freshpondtaiji

taijistream.com for online find an in person teacher though. my school all over the world: https://patrickkellytaiji.com/worldwideschools.html The fees should be more than affordable for anyone living normal life, most teachers willing to make some accomodations for young students on a budget

Find a good teacher in person. Depending on what "it" is, might or might not be practically "fixable" easily If it's just stagnation in the back, you can see if this helps (but I really recommend a real teacher for this sort of problem given the cause):

My understanding is not just "useful" humans, but any human has certain potential that some adverse entities would be interested in appropriating for themselves. Normally there are safeguards that deny them the opportunity, but overly negative people, or people who dabble in the occult looking for Powers, etc etc can unwittingly open up the window to that by their actions. It seems like spiritual common sense and enough to know on the topic for me to simply avoid dark alleys/"questionable spiritual neighborhoods" I don't need to be exploring at the moment.

Thanks Vajra Fist, Yes Patrick Kelly (PK) is my teacher. Guillem Bernardo his student who has been running his Shanghai school during Covid has an online course here too that I would recommend: taijistream.com , just watching it is pretty useless but if you actually practice along and try to carefully listen to (and do) exactly what he says there is a lot in there. PK's book "Infinite Dao" (available on amazon) is a memoir/has good notes on taiji and his own experiences meeting many teachers on the Path etc... I don't know Damo Mitchell but nothing he does looks remotely like anything Huang Xingxian taught. Agreed that Mark Rasmus is not Huang Xingxian lineage. Many people incorrectly doing Huang's "5 loosening exercises" who were not in his inner school or even his lineage, often learned from videos of Huang on youtube.

My teacher says there are only two reasons that can block practitioners from making internal spiritual progress over time: 1) not enough effort, or 2) enough effort, but outer self attributes the growth to itself (Spiritual Pride) A desire for Power can be a strong motivator, and that might be better for a beginner than something like satisfied complacency that keeps them "asleep," where the desire for Power will at least push someone to make an effort to do something. Later on, that same thing can be a real hindrance if a person does not work to refine their motives, as gaining Power can easily feed a person's Spiritual Pride and that will completely block a person's progress. Also seeking esoteric Powers can be quite dangerous in that it can attract entities offering "shortcuts" to such Powers that can seem quite attractive, and will cost the practitioner more than they realize until it is too late.

We don't think about moving the qi through the body, that's an easy way to falsely imagine things. Instead we move the mind through the body, initially an awareness but have to keep looking deeper for subtler things to find the intention. Truly moving the intention through the body causes a change/response in the body--if you move the mind and nothing in the body responds that's just random imagination and not doing anything. The "qi" is not what most people think it is, and in the context of Jing > Qi and Qi > Shen we're talking about an internal transformation not at all about moving something literally through the body. We do move the mind up the centerline. A publicly posted vid of my teacher leading a guided meditation here: https://www.taiji-schule.at/index.php/videos-en.html and some of his notes on meditation here: https://worldwideway.org/wwway/meditation.html

(posted new one below instead of editing somehow, see reply below)

Based solely on reading the passage above, my initial impression is: 1. his understanding seems better than the previous one he is renouncing 2. he is sincerely trying to communicate his latest understanding and there's something to it 3. I don't think 90+% of the terminology he's using is great/many other traditions use same words to mean very different things so can be a bit confusing, and his overall explanation is a bit convoluted/confusing/I think incorrect in some aspects, 4. but my understanding would agree with what I think is a central point he is trying to convey: in my words (my teacher's words) I'd say something along the lines of: the first step to true spiritual practice is clearly separate (in one's own mind/understanding) the inner self from the outer daily self. The outer self is all the daily body needs and wants that is 95+% of a beginner's mind (food, sex, resources, social status, etc... all the things we need to keep the body alive and reproduce more bodies), I believe the Bodri passage above is talking about feeding the inner self, and then letting that spirit come through. We could call this the 3rd initiation (in Gurdjieff terminology) = the lesser Enlightenment of the Buddhists = the "heaven" of the Christians. Many of the religions ("external" structures influenced by and built around the original teachings, with inevitable distortions that accompany that) view that as the highest level. My understanding is that it is actually only the first rung of the ladder (and there are many things so high above that that for our current level it is meaningless to talk about or try to comprehend, even this first rung is already at the limit of most people's current understanding) and I get the impression that is what Bodri is trying to convey.

people in my school teaching around the world: https://patrickkellytaiji.com/worldwideschools.html and an online resource from my classmate Guillem: https://school.taijistream.com/ There are good people in Belgium, Anne-Marie in Brussels and Marc in Bruges (on directory page linked above)

in our school (Patrick Kelly student of Huang Xingxian, Mouniji Maharaj and Abdullah Dougan, Huang Xingxian student of ZMQ and according to PK both Huang and ZMQ secretly in the Quanzhen school), lower dantian is Jing to Qi, middle dantian is Qi to Shen, Upper dantian Shen to Xu. We recommend focus on the middle dantian for first 10 years with a good teacher, if that energy is not refined enough trying to bring into Upper dantian could cause very serious problems. The main reason we train the taiji is the lower dantian work is deeper than most beginners think so just that physical starting point is a good way to set the mind up for the meditation. It's important to sink mind deeper step by step because easy to imagine one is training much deeper than what is really happening (and the false imagination is at best useless and may even be harmful)

See last paragraph at bottom: https://worldwideway.org/wwway/dao.html

My understanding is the risks of the Kundalini approach are fairly well documented (google "meditation psychosis"). We don't recommend taking the energy up into the head for the first decade of practice for many many reasons (generally relating to ways you can seriously damage your body system or worse). My teacher would recommend training these things only with an experienced teacher to guide, and initially to train only the middle dantian (deep emotions/Jing > Qi)--without refining a solid base there over a long time, risk of taking much cruder everyday energy up into the head, and that can cause a lot of problems. We only recommend taking the most refined energy up, and it takes some years training to refine it or even truly distinguish the difference.

My understanding is "Buddhist" texts were first written down ~hundreds of yrs after the Buddha actually taught, so it's quite possible that much was lost in interpretation/mixed with cultural norms that had nothing to do with what was actually taught over a dozen plus generations of oral transmission.

A warning about Adam Mizner: he studied briefly at some point with a student of Patrick Kelly (my current teacher), I believe the source of much of his knowledge, and was expelled for making things up. I asked PK about him as I was considering attending a seminar and Adam was marketing himself as being in Huang Xingxian (PK's teacher)'s lineage. PK warned me not to believe anything Adam was teaching. I have never met Adam but I know a few US taiji people in ZMQ's lineage who have been to his workshops and have told me something was definitely "off." It's also well known that Adam never even met Huang Xingxian much less studied with him (should be pretty clear just based on age and chronology) though I believe his marketing materials may have implied otherwise: his students are quick to point out he never made the claim of ever studying with Huang directly or even meeting him, yet most outsiders who see his marketing seem very confused about that point.

My teacher has a bunch of public info here if of interest (might have to click around a bit, lots of links semi-hidden): https://worldwideway.org/ My understanding is one of the most important things at the beginning is just to make an effort to get something going (without doing something crazy unsafe) but the results of the effort are directed based on the motive with which practice is approached, so eventually refining that motive (to develop/connect the highest spiritual part rather than only make the body stronger/healthier etc and definitely not with the goal of acquiring "powers"--that's a big trap/dead end for many reasons) becomes the most important, so that the energy provided by the effort actually goes to growing/refining the Spirit rather than just strengthening the Ego.