soaring crane

oh, ok, now I'll have to go watch it

well, yeah, Mars is dinky. Not sure what to make of the stat ... ? Just interesting trivia or something more meaty?

But the effect of Jupiter's huge gravitational field has in fact kept Earth, the little sister, safe from asteroids for billions of years. Without Jupiter, no Earth, no Mars, no much of anything worth speaking of.

and rememeber that 90-odd % of our dna is of non-human origin. Microbes have survival instincts, and they create us to help them move around more efficiently. No, we don't have free-will.

The "Birminghammer" was my play on German

haha, no, I meant what Chang meant

Saruman tried that. Didn't work out too well for him.

Hello Larxene, and welcome to the forums! Glad to have you aboard :-) Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, SC and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin

Hello Rolling Stone, and welcome to the forums! Glad to have you aboard :-) Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, SC and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin

Hahaha :-) so true!

Hello Source, and welcome to the forums! Glad to have you aboard. Thank you for the thorough intro, it's quite interesting and more than a little inspiring. Do I understand you correctly? Have you made so much progress with nothing more than following the instructions in that video? If so, that's pretty awesome :-) I don't know where you live, but if it's anywhere remotely metropolitan, you should be able to find a few qigong groups within travelling distance. I suggest seeing what's out there and going for a few sessions with various teachers. The specific form is the least of the criteria, but an experienced teacher can expose you to profound, basic principles that really open up new dimensions of healing and strengthening. Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, SC and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin

I love her, haha. So sweet :-)

everything seems off a little tilted, slanted, rolling down the hill

This is so true. I do in fact intuitively offer different approaches to the material, depending on the group. I might say something like, "for those who like images, imagine a balloon between your thighs, or that you're sitting on a skinny horse; and for the more physically-oriented, open the knees slightly, shift the weight to the balls edges of the feet ... etc.... "

o geez, this is embarassing. I wanted to quote Spotless earlier but apparently hit the "edit" button on my phone instead of the "quote" button! Big apologies to Spotless! I'm leaving the edited post for now, will let Spotless decide what to do ... They say power corrupts, but in my case, it seems to do something else. Make me stupid?

Brummies referring to Birminghammers, I assume? Welcome, BreezyBrummy :-)

Hello Yasjua, and welcome to the forums! Hope the tea was pleasant, glad to have you aboard. You can link to your blog in your signature, if you want. Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, SC and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin

Hello Nerien, and welcome to the forums! Sounds good, glad to have you aboard :-) Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, Chang and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin

Frau Mahlzahn became the Goldener Drache der Weisheit! It's quite profound, in fact. It happened after she was towed down the river behind the boat that Jim and Lukas used in order save the children she had imprisoned. It was a kind of cleansing through water, perhaps a baptism? In any event, it's what all the dragons in Drachenstadt are hoping for, and Frau Mahlzahn is eternally grateful to her saviors: In der Stadt der Drachen, hihi haha hoho, da gibt es nichts zu lachen hihi haha hoho, wir müssen nämlich böse sein, hihi haha hoho, bis jemand kommt uns zu befrein, vom hi haha hoho, bis jemand kommt uns zu befrein, vom hi haha hoho. We have to be cruel and evil till someone comes to free us There's more to that book than meets the eye. True of all Michael Ende's works. It was the first full-length book I read in German, and remains one of the best :-) Edit -- something else about the dragons in the Drachenstadt. They're also clearly Fascists, and the pathetic little half-breed dragon Nepomuk is a refugee.

Frau Mahlzahn! :-)

Hey I've wanted to do this for a while, have a thread where teachers can discuss the day-to-day of working with groups. I don't mean a place to start flame wars about lineages or debate the quality of competing systems or Sifus, but simply some discussion on themes that come up when teaching. For example: working with mixed-level groups minimum requirements for your room benefits of indoor vs outdoor sessions reacting to emergencies (low BP wobblies) insurance individual correction (or not) progression of a class (warm-up exercises, instruction, free training, still meditation, etc... ) duration of a class (45 minutes enough? 90 minutes too much?) maximum/minimum number of participants advertising (or not) many, many other topics ... Of course I'd leave the the thread open to all Bums who want to contribute, questions, suggestions, wishes, anecdotes, but I would not allow the focus to wander away from the topic. Anyone interested?

hahaha ... what? I'm not sure what I've written to be labelled crazy or partisan. I made a couple pretty good suggestions as to why the political climate in the US is the way it is, and I reacted to a statement from Brian. But that's about it, far as I remember. Nobody replied to my suggestion that the country would benefit from an independent, publicly-funded media system. So let me elaborate: If I had the magic wand, I'd create, overnight, a TV, radio, print and web network, fully funded (to the tune of billions a year) by public money, and completely immune to governement or commercial interests. A system like this was created by the allies in Germany after the war because they recognized the power of the Nazi propaganda machines. The propaganda was coming from government and commercial/industrial sources, and both of them were colluding with one another to make the misery as, well, miserable as possible. The system as it exists today is pretty complex, with regional systems and national systems running independent of one another, but sharing some programming. That means we get incredibly high-quality reporting on the governmemt and on industry, and they can do nothing about it. We pay a tax for this system and it's one of the taxes I genuinely support and wouldn't mind seeing raised.

Yes, I'll concede that 'callous, murdering sociopath hell-bent on furthering his political career' could be more accurate re Nixon. In my lay-understanding, the distinction between sociopath and psychopath is that the the former is aware of and quite probably enjoys the misery and pain s/he inflicts on others while the latter is oblivious to the effects of his/her violent actions on others. Read this: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21768668 How many Vietnamese died in that time? How many deaths were associated with his crazed ambitions? Not that he was (or is) the only one. And not that I disagree with with the points you make about all the callous, murdering sociopaths who have enjoyed high office in the US government; I simply happened to be astonished at the time by your assertion that the Viet Nam war had been ended by a moderate Republican. The way you put it, one could conclude that you consider Nixon to have been some kind of humanitarian, and a victim of revisionist history, when in fact he was barely human to begin with and his filthy history is still being unfurled. We don't know how many more nuggets of depravity remain hidden.

I was writing about the mental state at the time. For posture, like TM says, all good except make sure your chin isn't rising and your shoulders are relaxed. I don't think 'rounded' shoulders is a good goal in itself. To find shoulder position, go through the extremes of pushing them forward, and pulling them back, then settle into the comfortable middle. Let the arms hang loosely and turn the points of the elbows gently outward. Attach your rubber bands to the tips of the elbows. Don't think about the shoulders, you'll only tense them up. There's an exercise (I learned during a a few "Shaolin White Crane" workshops) that really helps to settle things with the shoulders. Kind of too much to go into here but basically, roll the arms to the front, briging the backs of the hands together. You'll feel the shoulder blades open, and the shoulder themselves will be shifted unnaturally forward, extremely rounded, you could say. Then open the hands, roll the arms outward so the palm are facing outward or even angled to the rear. The chest will open, the shoulder blades will pinch together, and make sure that the shoulders are going downward (you should maintain a long neck, like a ballerina). Those are the extremes. Move fluidly from one to the other. Breathe through the movemt. Let the movement become gentler and gentler, until it settles in the middle. Make note of that position, and of that feeling. Call it up at will (but then do the elbows outward thing, to opent the armpit kuas). There are a lot of small details missing in my description, but I think you can get them sorted out. Migmen/Qihai play a central role in the movement, btw. That's a clue :-)

Hello cel, and welcome to the forums! Glad to have you aboard :-) Please take the time to read the two posts pinned at the top of this Welcome page and take a look at the forum terms and rules. This covers all you need to know when getting started. For the first week you will be restricted to ten posts per day but after that you can post as much as you like. Also, until you’ve posted fifteen times in the forums, you’ll be a “Junior Bum” with somewhat restricted access and will be allowed only two private messages per day. Good luck in your pursuits and best wishes to you, SC and the TTB team ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Special Note: all female members are more than welcome to join the discussions at our new Women’s Cultivation forum, moderated by rainbowvein and zanshin