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AFAIK, middle aged men are more likely to have too MUCH estrogen, generally because they make their own from fat, or because they are converting testosterone to estrogen. Good for men to get levels checked, especially before consuming soy or any of the other estrogenic foods. In my book, soy is a no-no for any male, especially babies, and probably for any but menopausal women. Men (and women!) may find more benefit from the foods listed to increase testosterone: (Thanks, Dawei!) http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/04/11/foods-that-increase-testosterone-list/ Curious about the comment on yin fluids... Does CCM/TCM think estrogen is the main factor in the beneficial effect a man gets from contact with/absorption of yin fluids?

Bruce Frantzis' Opening the Energy Gates is wonderful for understanding how to protect the back and knees while you do these movements.

Songstan, It's low dosage because you can really screw yourself up taking too much potassium at once. Brian's right. Don't be supplementing potassium unless you know you have a deficiency. People who supplement are usually heart patients that are on diuretics or meds that are screwing up their electrolyte balance, which messes up their cardiac function and kidney function. If you eat fruits and veggies, you probably get plenty of potassium. If you seriously want to supplement, get a blood test first. And then track it over time, don't just guess on this one. Good to google "potassium overdose" (This from someone who takes a TON of supplements. )

You can often pick up a DIY blood type test kit at the health food store or maybe even drug store these days, just 10-15$. Cheaper to DIY than arrange for a lab test..

Whoo-boy, Taomeow, You just perfectly described both my dad — the family BB— and me, one of 4 BO sibs. (Mom was O) The oldest boy, though a BO, sounds more like the BB description. But the rest of us? BO definitely. That is way fun! Thanks TM!

Nope— BO negative.

I'm recessive O too! Can you expand on how a recessive O might "thicken the plot" for a B? I've been wondering about just that for some time!

Wolfberry! How about Bacardi Wolfberry Rum! Google also says Nestle is doing wolfberry research in a milk formulation. Opps, apologies to Nestle—not what I thought! This is actually pretty cool! Immunity and macular protection in the elderly, other research indicating most effective in hot skimmed milk, mediated by enhanced zeaxanthin absorption. (Doesn't look like they tried hot whole milk, which might have made the results even more pronounced.) http://www.research.nestle.com/newscenter/news/atraditionalchineseingredientwithimmunebenefitsfortheelderly Anybody got a good source for Goji/Wolfberry/Lycium, preferably not sourced in China?

@tumoessence, re Lavalamp I've never considered changing my DB screen name, but LavaLamp has just grabbed me! Maybe I'll just add it to my sig for awhile and see if the urge passes. @morninglight Curious... have you read Juice or other Scott books and/or checked out his youtube vids, or are you mostly responding to that one blog post?

Can Humans Harvest The Sun's Energy Directly Like Plants? http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/can-humans-photosynthesize-1?page=1 "Much like photosynthesis in plants, can human beings utilize light and water for their energy needs? New evidence suggests that it may be happening right now in each cell of your body." Fascinating article! Radiant receptors include the pigment melanin (both in the eye and in the rest of the body) along with the body's ample water. One of the most intriguing points to me was that sunlight polarizes water into positive and negative energies (yin/yang?), which both initiates flow and also makes it capable of acting as a storage battery! (Feels like I'm not doing this article justice, but maybe some other DBs will chime in.)

Dang! I wish the topic of this thread was more like "tonic herbalism", and not just "vegan"! I almost missed it!

Okay, gotta chime in. For some time I thought incorrectly that I was type O, and discounted the whole idea, because I was very sure that dairy was great for me, not an avoid. So then I find out I am actually type B, the only type that is supposed to be okay with dairy. It was also something of a shock to find out us Bs are supposedly descended from the "Mongolian hordes." That caused another cataclysmic self-revelation. But other than that, a client with terrible pancreatitis for years finally went on her AB type diet, and the pancreatitis has totally resolved. So long as she pretty much follows that diet. It's not just about what your ancestors ate. There are specific antigens to different blood types, and lectins in foods that can make YOUR blood type's blood cells agglutinate (stick together= not good). The only way to really test it is to check the blood agglutination of a person on the diet vs off the diet, that is, eating a lot of foods they are supposed to avoid. That was not done in any study I saw. Not proof either way. They didn't test the critical hypothesis: is that blood negatively affected by those particular foods? Here's D'Adamo addressing the various debunking studies. Fun! http://www.dadamo.com/txt/index.pl?3001 In general, be skeptical of debunks on the web, especially if the debunker happens to be Stephen Barrett. If you read his site quackwatch.org, be sure to check out another site, quackpotwatch.org As far as I'm concerned, being massively "medically" debunked online, especially by Barrett, is practically a gold star review. This also applies to debunks by vegans, vegetarians, paleos, diet book authors, and anybody else with an obvious agenda. And, my usual disclaimer, if you're healthy and happy, you're probably already "eating right for your type" and you can ignore blood type. If you're not healthy and happy, and you even slightly suspect your diet might be part of the problem, do check it out. (Along with BioBalance, by Wiley, another potentially helpful approach to dietary clarity.)

Lotta work, Apech! Urine is sterile when it comes out. If precipitate solids are minerals, soil needs 'em. If you're eating or drinking bad stuff or drugs, this probably isn't a good idea anyway. If you dilute it before application, it's not all that smelly, at least not if it rains occasionally. If you live in a dry region, probably need to bury it or pour it into mulch, cause then it WILL stink. Because of the dilution requirement (for the plants), you'll always have an ample supply. Fresh or aged, you still have an excuse for more red wine...

Hi tumoessence, Lava Lamp! I love it! I've always talked about seaweed —or sometimes squid ink— but lava lamp captures the sense of viscosity and containment in addition to the quality of movement. Bliss moving in a lava lamp! Yes! I have done the preliminary loop before trying to go on to the hands. Or maybe I should say I do it with my mind/thought, but the energy isn't palpable, and I know what THAT means. :-) I'm notorious (to myself) for being able to activate and feel the energy, but not being very successful in telling it what to do. It does its own thing. Too many years of passively watching it rather than actively directing it. And I'm real bad for not practicing stuff I can't feel. Scott's emphasis on directing the energy is helping me focus on this gap. The energy generated at niwan does go to the hands and feet, often really strongly to LDT, occasionally up the back, but mostly not by direction, just as it pleases, and somewhat randomly. Yesterday I decided to "RobertBruce" my forehead, and see if paying attention in that way can open it up— or maybe "make it palpable"— like it did the niwan. Surface circularity is contrary to Scott's "projection" image, but it did seem promising. I have tried the Peng stances, but old knee injuries complain about any SLO, although the granny version is okay. Santi works, and at least gives me practice in trying to direct the flow. Actually, I can almost always get it strongly to my hands, just can't track a path there. It just goes. It might be an eye thing. I'm not particularly interested in the other 8 compartments, just that the effects of activating whatever I'm activating are so varied that I wonder if most of it is really niwan, or other centers. Whatever it is, bliss is bliss. This is just SO COOL!

Hi Apech, Yes, this works really well. You want to dilute it a lot. And you pretty much WON'T want to store it! Well, I didn't anyway. After a few days it REALLY stinks! Some crops won't like it so much, but most do really well. I only put it on the soil, not on leaves, and made no attempt to cover it over as described in the article. I've only used it on my own small garden, but it is very effective, and it tends to keep other critters away. Maybe humans too.

In Juice, Scott frequently emphasizes the critical importance of niwan (the point in the middle of the brain) as the fundamental key to internal energy work. He advises us to touch in to niwan before any practice, just to warm it up, but not to dwell there or over-focus, not to give ourselves a headache. I tried this a few times early on, didn't feel much, and went on, looking for more palpable stuff. Recently however, for maybe 2 weeks, I tried this brief wake-up focus on niwan every night before practice. It maybe calmed and focused me for the practice, but didn't feel anything energetic from doing this, which to me means I wasn't actually *doing* it, just thinking it. And then, on a whim, I decided to rotate my sensating attention in my mid brain area (the Robert Bruce thing that turned on my acupoint work).... which I hadn't really tried in the brain, because everybody knows we can't actually feel the brain, right? May we can't feel the brain, but SOMETHING activated and started slowly spreading energy down my body, kind of same way feet send it up. Even after this discovery, I couldn't feel the energy by just perching there for a moment, as Scott had suggested, but had to rotate awareness, sometimes in different planes, to wake it up. So, somewhat contrary to what Scott advised, I started my own little niwan practice prior to my evening sessions. Scott said, yes, this is niwan, and now I was to to feel that the Niwan does not exist in isolation, and to integrate that awareness into the circuit/loop of the energy work. I have only really managed the loop Scott describes once, where you project from niwan to the entire forehead area, and then direct the energy down the throat to the armpits and then out the arms. But aside from not yet being able to do exactly what Scott suggests, other wonderful niwany things are happening! At first that gentle energy permeation was all I felt. I was also expecting some kind of cosmic energy infusion, and didn't feel that at all at first. But now, as I keep working with it, that is starting to happen. Taoist theory (JAJ anyway) names NINE energy centers in the head, niwan being but one. The energies that manifest feel different, and indeed, different parts of my brain seem to be activated. I still try every evening, standing santishi, to run the loop that Scott describes, with varying success. I can get the energy moving, but it usually does its own (cool) thing, not the recommended loop. I haven't opened a "finding niwan" thread as I'm fairly sure that's not a healthy practice to jump into... But having stumbled upon it within this context, I'm wondering if others are successful with the loop Scott describes, if anyone has suggestions to develop that loop (what worked for them)... and what ELSE might be happening by attempting to develop the niwan energetic he describes.

For those interested in the core concepts of Scott's book Juice, he made a dynamite blog post this morning in response to a readers comment. Here he (again) corrects the notion that the power he's talking about is physical/structural, but actually is just a very small energy that triggers your partner/opponent's explosive reaction. Here's the page. If you're in a hurry, you can scroll down past Scott's initial post and the reader's reply to Scott's first reply to the reader. http://cattanga.typepad.com/tabby_cat_gamespace/2015/06/its-interesting-that-if-you-casually-inspect-virtually-any-popular-qi-gong-program-what-youll-see-is-basically-wall-to-wall.html#comments Short excerpt: "But what I'm talking about is something completely different. I realize it's very hard to understand (especially since, though I can demo it, I cannot demo it at the level of Yang Luchan or Prof Zheng) To understand my stuff you MUST grok on thing: in real tai chi push, the power that moves the guy IS HIS OWN TENSION. NOTHING FROM YOU beyond the extremely weak trigger energy. Just as a bullet is NOT physically propelled by the primer charge - it is propelled by the actual gunpowder load in the shell. The primer is merely the TRIGGER FORCE nothing more."

Scott's doing a two-day workshop in Santa Rosa, June 20th weekend, and some posters on this thread might be interested. Tumoessense started a thread on it in upcoming events: http://thedaobums.com/topic/38571-scott-meredith-tai-chi-workshop-in-santa-rosa-ca-june/?p=629658

This is very interesting, hearing how many opinions we have about what waking up involves and, especially, how it should look! This probably isn't relevant, but I am reminded of something I read about raising kids. Sometimes they are just standing there, staring off into space, and a parent will scold them, "Wake up! Stop daydreaming! Pay attention!" And the text I was reading, advised that this is a critically important process in the development of their brain, that we should support this process whenever posssible, do not disturb them, as they are forming vital connections in their brains. Interrupting them will stunt or limit their growth! I tend to think that applies here! I look forward to hearing how this process of distraction (my sorry label ) develops for people so affected. Sure do appreciate where Spotless has come to!

Sweet pics of Tinkerbell! Thank you, Shanlung.

Years ago I had a meditation teacher who... how to describe this?... "meditated us". It was a group thing, and together we floated very high, very ecstatic, maybe not very grounded.... But coming back, that was when tears would just overflow... I asked him what that was about. There was no pain, no sorrow— maybe a little gratitude— but mostly just these overflowing tears. He answered that we were so expanded in the meditation that when we had to "come back down," all that energy simply could not fit into our normal fields, and it just overflowed into tears. We cried a lot.

I got it yesterday a couple times. For me it goes away by itself. I come back later and everything works again. :-)

Hi Dainin, Could we get the Shibashi practice just from the DVD, or do we really need the book too?

Here's Chapter 1 from The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, by Lierre Keith, the book Taomeow referred to above. http://www.lierrekeith.com/book-ex_the-vegetarian-myth.php For the flavor: "I want a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what’s dead on your plate. I’m asking about everything that died in the process, everything that was killed to get that food onto your plate. That’s the more radical question, and it’s the only question that will produce the truth. How many rivers were dammed and drained, how many prairies plowed and forests pulled down, how much topsoil turned to dust and blown into ghosts? I want to know about all the species—not just the individuals, but the entire species—the chinook, the bison, the grasshopper sparrows, the grey wolves. And I want more than just the number of dead and gone. I want them back." Wow! Thanks Taomeow!

Dawei, I just checked out the new subforum. Finding and moving all those threads must have been a LOT of work! Thank you!