Taomeow

In taiji, one of the first things I heard in the very first lesson, countless moons ago, was "listen to the back." At the time it was vague enough of course, but already I could tell that this simple instruction flies in the face of our whole cultural conditioning. We are supposed to look forward and "look forward to" this and that, "move ahead," "make progress," "put things in perspective" and so on. "In hind sight" we usually only refer to mistakes and a lack of understanding back then. So I started thinking about it from the get-go, trying to unlearn a lot of ingrained unconscious habits all having to do with "not listening to the back" -- both figuratively and literally. Typically, people's awareness goes there only when the back hurts, feels out of whack, stiff or tired or otherwise not right, i.e. they only "hear" it when what it says is "ouch." In taiji, you learn to listen to what else it has to say when "ouch" is eliminated. So, putting the mind there consciously, moving your awareness to include your back, is the prerequisite for doing whatever comes next. In taiji, what came next was the skill of separating the spine, and thereby the whole body, into the upper and lower parts, with opposite vectors of inner motion -- down and up from the mingmen simultaneously, like a rubber band being pulled by heaven and earth; then turning this rubber band into a bow and arrows for all directions in all applications; with many, many in -between steps. In stillness practices, you would perhaps do whatever the school is up to, and IMO the litmus test of whether it's worth it is whether it starts out by being 'up to' going down. That's another neglected direction in our culture, we are forward and up and at'em kind of culture -- back and down are our weak suit. Your weak suit is what needs the bulk of your work though. If it does not start by directing the energies down, I generally avoid any and all practices involving the head and the spine. Of course later -- much later -- you go wherever you want, you are not stuck in a one-way street.

I couldn't find that story about the Buddhist abbot coming back as a cat, but I remember reading that it was well documented by some British visitors who were astonished to see the monks bow respectfully to the resident cat and protect him by posting guards whenever visitors showed up. They explained that when the old abbot died, the cat showed up who convinced the monks very soon that he was the abbot's reincarnation. The abbot headed the monastery for many years and had a very distinct routine, which he followed every day. At certain times during the day, he would take a long slow walk around the premises, stopping in particular locations to observe or contemplate this and that, sitting down on a particular bench to rest, and then returning via a route that also never changed for many years, perhaps decades. Well, this new cat started doing exactly the same thing from day one. Take a long slow walk at exactly the same time, stopping at exactly the same spots, then sitting on the same bench, etc.. There were other peculiarities about him, and since the monastery belonged to the particular school of Buddhism (forget which, possibly a brand of Zen influenced by Shinto) that does not see animals as inferior to humans, and therefore finds no shame in an enlightened human reincarnating as an enlightened animal, they all agreed that the old abbot must have found it unbearable to leave them all just yet and came back as a cat so he could immediately resume the life he had been accustomed to.

We live in a culture of imitations, simulacra, illusions, as-ifs. With the sacrament in particular, the real thing used to be performed by a shaman chosen by the spirit world, not appointed by the church authorities. The sacrament was an entheogen, which did not require faith or qualifications from the lay folks partaking of it, it worked for the same reason your ignition works when you turn the key. Magical technology works like any other -- you have to know what you're doing when you use it. Some magical technologies are more user-friendly than others, anyone can press a button -- and, provided they know which button to press, the thing will be turned on. Others are not user-friendly and require an expert to operate. Even if it's just driving a car, it is not obvious how to make it work if you have never been told or shown how to start it, and don't know that you need a charged battery and some gas in the tank. Once you know, it's a no-brainer. With magical technologies, however, information is withheld -- part of it, or all of it. You are told that you can drive a car if you pour "the blood of a lamb" into the gas tank, so to speak. And then you take an imaginary journey in a car that never started. That's how our organized religions dispense magical procedures -- just so that they don't work. Of course lay folks are unlikely to stumble upon the absolutely correct magical technology by going through whatever motions without knowing the whole deal. Something will be missing, something will be amiss in a typical case. The real deal is kept secret. And a lot of it is not dabbler-friendly. It's very easy to convince people that it's not real when indeed what they are left with is simulacra. They are asked to "have faith" -- that's something you need when you are dealing with a non-working model. Have faith, be a child, play the game, use your imagination, put together two chairs and have faith that it's a car to take you places. No faith is required in the case of the real thing. It just works. But you have to have the real thing, and the real procedure. That's as rare as a real BMW on the shelf in the nursery where a 3-year-old's toy cars are kept.

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It's been my experience too. The cats I knew were all different to the same extent people are different -- no more, no less. For many years I hoped to find the reincarnation of my most beloved cat, Barsik ("little leopard" in Russian), whom I lost when I was 10. There were many stray cats in our city, you could always spot a cat or two here and there wherever you went, and I was looking for my cat all the time. I didn't know anything about reincarnation, but at the time, I invented it and wished for it to manifest. My silent covenant with whatever powers in charge of such things (I was raised an atheist) went as follows: yes, I know it's impossible, but I won't worry about the how of it if it happens -- if he comes back, I will accept him with no questions asked. I don't care how he comes back, as another cat who is Barsik, or as himself back from the dead. (Well, no Pet Cemetery horrors back then, so I didn't imagine anything Steven King style sick and morbid.) It took me at least two years to stop looking for my cat. Then I got another cat. I regret to this day not loving him as much as he deserved, he was a wonderful cat, with legendary good looks and the sweetest, mildest disposition. But he was most definitely not Barsik. Barsik had been full of mischief, a troublemaker, a daredevil, he was one of those cats they make Youtube videos about today that get a million hits. The new cat had nothing of that nature in him. Timid, eager to please almost like a dog. Sigh. My next cat was like a sister to me for 18 years. Nothing like the previous two, not much cat about her -- she considered herself human and got upset if she was treated as a cat. She didn't like cats. She liked people. She tried to prove to me that she was human every day, in every way -- e.g., by learning how to speak. She would enter the room with a hello -- always, no exceptions. Well, not this exact pronunciation, she had a special word for hello -- "nya," fourth tone if you know Chinese. She always said "bye" or "well, I'll be going now" when she left the room -- always. Also "nya," but third tone. I could write a book about her human behaviors and more than behaviors -- she had human mentality. That of a very good human being. Whose only flaw was, she didn't like cats. And so on...

The causes are multiple. Different for different people, or a combination of several. Here's off the top of my head: Number one: high levels of testosterone. One function of testosterone is to stimulate hair follicles in specific areas of the body, notably on the face, in males, while lower levels stimulate hair on the head but prevent such stimulation elsewhere in females, which is why we normally don't grow beards. We have the same follicles in the same areas, but without sufficient testosterone stimulation they don't flourish. Some men have higher testosterone levels and overstimulate their follicles on the head, which causes them to get depleted and eventually stop functioning -- so a man who is very hairy in his youth (high testosterone) is more likely to grow bald later. The levels of testosterone tend to be hereditary, all other things being equal, so if one's dad and granddad went bald, he is more likely to follow suit. Number two: environmental adversities. Notably radiation, and other kinds of oxidative stress. If it's high, women might go bald too -- e.g. chemo patients. If it's not too high, women are less susceptible than men for reason number one. Number three: dietary deficiencies. Again, males are more at risk for reason number one. There's many nutrients that synergistically work to maintain one's hair. If they are low in the diet, or missing, hair might suffer. Number four: endocrine disorders. Thyroid, in particular, but also a bunch of others. Number five: local, e.g. from wearing a hat too much (hair needs to breathe), using shampoo/conditioner with toxic chemicals (most have them), washing one's hair too much or not enough, using water for this that's too hot, neglecting massage of the head with a good brush which stimulates adequate blood flow to the follicles, to name a few. Number six: chronic or acute stress. Some people get grey hair from this, and some lose hair, but the mechanism is similar -- blockage/spasm caused by high levels of circulating stress hormones. Now about regrowing hair naturally once someone is bald. That's pretty hard to pull off. There's stories and methods, but stories are not consistent or reliable, and methods are pretty time-consuming and intense without guaranteeing success. Prevention may be one's better bet. Bonus prize: reportedly, Julius Cesar's maid, observing him lament his hair loss in front of the mirror, told him, "Great Cesar, nature in her wisdom gives something to every man. To some, she gives luxurious hair. To others, she gives a brilliant mind. Seldom if ever does she give both to the same person. You got the better deal, is all."

Venerable sages, can someone recommend a good textual source (in English) for Chinese swordsmanship, taoist jian, and/or around these topics? The interest is pragmatic, and is both general and specific. Specifically, I want to find out if any texts exist on the technique of drawing a jian from the back. I know it's not done in modern times -- the length of the jian exceeds that of your arm, so, no go. But I've heard rumors that taoists used to not only carry jians on the back -- as Lu Dongbin does in this picture, e.g. -- -- but possessed either a special design of the scabbard that enabled them to draw the jian from the back (the speed of the move is crucial in some situations, an attacker might not wait an extra few seconds for you to get the scabbard into a convenient position in the front to draw your weapon), or -- second rumor -- there exists a move you can execute which teachers kept secret from students because teaching this move would make the student quite dangerous should they ever have a falling-out, or because the teacher always wanted to stay ahead of the student and never taught everything -- until the secret either got lost, or became very hard to research out of oblivion. Would greatly appreciate any and all pointers if anyone can offer any.

Nah, don't worry about the mic. It's just this:

"The sage changes like a leopard, the inferior person discards the face." One of my favorite lines in the I Ching. How does a leopard change? Leopards do it very subtly, they don't shed their whole skin like snakes, nor their tail like tadpoles, nor transform drastically into something else like caterpillars. They shed some fur in accordance with the season, grow thicker fur when the time is right, change the glossiness, the fluid play of movement under the surface, so the light refracts differently and waxes iridescent on their body. They change as subtly and gradually as day changes into night, night into day. They turn into a play of light and darkness, of shade and brightness, but they do it with and within the body they have. The "inferior person" seeks "total transformation" and "transcendence" and "discarding the body" as something unwanted, discarding the "me," the "who I am" as something alien or inferior or bothersome -- "ego," "ignorance," "gross matter," etc.. For all purposes it's similar to betraying and abandoning an unwanted child. They seek to discard who they are because they feel that who they are is not that great. The sage does not do that. She seeks to cultivate herself if she's dissatisfied -- not erase herself, not eradicate who she is. She plays with and within who she is... trying on a different kind of sensitivity, a different kind of interactions with a different kind of phenomena, a different kind of strength, a different kind of beauty, a different kind of wisdom... but not discarding herself. She is the leopard. Not the tadpole.

Perhaps. I've heard many stories about its power, and observed what must be it in others, but personally, I have never experienced the placebo effect. Somehow I'm immune. Will tell you another story to illustrate what I mean. When I first came to the US, that was before Western sodas made an appearance in the country I left behind, and "diet" beverages were unknown. I was very enthusiastic to try everything new, I was fascinated by what seemed as an endless variety of consumer stuff to consume, and I had my first sip of Pepsi mentally geared to give it the most favorable review. It proved too sweet for my taste, so I thought, OK, next I will try "diet" Pepsi, "diet' must mean it has less sugar, right? I didn't know anything about aspartame, I thought "diet" means not as excessively sugared. So next day I got myself a can of Diet Pepsi during lunch break. Came back to work, opened the can, took a sip... spewed it right out nearly getting my boss in the face (a nice guy, merciful and forgiving ) and started yelling in panic, "Oh my god, Mr.T., I think I have been poisoned, this can has been tampered with or something, I taste some awful poison! What do I do?.. Do I call 911? I'm scared!" Mr. T. bravely took a sip himself despite my protests. "It tastes OK," he said, "a normal diet Pepsi. What's gotten into you?" What had gotten into me was immunity to placebo effects... People who drink this expect and believe that it's sweet. So did I. But instead I tasted what it really was. So, I can't be the judge of how the placebo effect works, because for better or for worse, it does not work on me.

I've been studying and practicing taoist sciences for many years and have come to the conclusion that you are the most amazing and most advanced technology in the universe, but you don't have the operating manual for how to use it. No lab is equipped to measure what this technology can do -- because their function is to do something opposite, to wit, to keep you so busy playing with (and obeying) trinkets that you never look in the direction where that lost (or, rather, stolen) manual can be retrieved. Well, I've found a bunch of pages and started studying it. And that's why I have a bit of access to a bit of the most amazing technology that I am. Nowhere near all of it yet. Maybe one-tenth of one percent. Maybe less. But even with this I've done things that you can't explain away with that catch-all bucket, "placebo." What was the placebo effect of my installing remedies at home after I determined, with Xuan Kong feng shui, that of the two job offers my husband was considering, one would mean disaster, for reasons I could neither comprehend not guess at but decided to trust the taoist science that gave me this conclusion? The moment I did install that "placebo," the calls from the company that, of the two, was the one he was leaning toward, stopped, suddenly all the people who had been very passionately interested in hiring him just fell off the face of the earth. So he took the second offer. The day he started work there instead of place number one was September 11, 2001. The job he would have taken if it wasn't for my "placebo" was on the 103rd floor of one of the towers. There were no survivors on that floor. Yes, not measurable by "modern scientific" methods. Measurable and occasionally do-something-aboutable by mine. Giving you just one example from my own experience -- not the only one, not the most dramatic one. Oh, and when they tell you that "primitive" tribes would think you're a god if you point a laser beam in their direction, they are flattering themselves and flat out lying. In reality, uncontacted tribes, upon being contacted in this manner, don't see us as gods at all. They see us for what we are, for what we've become -- dangerous malfunctioning tools.

Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

H.P. Lovecraft, finally. Finished The Call of Cthulhu and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Don't know if I have it in me for more. Curious stuff, but stylistically on the cheaper side. Someone once said that the best design is always slightly funny. I guess that's part of what's missing.

Taoists always pay attention to the change of the seasons, from micro to macro level -- from an hour to a cosmic aeon. Within a year we discern 24 seasonal transitions, known as the Solar Terms. Here's for 2016: 24 Solar Terms in 2016 Solar Terms Date Meaning Lesser Cold (Xiao Han) Jan. 6th It is rather cold Greater Cold (Da Han) Jan. 20th The coldest moment of a year The Beginning of Spring (Li Chun) Feb. 4th Spring begins Rain Water (Yu Shui) Feb. 19th It begins to rain The Waking of Insects (Jing Zhe) Mar. 5th Hibernating animals come to sense The Spring Equinox (Chun Fen) Mar. 20th Day and night are equally long Pure Brightness (Qing Ming) Apr. 4th It is warm and bright Grain Rain (Gu Yu) Apr. 19th Rainfall is helpful to grain The Beginning of Summer (Li Xia) May 5th Summer begins Lesser Fullness of Grain (Xiao Man) May 20th Kernels plump Grain in Beard (Mang Zhong) Jun. 5th Wheat grows ripe The Summer Solstice (Xia Zhi) Jun. 21st It has the longest daytime and the shortest night of the year Lesser Heat (Xiao Shu) Jul. 7th Torridity comes Greater Heat (Da Shu) Jul. 22nd The hottest moment of a year The Beginning of Autumn (Li Qiu) Aug. 7th Autumn begins The End of Heat (Chu Shu) Aug. 23rd Heat hides White Dew (Bai Lu) Sep. 7th Dew curdles The Autumn Equinox (Qiu Fen) Sep. 22nd The mid of autumn Cold Dew (Han Lu) Oct. 8th Dew is very cold Frost's Descent (Shuang Jiang) Oct. 23rd Frost descends The Beginning of Winter (Li Dong) Nov. 7th Winter begins Lesser Snow (Xiao Xue) Nov. 22nd it begins to snow Greater Snow (Da Xue) Dec. 7th It snows heavily The Winter Solstice (Dong Zhi) Dec. 21st The shortest daytime and the longest night of a year

Yes, inquisitive Lion. There have been at least five major ice ages in the past 2.4 billion years -- the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo Ice Age and the Quaternary glaciation. The latest started about 2.4 million years ago. We aren't out of it, we are in the interglacial period, which started about 11,5 thousand years ago. There were at least 17 cycles between glacial and interglacial periods of the current ice age. The glacial periods lasted longer than the interglacial periods -- all of them. The last glacial period began about 100,000 years ago and lasted until 25,000 years ago. Today we are in a warm interglacial period. It's not business as usual, it's a break between glaciations. At least that's how it's been going for the past 2.4 billion years. None of the interglacials, if memory serves, were longer than the current one that is very close to its expiration date if the history of the past 2.4 million years on earth is any predictor of what might happen next. (Global warming folks, first off, this is actually good news, even though you may not relax right away just because I say so but trust me, if we don't do ourselves in sooner -- we have an assortment of options for doing ourselves in, so don't put all your eggs in that warming basket -- you can relax a bit about this one. We may warm up some and may be at it for a little while longer, who knows, and we may even be responsible for the last few decades of these eleven thousand years, who knows -- but nothing has ever stopped an ice age in the past 2.4 billion years and I wouldn't be holding my breath for that. Winter is coming. And secondly, don't throw anything heavy, I'm just answering Rocky's question, I'm not getting into that debate in a thread I don't moderate, no way in hell. Just so you know that if you start shooting me down, you'll be shooting at someone with her hands up in the air.)

We had 400,000 years of plentiful winters, each lasting 70,000--80,000 years nonstop, before the blessings of civilization and sedentary agriculture made them dark and hungry indeed. And that's in my genes. A couple of days ago I chanced to talk at length with a young woman from Mongolia now living in the States, whose family are fourth generation urban, so she laughed when I asked her if she grew up in a yurt among nomadic herdsmen. She speaks several languages, was educated in Russia and is married to a Frenchman. And yet she mentioned that about this time of the year her family in Ulan Bator, like many others, get their winter's supplies of meat and cheese from the nomads living in the yurts. The arrangements are made in early summer -- city folk go to the steppe and specify to the herdsmen how much of this and that they will want to get in autumn, food and, for those who still make clothes and shoes as a hobby or trade, wool, sheepskins, leather and so on. She told me that her mom is worried about her -- how are you going to survive the winter in California without organic meat?.. The daughter said, I buy it at Whole Foods. For how much, mom inquired. And, upon hearing the figure that blew her mind, was still worried that daughter might have to start eating what people should not eat and start losing her health.

I have extensive experience with chaga (not for myself, I observed many people who drank it though, cancer patients. I didn't observe Ronald Reagan but I'm told he did too, when he had cancer, on Solzhenitsyn's recommendation.) The chaga I'm familiar with came from Russia and was prepared the traditional way. It's alive, you brew it like you would yogurt or kombucha. If your chaga comes from a source undetermined and is prepared by a method non-traditional, I guess this can change its properties in an unpredictable way. If you tell me where you get it and how you make it, I can investigate.

Oh, that's because old friends don't always have a reason to announce "you are a good person," we know that you know that we know. Please refer to my "You make me smile" thread. I don't blame you for being sensitive to ad hominem. It's a form of bullying, and any normal person is sensitive to bullying, only the holier-than-thou always peaceful namaste we are all one phonies put on a show of supreme indifference -- but only when someone else is being bullied, of course, when it's them, namaste goes down the drain but fast. For everybody else it's pretty natural to feel contaminated when a bully dispenses his metabolites. So, sensing that it is what it is is mighty fine, but taking to heart... no need. Bullies will be bullies. Remember that in real life you wouldn't spend a second voluntarily interacting with a bully. So long, you would say, and thanks for all the shit fish.

If I was King Kong. I'd probably go for a voice like this one... alleviates anxiety too, by the way -- just check out the eternally calm Chinese face behind her in the window, beginning at 3:09... I think he may have found his qigong.

I read about it in Desmond Morris's "The Naked Ape" many years ago, and thought that not only was it very plausible, but that it was not even part of "evolution." In parentheses -- I am not a believer in either evolution or creation, I am a believer in co-creation, a natural process of unfolding and self-correcting as you go, in our case thwarted by intervention, an unnatural process of domestication of one species by another. This idea, by the way, I also picked up many years ago, from Konrad Lorenz, whose mentioning in passing of the "abnormal and pathological process of domestication of humans" struck me at the time as a bolt of truth lightning. I've found much to corroborate that instant and painful "enlightenment by lightning" since then. So, I don't think we "evolve" anymore than a chrysalis "evolves" into a butterfly. We "unfold." And then someone or something came along and folded us into a different shape to meet its own specs. I've been trying to guess at the original shape for quite a while. I think we must have been adapted to the predominant features of the habitable parts of this planet -- which is to say to everything, and were not necessarily aquatic creatures but creatures a whole lot more aquatic than at present. Most of this planet is, after all, water. I remember my first trip to the Caribbean. The warmth and the beauty of the ocean blew my mind. I spent most of my time immersed in water, savoring the ocean. But coming back to the hotel I saw nearly everybody else, and definitely all American tourists, sitting or lying around or swimming in the chlorinated swimming-pool, happily dazed by the fumes, all of them facing the swimming-pool and all their backs turned on the ocean, their faces indicating to me... ... ...don't even ask what. We've been dragged a long way, baby.

A dantien exists much like your ability to read exists. Does it, when you are born? Yes and no. You may discover it spontaneously (as I did, both for reading and the LDT), or you may need to "activate," "develop," learn. And then there's levels of proficiency. What I could read at 4 and what I can read now is not the same. I couldn't read any English, e.g.. Or make sense of words like "dantien" and sentences like "a recessive allele influences the phenotype only if the genotype is homozigous." I can now. The literary vocabulary translation of "dantien" into English means nothing at all. The "pill" is as indefinite as "education." Do you have "education?" Do you have a dantien? It's not a yes/no question. "The pill" is the outcome of certain educational practices your dantien might get enrolled in. It might get enrolled in a different program -- or none at all.

I think some people may confuse "energy shields" with "character armoring." Not the same thing, folks. Energy shields are not aimed to address childhood trauma-induced or conditioning-induced vulnerabilities, they are not that kind of "defenses." They are older than human life on earth, as old and as indispensable as life itself, and serve a different purpose altogether. To wit, the purpose of counteracting the second law of thermodynamics. They are shielding the world of the living against chaos, against dedifferrentiation (the mechanism behind the change of healthy cells into cancer cells that "don't care for their identity"), against a uniform "energy soup" in which life cannot exist. For one thing, the difference between normal healthy shields and trauma or conditioning induced defenses, character armoring, is selective permeability of healthy shields. Armoring is crude; shielding is subtle. Armoring is blocking; shielding works much like cell membranes in your body work, exercising fine discernment, letting through nutrients and signal messages, discarding metabolites before they accumulate to a toxic level, not letting through pathogens, poisons, assorted disruptive non-meaning-transmitting electrochemical noise, molecules too large to fit in, too distorted to be useful, and so on. Shields are everywhere and that's how they work. Native Americans called all living things walking-in-skins and saw this peculiarity as the defining peculiarity of what live things are. They -- we -- have shields, we walk in skins. A man, a jaguar, a frog, a fish, a tree, a bee -- we all organize our participation in the Great Spirit (or tao) just so that we can exist as ourselves. Qi "blowing on ten thousand things in a different way so each can be itself." (Zhuangzi). The fragrance of a flower is an example of such permeable shield. There's species that will get attracted to it and pollinate the plant and let it propagate and live. And there's species that will get poisoned by the plant if they were to get attracted to it -- for them this same fragrance acts as a repellant. How wise mother Nature is. People who take some half-baked, made-up, or thoroughly misunderstood abstract ideal for guidance instead of her ways.... not so much. Dead things have no distinct boundaries. They don't protect themselves from intermixing with "whatever." They are open to everything. Anything goes. Ask any dumpster. It's wide open to "all" flow. Don't confuse the rules of engagement in the world of the living with those in the world of the dead and the undead. Living things don't block themselves against the flow -- they protect themselves within the flow -- they are alive to the flow, and it means able to differentiate. Dead things don't care what flows and don't discriminate. Laozi's "followers of death" follow suit. Followers of life do something different entirely.

The 1) might spark some controversy... but I'll risk giving my perspective. The reason people can attract more than their fair share of subtle adversities is the same they might attract not-so-subtle ones: they are not neutral/average enough to go unnoticed. They are closer to some extremes -- not absolute extremes, mind you, we live in a skewed world completely out of balance, so their being at some outer extreme of the status quo does not necessarily mean something is wrong with them or they are doing something wrong, and in fact may mean the opposite. A canary in a coal mine is extremely uncomfortable -- but it doesn't mean something is wrong with the canary, it means something is wrong with the coal mine. Or as that saying goes that used to make rounds on the internet, "don't adjust your mind. There's a fault in reality." Some people feel it more. Others have thicker skins, they don't feel the bad stuff -- but at the expense of armoring/numbing out that robs them of a chance to feel the good stuff fully as well. About those extremes -- here's a few examples. One can be weaker than average ("spiritually," which invites other kinds of weakness into her life), or stronger than average. The weaker-than-average is an easy target, easy prey. The stronger-than-average is going to be challenged (by whoever or whatever perceives her as a threat, e.g.), is going to be tested (by whoever or whatever might have plans for her in the "subtle" realms -- e.g. a shaman looking to transmit the power, a teacher looking for a worthy student, or a subtle being in distress on a quest for a strong enough savior.) Those existing in an amorphous zone where you are not strong and not weak, just "average," may be of little interest for either side. Not weak enough to be easily targeted, not strong enough to be meaningfully challenged. So, the majority living in this zone are usually left alone by subtle energies and entities, and tend to even "not believe in them" or "not worry about them"-- for lack of first hand exposure. On the very drastic outer extremes of the spectrum we might encounter a "sitting duck victim" and a "walking challenge warrior." These people might have to live a lifelong battle, but for diametrically opposite reasons. It would appear that taking some safe neutral stance and not getting noticed too much ought to be the goal because it is indeed this spot to which stuff "sticks" a lot less. But here's a surprise. There's been (e.g.) a study that showed that people who firmly believe that they are either very good or very evil live considerably longer than people who don't hold such beliefs about themselves. Whether it is the belief that prolongs their lives, or the mission (either for good or for evil) that generates the belief, or just this central idea, focus, that organizes everything they do and everything they are in some coherent pattern, no one knows -- but that's the surprising fact. Sitting on the fence may mean that neither side is particularly interested in you, but more people, and sooner, die from sitting on that fence than from jumping off and taking a side. So, this 1) can't be addressed overtly. To determine how prone one might be to attracting unwanted energies, one may need to do a thorough accounting along the lines of 'who am I," along the inevitable "know thyself" lines. Depending on the answers, there's choices to make. The answers of course are strictly individual, so there's no generic recipes...

I think a good way to gain command of the shielding practically is to start by using, at first, what they call your "primary representation system" -- different people use visual or auditory or kinesthetic as their primary, i.e. to remember or to imagine something, they "see" more readily or "hear" more readily or feel the motion more readily. And then move on to training your non-primary systems. Ultimately, to use the whole range of your senses to aid in the process of co-creation between memory, imagination, and subtle "energies of the world." E.g. if you are very visual, you can start building shields by visualizing them. If you are not, you can train your visualizing ability gradually, it is very trainable. You start out by visualizing something very plain and simple -- say, a white egg. You work on it till it gains some dimensionality, clarity, brightness in your mind's eye, then you paint blue polka dots on it. Once you have admired your work enough, give it little chicken legs to stand on. Then invite it to dance. People who are auditory will probably hear the music to which it dances at this point. People who are kinesthetic might tap their foot or even do a little dance of their own. And so on. Like with any skill, you work on acquiring it slowly but then you can apply it instantaneously -- and, as Brian said, "something" in you is more immediate in its responses than your conscious mind, this something is part of your protective qi (part of which is your immune system), and the shield might "inflate" like an air bag before you are consciously aware of the danger.