sean

I haven't looked into it in detail, but I don't see how this is a multi-user blog. It's advertised as a personal publishing platform. Can you point me to examples of multiple users having their own blog sections? Personally I think the blog format we have now is working superbly. And as I've mentioned several times eventually I'd like to upgrade us to either Invision Power Board or VBulletin, either of which have amazing forum-intregated blog features. For example, check out the one over at E-Sangha. Sean.

Thanks Peter. :twisted:

me.

I learned that from Scott Sonnon's "Be Breathed" program. It's part of his "Performance Breathing" protocol. Pretty interesting. That's exactly how I felt when I first started a training journal here. But eventually it started to wear on me. "I set up a discussion forum for this stuff but I'm not even doing anything? WTF?" Finally just having a blog here that never got updated and having that in my face every day got me to commit to doing some cultivation and posting about it more frequently. Still a pretty boring journal, but it keeps me more committed. Not lame at all. Actually pretty damn impressive. Just think about the percentage of people in the world that just come home from work and watch the game and drink beers and go to sleep. That's what I do when I feel depressed about how friggin lazy I am. Hey, pm your address and I'll let you borrow "The Five Minute Miracle" ... interestingly enough, it's an integration of the Five Tibetans with Scott Sonnon's "Be Breathed". Good shit. Sean.

Sometimes my nose closes up after doing Buteyko breathing; like you said, sometimes even shortly afterward. Since I've been paying attention more to my breath, I catch myself holding my breath on the inhale very frequently throughout the day. Especially when I'm stressed. So at this point I'm interpreting congestion to be a result of excess stress exacerbating already poor breathing patterns. So the symptoms subside when I consciously do a Buteyko session. But once I return to involuntary breathing, my dysfunctional breathing patterns bring back the congestion symptoms sooner or later. Here's how I apply the protocol: Stand erect and on the exhale lean forward a bit, rolling your shoulders forward, curling up your pelvis and pulling up on your diaphragm. Count until it the discomfort suddenly starts to rapidly increase. Subtract a second or two from that number and use that for the rest of your session that day. On the inhale, rapidly stand up straight, rolling shoulders back, relaxing your pelvis into a subtle backward arch and let go of your diaphragm. The released tension from having your diaphgram pulled up will have it drop and, along with the movement, automatically suck in a passive inhale. In other words, you don't need to actually inhale, the relaxation of your diaphragm and the upward movement of your body will suck in a breath for you. Without pause, immediatly contract back into the active exhale and hold. I do 5-10 reps of these and around 10 sets. In between reps do a very relaxed, looser version of the same thing but only hold the exhale for 1/4 or 1/3 of the time you've established for your main reps. I find this an important step to avoid switching to gasping/holding in between reps. Do these relaxed reps until your system has calmed down and it's completely natural and easy. Then start a new aggressive set. Let us know what your experiences are. You should start a Training Log btw. Sean.

So I finally got around to installing the attachment mod. Still need to tweak a lot of the settings but it appears to work fine. I've allotted 50 megs total for all attachments on the board for now. I want to see how it goes for a bit, in particular how it effects bandwidth, etc. Let's try to keep 95% of the attachment in the Taoist Discussion or Training Logs forums. In other words on topic and relating to the central purpose of TaoBums. I really would prefer not to see a zillion joke attachments in Off Topic as it will eat up available disk space and bandwidth and it's very easy to host things of this nature off-site. Of course lemme know if you have any questions or run into snags. Sean. [edit] Example attachment deleted.

Ahhh... ok, that makes sense. I will try to make it another option then. Called "Hybrid Mode" or something. Sean.

It's a great idea and I've really been meaning to make that mod. It's just too much of a server load (and not really that useful anyway) to have the forum-view in threaded mode. It's going to be a real hack though because "out of the box" the threaded-mod only gives you the option to either have it on or off. So I'm going to have to dive into the PHP on this one. It's definitely on the to-do list though unless someone violently disagrees for good reason.

Anyone ever google "foreskin restoration" ... If you've been circumcised, as unfortunately I have, you can non-surgically recreate the effect of being non-circumcised if you are bored and have the free time. I've thought about it myself. Still doesn't give you back what was cut the fuck off though. Modern barbarism, it's ridiculous. Sean.

Hey Jessica, the White Skeleton Meditation I referred to is by Bill Bodri and can be purchased here for about $8. Or you can wait until Talking_Pebble is finished with the TaoBums Library copy and he can send it to you next. I'm shipping it to him today. PS: Never got a chance to say welcome to the board. I enjoy your posts and your presence here. Sean.

Agreed. Sure, just PM me your address and I'll mail it out asap. Sean.

Excellent post Talking_Pebble. Your beliefs are very similar to my own. Sean.

Great ideas Pietro. I'll look into how easy/hard it will be to implement any/all of them. Sean

That is exactly the next thing I have on my TaoBums To-Do list. It's a pretty big mod though, not sure I will get to it tonight, but most definitely this week. Sean.

I said let's try to keep it at 95%. It's not a rule. It's just my personal preference. And I'm just one member of Taobums. But I think it's a very reasonable opinion. We only have so much disk space and bandwidth. It'd be great if we kept it available for files at least somewhat relevant to cultivation. Also certain "off-topic" files, for example useful chemtrail pics/small videos are justifiable. But frankly I just really don't want to see Taobums degenerate into a bunch of porn clips and pics off rotten.com. It's just not necessary. There are so many free/cheap places to host files on, and you can just as easily host material that completely unrelated to Taobums off-site and insert it into your posts. I understand in a sense everything is Tao related. But Taobums.com isn't everything. It's just one tiny little slice of space on the Internet. It's not a lot of things. It's not a skateboard enthusiast site, a pro-golfer site, a Michael Jackson fanclub, a Nazi propraganda forum or a porn site. Relatively speaking, it has a purpose and it's my belief that we should shoot for staying at least within some range of it. ... So you said you had a problem with uploading the attachment? Did you click "Browse", select a local file then click "Add Attachment"? Let me know what's happening specifically. Sean. [edit] PS: The stigmata-girl.jpg was just posted as an example of how attached images look inserted into a post.

What's your objection Ron? Sean.

Also, for the record, Sidharta Gotama explicity taught students to meditate sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. He also explicity taught to meditate on the physical forms of our body, on visual objects (ie, the moon), on certain truths (ie: impermanance), on emotional and mental phenomenon, etc.. See the Maha-satipatthana Sutta for reference. Sean.

It's great to hear from you Cameron! Thanks for keeping us abreast of what you've been up to. It sounds interesting and I intend to check it out more in detail when I have time. Keep in touch! Sean.

You'll probably find a wide assortment of opinions here. Many, especially lately, believe that sitting meditation is the practice and any other cultivation practices are either a helpful aid in preparing/enhancing sitting meditation or are disposable. The Healing Tao's "party line" tends to be that "mind only" enlightenment, as they might be apt claim is the desired result of a practice of only pure sitting, is not complete and is even potentially imbalanced. I believe there is absolutely no disagreement thought that sitting practices of all sorts are beneficial to any path. I frequently do a "follow the breath" meditation with either eyes open or closed depending on my mood. Sometimes I just do straight Shikantaza, which is just pure sitting without any aids of breath following, mantra, visualization, etc. Other times I practice what is known as the White Skeleton Meditation espoused by Bill Bodri. You can do a search for an in depth discussion of this meditation here on the forum, although it's not described in full since it's copyrighted material. If you want I will snail-mail you the meditation, but you have to promise to mail it to the next person that requests it. Sean.

I don't have any specific suggestions on content yet. But I would really like to see Bodri start incorporating more footnotes that link to a Bibliography. A Bibliography that lists all of the sources consulted in preparing his work. IMO Bodri shoots from the hip a lot and it would be very nice to be able to correlate his opinions with authentic sources outside of what I can't help feeling is often just because Nan says so. Even if he does just insert footnotes to, ie: "based on xyz book by Nan", throughout the majority of his work, it would still lend more credibility and lessen the air of arrogant casuistry. Numerous times I've tried doing research on aspects of his work and come up with an utter lack of resources for either confirming or denying his theories. Personally I am not going to invest a whole lot of time into someone's eccentric perspective on cultivation if they are not going to do at least one of the following: a) Speak primarily from personal experience. ie: "When I practiced the Hungry Ghost feeding ritual for one month, I noticed it did xyz for my meditation practice. This is how I intepret that." Quote sources in detail.. ie: "Nan tells me that the Zhunti mantra is even practiced by the Zen school in China even though this school typically eschews external cultivation." Sorry if I sound harsh or critical. But I think it's a bit irresponsible of him to not be more upfront with his level of experience and the sources of his insights. Bodri has a combination of charisma and matter-of-factness that I feel could be dangerous in it's ability to draw in and potentially take advantaged of, ie: depressed people surfing the Internet for a new guru. I would prefer not to think that he is deliberately utilizing cultish language patterns and the inclusion of a detailed bibliography in his future research would do a lot to dissuade me from this belief. Sean.

I just installed a mod to allow us to see when a member has last logged in for the purpose of looking into Harry Pain's whereabouts. If the information is accurate, his last login was Monday, December 20th, 2004 at 3:18pm. The Tsunami came that next Sunday, one week later. He was one of the most active posters before this time. I sincerely hope he is just marooned on a remote island eating coconuts and meditating while peacefully waiting for a rescue team to save him from the gorgeous women he was unfortunate enough to get stranded there with. If anyone would like to try to contact him, his email is: [email protected] Sean.

I spend the better part of this evening upgrading to phpBB 2.0.11 which included some very important security fixes. Upgrades are usually painless, but in order to carry over the threaded-view mod I had to do a lot of it by hand. :x But it's not sweat because I learned a lot about Php and MySQL in the process. 8) Sean.

Well I have an attachment mod but it's going to be very very tedious to install because again I have to do everything manually to avoid messing up the Threaded-mod. I'll install it as soon as I can though. Hadn't even noticed before! Bad ass! 8) Sean.