Jenn

Talk about something you can't unsee... 😨

Once you see something, you can't unsee it

I wonder if some of the confusion / differences in location is due to the challenges and imperfections of looking in the body and how the ability to look within grows and strengthens with time. We spend a lifetime orienting ourselves in space by sight and have access to pretty elaborate information on anatomy, but "seeing" in the body with the mind is not so straightforward. I noticed as I first started to be able to sense individual organs, my internal sense didn't line up perfectly with where anatomy places the organ, sometimes I would even feel my focus on the organ was actually slightly outside my body (even though I am fairly sure my spleen is not on my outsides 😋), but that is where I felt the organ. As my internal sense got better, I started to feel the organs closer to where they are physically, although probably still pretty rough. Like my brain needed time to learn to figure out orientation and scale inside. You can find it using your inner sense, but trying to reconcile that sense with the whole different system of senses we use to operate in the outside world (with sight/sound/feel/etc) likely takes time and might not even be fully possible. Like comparing someone who can see and someone who cannot, likely they can both move through the physical world with confidence, but their internal frameworks of orienting in space would be very different and fairly incompatible with each other. We build that framework internally, and as we build it individually within ourselves and that framework adjusts as it strengthens in time with practice, no two would be identical instead just roughly similar.

My apologies, I was actually thinking of this link and got the posts confused, although that other link is interesting / related too

This post might interest you: It started as the purpose of the dantian but lots of info including discussion on the location wrt different systems and practices of the LDT. TLDR for the link above: It's complicated and each system has a slightly different location description - probably best as a beginner to choose a system and use their definition of the LDT. Once you feel it for yourself, it makes more sense.

What will happen if your new practice is incomplete and someone becomes stuck in a state that is not healthy mentally? Look up "dark night of the soul" - many people become stuck at various phases of facing inner demons and it is not healthy. As someone who "fell" into all this innocently trying to simply work through with some traumas, I can tell you first hand, if this phase starts too aggressively, there is no getting off, you are in it until it completes and it is an extremely dark and long road with no one who can really help you or guide you. Modern psychology isn't equipped to handle this type of qi deviation, and if you do not have a teacher and lineage, how do you find someone that can help you? There are places so dark and hopeless that things like thoughts of suicide can arise, your life becomes unbearable so quickly you night not have the time to transition to something more suitable before you are no longer able to handle it, etc. Some people might simply not be ready for such an onslaught, they might not have the mental / physical or financial qualities yet to see this safely to its conclusion. Looking back after finding daoism and practices with similar goals, I think the reason a lot of practices start off slow and emphasize virtue, learning and right thinking is that you have to have a lot of qualities in place before you can safely navigate the psychological impacts of aggressive "inner demon" work. Or systems go bottom up, which lets you work through a lot of the stored emotions / etc, so by the time you move to the upper dantian and the mind, you have far less opportunity to become stuck in a psychological disorder than when trying to work with the mind before the body/emotions/lower energetics are ready and open. Physical qi deviations can also arise from unsafe practices even if you follow that practice correctly. They could be unsafe because they are unsafe, or because someone attempts them too early when they are not ready. Your new practice is untested, so you yourself cannot now where the risky points are, what types of risks can arise. You have not yet seen your practice through to its end, inevitably you will need to adjust it as you go deeper into practice because life rarely unfolds exactly how we predict and the path is rarely a straight line to the end. The reality is until you yourself see it through to its natural conclusion, you do not know if it is safe, robust enough to guide someone completely through the process, and what the end result will be. Your new technique could very well be excellent, but until you yourself see it through to the end, if that is what you chose to do, it isn't safe for others because there are too many unknowns and the process hasn't been tested for safety, effectiveness, etc. I do look forward to hearing your feedback as you go and once you attain the final results of your process! But please understand, others may not feel it is wise to try until it has been tested to its full conclusion. If you are interested in digging deeper into qi deviations (and have a little spare cash) Damo Mitchell has a course on these deviations, what can occur and at what stages the risks increase / etc that was pretty good. It might be helpful in knowing what to watch out for in practice and how to adjust practice if "things get weird".

Haha, I was just riffing off your excellent description of the demon pans. Meditation often helps free us from the "darker" qualities of the acquired mind like desire, freeing us to live more lightly. But I like your description better 🙂.

Banishing true evil is very taxing on the energetic system. Rest little kitty, regain your strength before returning to face the darkness within.

This is probably an unconventional view, but personally I think karma isn't so much that whats happens to us is based on how we lived our (current and past) lives, but what we do to ourselves in response to the random things that happen to us in life. When something happens that makes us angry, sad, ashamed, guilty, etc or we allow ourselves have obsessive desires, if we don't manage those in a healthy manner they stay with us in the body in the form of subtle tension and blockages and compound over time as we pile in more and more unresolved negative feelings and desires. Eventually these simple emotions warp into complex or "high minded" emotions like hate / shame / pride / etc as more and more unresolved feels twist and fold in on themselves until we can barely recognize "ourselves" from who "we" really are. All these become twisted and matted together, so that it is next to impossible to manage your emotions in a healthy manner. An emotion should flow through the body in the moment and dissipate once it has "done what it needs to do", but if it is blocked by tension and prior unresolved emotions, instead it further ingrains that feeling in the body and also you experience that feeling in increasingly dysfunctional ways, because the whole matted network of tension and blocked emotions connected to the simple emotion you should be feeling are engaged. Now a flash of simple anger than should dissipate quickly if your healthy becomes more extreme, stays with you, and you experience other emotions that shouldn't engage like shame / disgust / hate / etc because things are too tangled together. Resolving karma is then process of untangling the matted mess of causal chains we allowed to compound unchecked. Once you do this huge process and remove all that tension and resolve those emotions and desires, you are no longer affected by karma, because you are free of your past karma, and now know how to process events in life without allowing them to carry with you (and what to do if something does linger). Also as you remove these "knots" within yourself, it becomes clear how you ended up with them in the first place, which give you the insight to move through life more deftly and avoid situations that cause excess negative emotions for yourself (and in those you interact with). IMO this ties into reincarnation because of how the subtle bodies all affect one another. For example if you have a physical ailment that is not resolved, in time it begins to impact you in ways beyond physical such as mentally, emotionally, energetically, and eventually affects your spirit. And the longer left unchecked, the harder it is to resolve because it must be done within all the affected subtle bodies. When you are reincarnated, anything lingering in your spirit comes with you, but the rest is left behind. However over time in your "new" life, those unresolved parts of your spirit start to manifest slowly through the various subtle bodies at some point in your life impacting you physically / emotionally / etc and remain until they too are resolved in the same manner you resolve your karma from your current life. Once you finally resolve a past-life karma, even though you don't have the memory of the exact events, you still witness (and undo) the chain of causality within yourself, and therefore benefit from the lessons in the same way you benefit from unravelling your current life karma.

My seated practice is a mixture of semi-active and passive. The semi-active work involves feeling areas of tightness or resistance in the body and moving my awareness there, alternatively if an emotion or negative mental pattern arises instead I follow it and let it work through the body, and sometimes I feel pulled to breath into certain areas of the body and I just go with it. Staying on the active side, I also have been working on changing my life a lot of support the active work, especially on the emotional side (like letting go or people and material things that are unhealthy but have a hold over me), and working on being less high strung. I do some qigong and standing work, but that is recent and still in the technique building stage. The rest of my practice is passive. Usually I start a session with being in the body, most of the time something physical, emotional, or mental arises first, and probably 3/4 my practice sessions stay in that space for the duration or I slip into a deep stillness part way through. But odd things arise in some sessions, and when they do I just let them play out. Things like I described in my first post that feel energetic, and on occasion some really weird stuff that I categorize as "spiritual" or just the brain being wacky because it doesn't feel energetic and isn't grounded like the emotional/physical work. Sometimes these things get too weird and I refocus back on the body or just stop. I mentioned the mco because the location of the sensation aligned with what I feel in some sessions, although that feeling of circular movement arises often for only a very short period of time before changing into something else (maybe 4-8 rotations).

Hi Everyone! Long time lurker, first time caller. I am mostly interested in Taoism, although I enjoy reading threads here on experiences with Buddhism and other topics. My path to Taoism was probably atypical, during a dark chapter of my life 2.5 years ago (after a life altering injury that happened the year before), while trying to work through old traumas / anger / loss / etc in order to stop feeling numb I kicked something off. Had no idea what was going on, after a few strange and fairly extreme experiences I started looking online to see if others had similar experiences. Waded through dark night of the soul, join local new age groups, read about many other systems, human design, chakras, etc, etc) but nothing really fit, but everything fit a little. Dark night of the soul fit emotionally, but didn't account for the physical and what I would later recognize as energetic changes and sensations I was going through. chakras (or what I called "white hots" before learning about the chakra system) seemed the closest for awhile - but I experienced more than just the typical 7 on the spine, mapping them out didn't match any of the larger chakra systems I could find. I landed on Taoism as it fit my experiences much better, although initially I didn't feel it was a perfect fit, as I move further along my understanding of Taoism is deepening and aspects I thought did not fit started to become more clear as earlier misunderstandings of what Taoism was really saying. The utter ambiguity and slow unfolding of understanding of what Taoism really is as a byproduct of practice and experience is both incredibly frustrating and literally the most amazing gift I could ever imagine. I'm from the west, we like all the answers immediately and easily digestible . In retrospect, what a sad waste of the mysteries of life. I love reading others lived experiences on this forum, and look forward to participating rather than just watching.

While I personally do believe in karma and reincarnation (albeit not the way karma is usually described and not for the reason I am giving here), for some it might be a comforting way to cope with the unfairness of life within the framework of good/bad we have been fed since birth. When good things happen, it is because you deserve and earned it because of your good karma. When bad things happen, it is payment for past or ancestral karma. In reality, most of life is probably just random, which is much scarier to cope with. Especially when we have been indoctrinated since birth that if you are honest, work hard and care about others you will succeed and if not, you will fail - which is a sentiment that lines up very well with the idea of karma. In reality, many who work hard and do everything right in life fail and struggle, and many who harm others, cheat and put in little effort succeed. Also, you know, being all enlightened and "escaping reincarnation" makes you look really bad a** on your insta, so there is that 😋

I can't offer any reliable data or insight on ancient texts as my knowledge in the area is limited to experiences mostly, but I can share some of what I've experienced, for what it is worth. I agree you can store excess qi - in fact that seems to be a common pathway different sects use to open channels by using pressure from stored qi. Personally that wasn't my path to opening channels, but I can see how that would work, having felt qi build and move into the channels, and pressurize them. I have felt that qi push out into other channels/meridians and "pop" open causing a cascade of sensations and/or muscle tensions releases, although dan tian gong and such practices were not my main method of opening / releasing the body / channels. What I can speak to better is what I have experienced arise in practice relating to the dan tians. I find the dan tians do kick in of their own accord during some practice sessions. For some context, most of my practice involves opening the body and reducing tension, then getting the mind out of the way and allowing what happens to happen. I find after I have made significant progress in releasing tension and or emotional baggage in recent sessions, I usually have 1-2 practice sessions where the lower dan tian kicks in, tightens like when you build qi in the area for awhile, then releases into the channel and flows generally up the spine and around in a circle or vice versa (although sometimes flows into other channels or feels like spinning in one of the dan tians which then usually migrates to the other dan tians). Sometimes it feels like the qi moves up and floods into the middle and upper dan tians. Other times it feels like after the qi flows back down it comes up through the perinium area in kind of an S shape then feels like it is yanked back and down into the spine instead of just flowing in more of a circle shape like normal and as described in the mco. Usually I feel hot in the dan tian regions (and all over) when these occur, but sometimes other sensations. Nice side bonus (though not likely related to the actual purpose of the dan tian lol), my whole life I was always ice cold, since opening the middle dan tian, I am usually comfortable bordering on too warm (which is awesome right now heading into another Manitoba winter). Another thing I feel the lower dan tian useful for is it is an easy and safe place to place the mind while it "learns" to breath and circulate qi. Like one type of breathing that arises a lot later seems to be a by product of starting to opening the lower dan tian. I actually learned it from Damo Mitchells anchored breathing, but I think it would arise naturally of it's own with time as the other types of breathing do. But once you can do that, your body/mind starts doing that type of breathing in the other dan tians then later throughout the body as it needs. Even though your lungs are closer to your middle dan tian, I don't think resting awareness there too long until it is more open is healthy. But it doesn't seem like too much can go wrong or weird focusing awareness on the lower dan tian even if you are still a tight ball of tension and tangled emotional power hungry mess. One other thing that the dan tians are helpful is understanding progress, if you don't visualize or otherwise interfere in what is going on in the body during sessions, it is very clear when the dan tians start to open and then fully open, and that is a useful marker when checking progress in the writings or more modern teachings (if your going it alone without a teacher). One thing I will say about dan tians, opening each of them fully seems to directly correlate to (follow) releasing the muscle/fascia tension in that area, which in turn correlates to (follows or precedes) the release of the associated emotions and mental barriers / negatives patterns stored in that part of the body. The dan tians feel almost like pathways between the various bodies (physical / energetic / spiritual / etc) that we can access in a way we can understand (physical), until we understand how to interact with (feel) the non-physical bodies. Don't take that last sentence too seriously, it popped into my head while typing this and I haven't thought it through 😅 I would say, personally I don't know if dan tians or even qi are "real", or are just our minds way of interpreting internal sensations as within the blood / muscles / lymph nodes / nerves that we feel during the process of reducing the "power" the acquired mind has over us via emotions / patterns / desires / etc stored in the body. I don't think it matters really, it works and the results are worthwhile. And incredibly fascinating to feel first hand what the ancient writings are talking about and how / why internal alchemy etc came into being when they feel so foreign to us matted emotional hungry trainwrecks who have lost connection with our bodies and the world around us. TLDR: I don't know specifically what the dan tians are for, but when they get involved, a bunch of weird stuff happens and from my experience it has always been beneficial.