senseless virtue

You shouldn't apologize because sometimes it's necessary to be a bit blunt. You were entirely honest to yourself and to the point you made, and this precisely helped me to gain most of it. My assessment back then was colored by what seemed like a sudden change of tone in interacting with you, but it has changed for better because I recognize I had a noteworthy flaw and too thin skin to admit I was wrong. There was nothing wrong in what you did in my opinion. There may be other points that I may address in your post later, but this is all for now.

What I am writing below is not meant personally to you, but I wanted to comment on your ideas. I indirectly addressed this concern in my Vitriol topic that I recommend everyone to read. In my opinion there exists no wise categorical solution to the problem of direct and indirect personal slights. Why? It's an issue of the relationship between people, not what is said or how it's delivered. A friend can say to me rude things even in public because I know he or she has my back covered and absolutely means well. Even strangers and enemies can say uncomfortable things about me publicly because it's his opinion and right to explain his stance if I'm not somehow fitting his expectations, and the same goes for me against him. It's clear and defined. Example: @steve once addressed me in a stern and confrontational manner when I neglected to properly address wisdom practices in internal arts, as if energy work was somehow enough to consider. I felt he was being a dick how he made his point, but it was a very instructive lesson that I have kept reaping rich rewards ever since. Thanks steve! This issue only becomes confusing when there are really thin skinned people who haven't learned to set personal borders firmly and may feel everything overwhelmingly offensive or argumentative, which will lead to a pressure for stricter enforcement of no insults policy because it's a common decency to offer others respite. The irony is that the thin skinned in turn use their whining to cross personal borders when they unilaterally start demanding so and so compliant behavior from others in order to maneuver others around their own unstable and weak personal borders. Why the hell should this be a sign of civility if we completely catered to such demands? I can already think of one person who certainly used the tactic I just described in recent memory. As a somewhat related note, the severest forms of abuse are always when a manipulator keeps shifting the perception of personal borders and then the victimized person loses the clear track of who this other person is — A friend or foe? Why can't I understand how he really wishes to relate to me? — to which the manipulator always inserts the trope he didn't do anything wrong, but it was always the victim's fault for failing to take care of this or that. Okay, so what's beyond friends and enemies? It's the lukewarm people who don't clearly define their relation to me that are a concern, even in forum environments. They don't actually talk to me, we haven't formally gotten introduced, and yet they seem to know me better than I myself when he needs to refer to me. That's what any bully essentially is: He may come over and trashes me directly or he may indirectly hurt me by spreading mean gossip behind my back, but most importantly, he never relates to me as a person but as an object and plaything devoid of human value that is put aside when the "need for fun" is over. Do you now see why Earl Grey might have felt so bitterly abused? Otherwise, you wouldn't understand the pain because you haven't related to him despite his cries. I've tried my best to help people reconcile, but I can only do so much. Either you understand this point and work to resolve it or this drama may keep cycling on and on. PS. Writing about this topic now and recently on Vitriol has made me understand my own bad experiences related to abuse and bullying. It's starting to feel so clear now.

Latent lactose intolerance.

Weirdly tinted color overlay of horizontal stripes. From top to bottom: gray, blue, green, red, gray, blue, green, gray. I suppose the black tones are supposed represent some type of inkblot figures, but to me there are hardly discernible shapes. The black mass in the top left corner is some weirdly shaped tinfoil balloon. The right side is very iffy. It's got a prominent grill shape so I first thought of a fan or a bird cage. Then I realized it could also be prison door with iron bars or a window with thick bars and lights from a town shining inside some apartment. In the front of this door there seems to be a humanoid figure with a right hand extending around the corner. The figure has got shirt on with right sleeve rolled up high. The face of the humanoid seems non-human, the head is tilted quote far backwards and has a tongue sticking high up in the air. Maybe this is one of the fabled reptilians often referred in Gendao's (peace be with him) writings. Parsing it all together, it seems that the humanoid may be holding the balloon by a thread the resolution and noise hides. I imagine it could actually be a child wearing a scary carnival or Halloween mask and trying to give a spooky impression to the person behind the camera.

A master healer's intervention can sometimes produce very good results easily if the karmic issue isn't very deep. It can work well, but it's far more important to commit to one's own personal practice like I discussed. Your own lifestyle, ethical behavior, and energy work commitments are the ever improving foundation for turning your life around: It would be supposing far too much responsibility onto others to expect them to manage your life in minute details. The original poster asked for a healing centers and healing powers so this prospect was what came up in my mind. It can be a very powerful combination to have both personal practice and clinical distant healing support each other.

Quanta Magazine article Why Sleep Deprivation Kills tells of cutting edge research on sleep deprivation. It turns out that the gut is the first organ to show damage from sleeplessness: The intestinal linings become covered with reactive oxygen species (ROS), which will lead to lethal tissue damage after enough buildup. What came as a surprise then was that feeding test animals with antioxidants helped them to completely overcome the ROS buildup and its damaging effects. Please note that this simple model only accounted for insect physiology and cannot account for other benefits that ordinary sleep may bring to higher animal bodies like possessed by the human spirit. It's not recommendable to substitute good regular sleep with antioxidants, but people who have chronic sleep issues should take a cue from this study and make sure they have healthy diets with enough sources of antioxidants to help mitigate any oxidation damage poor sleep might have caused.

My answer here is not direct to the original poster's line of inquiry, but rather a diagonal approach on the topic how to develop internal side without mediation or energy work. It sounds a lot what the Confucians would do. It's not necessary to meditate or involve theories of vital energy if your conduct is entirely spotless and your heart remains calm at all times. Under those conditions it's then natural for humans to spontaneously develop vitality and become enlightened sages.

@Klinsly While your condition sounds pretty much unique, following a healthy lifestyle and having a solid Qigong style complement it can do wonders if you are both patient and dedicated. Basically, any established Qigong style can help you feel better and perhaps improve your health conditions. With that being said, Sight Improving Qigong (Taiji Bagua Qigong) has a very good reputation for healing sight related issues. http://www.qigongchinesehealth.com/sight_improving_qigong Indeed, one could say that the real internal arts put extra oomph to feeling bliss and getting more out of the good old xxx!

I forgot to mention this, thanks. If this is the case, then Vajra Fist should spend a bit more time constructing sentences with unambiguous meaning. @Vajra Fist I would recommend you adopt a bit less reaching tone and not jump to conclusions so eagerly. I don't think is the isolated instance you have done so. You didn't seem to react favorably when I brought up an alternative explanation to karma in my first post which I feel was completely innocent. Your posts can provoke similar feelings in others too like I witness in myself not completely understanding your language in the midst of its provocative tone. For my own behalf I apologize for not seeing the ambiguity issues in your writing and not asking for clarification instead of retorting with a fairly blunt rebuke.

It seems you aren't looking at the right parts what he wrote. When someone is accusing me with an unexplained and vague ad hominem and then carrying on as if nothing happened, even though I clearly brought up the allegation as a separate issue, is this not rude? Insinuating anyone as paranoid is not a compliment in any context: paranoia is a morbid mental health condition. Especially considering the context is a diagnostic professional's assessment and critical evaluation skills where the entire career reputation is established upon not claiming costly and difficult to deal with false positives, I would say that it's a particularly damning charge. If you went next to a physician's office and publicly held a placard saying "He might too paranoid to diagnose your serious issues right, he might be making things up" in any primarily English speaking country, then you would end up with a civil litigation very fast if not hit with public prosecution first. Why? It's freaking rude and clearly recognizable as smear on another person's character.

@Vajra Fist You are now being very rude and smearing Eric Isen for little reason other than his answers not conforming to your expectations. I would expect more courtesy and thoughtful criticism if it came to seriously scrutinizing someone's professional capability and good will. I am not a fan nor a regular client of Eric, but I have always found him acting in good faith and treating me cordially, and his results are something that I could always confirm with the help of other people or other psychic sources. Someone else's experience might be different, but this is mine.

Sorry, but I really lost you here. If I have implied anything insulting, then it was a pure mistake because of my poor language skills; none was intended, I assure you. Karma is a tricky thing because it's not linear but interacting agency. Eric's readings will always change according to person's current karma and circumstances, thus creating a different overall clairvoyant vision as the person lives his or her life in time. I wouldn't feel any reason to get concerned over changing results even if they reflected reality. It just shows that there is much more to karma and its purification than we can decipher through medical clairvoyance and its limitations. I understand. I personally feel Eric's readings are best understood as wisdom practice for yourself so that you get more insight and confidence into your own health. For mature practitioners it can be useful for pin-pointing constitutional body chemistry issues or other particular challenges, but otherwise the reading is not by any means a substitute for working on one's own wisdom and skills. I find that Qigong style reading is a popular choice with Eric, but it's not a bullet proof way to see through latent karmic issues that may later come to hinder some specific practices or their combinations.

Eric's reading is always for your current moment. You really might be going through a phase of karmic cleansing so that dropping either would do you more good.

This is not by any measure a problem that would be specific to Flying Phoenix. All internal arts will bring awareness to experiences you would rather avoid. Sifu Terry would call anger and other uncomfortable emotional experiences as "grist in the mill" and encourage you to carry on. Emerging emotional blockages are a sign that you are processing some deep seated issues so keep this in your mind as motivation. You didn't directly ask for advice, but I thought you might appreciate my take on this matter. You might want to take a look outside your formal practice and focus a bit on how well are you connected to your true feelings and feeling around certain people — starting with yourself. The Buddhist perspective to both fear and anger is that they are fundamentally about aversion and avoidance. Personally, I feel that facing such issues often benefits from the conscious practice of forgiving and asking forgiveness. Alternatively, it could be a reminder that you have not been true and stood strong against some past injustice that you should simply acknowledge as viscerally as possible in order to process it fully, which can be quite difficult if there is emotional disconnect.

Very good points, my good Sir! Art speaks and entices us to investigate and let go for a while. I don't know if any of the critics have noticed, but many of the fantasy and early science fiction inspired authors used subtle, maybe even sometimes unintentional, subversive tones against the prevailing moralism and lack of mystery in the late 19th century Anglo West. Indeed, the lack of mystery and the ennui borne with it are a most certain provocations to the creative spirits and the childlike inquiring minds: There ought to be something more to the world than what the dull rationalism of mechanical obligations and the often judgmental moral certainty (e.g. puritanism) could ever allow.

@silent thunder Now we know why you have been training Daoist skills. You are preparing to learn how to change into a real Totoro!

Meteorite lakes.

@mrpasserby Your old man is John Constantine of Hellblazer fame? Anyway, thanks for the entertaining story.

Some meditation teachers say that speaking the healing sounds loudly is wrong: they should be said silently and that the shape of the mouth is the only thing that matters. As far as I understand it's about training towards a smooth and long breathing, which will help pacifying the heart and spirit. Arriving at stillness is the next step, and it cannot be forced in any manner.

That is true if your practice is about reaching a proper trance state, i.e. Dhyana. Those who practice Buddhist wisdom methods like Zen and Dzogchen would aspire to rest in natural open awareness where in and out lose their meaning and deep meditative absorption is often viewed as an undesirable side path.

Applying tension is a fundamental part of these practices. It's frankly quite dangerous and very unorthodox in the context of typical Daoist training precept to keep everything relaxed. You would need to have superb teacher to not get any type of deviation, and there's the often left out premise that hardening and tension practices suppose an excellent health to begin with. And then what? The complete system is supposed to have some 72 levels so it's deficient training in as much it's incomplete. It might not be good for health to leave the training unfinished or prolong the practice of beginning levels. Everything in technical internal alchemy pursuits, like Mo Pai supposedly is, requires extreme context sensitivity and wisdom. There are many things that could go wrong even if you did everything by the letter.

Hello MattMyster and welcome! Tension practices that aren't so good for health. These only work in the context of the complete system and under superior instructions, but there is a cabal of stubborn Western practitioners out there in the wild who think they are smarter than everyone by the margin of a misconstrued scientific proof. The ethically right direction is with legitimate and safe practices trained under the auspices of responsible and competent teachers.

Both Flying Phoenix and Sleeping Qigong are rather modular and very easy for learning purposes. The technical level is low compared to some styles of Daoist alchemy. FP DVD volumes 1 & 2 are a great starter pack. With Sleeping Qigong you could ask Sifu Dolic to teach you the exercise Five Dragons Curled Up or the first main exercise called Body and Mind as One depending on what type of practice you would like to do. Please note that FP and Sleeping Qigong are compatible and synergize with each other splendidly.

http://www.taichimania.com/chikung_catalog.html http://www.qigongchinesehealth.com/ot-sqg http://www.qigongchinesehealth.com/sleeping_qigong