thelerner

<edited a bit You know what I think..? I think Kosta was telling the truth and Chang was .. romanticizing. That answer puts together all the pieces of the puzzle, imo. I think Chang is a master, great healer, can do the electro shocks with his body. But I don't think that's enough to impress Westerners, to separate him out. Attaining such mastery is a long and pretty boring journey. Hours and hours of daily practice over decades.. to master the art and healing. And in his country it doesn't overly impress people. Westerns are smart but they also very gullible. Since the early 70's we have the Castaneda effect going on. People looking for wonder and powers. It leads to bad ends, Castaneda certainly did, for himself and his closest followers. Good books though, but they're invented hodge podge created by an anthropology major. I think, not sure, so are some of the stories Chang told Kosta. He added legitimate practices from Mo Pai, but also stories, not lies exactly, romantification I call it, and he's not the only high level guy guilty of it. The fighting off natives, secret books, wizardly battles are romanticized. I think if we went to Indonesia, saw real practitioners and visited there school we wouldn't find people levitating stuff or doing pyrokinesis. We'd fine an excellent and deep school of gigong. I could be wrong but that's what I got.

I guess what people are saying is a man can be head heavy, in two ways. If you feel wobbly or off balance, move to the center.

Maybe 20 years ago I took an intro course with him when he was going through Chicago. I find him an important pioneering figure in spreading Taoist meditation. I think he's real and well meaning, yet damned by trying to take esoteric arts to the masses when they're best taught in smaller personal venues. Much is lost in mass produced books and videos. Those who have been able to take classes with him, indepth and regularly seem to fair quite well as do those who practice with full integrity. His books and videos promise much and I think people who study with him, do get amazing results but those picking a video who read the glowing reviews (which I'm sure are real) and think going through a book and practicing for a few weeks or few months without live teacher feedback are going to reach any great heights are going to consider it phoney. It's not him, its not even them, its trying to learn from book. A few can, but most won't or can't take it that deep. In short, if you can practice with him or one of his past hard core students (I like Michael Winn) it'd probably be worthwhile. Note opinions will differ, but we do (did) have people here who took Chia's teachings far and deep.

Sounds good, keep it up. People tend to be way to head heavy, keep things on the down low and we're much more in flow.

That's why you listen well and 'blink' your eyes open when you feel.. something. Every 8 or 10 steps is every few seconds. As you trust yourself it gets longer. With practice you walk straighter and find the cyclists, skateboarders make enough noise to spot early.

Funny you should mention walks, last weekend I was getting into something I used to work on. Walking with eyes closed. I'd start by taking 8 steps then 'blink' them open, then 10, then 12 steps, finally walking for as long as I felt comfortable before sneaking a quick peek. It's an interesting combination of paranoia and peacefulness.

This might not be what you're looking for, but these days I'm bastardizing some of what I'm learning in the Wim Hof cold adaption method. He likes doing some exercises with breath holds. I'll do 10 easy push ups against an incline, like a table or counter, then 10 more with deep quick breaths, breathing big when I go down, out when as I come up for 10. The last 10 I'll do holding my breath after exhaling. I'll probably increase it to 15/15/15 soon. Not particularly spiritual but I like the single page 'sheet' exercises at darebee.com . From 'superhero' workout sequences to ones with specific ideals, they might have a sequence that looks good to you. I'm currently working with there K-Sculpt workout that uses kettlebells.

For staying connected to some old friends and for keeping an ear on certain events (for me Burning Man & Wim Hoff group..) Facebook has been important. Not something to use every day. Or even post much in, but good for keeping tabs.

Perhaps the greatest loss in the modern world is the loss of camaraderie. Be it the close knit family that eats together, or the bonding group- be it church, temple, 'secret' club even regulars at a bar. We've gotten too busy and its a soul deep loss when we don't have it. The solution is simple. Take the time, find the group and if you can't, roll up your sleeves and create yourself.

What do you call that long funny looking creature? and what kind of snake is it holding?

I think Aussie gave some good advice. Here is something I'll add http://www.yoganidranetwork.org/mp3/yoga-nidra-good-night-sleep (free download), a yoga nidra self hypnotic routine that is very nice for sleep. All of them on yoganidranetwork.org are good for deep relaxation, but the one I link to is very good for falling asleep. Once you listen you can fast forward to 4 minutes 25 seconds and go directly to the routine.

This is an interesting piece of social commentary. A conversation that runs 34 years from a young person to there older self or is it vice versa. this played after that and it really worked well. Poignant.

In any act of killing there is strong sense of separation; a closing of eyes and hearts. If we decide on that course of action we can do our best to make death swift and say a prayer of respect to the lost soul. Maybe we can also be mindful to do wildlife some good. So many things are double edged swords though. Across the street from me, my neighbor is quite the bird feeder. He has at least 4 or 5 up and filled all year. The birds get it first, the squirrels second, rodents after that. He and his neighbor on that side,get mice problems probably because of those feeders. Hard messy world. One tries to minimize harm and walk softly but we in civilization are large destructive beasts.

Haven't looked at it and can't vouch for it but this seems to be his blog http://www.actionlove.com/WordPress/2013/02/27/vagus-spinal-nervous-stimulation-qi-gong/ also a youtube-

People get depressed. There are valid reasons for it, life really does suck at times, as well as hormonal- not getting enough sun, genetic components and brain chemicals dopamine, serotonin etc., out of whack. Point is, it most often passes. Sometimes counseling helps, sometimes the right meds, sometimes waiting it out. It passes, we get better. Life comes at us in waves, keep your head long enough and you get a current that goes your way. Or you simply learn to float with what you have.

I didn't do brussel sprouts this year, but my friend did. He's way more conscientiousness a gardener then I am. He was plucking the bottom sprouts out in mid summer and apparently they grow back, so he's gotten a second crop out them in late October. The school near me has garden and they have some small brusel sprouts that are still going strong now, in late November. It's been a long fall. As I recall many will wait til the first snow fall to pick there sprouts, but they seem most tender when they're young.

We take technology for granted, but its an amazing achievement, created by dozens, hundreds, thousands of people working together with a common aim. Creating something that is a little bit magical. 15th year anniversary of the International Space Station: http://time.com/4094719/space-station-fifteen-years/ "You probably don’t remember what you were doing on Nov. 2, 2000, but astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev likely do. That was the day they climbed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), becoming its very first inhabitants—and beginning a streak for the station that reached 15 straight years of occupancy early Monday eastern time. Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev—who were aboard for four months—were members of what was known as the Expedition 1 crew. Last July 22, Expedition 45, including American astronaut Kjell Lindgren, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to begin their own station stay. In all, 220 people from 17 countries have lived aboard the ISS since 2000. During those 15 years, the station has made 87,600 revolutions of the Earth—give or take the odd leap day. Oh, and in case anyone’s counting, the crews have eaten approximately 26,500 meals—so far. The ISS was little more than three pressurized modules, some supplies and a couple of solar wings to help keep it powered on the day the first crew climbed aboard. Today, the station is a flying piece of cosmic infrastructure the size of a football field, containing 15 pressurized modules, which afford the astronauts as much habitable space as a six-bedroom home. It weighs 1 million pounds (454,000 kg), runs on 3.3 million lines of software code and required 115 launches just to carry all of its components up to orbit.." In a divided world its good to have something International, housing people, some of our best and brightest, from 17 different countries (at various times), living and working together. A speck of humanity in the hostile vacuum of space.

The real questions for me are: Is he happy? Well balanced? Healthy? Being able to move an ounce or two with your mind is an interesting feat, but the above while mundane are imo the important ones.

This isn't a David Wong article but I find it similar and very relevant to our age of 'manufactured' outrage. 5 Ways You're Tricking Yourself Into Not Being Happy By Winston Rowntree | November 14, 2015 Are you not happy? Is it for reasons other than external forces out of your control? Do you already hate me for asking? Then read on. Because having stared at the Internet for a while now, nothing is more obvious to me than the sheer number of viciously angry, angry people online. And anger is only a symptom of unhappiness, and there are two paths leading from it, and you don't want to take the wrong one. Of course, some people never sucked, but we don't talk about them. You know how I know you suck and are miserable? Because you're about to read the rest of this article, for one thing. Beyond that, here are a few more reasons you're an unhappy mess ... #5. Comments And Social Media Posts Are A Counterproductive Way To Express Yourself Happiness comes from accomplishment and purpose, and those come from Doing Shit. And we get shit done and accomplish things because we have to, and I know you're not happy because you haven't been forced to accomplish anything. And the best example of this is the angry comment you're already writing, despite not having read this entire article. You don't need to write articles to have your say online, because you can simply write comments. As a result, a website might have, like, 20 columnists but thousands of commenters. But what if there were no comment sections? Well, you'd have put the time in to turn your thoughts into an article, then try to get it published, and then maybe you'd get paid, and that might lead to other things or give you the confidence to try something else, and then you might end up successful and/or happy. But we do have comments, and Twitter, and so on, and so we have a release valve for people who HAVE to say something. But that valve prevents the buildup of the internal pressure necessary to drive you to have your say in a more fulfilling manner. Look how sad you're making the dog in this metaphor. Everyone leaves a few Internet comments here and there, but if you're doing it INSTEAD OF writing articles or books or screenplays or crazy manifestos, then I know you're not happy, because there are only so many hours in the day (more on that later) and so many ideas in your head. If a comment tree gets 1,000 upvotes, does it make a sound? Media and the arts are ultimately the comment section of real life ... ... so anything below that is probably doing you a disservice if you spend too much energy on it. Or think of it this way: If everything you've ever said can be blinked out of existence by a browser extension, then you may not have that much of a voice. Is the Internet preventing YOU from being happy by not forcing you to work to be heard? Let me know in the comments ... #4. You Think You're The Same As Successful People The worst way to get anywhere is to think you're already there (I showed my imaginary girlfriend that line and she loved it!). And one reason you suck is that you think you're generally on the same level as actually successful people. You know how I can tell you're not happy and productive? Well, for one thing, you get mad about stuff that should be ten millionth on one's list of personal priorities. (Have you ever unironically typed the phrase "anti-consumer" in a comment? Here's a simple test: Get out your birth certificate and check what it says under "Name." Unless it reads "Ralph Nader," you're a dumbass.) For another thing, you accuse successful people of doing things that YOU do. You, who notably suck and are a failure. For example, if one foolishly spends enough time online, one will quickly pick up on the absolute plague of idiots accusing video game designers of "laziness" when it comes to some trivial aspect of their work. It's modern cliche of online dumbassery. But semantics matter, and any working creative professional is officially living in the Post-Lazy Realm, because laziness is the thing which prevents people from becoming working professionals in the first place -- that thing you're doing right now. Working pros can be compromised, or run out of time or resources, or simply make mistakes, but professionalism precludes laziness as you think of it -- that's the deal. And so accusing professionals of laziness is so very revealing, because we assume of others what we know of ourselves, and laziness is why YOU would do it. See you later, extrapolator. People who have put the time in to make something of themselves are not like you, but you erroneously think professionals do things for the same reason you would, in the same way that your cat thinks that you're also a cat. You see laziness in others because you just sit around and think you're entitled to have an equal voice in the public sphere with no actual effort on your part. So you don't put in the effort, so you don't accomplish anything, so you're not happy. Because you're fucking lazy. #3. It's Not Cool To Be Happy This isn't all your fault. One of the impediments to happiness is an absence of inspiration, and one of the impediments to inspiration is how, for whatever reason, the Inspiration section of any bookstore is by far the least inspiring thing in there. You may not be happy because the language of telling people things will be okay seems to have long ago been co-opted by idiots, the insincere, Hallmark, and Chicken Soup For The Money-Liking Fucking Liar Who Wrote This Best-Selling Book. Pictured: Poe's law. Inspiration as we know it seems to work on the theory that you can simply tell people what to do and they will instantly do it, which is frankly not even true of dogs. It's empty phrases and easy answers and telling people to quit their job and become a _______, because that sure is easy to say when you don't have to do it. Most inspiration is just the IDEA of inspiration, as opposed to meaningful advice. You likely fucking noticed all this shit and learned to ignore it long ago. You may be miserable, but you're not an idiot. There's a reason these things are like 40 percent of the Internet. So due to its tiresome association with glibness and moronity, is it easy to see happiness as kind of ... lame? Possibly? It does feel like the only people trying to sell happiness are also selling books and posters and fucking Scientology, so it's unsurprising that cynical people seem to stay cynical. What the rest of us can do is try to lead by example, and by god Make Stuff which inspires by example rather than by artificially trying to Be Inspirational, and give advice that takes, uh, reality into account, and try to sell success better, and not make people hate themselves by making it sound as if happiness is the fucking absence of misery, because it's not -- it's when you sometimes have a really bad day, as opposed to the opposite. You know how I know you're not happy? Because a lot of the people telling you about happiness are lame as shit. #2. You Think You'll Live ForeverPeople occasionally make the mistake of asking me for artistic advice, but there's only one hint you'll ever need to be a good artist (or a good anything else): Nobody who knows they're going to die is capable of not trying their best. You know why nobody is reading your comic strip about two dudes who sit on a couch and play video games? Because that's been done ten trillion times before, and nobody who knows they don't have forever spends their time on something that doesn't prove they existed as an individual. You know how I know you're not happy? Because considering how unlikely it was for you to exist in the first place, you are now wasting the few short decades of that existence, and nobody who wastes their time ends up being happy about it. The skeleton represents death. I remember being younger and reading about a photo exhibit about people before and after their deaths, and things just kind of terrifyingly clicking for me that like sands through the hourglass, so are the, uh, something of our lives. And while I don't think that being relentlessly haunted by a terrifying hyper-awareness of the looming horror of mortality is essential to being fulfilled in your daily life, there are way too many people writing about nothing, and way too many people not being inspired by it. So by contrast, let me posit the following metaphor. You're in a movie theater. You've got your seat and snacks and everything (which is more than a lot of people get, incidentally). The curtain has gone up and the show has started. You're sitting there enjoying the show, and it's only been like half an hour and it feels like there's just tons of movie left. But at the same time, you know it's going to end eventually. That is you, now. The curtain went up a while ago and the previews ended and we're well into Act 1, and you're still just sitting there eating snacks, even though the clock is ticking and this is not a double feature (unless you're a Buddhist, I guess). That's you, and all of us. We're all in here together, and it seems like it's gonna last forever, but it fucking isn't. You look to your left and some people are scribbling stories and journaling furiously on pads of paper before the movie ends. You look to your right and people are screwing like mad so their kids can take over their seats. You look at the back of the seat in front of you, and whoever was sitting here before you has etched something about how he wasn't happy until he realized he had to make some kind of lasting mark while he still had time. Bette also wishes you'd used your time. #1. You're Supposed To Be UnhappyI think there are two kinds of lives that most of us are likely to have. There's the one where you start happy and the one that's the opposite, and the latter is of course bitterly envious of the former all through high school. But each has its pros and cons, and the good part of being a late bloomer is that you give yourself a chance to bloom. So if you're young and Not Happy, then don't be too jealous, because at least the one thing you'll never do is get entrenched in a life you then outgrow. Of course, some people were always content, but we don't talk about them. I think that for most of us, the ONLY way to happiness is through The Shit. That's why it's happiness, and why it's so rewarding and hard to lose it once you have it. There are only two shortcuts for people who want to feel good all the time, but don't have the patience to play the same game that the rest of society does. They are hard drugs and organized crime, and those have terrible entry fees. There are no legitimate shortcuts, in other words. Which is the entire point. As a wise man once said, nothing worth having is easy to get. You know how I know you're not happy? Because you're young and virginy, and many a happy person started out as a miserable fuck who wanted something but didn't have it yet. And boy do I ever speak from experience, because no one was less happy than me when I was younger and online. To be fair, they were totally wrong about Tomb Raider. But no one's more improved than me now, and that's the point here: It's fucking GREAT that you're not happy, because that's step one on the path to something way better. So fucking use it, because , and if you're angry and in it for the long haul, then eventually it'll be YOU getting paid to lecture people in lieu of entertainment (instead of writing comments for free with just as valid an opinion). I just want you to be happy, so i'll leave you with an actually useful bit of inspiration (aka Common Sense). It's the one thing that helped me out the most: If you want it bad enough, you'll get it. Because that's who gets shit. And judging by how unhappy you are, you probably want it pretty badly.

Why would anyone want to log out?

Probably a strong case of buyer beware. The real stuff is probably pretty rare and I'm guessing highly faked. FWIW I see Himalayan honey as cheap as $8 online, but its not the drugged out giant bee kind - https://www.google.com/shopping/product/4679822780281814508?q=buy+himalayan+giant+bee+honey&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 Still anyone finds a legitimate stash, I might be interested. I used to take teaspoon of honey w/ royal jelly every day. Good stuff. Especially in the winter or when one has a sore throat.

SotG, in your opinion, how much time should be spent building up the lower Tan Tiens and what are the signs that one could safely move on? Thanks

I don't know.. the Universe is mostly empty space. Maybe its more about serving/helping/kindness to others...?

I don't know much, but I like the idea of the salt showers/or bath, and most of all agree with the idea to slow down or stop your current practice and ground. Long walks in nature, simple quiet sitting, clearing your mind. Wait a while and get back to it fresh. When practices turn strange and twisted, its time to slow down, stop and smell the sage (or sandalwood).

Truly. When we lose our sense of humor, we have lost much. We spend so much time arguing and comparing our foolishness against other people's. When clearly My foolishnesses is the best.