HaRaMaRaHa

I've begun the video course, I believe it is his student Paul cavel who wrote this as it is him delivering the video course. I can only speak for the course in that he gets straight to the point and goes over the very simple practice over and over until you get the more subtle points, eg. How you breath, how you rock your feet, how to move qi through the spine. My experience is that a video course is much better than a book and a book doesn't really do so much as just a reference guide for the video or a real life teacher. I can't really comment in the effect the qigong practice has had on me either as I haven't felt much apart from a calmness and sense of expanding qi but I haven't gone too deep into it yet.

I had dengue fever a couple years ago and used medical qigong to great affect, as in the worst it got was I puked once and pooped strange for a couple weeks.

I am currently learning Bagua from a disciple of Jiang Rong Qiao who is of the opinion that storing energy in the Mingmen is better than Dantien. He pointed to various masters of what he calls Shaolin origin who use the Dantien, and they appear overweight (the Qi expanding the gut). Then he describes his method as the Daoist method. He has his own method of qigong which I could describe as similar to a sacral pump combined with the microcosmic OR macrocosmic orbit (he has two methods). To be more precise, he defines Dantien as the general area of energy and the mingmen to be the specific storage. Shaolin schools in his opinion focus on storage from the front rather than back. For this reason, when I ask him about Zhan Zhuang practices he would say that these would cause one to develop a gut. I previously learned ZZ from my first teacher and this benefited me to sense my alignments and feel the energy in my body. However, this is not the first time I have been told that ZZ is bad. A prior master I had was of the opinion that ZZ causes too much Qi to rise to the head causing madness. I believe this man was from the dragon gate sect and he also taught strictly movement based qigong. This same master claimed to levitate tables and spoke quite negative of the Wudang tradition. I am unsure of his abilities, however, he did demonstrate a lot of knowledge. My conjecture so far is that both masters are developing Yang Qi and have not seen the need to develop subtler practices of ZZ. Meanwhile, I have been following BK Frantzis, JA Johnson, and Lam Kam Chuen all of whom promote ZZ. Anyone have any opinions/clarification of the above?

Given my passion for the spiritual, and philosophical, For interest and reference, or for anyone who might wish to discuss points with me, my current practices Include Huang Xingxian Tai Chi, Xing Yi, Ba Gua, the water method of Bruce Frantzis and a study of the Chinese classics. I hope to be of service to this forum Will and Love, James.