affenbrot

hi cat, i used the device a short while. What I liked the most was the bubbling sound it produced when blowing out, gave me this nice Jaques-Yves Cousteau feeling. the snorkeling sucking sound on the inhale was nicely weird also. The sound helped a lot to focus in fact. I very soon reached breathing cycles of 1/minute over the duration of 15 minutes or so. Which i found quite astonishing. these long breathing cycles held me in a state of deep meditative blankness - much like underwater. Could be I proceeded to quick though - what I noticed after about two weeks was a growing and building up tension of my whole breathing apparatus, especially after the practice, and staying ever longer through the day. I guess it just added tension that already was there, I should have taken care of first relaxing and freeing the diaphragm, the rip cage and so on and maybe apply the technique slower and more carefully. I think you can obtain good results with buteyko alone without that frolov thing (although it was kind of fun). affenbrot

hey that's cool, I just yesterday told a friend how I would love to meet you guys in persona one day. Even though participating in a meeting doesn't look very realistic in the near future for myself, setting up such an event feels like a step in the right direction.

i appreciate your honest straightforward post a lot. gives me some things to chew for the moment. thanks a.

oh - does that mean you quit the system in whole? I would guess this build-in block of probably not being able to reach level four was quite tough to swallow, and not very motivating? Or you had different issues with it? have you found a practice or teacher in the meantime that makes more sense to you? the aspect of 'realness' was the one that still fascinates me most about the magus of java. I always wondered if the principles of the HT that basically seem quite similar to me, could be brought forth to the same realness and physicality as in the mopai, maybe in a more gradual approach though. Do you see a connection of these two systems - or are they just too different in your opinion? What's your view on neikung now? very curious, and thanks for pluggin into this topic, affenbrot

never steal from a monk

yea, I noticed this too. Maybe he zoomed in because he thought it strange for this monk to carry a laptop, but now I tend to think it was staged. (still hilarious for me!)

right! beware brothers, they are really dangerous: this guy is facing three years of prison because he tried to smuggle his penis pump on board of an airplane! OMG news link

me too, cool job Sean!

a Plato's book

during the cultural revolution his red guards distroyed most of the monasteries and temples. I guess this demonstrates how his "policy" regarding religion was....

all the exercises of the book are described here on this website

yes please well, no actually i think your avatar is your very personal thing and none of my business at all. I just wanted to give you my feedback on it and was a little curious if there was some agenda behind it or not. never mind. affenbrot

i have never been to china so my view on the chinese was and is mostly prejudice ... By reading the book I learnt for the first time what kind of horror Mao and anybody brainwashed or intimideted enough by him and the government dumped out over the whole of china. Brutal and grotesque. Like the whole country changed into some insane religious cult! The stories are written so vividly - sometimes I was quite hypnotized by it, at the verge of abusing ("du schwein, how could you do that to her poor mother?!") the next chinese tourist inncocently doing sightseeing in Berlin. Some patterns and ways to handle issues I observed with chinese qigong teachers became more clear and understandable knowing the political context they were raised in - e.g. the way information is released or just in general what they think is good PR (but actually isn't) or the positive attitude towards mass movements (quite contrary to the views of many western practitioners of course...) and other things that cannot only be explained by the difference in chinese versus western culture but is obviously shaped by mao and his "communism". And wasn't the Qigong Craze of the 80s in China an outlet of the previously supressed spirituality but still strangly used ways of propagating this, which just smelled like thought up by Mao. the very few older chinese people i have met who experienced the cultural revolution impressed me a lot especially and even more so after reading this book. They were so joyful and positive! affenbrot

hi Pero, in postmodern days of spiritual practice one can receive dzogchen transmission even via webcast, and I feel this is real and meant seriously not some fancy playing around with net technology. Namkhai Norbu is broadcasting some of his dzogchen retreats on the internet, if anybody is interested check out tsegyalgar.org. btw, although I slowly get used to it, I feel your avatar is still kind of extremely agressive. is that your intent? affenbrot

if you want to find out about how people 's life was during the cultural revolution in china I really can recommend Jung Chang's novel "Wild Swans"! This book changed my view on the chinese a lot.

hey this is interesting because with me i always found that yoga would bring the energy up and to the surface and most qigong bring it inward and down.... i always thought the techniques as such would yield this effect, but maybe it is more how each different body's constitution reacts to different input...

man, this is really embarrassing. but watch this trailer of this german Hausfrau demonstrating human magnetism.

propaganda? microwaves? eerie if it was so: "We are seeing abnormal burns, different from wars we've seen in the past. The corpses of these victims are shrinking to half their normal size. You think it is the corpse of a child at first but it turns out to be a grown man," said Raed Salman Zeinedine, director of Tyre Government Hospital. more in this newspaper article in the New Zealand Herald

I liked the book a lot. It is full of stories, anecdotes, unusual encounters. written very well... though the author might have polished one story or the other into more glory I believe its content is basically no fantasy but about people, encounters, capabilities and lineages that actually exist. The theory given about the dantian, qi, yang and yin, about general mechanisms of practice I found very valuable, even if it never gets into hands-on description of the actual practice of this lineage.

as I understand it he brings down his yang from the dantian to the huiyin. There he gathers as much yin as there is yang, then eventually yang and yin rise together (but still separate). Finally he squeezes the two together inside the dantian. "If your are successful by forcing the two together, you also force them to react (...) this is how the spark, the lighning bolt between the two is generated..."* In the book this is described as "Level 4" and already very advanced. affenbrot p.s. there was a thread at shaolin wahnam forum about it that i quite liked. a pupil of Kosta Danaos gives good insights here: wahnam neikung * quote from Magus of Java

being no native speaker I'm probably not qualified.... but doesn't "paid supporter" mean someone who get's paid to support s.th.? Let's me think e.g. of Japan trying to outvote the International Whaling Commission to lift the current moratorium on commercial whaling with the help of vote-buying or "paid supporters" ...

for religious taoism i think books by Kristofer Schipper and Michael Saso are good sources. a.

I'm still using my old Atlas 3000. Gives me I good workout when ever I use it too...

haven't read his book on parables, but "the Magus of Strovolos" is one of my all-time favourites!!

I remember that Winn some years ago talked about constricted lymph flow caused by bras... he also mentioned that one of the reasons qigong or tai chi seem to help in cancer so much is in parts because the slow circular movements help the lymph system tremendously. here's one website: bras breast problems