liminal_luke

Get well soon!

My Zapchen coach recently suggested I start focusing on my spine as a way of connecting deeper with myself. It got my wondering what spinal work people do Do you do any meditation or physical movements designed to work in particular with the spine? Any wisdom as far as the energetic/esoteric significance of the spine, specific vertebrae, sacrum, etc? All spinal sharing appreciated. Liminal

Very cool . Looks like something I´d like to learn.

Omron Pedometer...Sure, I could go all high-tech and go with FitBit or one of the other new-fangled activity trackers that would allow me to upload data to my computer, but for me this simple, relatively cheap step counter is all I want. Wearing a pedometer really changes my perspective about walking. It encourages an every-little-bit counts attitude. I get up at the cafe to go to the bathroom and feel the glow of accomplishment -- another two hundred steps towards my goal! It makes walking into a fun game. Getting 10,000 steps or whatever isn´t the be-all-end-all of fitness, I know that, but, for us less athletic types, it provides a baseline of healthy activity. Red Boat Fish Sauce...Really healthy asian food can be hard to come by. You might think you´re ordering a simple plate of meat and stir-fried veggies, but what´s that gloppy florescent sauce? Unlike so many other fish sauces, Red Boat contains no sugar or mystery chemicals: it´s just black anchovies and sea salt. What´s more, it´s delicious.

UrbanYogi, I love your word -- swaying -- for the spontaneous movement you do. It sounds like you´ve spontaneously hit on a great practice for your body, and the proof is that you´re getting results. In general, I don´t think you can go wrong allowing your body to move how it wants to move. LIminal

Tecate beer pokes fun at Trump

Thanks Steve! I like that one too. Have the book and do it periodically. I started up again on October 1 with one round and have been adding a round a day. Hopefully I´ll keep it up until I get to 21 rounds and then keep it up from there. Four or five rounds doesn´t seem to do much for me, but I remember a very grounded feeling when I got up to 21 in the past. I originally learned it from Michael Winn´s sexual practice dvd. He recommends it as a tonic for kidney energy.

regression toward the mean

Thanks Ralis! I went to a Feldenkrais "Awareness Through Movement" mini-workshop once with my mom and loved it. Afterwards, my voice was lower and I was weirdly talkative.

falling leaves in air fall fell falling feeling free grief drops to the ground

Taomeow, Yes, I like the idea of going back and down, neglected directions for sure. So far, the practice doesn´t seem to have any intentional movement of energy vertically either way. The instructions are simply to be aware of myself as my spine (put my awareness there) and hum "Ahhhh" so that the sound reverberates into the area as a whole. She says that normally some parts of the spine are easier to feel into than others, so you let yourself become conscious first of those easier areas and then allow the awareness to spread to parts of the spine that are harder to feel. There´s a psychological component as well. My tendency is to be very diffuse in my energy body. I can pick up what is going on with other people energetically/emotionally but sometimes at the expense of keeping grounded in my self. I think the idea of this practice is to start to learn how to "hold onto myself" while being in relation with the outside world. I have only just started, but it´s interesting so far. DustyBeijing, Thanks for that video. That guy is amazing, and I agree that those movements cover a lot of useful territory. I might try some of that.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. George Orwell

I like that about dragons idquest. It certainly goes along with the idea that "spinelessness" means lacking in courage and strength. It´s hard to imagine a creature stronger and more ballsy than a dragon.

JoeBlast...Checked out xing shen zhuang on YouTube and it looks amazing. Think I´ll learn it and use it as a warmup for my spine meditation in the mornings Thanks! Sagebrush...interesting about the connotative meaning of "spineless" in our culture. I looked it up in the dictionary and, in addition to literally meaning without a spine, it also means "lacking courage or strength." Perhaps that´s why my Zapchen coach wants me to do this work: as a tonic for courage and strength.

Nope, definitely not Buddhist. The test must be skewed.

(-3.25, -6)

Noun or verb? I dao know. Perhaps this very question points to the necessarily slippery ambiguous nature of the Tao; maybe the ability to hold neither-this-nor-that consciousness in mind without grasping for something that "may be spoken" is precisely the point. ps pease forgive my tardiness in going back to the beginning

People can say what they like, of course, but the last thing a bald man needs to hear is that he´s a brain damaged, spiritually compromised, unfeeling drone.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say 'I want to see the manager.' William S. Burroughs

I´ve never signed out on purpose in my whole life. But that´s just me.

Oh, that´s an easy one. We´ll talk about whether or not the election was stolen.

Let´s suppose what Joeblast, Kar3n, and numerous others are saying is correct: Hillary is a corrupt criminal. What is a poor voter to do? For me, Trump is not an option. He´s either a madmen or someone willing to play the part for TV. God knows why he´d want to do that, but it seems possible. We are faced with a choice between someone who sounds good but is covertly evil, and someone who sounds bad (and likely is bad).

To me, Hillary sounded reasonable and rational. But, on the other hand, I´m not sure that it matters much. Knowing how to sound good is one thing, what kind of president she might actually be another. I don´t trust myself to pick the right person on the basis of how good they sound, because I think there´s so much more going on than what I can possibly see. But, yeah, I could never vote for Trump. So he makes it easy for me that way. Perhaps that´s the whole point.

Yes, he kind of made it easy for her. She just had to let him do his thing and then say, in effect...did you hear that folks?

Thanks for the YouTube link of the debate, Wilfred. I think Hillary (or perhaps her body double --who knows?) won.