on a hard surface lined with maybe a pelt. And an earlier one, of the time we brachiated and made our beds in the trees the way chimps make them, weaving together branches into a rocking wraparound for the body, with the head and the legs sticking out, replicating the relaxed position of a baby in her mother's arms. That's all. The second version (which I've read a Japanese company started making and plans to launch commercially, a circular wraparound bed on eight legs for the gentle rocking effect, which sounds very inviting but will probably cost a fortune when/if it becomes available) is currently for chimps only, but the first one I replicated to my body's great stretching satisfaction. I also use a hard neck pillow instead of a soft head pillow. This was harder to adjust to than the bed, but I just don't want to either clench my jaws, develop a double chin, or get headaches. Ever if I can help it and if gods don't deem any of that necessary for their own mysterious purposes. So far it's no mystery, it's the pillow.

The taiji way to push against resistance when doing a solo form is to do it in a vat of honey. This way you also stretch your mind. The honey is imaginary, but you move, for purposes of this exercise, keeping in mind at all times that you are in a sticky, resistant medium. Hard to push into, hard to pull out of, every single move is against resistance. The honey can be almost runny or almost crystallized solid, depending on how difficult you want to make it. The thicker, more difficult honey slows down your movement to a greater extent, and this kind of training is partially the reason for doing the forms slowly (not the only one of course). Add to this "sitting" in that vat of honey rather than standing, i.e. a low stance, and you will stretch the hell out of your lower body while gaining stability of all the elongated parts. When you face real-life resistance in the form of a push-hands opponent, he or she will merely be more of the same, just a sticky, resistant something-to-overcome. My teacher calls the exercise "honey bear," because you are supposed to push against this imaginary honey with the strength of a powerful bear.

Impressive. I can easily switch between English and two other languages and not so easily a fourth, but the rest my mind has thrown together into a generic pile labeled "foreign languages," and if I go digging there I never know what might hit me -- it's like MMA there.

Yeah... and the real swimming starts once the ocean is dropped. Dropping the form before it is embodied is where McTaiji stars. Dropping it after it's embodied is impossible. You can't help understanding what I write because you can't drop the neural wiring created in your brain that has shaped it into a brain that can read English. Nor is there any need. if you are sick of English, you can always revert to another language or learn a new one.

I wish I could introduce you to a man who flies in from Europe for taiji training with my teacher every year. He is short and skinny and has the body of an undernourished boy of 14 even though he's almost 60, and he has always looked like that. He was always targeted by bullies when he was younger, but the bullies always backed down because he would have this inner resolve -- ready for anything, not afraid. It's in his posture, which is royal due to a combo of many years of taiji and a genuine self-respect and a sense of personal worth. He's popular with women too. Was married four times and is not done with his adventures in that respect yet. He seems to eat very little but it's never on his mind that he's "too small" -- too small for what? He knows he's not too small for anything. I would suggest cultivating this feeling instead of trying to overrule what your body tells you about how much food it wants. I've met other guys like that, guys who started out small or skinny or sickly or insecure so they were feeling weak, powerless -- who proceeded to make themselves into anything but, not by faking it, but by cultivating inner strength, which eventually translated into outer sense of power not contingent on body size or shape. Of the ones I haven't met but have read about, a tiny boy comes to mind who wore thick glasses not only far removed from a fashion statement but repaired with a piece of wire because he had no money to buy a new frame. His name was Bruce Lee. Another tiny skinny boy who started a revolution in the minds of millions was named Carlos Castaneda. Yet another one was called Julius Caesar.

That's good to know. I have never been to a yoga studio, flashy or not. I learned some yoga from books by Swami Satchidananda and a couple others who had a reputation for being genuine, none of them Westerners. But that was a long time ago. I went through the experimenting phase before zeroing in on "my thing." I did a bunch of stuff at the experimental stage, not just asanas but quite a lot of raja yoga, some arcane Hindu meditations, and yes, the closest I came to genuine yoga was by self-study, all yoga teachers I encountered were somehow off... I read people well, and they were way off. Although I've heard about good ones too, but never met one who would ignite the desire to follow and learn. With taiji, it was the opposite. My every cell said "yessss!!" after the first one minute interaction with my future teacher. And I have quite a bit of natural ability for yoga and, at the time, was absolutely non-taiji in the habitual use of my body, very flexible but the yoga way, very much in need of internal stability and balance. That's another thing... in yoga I know of (and I'm no expert of course), the balance is achieved by anchoring yourself outside yourself, e.g. by fixing your gaze on an external object I think this is consistent with the whole guru tradition, the source of your spiritual strength is not inside you, it's someone else. I am very respectful of that tradition but I'm wired differently... So even when my body said "yoga," my mind said, "no, taiji!" Well... the body had to catch up. In taiji, the mind is the general. Your own mind.

Thanks for the explanations. The taiji lineage I was talking about is not orally transmitted. The orally transmitted ones go way farther back. I was specifically referring to written documented lineages. China has been a bureacracy for a very long time. Your explanations seem to corroborate exactly what I was originally saying in response to Dusty's query: not all stretches are created equal and not all stretches serve universal purposes, there's specific techniques toward specific goals, and the ones used for taiji purposes are not the ones used in yoga. Yoga as it is available to an average Westerner (or Indian for that matter) who wants to keep his or her body in good repair is not the same yoga that requires celibacy and the rest of it of a devout follower of a spiritual guru. The former does not do the work I described that is done in taiji toward a body that embodies taiji, and the latter is not "a stretching routine," it's a lifestyle alteration. I think we may find a way to agree that I was not wrong in my assessment, since from your description, any yoga one is likely to encounter in real everyday life is going to be McYoga, and any yoga that is not McYoga cannot be encountered without canceling one's life. Because taiji has no requirements other than practice, imposes no restrictions whatsoever on one's lifestyle or belief system while providing (in the case of the real thing) access to its own developmental history which one is not required to have faith in anything in particular in order to be able to verify (this is neither "scientific" nor "scientifically incredible," this is just good housekeeping), it can be approached by anyone in search of authenticity -- and then the authentic teacher might open the door and it's up to the student to do the leg work. There's very, very mysterious places to go from there, but not everyone is looking to taiji for that. I do, but I know there's no shortcuts... so I stretch the taiji way to reach what I'm after.

This is interesting and quite believable. Taoists have their own stories (and sources uprooted archeologically) pointing to the ancient prehistoric origin of taiji and qigong. But by "lineage" I mean something documented with names and biographies and years of study and places where such study was undertaken... who was whose teacher and who was his or her teacher's teacher and for how long, and so on. E.g. I know my taiji lineage for sure 12 generations back, and am the 13th generation in that particular line. It is very likely to be much older, but I only know it, with all the information I mentioned, from the 17th century, i.e. from Chen Wanting. It is unbroken and documented for nearly four hundred years. That's what I was wondering about in terms of the alternative to McYoga -- is there anything similar to be found in yoga? And if not, how does one find the "authentic Hindu source?" What kind of proof of its authenticity does a master offer if the student happens to be interested in getting the authentic art rather than this or that "Kumare?" Remember Kumare?

I second this recommendation.

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That's possible. Can you point out a genuine yoga lineage that is not McYoga? The ancient practitioners of yoga used it as a cosmology and a fighting art and did produce some formidable martial traditions. Religious appropriation may have done away with that long before McYoga though. This hasn't happened to taiji yet, but the tendency toward McTaiji (from "wushu" to "competition forms" to "taiji is not a martial art, it's for health" to DVD-taught "masters") is relentless. However, we are still lucky to have the real thing in unbroken lineage transmissions, and with a modicum of research are able to zero in on the genuine article. I don't know the situation with yoga, but I have never seen yoga that can be used to kick someone's ass except in some rare footage from a Dzogchen monastery in Tibet, but practitioners of that yoga, which did strike me as powerful and genuine, never teach the public.

1. This depends on my diet. I am at peak flexibility if I avoid all grains. Less so if I eat some. And the least flexible when I fall off the gluten-free wagon. Nothing glues your joints together worse than the glue. 2. Yes, absolutely. E.g. very few yoga stretches are compatible with taiji, and none of the ones that lock the joints or overstretch the ligaments or both. A prime example is Snake Creeps Down. It is very easy to do the yoga way, very hard to do the taiji way. The taiji way relies on elongating the spine, opening the qua, smoothly operating the psoas up and down, and being able to transfer the weight/qi/power from the back to the front 100-0 to 0-100 -- to name a few intricacies. The yoga way is easy peasy, you just stretch out the ligaments, this requires no leg strength, no joints control, no spine "unfusion," no internal muscles involvement. So, this has to be done the taiji way for a real deep impact. 3. Yes.

I have experimented with assorted green teas and make them on occasion, also have mastered matcha, to an extent... but I don't feel as confident about my green gongfu as about my training since early childhood in black tea gongfu. Let alone coffee. I could and probably should start a coffee mystery lineage someday. But since this is about tea, here's my black Russian tea gongfu: black Ceylon tea, the best you can find. I don't know where to find the best. It's hit and miss. I remember the taste of the real thing, but it was one and only when I was growing up, and it's not there anymore. So, any Ceylon with good Amazon reviews these days. Warm a porcelain tea pot with some hot water. Mine is English, the pot that is, not the water, and part of the charm is to use a tea pot that is aesthetically appealing and to love it. The water is deep artesian, from a local source in Carlsbad, CA, which I blissfully get delivered to my home -- their delivery range is pretty much microlocal, and I'm in the range. Our tap water is undrinkable. Discard the water used to warm up the pot and put four heaping teaspoons of tea leaves in the pot, pour water over them that just this second has come to a full boil but was not allowed to boil or it will lose oxygen. I use a kettle with a whistle to tell me when, even though I prefer traditionally designed kettles with a long, sensuously curved spout, but I lost a lot of water to sheer absent-minded evaporation when I had one of those, so aesthetics had to be sacrificed to utility. (I never use electrical devices for any food or drink purposes.) The pot is filled to 3/4th its volume. That's going to be the tea concentrate, zavarka. This has to steep a minimum of 5 minutes. Then you pour some of it into the cup and add hot water, regulating the proportions by color and personal tea strength preferences of the drinker. I like to bring the water in the kettle almost to a boil for the second time for this, but that's optional. The concentrate will last 24 hours, so you can drink your next cup whenever you like in a similar fashion within this period. This is the kind of tea you drink either as is or use the same technology to make what they call chai tea, or tea with lemon and honey, or tea with cream, or tea with fruit preserves or with whatever snacks. It is cozy tea. Non-ceremonial. I drink it whenever it's too late in the day for coffee. But I do make it "just so" -- which is what gongfu is about. A somewhat rigid procedure, polished to perfection and adjusted between the hoary tradition and personal preferences. My preference is to drink it every which way, depending on the season, the mood, and the time of the day. I won't make it weak early in the day, won't make it strong in the evening. I make chai tea with Indian spices I mix myself in colder months. I drink this tea with munchies when watching a movie or reading a book. These days it seldom serves its primary purpose, that of a social drink. When it does, I serve it with fruit or berry preserves, honey, lemon, cheese, and whatever snacks are handy.

Happened today in Turkey during a live news broadcast. Judging by this kitty's confidence and competence in the environment, he might be a reincarnation of a past anchor.

Nothing wrong with that. This stuff you go deeper into only if it beckons. Calls out. Sometimes fainter with time, and sometimes louder. In my case, years ago the call of cognitive neuroscience was loud and clear, but once I "got" what it was talking about, which did take a few years and a lot of integration, I came to a place where I decided it has already told me all it had to tell me and stopped listening all that closely. With wuxing, it's the opposite. A faint whisper at first, with time it became one of the main themes of a great symphony.... So I'm not likely to stop listening and, on occasion, playing this or that tune I've discerned...

What his success is based on? Any number of factors. Linking neurotransmitters to TCM in a wrong way may not have interfered with his empirical observations and intuitively correct conclusions to an extent that it would cancel his insights. The same individualized approach could be focusing on entirely different factors -- e.g. in thyroid vs. hypothalamic-pituitary vs. balanced giants in basketball, we are dealing with three different personality types who all benefit from individualized approach. To discern the type without knowing anything about the underlying endocrinology is quite possible for an observant, keen, experienced coach. To misname and misattribute what he observes, ditto. As for Fire with Water meaning someone is Water dominant -- well, a label means nothing without a deeper understanding of the underlying system. What does Water dominant mean? Someone well versed in wuxing analysis discerns many different meanings that can boil down (pun?) to Water dominance. A person has a proprietary phase and a dominant phase that don't necessarily overlap, a deficient and an excessive phase which may overlap with the former, and any number of scenarios in which one is overusing -- abusing -- the excessive phase, precisely because it is easy to come by, and deepening the overall imbalance long term. Say one's proprietary phase is Fire, but Water is his dominant one, and he's Metal deficient, Earth deficient, Fire deficient. This scenario will mean that he may accomplish everything he is to accomplish by relying on his dominant phase, Water, by throwing it on the Fire to produce spectacular steam engine power, but after a brief career the resource will be exhausted, the proprietary phase done for, and the ex champion will develop heart disease (as many do) because excessive Water will be putting out the Fire which the deficient Earth won't be able to replenish. So, success in sports is indicative of nothing at all except for the fact that a way was found to rely on whatever is abundant. It may be abundant at the cost of depleting something else, however, which is why professional athletes are hardly ever paragons of health beyond their prime, and are not famous for their longevity either. Wuxing analysis is a taoist science that requires years of study and practice to master. Cognitive neuroscience, ditto. Superficial parallels to draw between the two based on this or that aspect looking familiar is -- well, I dunno. A sport?

All neurotransmitters are Fire. Some are yin Fire and some are yang Fire. Some are Fire with Wood and some are Fire with Metal and so on. The Fire with Fire one is missing, incidentally, the author overlooked it and went for "balance of the four" as the fifth-- nope, that's not wuxing, which is "five phases" -- but I know it well, since it acts as a primary neurotransmitter in only about 9% of the population and I fall into that category. It's nitric oxide, NO, and it's a gas... in both senses. Rule of thumb: if it's something that acts first and foremost via a firing of a neuron, something that causes a neuron to fire, it's a Fire phenomenon in the body. All neurotransmitters and hormones are of the Fire phase. It's not for nothing that the traditional taoist model of human physiology categorizes all these intangibles under the Triple Burner system. The heartmind, i.e. the psychological manifestations of the Fire phase in the human body, both the source and the recipient of neurotransmitters, can be tweaked with by pouring gasoline or water or throwing wood on that Fire. In this sense, neurotransmitters are what gets it to burn and what regulates its burning and what burns -- simultaneously. One can of course study them for their more precise wuxing features and discern Fire with Wood, Fire with Water, and so on, and this way one might know what it is exactly that she throws into the Fire when she reads a book, eats a chocolate bar, smokes a cigarette, or takes a nap. I've done this work some years ago and am very rusty... but I will look at the Braverman test, see if anything there rings any real bells, and report back. Thanks for an interesting exercise.

Walker, that was a very interesting and stylistically rewarding read. Reminded me that quite a few disillusioned doctors abandoned medicine to pursue a successful literary career, from Anton Chekhov to Michael Crichton... who incidentally had many, many unkind things to say about Harvard medical school in his autobiographical book, "Travels." Did you ever go to a med school in the US? What are you comparing the picture you have observed in China to? Not for the medical arts, but I did go to school both in an Orwellian enough country and in the US. Both shocked me with the level of the unnecessary, the undoable, the bureacratically insane, the intellectually disabling and the spiritually deflating aspects of their respective curricula. And I hear in the med school it is way, way worse. I think it's not something one can blame a particular country or area of study for. Wherever you go and whatever you learn, you'll be climbing over barricades of garbage to get to the -- well, in many cases, to the dumpster. Zeitheist...