sean

Well if I am understanding the Butekyo perspective, it's not necessarily wrong to breathe deeply. I think Butekyo is just a way of addressing and correcting a common type of "problem breathing". If your natural breathing patterns are consistently on the verge of hyperventilation, then I would think sessions of deep breathing would just amplify the existing imbalance. On the other hand, once you've brought your breathing into proper balance, a deep inhale would likely to be naturally followed by a deep long exhale and an appropriate pause. It's interesting to look at the Butekyo method in light of Winn's "Shen theory". If you are not familiar with it, the idea is that each of the Five Organs has an innate Intelligence and that our microcosmic Self is actually the relationship between them. The Lung Spirit, "Po", is the only Intelligence directly connected with the outer environment. It takes in oxygen from the outside world and processes it's Chi into useable energy. The imbalanced Po spirit happens to be the most selfish, materialistic and afraid of death. Sound like modern society? So in this sense, the obsessive-inhale reflects our addiction to me, to consumption, to more.. So the Butekyo method seems like a great way to refine your ability to more efficiently absorb Chi from available oxygen. In so doing perhaps we become less addicted to the intake and more centered and sustained by the abundance of inner Chi we typically neglect. Thus promoting health.

Ahhh... I assume you are speaking of Frolov's Device. It's not actually mentioned in the article I posted but it's often mentioned in the same breath (sorry ) as Buteyko in helping develop the same breathing style. Glad to hear you've had success with it. I've been meaning to buy one for awhile and I think I will. Since I quit smoking on New Years I've been sort of riding a wave of increased depression/anxiety and looking for ways of getting back in gear. Sean.

It's a digital painting I did in Photoshop a few months back of Leslie and I. Thanks for the compliment! Sean.

Very inspiring in a sort of return-to-Boogie-Nights-esque kind of way, Ron thanks. :wink:

Thanks for the reminder Ron. I've been meaning to add a "file attachment" mod and maybe even install an integrated gallery. Please try to keep porn down to a minimum though. :roll: And thanks as always for the kind words. Love you man. In the most heterosexual way a man can say that to another man. In other words, completely drunk, with zero eye contact and a lot of back slapping. Sean.

Hey, thanks Max. That geekhosting in particular looks like a good deal. I should probably look into new hosting options. Unfortunately I just switched over to the Quest I hosting package at Glypto. I've been with Glypto for many years now and have come to trust them. They always respond to my support inquiries immediately and I've had some terrible experiences with web hosting services that make me very wary of switching to a new host without doing a lot of research first. I should probably actually update the "Disclosure" page to reflect that the $240/year is not just for Taobums but is also where my own personal website had been moved since I switched from a personal "Theta" package to the "Quest I". Shit, now I feel bad. But I'm not sure how I should do that math though ... I guess I could just say that I switched over to a $20/month package for Taobums sake, whereas before I was fine with a $6/month package. So the difference is $14 extra a month, multiplied by 12 months is $168 a year for Taobums. As for the domain registration, I always go with networksolutions now. I've heard horror stories about the fine print of many so-called "registrars". In fact many of them actually own your domain and are only leasing it to you and will refuse transfer requests, go out of business and become unreachable but still own your domain, etc.. Whenever you buy a domain you should at the very least make sure it's on the ICANN Accredited Registrars list. Networksolutions is expensive and their politics probably align them with the return of the antichrist, but they are reliable and won't fuck up my domains. :twisted: Sean.

My Christmas present to myself was two sets of Clubbells, a 5 lb. (so Leslie could join the fun) and a 10 lb. set for myself. I've never used Kettlebells before but I am sold on Clubbells. They just feel right to hold and swing. And they are much heavier and harder to wield than they appear. I just pushed play-all on the CST DVD and tried to go through the whole thing with the 10's and there were several exercises I had to pick up the 5's to complete. :oops: I've only just begun working with them last week so I don't have any insights about them other than I think they are bad ass and I'm excited to have finally found a strength training regimen I can dig. 8) Sean.

God, tell me about it. I think I'm going to sleep this whole weekend. Agreed. Agreed. There are only two forms of moderation I intend to do at this point: 1) Move topics posted in the wrong forum, ie: off topic posts to Off Topic. 2) Remove illegal content that could jeopardize the board, ie: serial numbers to software, posted files (I'm going to add the ability to upload files/images soon). To be determined. The biggest problem with this idea, at this point, is that I have not personally met anyone on this forum yet. Since, as you say, community comes first, obviously I don't want to jeopardize the community by giving away the power to completely disrupt it to someone I don't know at all. Currently the only person I know well enough to even consider giving domain ownership, etc. would be Trunk but I believe he is not interested in this. Agreed. Makes sense. If somehow I end up with more money at the end of the year, we can take a poll on what to spend it on. To an extent. I'm not interested in creating a byzantine bureaucracy where I can't play with the site design without asking approval of every single member first. The way I've been handling this so far seems common sense. I implement member suggestions and my own ideas I feel are logical. In the event that someone dissapproves with good reason then we can move it to poll. Ahhh... yes. Subdomain issues. I'll work on that this evening. Agreed Pietro. Thanks for your thought provoking posts. Sean.

Ooohh me me me! I really want to get into this. Sean.

Yeah, that sort of nails it. I am kind of weird like that. I don't collaborate artistly very well, which is mainly how I treat this forum; as an art project. I am not really interested in "power" per se, but I am sort of OCD about artistic final say. As long as I can retain that, I don't really give a shit who hosts, who owns the domain, etc. I can make up my own mind about who I do and don't like. Obviously if you get unnecessarily vicious and crude with her, or anyone really, it will effect my opinion of you. But feel free to speak your mind as constructively as possible to anyone on the board. Sean.

I'm actually teaching myself PHP so I can do some cool mods to this board. One of the ideas I have is to get this board to output flat HTML of the entire board so that people can store or even host archives of the site. Sean.

If WE are not in charge, but YOU are in charge then I am out of here. Pietro Again, please, I wrote "technically" in charge. As in, on paper. But I consider every member to have a basically equal say in the site, so YOU and everyone else are in charge de facto. I would love it if more people got involved in the site. Start discussions about where we take this. Ask me for a templated page for a personal bio, or a gallery... write an article, we can build an articles section. Plato is still working on creating a link exchange for me. Create your own Phpbb template and we can have different styles for the boad. Brainstorm, get involved. Tell me what you want! Sean.

Moving to a new server. I'll put the forum in maintenance mode tonight and take it out tommorow afternoon. Sean.

Crap. There's been a delay in the server move. It won't occur until this evening. I'll have to take the board down again from around 10pm until Monday afternoon. Sorry for the inconvenience. Sean.

I don't have a whole lot of time tonight, but let's be frank. The answer to your question is no. You are not in charge of Taobums. I own the domain and the hosting, so in this sense I am technically in "charge". I also put in many hours of work to install the software and design the site. I've worked to create a sense of co-ownership here by listening to and implementing every single piece of feedback about the site I could within reason. I've added a "Disclosure" pop-up under the Paypal donations button down in the footer for you. It includes how much hosting/domain cost me per year, how much I've made from ads so far, how much from donations and who has donated so far. This is what I have striven for. Please always feel free to let me know specifically where an idea was presented and then refused implementation for grounds other than feasability. This site would be nothing without it's members. So there is really no logic to me making it my own private place. Would I post to myself? Naturally I have a motivation to making this place the best experience I can for it's members. I guess I understand your concerns in light of the problems that occurred on HT. But this is something that happens all the time. Databases get corrupted, hackers delete things, virii spread, harddrives fail, benevolent dictators are driven made with the power of running a tiny niche spiritual forum, LOL! Everything is born, suffers and dies. And what is the alternative? One person's name has to be on the domain. One persons name has to be on the hosting package. Only one person at a time can work on the site design and structure simultaneously or else everyone would be uploading templates and html over each other and the site would be a mess. Otherwise a bureaucracy would need to be formed to make the simplest decisions. For example, you just asked for a "disclosure" page. Boom. Done. Imagine if every single member of this forum had to vote on that for it to get implemented? 60% of the members don't even show up on the board every month. Also how many of them even care about this decision. It would slow development to a screeching crawl. On the other hand if 15 people PM me tommorow and tell me that they think the "disclosure" pop up is a terrible idea and present compelling arguments with brilliant alternatives, then I would most likely initiate a discussion and perhaps a poll. In your collective vision, would everyone have full access to modifying the entire site? Because nothing could leave Tao Bums more vulnerable to malicious intentions than this. And there are hacker spiders that troll the internet for Phpbb forums with vulnerabilities, so it's not just a matter of trusting our own community. Or perhaps power distribution would be based on some criteria (decided by whom?), for example, seniority, taoist knowledge and experience, likeability, etc. power is distributed? But what kind of "power" are we even discussing here? It's such a dramatic word. The "power" to moderate posts? I have yet to do this once. If I did it would probably have the seething and dictatorial quality of moving a post from Taoist Discussion to Off Topic. Well I hope I've helped you understand things more clearly. Sean.

kittens!

Good idea Pietro. I will add this. Give me a few days, I've been busy as crap lately. :? Sean.

I've been kind of slowly plodding through Winn's recommended sequence. I've been playing with Chi Kung Fundamentals 1-4 for almost a year now and the only thing that's stopped me from moving on to Fusion of the Five Elements is basically money. If anyone has Winn's Fusion of the Five Elements tapes, or could recommend an alternative way to learn this aspect of Taoist alchemy I'd appreciate. Cheers! Sean.

Thanks for the tips Ron. And it's good to see you back! 8)

spyrelx, nice to see you around. I think it's a good guideline. One that I have actually already broken though. :oops: I posted a link to a book somewhere around here that I was genuinely recommending but included an amazon affiliate link. But anyways, so far I'm not too big on establishing any official rules for the board. As long as everyone plays fairly nicely I don't see a need yet. Cheers, Sean.

Seems so, yes. My host has been doing a lot of upgrades lately which has probably been randomly slowing things down. Hopefully it stays fast now though. Sean.

Excerpt from: Where's Mao When You Really Need Him? The New Age Racket and the Left By Justin E.H. Smith But enough about me. Let's get to the issues. I would like to discuss that movement often covered by the umbrella term 'New Age', and to argue, specifically, that New Agers should be ashamed of themselves, for abandoning all concern with those goals that have traditionally served as the driving force of progressive politics, like social justice, equality, the end of oppression, etc., and allowing -nay, aiding- the cynical and opportunistic power-mongers to make the world as disappointing a place as it currently is. Before this polemic begins in earnest, perhaps it will be best to sketch out a definition of the concept that concerns us. By 'New Age' I mean to refer to any world-view that: 1. is decidedly postmodern, in that it picks and chooses from vastly older traditions those features it finds useful; 2. is sloppily multiculturalist, in that it levels out and denies legitimate distinctions between the traditions from which it borrows; 3. is individualistic, in that it takes spirituality to be a 'quest', and sees the ultimate end of this quest as self-fulfillment (however much it may borrow from traditions that emphasize self-overcoming or dissolution of the ego, even at times insisting that it shares this goal); 4. is nostalgic, in that it maintains that with the rise of modernity, humanity experienced the loss of a distinctly 'spiritual' disposition, in contrast with the rational disposition; 5. in large part as a consequence of its suspicion of rationality, is also uncritical as a matter of principle; 6. portrays itself as apolitical, or, better, as tapping into a reality so profound that any explanation of it in terms of the social, economic, and historical plights of its adherents can be safely dismissed as irrelevant. I propose, in contrast to the last of these, that the New Age movement can only be understood politically. In an atmosphere, moreover, in which one rarely come across a self-identified anarchist, socialist, environmentalist, or progressive who will not also willingly identify his or her star sign and proceed to expatiate on the finer details this totemic affiliation reveals about his or her personality, I must add that it is exceedingly urgent that we come to a political understanding of how it has come to this, and then proceed to purge this disgraceful tendency utterly from our ranks, either through re-education or, for the intractable, banishment. That's right. It's time for all of us who consider ourselves even mildly progressive to get at least a little bit Maoist on the occultists' asses, confident in the singular correctness of the scientific world-view, and intolerant of 'difference' when all this manages to give us is muddle-headed obscurantism. Full article here: http://www.counterpunch.com/smith08282004.html Not saying I agree with this article. Just food for thought. Sean.

I believe everyone should seriously just buy Sonnon's Warrior Wellness Trilogy DVD ... It's only $50. There are three levels on it, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced ... I've been doing the Beginner semi-religiously for I guess six months now and have just moved on to the Intermediate. Really really incredible stuff. GrandTrinity: although I have zero experience with Furey except hearsay, my two cents is to definitely go with Sonnon. Great posts btw, Trunk. I'm going to explore some one-legged qi gong as you are describing... I feel a spontaneous inspiration (I guess you could call it) whenever I even just see images of forms similar to the one the guy on the beach in that little pic on the left is doing. Sean.