Creation

Would you be willing to share about this process? I haven't looked into this kind of thing before, but it has just become a priority for me. I just consulted with Ayurvedic practitioner with inner vision siddhi (the one Earl Grey and virtue are always recommending to people) who told me I have weak digestion and it's causing a lot of inflammation in my body. (An aside - since you just mentioned it in the tea thread, he recommended gynostemma for the inflammation, along with dietary changes and digestion supporting forumlas.) _/\_

OK, good to know.

Sounds marvelous when you describe it like that. Some questions come to my mind, more out of curiosity than anything. Spontaneous movements can be the results of other energy flows than kundalini, is there a reason you think it is that? You mention secret smile, are you in KAP? And "I AM" in all caps, is that from the Thusness seven stages?

I know you are being rhetorical, but just for fun let's look at the evidence. You brought up Trungpa Rinpoche's abuses. Now, Trungpa was Tibetan, and Tibetans have been targeted by the Chinese for cultural genocide. Dwai was silent. Then you brought up Sai Baba, and Dwai went off on a rant about how anytime someone criticiszes an Indian Guru, it is because they have been brainwashed by Evangelical Christians who want to destroy Indian culture, and he had the nerve to say this to a person who has spent years traveling Asia training seeking teachers, some of them Hindu, often being the only Westerner in the group! How appropriate that this comes up in a thread about how a person who has had profound experiences of transcendence can still be reactive.

@forestofemptiness I was too cavalier when I said "dispense with visualization", you are correct of course. Did you see my post above about the role of deity yoga in Tibetan practice? What I should have said in the post you quoted is that for high level yogis practices are integrated with rigpa so there is no sense of effort involved, they are no longer "mind based". And this is strictly to discuss the efficacy of visualization in producing deep transformation of body and qi, which is what Damo was addressing. The issue of insight in the Buddhist sense quite a different issue, though one that I can tell is very important to you.

I just want to say, there is some confusion about the point of deity yoga for serious cultivation, especially among those who are deep into Daoist internal arts, namely that it only functions as a preliminary to later things like the Six Yogas and Dzogchen/Mahamudra, and is thence dispensed with by real yogis. I think forestofemptiness is right to point out that this is not correct, but I disagree with him about what is not correct about it. An instance of why this is not correct is Jigme Lingpa's personal retreat schedule in his later years: it contained roughly equal parts deity yoga, channels and drops, and Dzogchen. Why would he continue to do deity yoga when he was already at a very high level if it was only something for beginners? Using Daoist terminology, empowerment gives a shen tranmission that allows the various mantras and visualizations to tap you into things at the shen level, the ling level actually, to the extent that I understand what that even means. This is why samaya purity and surrender to the teacher are given such importance. freeform has mentioned about top down and bottom up approaches in a thread you started, Tibetan Buddhism, and deity yoga in particular, are a top down method. If you look at it like it is a bottom up method, and compare it to other bottom up methods you will misunderstand it. Requiring preliminary practices before empowerment was an insertion of bottom up methods into a fundamentally top down method. This is why it causes such cognitive dissonance in many Westerners, but also explains why it became mandatory: As freeform observes that thread, people get more stable results that way.

I suspect that the people he has talked to who are deep into Tibetan Buddhism are Dzogchen practitioners. You know as well as I do that they dispense with visualization once they get rigpa, and the only people who attained rainbow body in Tibet did so with Dzogchen. So the part of what he is saying about needing to go beyond visualization to get deep body transformation is, IMO, a completely defensible thing to say. Now, I do agree with you that there is more to deity yoga than just developing good qualities as Damo claims, but that is entirely due to empowerment. If there was no empowerment, I would agree with Damo that it is just for developing good qualities, even if some of those good qualities seem "advanced" like super strong visualization ability.

This is great! Do you remember what Damo said about building the container? He said if you haven't built the container, the mind will sink to the region of the lower abdomen rather than be pulled to a specific point. It stands to reason that if you are clear enough, without that pull the mind will just keep sinking all the way down to the feet. freeform has mentioned that a primary difference between neigong and Taiji is Taiji emphasizes sinking all the way to the feet, while neigong emphasizes the process of building the dantian.

I also have reason to think location arises in consciousness. Yet, on the level of conventional truth, the mind has something it's taking as object, even if on some absolute level that object is actually arising in consciousness, right? So, even with this realization, one could still follow his instructions to not intentionally direct the mind but be aware of what it's taking as object in the body, and relax completely, and see what happens. If you do this, does it begin to sink like he says it will? Does that have a different effect on your energy than deliberately placing your mind on dan tian? For me the difference is subtle, but I can imagine that if I was doing practice really seriously and generating huge amounts of energy in body and mind, the difference would become more pronounced and important. It would allow me to relax deeper and interfere with the qi less, which would then allow me to generate more qi, which would allow me to relax more, etc. I suspect that people who get to a high level by deliberately placing the mind on dan tian at some point figured out to sink the mind without effort, maybe via transmission from their teacher, an indoor teaching, or natural intuitive talent. Sort of like how some people start qigong using visualization, but if they have gotten to a high level at some point they will have had to drop that.

I'm quite certain it's not muscle or ligament pain, and yes it's quite high up in the torso, the region between the diaphragm and navel. Actually, when I had an ultrasound for appendicitis a few years ago, they told me I had a small kidney stone, which I presume has just been chilling in there this whole time. There is an emotional component as well - my kidneys existed for a long time in a state of extreme continual fear contraction, and this still gets triggered relatively easily (for instance a few hours ago). This habitually contracted state of the tissue around the kidneys makes the area very sensitive. And finally, due to my fearful/willful water nature, when Daoist practices didn't seem to be getting anywhere for me I got really into forceful yoga postures and breathing methods, just to feel some self-efficacy. I'm still unraveling how this compromised my ability to sung the body and breath - I was really intense about it. And yet I had a certain amount of carefulness - I never hurt myself overtly, it's only now that I'm doing Daoist practice again that I see the problems it caused. I only felt sharp pain in yoga poses on three occasions, and it was in in this same upper abdominal region that I am having issues with now, but it was muscular then - the upper psoas, or so it seemed at the time.

Well, this thread has brought up some things which have been major issues for me recently, so I'll share here. I got to the point where assuming Damo's Wuji for any amount of time, even a few seconds, would result in a kind of crushing of my kidneys, so that, in the pose I didn't feel pain, but afterward, if I made any movement involving the abdomen I would have sharp pain in my kidneys. Needless to say, I was quite frightened. I stopped practicing and got to work to see what might be wrong. Two major things that needed sorted our were 1. Collapsed arches and habitually holding my weight over my heels. When I would shift the weight into the front of the foot per Damo's instructions, my plantar fascia didn't engage as intended (which would be the physical correlate of activating yongquan), and the weight basically went into the toes. I was going from heels to toes and never actually activating the part that was supposed to activate. 2. The spiraling actions of the legs and arms that synergzie proper opening and closing of the hips and shoulders were not engaging correctly, particularly external spiraling of the legs. This came from years of practicing yoga with bad cues (basically, internally rotate the legs in all poses). So whenever I would open and close the kwa, there was a fundamental imbalance and instability in how it was happening. Even now that I have started doing a little practice again, I'm only practicing for a small amount per session, taking a lot of care on these points. There are further things going on not relevant to this thread that also need sorted out. I had a dream that warned me that I might seriously damage my kidneys, so I'm trying to not do that.

I recently saw a clip from that interview and the awkwardness was really difficult to watch. I don't think it's because Musk lacks social skills per say. Think of it like this: I know many very smart people who have perfectly good social skills in ordinary contexts, but when you ask them about their field of expertise, they reveal themselves to be one of two types of person. One is the type of person who thinks you don't really understand something unless they can explain it to a random person on the street, that is, for whom simplifying something to it's essence is an important part of their personal understanding of it, and they will be able to talk about their field easily. Science popularizes are like this, so were, for instance, Einstein and Feynman. The other type of highly intelligent expert doesn't use intuitive simplifications in their thought process in this way, instead they rely on their unusually high mental processing ability to do their work. These people just don't know how to talk about what is in their head to non-experts and less intelligent people, it's painful and awkward for them to even try. Musk definitely seems to be in this latter category. Check out his interview with Lex Friedman (an AI researcher at MIT) to see him in his element. What really struck me about Musk in the Rogan clip I saw was his benevolence and generosity of spirit. He is not doing the things he does for money or fame.

I used to be really curious about this kind of thing, now not as much, but this has me curious enough to ask a theoretical question of you. I was just watching Damo Mitchell's podcast on the Microcosmic Orbit/Small Water Wheel. He mentions that the Water Wheel is not qi circulating in the ren and du (du being the posterior of the spine, not the inside of the spine), but is the refined jing rising up the inside of the spine, producing nectar in the head, and the and nectar dripping down the throat and the deep insides of the torso. Is there any relationship between this process and kundalini as it is used in your lineage?

I have read some articles that make a plausible case that contemporary Theravada's emphasis on being the "correct original" teaching of the Buddha is actually due to the influence of Protestant missionaries on educated Southesat Asians in colonial times.

I don't disagree with you, but I know many Westerners who would not have been able to make any sense of the dharma without psychologizing it, and benefitted from the psychologized version. This is why teachers like Trungpa Rinpoche emphasized the more psychological aspects when first presenting the dharma to the West - skillful means. You seem well informed enough to know that it took the Chinese something like 300 years before they stopped interpreting Buddhism as a form of Daoism and understood it on it's own terms (I'm taking Kumarajiva as the major watershed figure here). The West started seriously learning about Buddhism about 150 years ago for comparison's sake.

You say Theravada makes sense to you rationally, but in the Pali Canon there are heavens, hells, deities, and magical powers. Can I surmise that because the core teachings of the four noble truths and noble eightfold path don't require belief in such things, you feel free to ignore the elements of traditional Theravada that seem irrational to you? But you don't see a way to do this with Mahayana? There is a strategy for doing this with Vajrayana that is very common in the West: Psychologize all deity practices and rituals. That is, treat them all as symbols that work because symbols are the language of the subconscious mind. A similar strategy could work for Mahayana, no? This is a type of mental rationalization. On the other hand, believing in things you have no personal experience of is also a type of mental rationalization. Since you are doing the practices and they are working, maybe you don't need to engage in either type of mental rationalization? (Edited to add: that was just a thought for discussion's sake, personally I always want to fit what I'm practicing into a logical framework.)

Richard Freeman and Simon Borg-Oliver are my two favorite yogasana teachers, by far. The difference in the depth of their understanding of asana vs other teachers is clearly a combination of natural aptitude and cross training. Simon is very clear about his teachers, Iyengar and a direct student of Jois, but also an he cross trained in traditional pole and rope gymnastics, Western free diving, as well as Shandor Remete's Shadow Yoga and a Shaolin qigong master. Freeman on the other hand presents what he is teachings as nothing other than traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa, but if you are familiar with Vajrayana it is unmistakable that he has trained it and incorporates it's principles into his Ashtanga teaching. He even co-teaches workshops with Bob Thurman. Most all of what I know about Krishnamacharya and Ramaswami came from Grimmly's Ashtanga blog, which he unfortunately seems to have deleted. Did you ever come across it when it was up?

As to the more specific aspect of your question about keeping the tension while stretching, I would like to point out a distinction. The yoga teachers I always liked best emphasized things like actively moving into postures, balancing opposite actions and moving with complete control (which requires eccentric contraction - contraction while stretching, think of the floating transitions and tick tocks of Ashtanga Vinyasa), and maybe even borrowing the wester sport science idea of PNF (which again is an eccentric contraction). As far as I can tell, this all creates a creates a certain amount of connective tissue integrity, which is good! But it is connective tissue engagement that is dependent on muscular engagement. The height of this found in elite gymnasts, who have incredibly strong connective tissue compared to other types of elite athletes, but it is always linked with muscular strength/tension. This it is not the same as what Damo is taking about in that video, which is connective tissue engagement that is not dependent on muscle engagement. When you realize that you can engage your connective tissue independently of your muscles, that changes everything.

I wouldn't call myself an "experienced yogi" but I've been considering the answers to similar questions for a bit now. First consider that this is coming from a particular lineage within everything that could be called Daoism or qigong, which, as freeform is always saying, is trying to absorb the mind into the body and relax they body to an ever deeper degree. So if some other lineage does it differently, perhaps it's because they don't have that particular goal in mind. Particularly, many lineages of yoga do not make this their express goal. They might be trying to awaken and channel internal energies like kundalini or bindu (sexual essences), and not care so much about the complete well being of the body or a more whole-system understanding of what the process of spiritual development entails. The other issue is that the goal of much yoga asana practice, even what is taught Indian teachers that can recite the Gita or Yogasutras from memory, is to have a Hindu/sattvic form of physical culture and is not connected at all to the kind of radical inner transformation of real hatha or raja yoga (as described in, say, Autobiography of a Yogi). So their perspective on how to practice yoga asanas will be skewed by not having this deeper knowledge, however well meaning they might be. It's sort of like a Chinese person coming to the West and teaching the Tai Chi 24 form and telling their students that they are doing ancient Daoist Internal Alchemy out of a desire to promote Chinese spiritual culture (and this is being generous, they might have less noble reasons for overselling what they are teaching). So, which yoga teachers understand the hatha yoga asana practice as part of a complete spiritual system for total spiritual and physical transformation, rather than paying lip service to kundalini or the eight limbs of yoga but in practice just promoting mindful exercise with Sanskrit names and a sattvic lifestyle? Iyengar, Jois, and even Sivananda and his students as far as I can tell were doing the latter. One exception was the father of modern yoga, Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. He stopped his heartbeat under medical examination on multiple occasions, a pretty clear indication of real yogic attainment. But when his own son begged him to teach him how to do this, he said "I will teach you anything I know except that." All evidence suggests that he was teaching a form of exercise and healing suitable for householders, and didn't teach his deeper knowledge of internal transformation to any of his students. Moreover, he taught differently to different students at different periods, so he taught Pattabhi Jois a certain way and put him in charge of training young boys, and taught BKS Iyenger seemingly just to be a demonstrator of challenging asanas, and this clearly colored the way they taught when they ended up spreading their teachings worldwide. That said, he did teach some of the deeper knowledge he had, as evidenced by his writings and the teachings of the students who studied with him longest, in particular Srivatsa Ramaswami. You then get a different picture of what he was teaching than you would get from Iyengar or Jois. You see long stays even in challenging postures. For instance, Krishnamacharays mentions the benefit of holding mayurasana for 15 minutes in one of his books, and that to do this you must soften your abdomen. 15 minutes! I can hardly believe it. And if you look at the pace of movement in Ramaswami's teachings, it is very very slow compared to other teachers, and movement is always linked to breath in Krishnamacharya's method so this means very slow breathing. So, slow movement linked to slow breathing and long holds in postures that force you to relax in order to continue to hold them, what other lineage of spiritually informed physical exercise does that remind you of? I know this deviated pretty far from stretching, but all this is to say doing yoga postures with attention to the principles that Damo Michell teaches is probably closer to what Indian Hatha Yogis of real spiritual attainment do, than how contemporary asana popularizers such as Iyengar, etc. say to practice.

Could you say more about what qualities one's sense of self would have for this insight to be revelatory rather than damaging, and how one could cultivate these qualities without strengthening the deluded parts of one's self? I spent years trying to develop a stronger and more coherent sense of self in ways which I now see harmful and blocked my spiritual unfoldment, so this is a matter of some personal importance to me.

Hello, Not all Tibetan Yoga looks like this, in fact most doesn't. The dramatic jumping movements in these videos are called "vajra drops". It is an amplification of a technique from Indian yoga called "maha vedha mudra" where the body is lifted off the ground by the arms (say, in lotus pose) and dropped a few inches, causing a jolt to the perenium and spine. This is combined with breath retention and muscle locks to bring the prana into the central channel at the lower abdomen more powerfully than breath retention and locks alone. All Tibetan lineages use breath retention and yogic movements to bring the prana into the central channel and ensure its smooth and balanced flow, but not all of them use these aggressive drops (bep in Tibetan) to amplify the energy. Acording to scholar-practitioner Ian Baker, drops were introduced into Tibet in Dzogchen termas, and each new generation of termas had a more intense style of drop: first something very mild like in Indian yoga, all the way to vajra drops, that is, jumping from standing and landing in lotus as in the videos you posted, in the Longchen Nyinthig. Any lineage which has Dzogchen (Kagyu and Nyingma, not sure about Bon) should have this style of yoga, but whether and particular teacher knows it and will teach it is another story! It is a supplementary practice, only suited for a certain kind of person, with very strict prerequisites. Clearly, you can hurt yourself not just energetically but physically trying this type of thing.

Oh! I saw a particular timetable posted for the lessons and assumed there was a commitment to doing the lessons within that time. Well, that settles the thing for me, thank you.

The point with them is that if you get the alignments correct and do the movements as relaxed as possible, the downward flow starts to happen on it's own. The two problems I encountered were: 1. Trying to "do" outer dissolving with the conceptual mind will not sink the qi, but will actually raise it. 2. Confusing relaxation with limpness and confusing sinking via letting go with pushing energy downward. I didn't make the first error very long because I was warned against it, but I very much made the second error (both parts) and it completely prevented any progress. Only when I learned the joint and fascia work taught in his other sets did I realize how big of a mistake I had been making, at the same time I found Damo Mitchell's material which confirmed this.

Thanks. It's not prohibitively expensive, sure, just requires a fair bit of saving up on my budget. Most all my expendable money goes to cultivation related things anyway, it's just a matter of selecting wisely what to invest in. A week of training in person with Adam Mizner, for instance, would be comparably priced, hard to say which would be more beneficial for me. Since you call this Shuigong alchemical, the question arises for me is does the issue of yin shen vs. yang shen arise? Often one hears alchemical lineages discouraging astral projection type practices as an obstacle to yang shen cultivation. @Earl Grey, would been interested to hear anything you have to say on this as well.

Ah, that's movement 3. If movement 1 works well for you and you didn't have any problem with 2, consider re-incorperating 2. That said, given you issues, Energy Gates or Heaven and Earth would be my pick from Frantzis' entry level sets. Energy Gates is where the downard flow is specifically emphasized, Heaven and Earth trains the joints and fascia without which the methods of Energy Gates might not work well (in my experience, others have been fine starting with EG). Not sure which to recommend in your case, but EG has a book while H&E is online only so more expensive.