liminal_luke

Here´s a youtube my new Zapchen coach put up about yawning as a way to deal with worry. Enjoy!

Can´t Say Much? Yeah, me neither.

Yawning...my Zapchen coach had me yawning three times a day for ten minutes at a go. Relaxing and calming.

Oh my, Sionnach....you do love play the provocateur, don´t you? Many folks find the outlandish dress (or lack thereof) and in-your-face kinkiness of a small subset of the gay community upsetting. An argument can be made that some of that doesn´t represent the best of gay culture. But I find it distasteful when people try to use such images to smear the gay community as a whole. It´s misleading, destructive, and, quite frankly, hateful. I could post pictures of heterosexual prostitution and swing clubs and all manner of shocking hetero lasciviousness. If we´re slinging pictures there´s plenty of that to go around. For better or worse people see those things and they don´t think that all of heterosexuality is wrong. Show pictures of the same people in a gay context and, well, homosexuality itself takes the blame. But then I think maybe that´s your point.

You came to the DaoBums wanting a fight, and you´ve found lots of them.

Maybe it´s the old foggy in me, but I´m not sure everyone needs to learn to code. Best case scenario, everyone is exposed to a wide variety of potential learning tracks and encouraged to follow their own curiosities.

You might be right. Never having quieted my mind, I wouldn´t know.

Put me down as a "yes." When the mind is quiet anger passes through the body as light through a crystal.

Whose angry?

This is something I don´t understand. I´ve been to several seminars with Max, and have practiced Yi Gung from Jenny Lamb´s self-healing dvd. I know that Max says his Kunlun is different, but I´m not at all clear on what that difference is. The teachers do have a different focus. At first glance anyways, Sifu Jenny is much more focused on physical health. Her dvd contains before and after practices that, to me, give the practice a physical-health improving quality. Max includes several other practices in his Kunlun system, most notably Red Phoenix. If Kunlun is done in conjunction with Red Phoenix it likely has different effects than just Kunlun alone. So...the adjunct practices that go along with Kunlun/Yi Gung are different -- I can see that. But as far as the basic the Kunlun practice itself goes, I don´t see what the difference is. Am I missing something? Thanks.

I find it enhances the TaoBums experience to imagine that some people have done things I haven´t and know things I don´t. Otherwise, I might as well just be talking to myself.

People can really mess themselves up reading spiritual philosophy. There´s all this stuff out there about love and compassion and all the other groovy mindstates that supposedly come on the way to ultimate enlightenment. And it might be true, too, but for many people it´s deceptive: they use it as an excuse to avoid all their emotional crap. Spiritual people are always loving so I will be too. But then they don´t do the work, and the work is what drives the whole process. You can´t get to love by pretending you don´t also feel angry. No, no, no, no, no...you get to love when you stop pretending you´re not angry.

Those inclined towards fear will find abundant justification for the sentiment if Trump OR Clinton wins.

The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

Yes! The big question I´d ask is "do I want to be a doctor"? Do I have a passion for helping people with their physical health? Also, am I the kind of person who would thrive having his own business? (Most people aren´t.) Or, if not, how woud I make use of my degree? If you have a passion for physical healing and could see yourself enjoying the day to day of working for yourself in a clinic, then I´d stay where you are. The program you´re in now won´t be the end of your studies but just the beginning. After you graduate you can continue to flesh it out with continued education. You will have a foundation and will be able to tweak your practice in any number of directions depending on your interests and talents.

I´ve achieved consciousness of a sort. Whether or not it´s super is debatable, but it beats unconsciousness.

Love, compassion, kindness -- these are the bedrock emotional vibrations of the spirit, qualities close to the essence of who we are. These are the good vibes that remain once all the crap and blockages and psychic trauma has been stripped away over hard years of cultivation. Hate is just a pothole on the way to immortality.

I admire a woman who doesn´t let death stand in the way of political ambition.

Thanks Silent Thunder. If I get my Blendtec fixed I´ll give this a try. I read that it will blend avocado pits before but never tried it.

Thanks Taomeow! I´ll have to do some more investigation as to the exact problem, but that might work.

: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”—Upton Sinclair.

I´m not there either, not by a longshot, but I believe in it as a human possibility.

If you need money to be happy, you´ll be afraid of losing your wealth. If you need the love of your partner, you´ll be afraid of disharmony and divorce. If you need health, you´ll be afraid of the body´s inevitable decline. If you need a functioning laptop, you´ll be afraid of electrical outages. If you need to live forever, you´ll be afraid of death. But what if you can find a place of inner secret joy, a place where you don´t need money or somebody else´s love or even your body...what would be left to be afraid of then?

I wouldn´t worry about it. My experience has been that practice helps me become the kind of person I want to be: more grounded, more loving, more happy. Along the way of course, I have to deal with a lot of crappy blockages and resistance, but what ya gonna do -- that´s the human condition and I figure I might as well get on with it. It´s never happened, but if my practice was really making me more hateful (as opposed to simply uncovering nasty emotions that were lurking around in my subconscious in the first place), I´d can that practice and pick another. Oh, and about that assumption that "consciousness rises progressively from lower to higher." I wouldn´t be so sure. In any case, we are culturally conditioned to go up and there´s a whole lot of important work to be done in the other direction. (Thanks to TaoMeow for her recent post in the Working with the Spine thread about the importance of going down.)

I have a Blendtec as well, and loved it, but the jar seal broke and it´s like $100 to get it replaced. Maybe I´ll do it though -- amazing machine. Any favorite pytochemical rich recipes, Silent Thunder? The infra-red sauna also appeals. Meditating in total darkness just sounds so nourishing, so I´m especially interested in that use. Wonder if I could buy a small tent and cover it with black-out curtains for the same effect. Any thoughts on whether this would be feasible from our resident engineers? How can I block out light and keep the oxygen? Thanks!