cheya

Thanks, Bubbles! I especially like that you say he was teaching how to feel the structure. I had gone through the website pretty thoroughly, but going back I did find an excellent review I'd missed. You mentioned the author is a disciple of Lam Kam Chuen and also practices mindfulness within Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage. That's great in itself, but he's also an acupuncturist, and not just an acupuncturist, but one who uses the Toyohari style, more big pluses in my tally up! I'll have to see if I can leaf through the text on someone else's computer. Mine isn't up to it, and I do need to do that before I buy it. Thank you for telling me so more about the subtleties of the book.

Anybody read The Dynamics of Standing Still, which Bubbles recommends above? It looks great, but it sure is pricey...

Welcome iradie! Thank you for all your sharing in your practice journal... Seems we have much in common, and I look forward to your posts. Great to have you on the board!

Get your vitamin D levels checked! Flu season comes when vitamin D levels sink, and vitamin D (and sunshine!) are negatively correlated with getting the flu. Some vitamin D experts suggest taking massive doses of vitamin D for three days in a row...Check out Dr. John Cannell of the Vitamin D Council for specifics. And for treating the flu you got, besides lots of vitamin D, also lots of vitamin C (talking grams here), eat lightly, chicken soup, and ginger tea. Ginger tea all day! Hope it's gone soon!

Might not be your bedroom... My eyes feel bad in the morning if I spent too long on the computer the day before, especially if I was online late. Also, Chinese medicine says the liver opens to the eyes, so that might be something to look into.

The paperback is available now too for those of us who don't do Kindle. Here's the blurb: "My new book Tai Chi PENG Root Power Rising is a superset of the material in the video Tai Chi PENG Surfing the Soft Wave. It can function either as a supplement to the video, in that all drills on the video are covered in the new book, or stand-alone, in that the drills are presented comprehensively and there is a lot of additional background material. Tai Chi PENG Root Power Rising explains the mysterious tensile/elastic power of traditional Chinese Tai Chi known as PENG energy. The concept is clarified with direct reference to original translations of classical Chinese source texts. The human energy architecture that enables PENG development is detailed. Seven Tai Chi poses/structures from the Zheng Manqing Tai Chi sequence are introduced as a new framework, beginning with traditional 'standing post' energy exercises. Standing Post work (zhan zhuang) is enhanced with unique Tai Chi characteristics, leading to the evolution of a new relaxation and energy cultivation protocol: 'expanding post' (zhang zhuang). Fully illustrated, with extensive commentary on all aspects PENG definition, cultivation, and deployment, including a highly effective basic Tai Chi straight sword drill for linkage between core power centers and the hands." Here's one of the manga illustrations from the book, and, yes, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words! "Step Like a Cat" http://cattanga.typepad.com/tabby_cat_gamespace/2014/03/step-like-a-cat-from-tai-chi-peng-root-power-rising.html

If you're bouncing your legs, you're probably flexing your ankles and pounding your heels a bit. This would stimulate the qiao mai, two of the eight extraordinary channels that circulate energy up and down the body. This may be what Chuang Tzu was talking about when he wrote: "The ancient ones breathed from their heels." (This "breath" is actually chi, not air.) Lots of chi circulating does feel really, really good.... Speaking from personal experience now, when you get those channels cleared out, they're very available to restimulation. I was totally surprised that your "method" works for me too, although not (yet!) to the point of "unbearable bliss"... just kind of regular bliss. TTB has some threads on the Eight Extraordinary Channels, you might find interesting.

"Don't think.....feel" Bruce Lee "Feel.....don't think" Qui-Gon Jinn ......Mal's signature

That "powerful natural high" thing was one of the first things that really got my attention when I started reading Juice. I had already come across that feeling in my Tai Chi Ruler practice, and was surprised nobody seemed to be talking much about it. There's a famous picture of Grandmaster Wang Xiang Zhai standing Zhan Zhuang with this incredibly blissful expression on his face. Couldn't figure out how to post it, but you can see it here: http://www.chi-kung.org/en/tradition.html Yeah, THAT!

Hey SC, Scott noted on his blog that the video will be available later for Europe and Japan markets. Whatever "later" means, but it is on the way...

For those who appreciated Scott's book Juice, his video clarifies some important points and demonstrates methods for developing sensitivity to the energy, now identified as Peng energy, carefully—and convincingly—differentiated from the Peng stance (or stance strategy maybe) in tai chi. These methods are not covered in the book, and demonstration is much more helpful than reading. His goal is to show you how to practice in order to get the peng energy palpably (and deliciously) interpenetrating the entire body, filling from feet to head to hands. That said, be prepared that this is a bare bones presentation, very to-the-point. The video itself is okay, lots of quick cuts that can be distracting, some audio distortion on my copy, but nonetheless, covers his points directly and succinctly with no frills. Totally his style. I especially appreciated the way he used his own translations of old texts to illustrate and validate his points.. (And startling in a fun way to hear that Chinese coming out of his mouth!) The DVD was inexpensive and definitely worth it to me. His next book, the Juice sequel, is due out in March. Tai Chi Peng: Root Power Rising appears to cover much the same material as the DVD, with a few additions, and more depth. http://cattanga.typepad.com/tabby_cat_gamespace/2014/02/juice-sequel-book-march-15-on-amazon.html Even if it's largely the same material, seeing (and hearing) it offers a good balance to just reading.

Chi junkie Far as I can tell, that's about it. Flowing chi just feels soooooooo good! The more I practice, the more I can feel, and the more available it is. Yum.

Scott's training video is finally available on Amazon, either as DVD or instant download. Tai Chi Peng: Surfing the Soft Wave. "This tutorial video demonstrates and teaches the core energy training methods that allow realization of the experiences described in the book: JUICE Radical Taiji Energetics by Scott Meredith. The method is based on Zheng Manqing style Taijiquan but the tutorial assumes no prior knowledge of this system." Instant download is $9.99, DVD $12.95. He's certainly made it accessible! http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_13?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=tai+chi+peng+surfing+the+soft+wave&sprefix=Tai+Chi+Peng+%2Caps%2C2140&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atai+chi+peng+surfing+the+soft+wave Note: the runtime on both versions is 2 hours 14 minutes.

Love that green horse! Kudos to Sean!

Contemplating the TA in the morning before I got out of bed,, I was playing with reverse breathing, and felt the immediate increase in blood circulation/pressure/warmth in my head. If you inhale with your gut sucked in, your lungs are full of air, and your gut is contracted, where else can the blood go but to the head? I guess the legs, but I didn't feel it at all in my legs. Then again, I was lying down... Have to play with it more. Obviously not for folks with high blood pressure or glaucoma! But very interesting to me as my iridology indicates reduced brain circulation. Also, there's a LOT of material on the web about the TA, and the relation between the TA and reverse breathing (search the two together). I particularly liked the discussion on this site, which talks about TA's role in maintaining upright posture and includes some TA exercise: http://loveyogalovelife.blogspot.com/2013_04_21_archive.html

RV, those are great pics, very helpful to understand what's pulling on what. Thank you! Friend and MithShrike: The transverse abdominus does not pull the ribs down: it sucks the gut in. So the TA is the muscle you want to train (make it shorter and tighter). The rectus abdominus and the obliques are the muscles that traction the ribs down, so those are the muscles you want to lengthen. You do want them to be strong, but you want them to have increased span, allowing the ribcage to lift. Have a longer look at RV's pics to get straight on what you're trying to do. Question for Aetherous: would reverse breathing train the TA? I've never paid much attention to reverse breathing, but after thinking about it, I am suddenly VERY interested. In addition to the potential for training the TA, it clearly increases brain circulation! Do people with poor brain circulation tend to have weak TAs?

Hi RV, Extending the exhale is a great method for increasing your carbon dioxide capacity, which will also increase oxygen usability, but I don't think it would necessarily elongate the TA. The TA is kind of like a girdle, so you actually want to shorten it, ie tighter girdle. If you were able to isolate the TA and use it to extend the exhale, then that would probably tone it more, but you would have to make sure you weren't using the RA and obliques to do it. Extend the exhale keeping your rib cage lifted and without caving forward...Interesting experiment.

A lot of back pain comes from being too short/tight in front. Overly tight rectus abdominus (RA) and obliques crank the ribcage down in front and then the back and neck muscles have to work harder to keep you upright. Then those muscles are tight all the time and it doesn't take much to take them over the edge. Shortened serratus anterior and hamstring muscles also contribute. So those are the muscles to lengthen and loosen. It's difficult to strengthen a muscle when its antagonist (the ones that do the opposite action) is tight. So you have to stretch the short ones mentioned above before you can effectively strengthen the back muscles. Referral zones from trigger points in the rectus abdominus (aka six pack) muscles go all the way across the upper and lower back! A ball park guide to how far your rib cage has dropped: turn sideways to a mirror, and put one index finger on your throat at the depression at the very top of the sternum (sternal notch). Put the other finger on your first thoracic vertebra in back (the first one that doesn't turn when you turn your head from side to side). Your two fingers should be close to level, an inch drop at the most. Most of us are 2 or 3 inches dropped in front, all due to tight abdominals! Crunches and sit ups make this WORSE! The "core" muscle you really want to activate/strengthen is the transverse abdominus (TA). Problem is there is no overt exercise (that I know of, but maybe nauli does it)) that strengthens it, and the exercises are very internal and subtle, so hard to explain. You want to strengthen it because, unlike the RA and the obliques, which pull down on the ribcage, the TA wraps around your lower gut, working through hydraulics, squeezing the fluids in, lifting and supporting your rib cage! When the TA is stong and toned, you stand up straight effortlessly! Your gut disappears! Your back muscles heave a sigh of relief! You can get a feel for what this is like by standing up straight and stretching both hands up over your head. Then hold that posture, while letting your arms come down to your sides. That's what it feels like, effortless buoyancy! The TA attaches all along the lower back, so when it has more tone, your lower back is also supported. If someone gives you an exercise for the TA and you do it but find you can't breathe freely while you hold a contraction, then you have contracted the RA and obliques, not what you're looking for. It's a tricky thing. I can try to describe one of the effective exercises if anyone is interested...

I think I like it... although it's a little confusing to follow... Let's see if I got it.... So the OP (aka A) asks a poster not to continue in a given negative/counter vein, but B ignores A's request, and continues to counter post. So A asks mods to remove the second person's posts from the thread. Is B then blocked from the thread or otherwise disciplined if they continue to post negatively in the thread? (By negatively here, I just mean adversely to A's intention in starting the thread, which maybe we could name something like counter-posting) It sounds like the first "counter post" would remain, but others from that poster removed? Then another person might counter post, be asked to refrain, but their original counter post would also remain. So the thread could just be a series of single counter posts from different posters, if the original topic intent didn't draw much affinity, or didn't develop along the lines the OP had in mind. If the OP had no objection to some counter posting, the thread would just wander around. This sounds really good as an alternative to throwing so many threads in the pit and all the splitting, which I think really damages continuity of discussion. And maybe more people would be drawn back into posting, knowing they had some protection/defense/recourse against their thread just going thoroughly awry (from their point of view.) I sure hope someone who has had trouble with this will try it out! Rene posting on De or virtue comes to mind, as a situation like this seems to have driven her entirely off the board, and I miss her input! I'm thinking people who get off on counter-posting are definitely not going to like it! But this sounds like it will be a limited discussion area, so they can just not go there, either to read or post, same way MH avoids PPFs! Yes, I definitely like it.

This is totally in line with Buteyko's breathing technique. Check out the Frolov device, another way to accomplish this. And for a fascinating read, check out the book Dr. Breath, the story of Carl Stough, a church choir director who developed breathing protocols, first to improve his students' voices, and then later to help VA emphysema patients breathe. He wasn't a medical person, and didn't know emphysema was supposed to be incurable... so he proceeded to cure them! Or at least to set them on the path by reactivating their diaphragms. Stough eventually went on to coach US participants in the high altitude olympics in Mexico City. His breathing methods enabled many of them to not only better their lifetime records, but to do that at high altitude without supplementary oxygen! The book has gotten ridiculously expensive, but there's info and video online.

This was a great read. I kind of gulped it down first time through, but it's one I'll be reading a few times over. Thanks, Snowmonki!

ThisLife, These stories are truly treasures! I am enjoying them tremendously. Thank you so much for taking the time to put them here for us! cheya

Back in the mid seventies, I lived "off grid" for five years before I headed off to India to join a cult. :-) We started out with just an old schoolhouse, no electric, no running water. Waste disposal was an outhouse which we only had to redig once. Lights were kerosene lamps. Cooking was on a wonderful old wood cook stove we christened Big Mama, that had a water jacket. Another stove heated the living room. We did have a phone. (You don't actually need electricity to have a landline.) We raised milk goats, chickens, and bees, had a huge garden and orchard, heated with wood, bathed with water carried from a spring (in the kitchen, in a galvinized tub!), and I managed to hold down a town job through most of it. Now THAT was a challenge! It was like recapitulating civilization. Big advances were when we plumbed the spring to feed across the hollow by gravity. Gravity alone wouldn't quite reach up to the house, so we mounted one of those red-handled pumps on the kitchen sink. After carrying all the water for two years, this was like a miracle! Another big advance was getting a propane fridge. OMG! ICE! Another miracle! There are lots of ways to live "off grid". Some dear friends live in an ecovillage here, 60 some people on 330 acres, entirely off grid. Of course they are much higher tech than I was all those years ago! Most have solar electric, phone, and web access. There's a community micro-hydro system, and some also have generators, so they don't have to toe the solar line quite so carefully. And most of the houses take advantage of passive solar heat so they aren't so dependent on burning wood. Off-grid is one thing, but self-sufficient is an entirely different animal. You're always dependent on others, and the more good folks with skills in your network, the better you'll fare. And "tiny houses" are great for off-the-grid, but not so much for "self-sufficient: if you're going to really be self-sufficient, you need a lot of equipment to raise and process food, care for animals, build and repair stuff. So you need space to store it. A lot of space. That, and all the kids (or friends) necessary to do the work, is the reason those old farmhouses were pretty big! That said, a great site for tiny house dreaming is http://tinyhouseblog.com Some of my current favorites: This handmade trailer even has a sleeping porch! http://catstinyhome.wordpress.com/ Wonderful design details on this one: http://tinyhouseblog.com/stick-built/erin-and-dondis-off-grid-tiny-house/ And this adobe house is one of my all time favorites! http://tinyhouseblog.com/earthcob/rina-steens-adobe-house/

Hi Seph Many years ago I had a long run in with Worry, where I would wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying. I'd worry on one topic after another, and it felt like a bull dog knawing on a pile of bones! Then in the morning I would be astonished that I was so worried about those things. I finally turned that bull dog into a funny little goblin monster, named him my "Worry Ogre" and started laughing at the whole process. That helped a lot. Not much later I had my first appt with a wonderful five phase acupuncturist, who showed me that I had a huge imbalance in the earth element, which predisposed me to worry. After just the first appt, the worry ogre went on vacation and has seldom showed up since. When he does, I know I need to check in on my elemental balance. Once you understand the way the five elements work, you can adjust food choices, activity, and sleep to rebalance them. It's a wonderful thing to know to stay balanced. Also, in five phase theory, the earth element controls the water element, so I think you're on the right track, but get some help and make it easier on yourself!

You can hide a single member's signature (without blocking the post) using ignore preferences....