Encephalon

I just did my 40 minute Embrace Horse while watching "The Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha," the PBS production. This is considered cheating by some circles but I don't make a regular habit of it. This show was really well done, a fine explication of the mythology of his life, and watching it in zhan zhuang created a couple of very energetic moments for me. Hope you get a chance to see this - five stars! http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70131662&trkid=1538360 Did you ever see "Jesus Camp"? It's now on Instantwatch too.

Hey, that's pretty heavy. I won't be posting for awhile now, just to let the groove sink in. Yeah, check out instantwatch documentary/religion & spirituality - mostly Buddhist stuff, but some interesting martial arts too.

Yep, I think you and Gold have it right; striking a balance is the goal. In response to the initial question asked by this post, you have to be strong enough to feel your musculature in order to relax enough to feel your incipient energy work. Many people in the general population do not have that minimum level of strength. And strength training is most definitely corrective. When people complain of muscle tightness, cramping, or spasms, it's usually from a lack of strength in a particular muscle group in relation to surrounding muscle groups, called relative strength; weak muscles go into spasm when they can't keep up with the others. But instead of strenthening, people will often conclude that they need to stretch, not an entirely counter-intuitive choice, but often incorrect.

It depends on the routine. Some call for holding your breath to stabilize your abdomen, some call for linking the exhalation to the motion that naturally squeezes the lungs, such as a KB swing with moderate weight, reversed with heavy weight. There's really no short answer to all the possibilities. I have my clients exaggerate their breathing, exchanging lung gases as deeply as possible, because KB routines will suck the oxygen out of your bloodstream like there's no tomorrow!

I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. - Dogen

Oh, boy... now you've done it. Gonna getta lotta feedback on this one. 4 years ago, when I turned 46, I became a personal trainer in LA, partially out of a desire to help people, partially out of a need for $$, but also because I wanted to gain a few pounds and have a free gym to do it in. At least three years were spent working out 2-4 hours a day, 4 days a week. I didn't gain that much, and actually lost weight, but that was because I fell in love with strength training and lost interest in size. Besides, when you're 11-12 percent bodyfat, you look muscular anyway. I was virtually the only trainer who took flexibility and yoga classes seriously, being the "old hippy" of the group, and it was the perfect combination; strength training with deep flexibility. Pound per pound I was the strongest, and smallest, male trainer there, and hands down the most flexible. I invested in kettlebells and put on a freak show. Looking back, I can see why my joints make more noise than they need to, but the fact is that strength remains the godfather of all other fitness criteria. Strength will grant you the "mind/muscle connection" faster than any other form of fitness...BUT.. and this is critical... you MUST balance flexibility with strength. One should never exceed the other by too much. This makes sense for many intuitive reasons, but as this pertains to energy work, your capacity to relax in order to feel your incipient chi flow is essential, and the right combo of strength and flexiblility will grant upon you a well-honed capacity for deep relaxation. The feeling of "effortless effort," that exquisite feeling of bolting up a long flight of stairs without even feeling it, is the state of fitness you're after, fertile ground for feeling your chi. Almost anything else you hear on this thread about the negative side of weightlifting will no doubt be true, but it may be soundly indicated at some juncture of your life and ill-advised at other times. By far, the greatest joy in my strength-training career was when I took a break from exercise for about 4 months and did nothing but finish my thesis and practice nei kung. When I returned to working out with my clients, I was absolutely blown away by the absence of soreness following my microcosmic orbit opening up. My kettlebell routines leave people sore as hell, but I was without it. I can only assume, based on the literature, that our nervous systems get much more efficient at triggering the motor neurons, so our musculature seems less taxed. That's my working hypothesis away.

Bad laptop. No donut.

Chancellor's Introduction starts at 01:03:20 Biddle's speech starts at 01:06:00

I hope you get the answer you're looking for, because I'm about to buy the book (Vol.2) to get the same answer. Amazon does a great job of removing page 100 from the "search" feature, which happens to be the page that introduces the method. I naturally gravitate toward the dissolving method when I meditate because it's, well, natural; the blockages reveal themselves easily enough and I just go there. I too am looking forward to the next step of dissolving emotional blockages, all three million of them. I don't suppose you could PM me page 100?

I just read the reviews of the books you listed and put them on my wish list. I read "The Chronicles of the Tao" by Deng Ming-Dao and "Opening the Dragon Gate" by Cleary and enjoyed them both a great deal.

This was precisely the concern I had that precipitated the question. As I've come to understand it, the point at which you can experience the waves of energy moving and manipulate them at will, MCO if you choose, is also the point where your nervous system - the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves - becomes increasingly sensitive to "information" of all kinds, conscious and unconscious, internal and external. It's like replacing the coat hanger you've been using as an antenna on your car for a brand new state-of-the-art auto antenna. I've always been an intuitive person anyway - textbook left-handed, right-brained, artsy-fartsy - and nei kung also serves to amplify one's natural abilities anyway. I'm no creative genius (yet! ) but I do know that the stream of negative, self-defeating emotional noise I've been carrying around for 35 years has been almost completely shut off. At the 3 year point, I'm not yet one of these people who accomplish more before 10 am than the Hordes of the Unawakened, but I'm getting there, and I have absolute faith that this trajectory will remain as long as I commit to the practice.

I posed an obliquely related question to a Vipassana teacher here in LA; am I missing out on anything by practicing Nei Kung to the exclusion of Vipassana? He referred me to a chi kung teacher who also happens to be a Vipassana teacher and 5th degree aikidoist up in N. California. This gentleman was thoroughly familiar with my Nei Kung practice and experience and assured me that it is a powerful meditative technique in its own right. This was profoundly encouraging, although I still try to get in two more 30 minute sitting meditations in the evening, basically extended periods of energy awareness. Sure beats counting breaths. This economic catastrophe's a great thing, eh? How else can we commit 3-4 hours per day to cultivation?

I have Clyman dvds too. PM for info.

X

Aaaaahh!! Total bliss! the opportunity to weigh in on core development. Seriously, on the gross level, a stong core (lumbar-pelvic-hip complex) will change your whole sense of embodimemt, how you perceive your Self moving through space. There are three exercises that seemed to work exceptionally well in our gym - back hyper-extensions using the roman chair (or laying over the edge of your bed with your partner sitting on your legs). The barbell Russian twist And the Wheel of death!! Or, the Ab-roller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alNznCbqTrs&feature=related My experience tells me that a strong core gives you a palpable sense of what it means to "lower your center of gravity." Most people live their life in their heads; a strong core brings that down, and that can only help you localize and become sensitive to the energy of the lower tantien.

( . )( . ) She's flashing you too.

When I failed to see any emoticons in your text I descended into a state of despair and sobbed inconsolably into the nape of my cat. My wife took great pity on me, flashed me and tossed me a vicodin, and now I feel much better. Then I came back and looked up the word sarcasm and realized what a horrible mess I made out of our Wednesday evening.

I found this book to be virtually impenetrable without a scholarly background. I trust there are plenty of Bums who can make use of this book but I found it far too cryptic for my beginner's mind. "The Complete Book of Chinese Health & Healing: Guarding the Three Treasures" by Daniel P. Reid was vastly more helpful. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Book-Chinese-Health-Healing/dp/1570620717/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284600700&sr=1-1

There was quite the controversy about 4-6 weeks ago regarding the wisdom of beginners entering into microcosmic orbit practice, which SFQ advocates, although I must say that I like the way Chunyi coordinates the breathing practice with the mco. A few seasoned practitioners argued that the MCO should be allowed to start itself up once an extended period of zhan zhuang, the static postures of nei kung such as "Embrace Tree" or Embrace Horse" has been practiced and the energy waves begin to course through one's body. I have to say that I feel fortunate to have practiced nei kung for year and a half before I even tried the MCO, because it didn't take long for the "small orbit" to spill out into the large orbit. Nevertheless, I see people practicing the MCO routine who have no tangible sensation of energy yet, and I am ignorant of what the implications are.

Greetings to all the Newcomers -- We're working on a modest information sheet that should be helpful to all the new folks joining up. Enjoy the ride! Regards, Blasto

"Mr. Dufy lived a short distance from his body." James Joyce I'm not so sure about that, but you could be right. In my experience as a personal trainer in LA, there is a huge population of people who share Mr. Dufy's plight, people who've learned to live their lives almost entirely in their heads, as disconnected from their physical selves as they can be while still alive and awake. I think we've demonstrated that ZZ doesn't require advanced training and instruction, but there are a number of postural adjustments that require mindfulness and regular correction, and some folks are simply not "embodied" enough to do this without some basic instruction. Granted, that population may not be reflected by TTB folks.

Yes, you're right, it's only out in vhs, which I formatted onto dvd. Also, the book "Zhan Zhuang and the Search for Wu" by Yu Yong Nian is actually a better source for the kind of data I was looking for. I found the pdf somewhere in here but I'm drawing a blank, but I guess it's pretty expensive otherwise.

I opened up the thread to get feedback on the book. After the past few weeks (maybe months, years?) the subject of zhan zuang has come up repeatedly and I've been in search of hard physiological data on the practice. I was able to squeeze out some of the info from the amazon site. My experience with "Embrace Horse" instruction would corroborate what you said. It was a one-hour instruction, and I bought both the dvd and the book of Chu Nei Kung instruction for reference material. At the three year mark, my waves are pretty strong, and my legs feel the same as my arms did when when they started to open up. I would like to see the physiological dimension demystified enough to see the dissemination of nei kung really blossom, since the world needs it so badly, but, like yoga, I would not want to see it "secularized" to the point of being cheapened. There's balance in there somewhere.