Encephalon

I took level 1&2 SFQ earlier this year but haven't practiced it on myself or others; just too hooked on my nei kung and meditation practice. Can anyone kindly chime in on exactly what I'm supposed to do with a bunionectomy? Do I just continue to dissolve it, a la Frantzis, or should I exhale the black smoke? Sword fingers? Drew, Yamu, I hope you put in your 2 cents worth.

Sure! Especially if she's hot!

Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. Western medicine loves to isolate a single factor and misses the rest of the syndrome. The only thing that makes sense is that I'm 50, with hereditary issues, and I eat a lot of coconut oil, but I don't think this latter point is responsible. Plenty of homework ahead.

Oh lighten up, for chrissakes. Did you never have self-doubt when you first set foot on the Path?

Thanks for posting this link, Dainin!

I just told my surgeon that I didn't want vicodin for my post-op because it obliterates my hard-earned chi flow. He gave me a bottle of Darvocet instead. Any pharmacologists in here, or people in the know? They also told me that I had to stop taking my horsetail/schizandra cocktail 2 weeks before surgery because of possible anesthesia implications. This sucks. These two compounds have removed 6-8 yrs worth of wrinkles off my face. PS - I love vicodin.

I would encourage you to take up the practice of alcoholism.

I'm going in for L bunionectomy. Thanks to nei kung and Frantzis' dissolving practice I can pulsate my foot at will now and have opened up the Macrocosmic Orbit. I don't know if merely throbbing my bunion at will is the proper method or if I should be using swordfingers a la SFQ, but I'll bet the answer's in here somewhere, eh? Thanks.

Yes, yes, yes.... the best advice. This is the essence of Nei Kung practice. 20-40 minutes of Embrace Horse (zhan zhuang)followed by the 9 movements that circulate the chi you've built up.

Zen mind, beginners mind! A great place to be. We all have our individual journeys and try on different teachings until we find one that seems to bring our deepest longings to fruition. I thought my life was going to be understood in terms of before yoga/after yoga, but this took me only so far. It did compliment my personal training practice and enabled me to get freakishly strong AND relaxed at the same time, so when I started with the internal energy work, I was able to feel the benefits fairly quickly. By googling "chi kung Los Angeles" I came across www.neikungla.com and the rest is my own personal history. Bruce Lee described his martial art philosophy as an ongoing process of stripping away the non-essentials. (He also had a degree in philosophy and thought the same sentiment applied to his mental universe.) So if you go to the Nei Kung website and indulge in google madness you'll find that it's a practice that is remarkably pure and unencumbered by countless interpretations and revisions, and is the springboard for all the medical, martial, and spiritual refinements. When I visited Gary Clyman's website and read about his Tidal Wave Chi Kung and Nei Kung practice I became even more convinced that Nei Kung was what I needed for my peace of mind and spiritual growth. Clyman's work has garnered deservedly mixed reviews, but he is correct when he states that chi kung practice will increase your sense of personal worthiness (what he calls "deservingness") while stripping away your self-defeatism and self-loathing, a state of mind that is epidemic in western consumer cultures. But, since I live in LA, not in Chicago, I went with Nei Kung because the teacher was here. Another case of geographical determinism!

I was excited to seed someone finally post this sentiment. As a fledgling Taoist with a background in urban geography/planning, I see the confluence of sustainable development and Taoism as inevitable. Can you imagine what it would be like if we could professionally design a sustainable community populated with... people like us!? Dibs on sauna/greenhouse design. Wednesday, 14 July 2010 http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/07/journal-building-resilient-communities-from-scratch.html JOURNAL: Building Resilient Communities From Scratch Here's another approach (one of many alternatives) to building resilient communities that may be of interest: There seems to be a considerable amount of interest in building resilient communities as completely new and professionally designed housing developments. Given how terrible the housing market is (and will continue to be from here on out), this makes sense. It's the only game in town. It's also an effort that has the potential to succeed. There are hundreds of thousands of people (soon to be millions) that both fear the social/economic tsunami ahead and have the (current) financial resources to fully fund the development of resilient communities. These people have a overwhelming desire to circle the wagons (for themselves now, for retirement, or their extended families) while they still can. However, serving this emerging market is going to require a major shift in culture for most traditional developers. Why? Selling a resilient community is a very different process than selling a house (school quality, commute distance, architectural amenities, etc.) or a retirement/vacation retreat (luxury, services, access, etc.). It's about selling a complete and integrated economic and social system (of which there are many designs to choose from), in microcosm. In short, these communities need to embody a vision of a viable and vibrant future that will persist despite widespread global failure. As a result, successful developments that serve this emerging market will need to do everything from finding ways to fund the buildout and management of new resilient community infrastructures to the ongoing economic/financial support required to establish and grow a large number of prosperous local producers (that will eventually power the community over the longer run as the global situation worsens). Anything less won't sell.

Just can't do fiction anymore. It's sad; the only thing I liked about Condi Rice: she lost the patience for fiction too. "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century," by James Kunstler is non-fiction but reads like fiction, almost like an adventure tale. His fictionalized account of the same material, "World Made by Hand," I did read and enjoyed it immensely. It takes place around 2050 or so, just as what's left of the American population starts to rebuild. He details all the positives - clean air and water, abundant animal life, plenty of marijuana, no police state, the ability to use dirty coal for trains without contributing to air pollution - with the liabilities; diminished health care, no electricity, violent gangs, religious fanatics. I don't know what to think about anti-UN sentiments. I've seen it grow in tandem with anti-government sentiment since Reagan rode into town on his white horse. Except for environmental lefties, or conservative business owners who have solar arrays on their warehouse roofs, I cannot imagine the concept of sustainability garnering credence any time soon, not in our consumer culture. When Glenn Beck gets away with telling his legions of listeners that energy independence is a ruse to create green union jobs, we've pretty much been handed Orwell's 100-page dictionary published by the Ministry of Truth. If Agenda 21 is getting bogged down by bureacratic BS then of course I'm not surprised.

I attended the first Integral Theory conference in the SF Bay Area in the summer of 2008. They were just getting their feet wet, trying to wrestle with IT and its various applications. Wilber's AQAL model is such a huge model that it requires you to reorient virtually everything you know about a particular subject, but you end up with tremendous explanatory power in the process. I'm quite fond of Marilyn Hamilton's Integral City work up in Vancouver. I do believe it is still a profoundly optimistic view and I'd expect the planning and development phase to go accordingly if the financial resources are available when the oil crash kicks us in the teeth. I think they'll provide us with valuable advice. I'm not so optimistic, and Vancouver is a very civilized city by American standards, particularly their urban planning/transportation departments. I hope we Americans can keep the violence down while we re-tool and construct our small-size permaculture models. The problem is that this expertise is not equitably distributed in the population, and those of us who have created post-industrial/permaculture skills will be flocking together. Community requires tremendous maturity and resilience and skill. I met Sean Bjorn-Hargens at the conference and one of his colleagues was conducting Tai chi classes in the morning for the attendees. I asked him where he drew the line between IT/AQAL and Taoism, and he just chuckled and said he didn't want to get into trouble! By that I assume that he found tremendous similarities and didn't feel like doing the work of separating them would be fruitful at this time. IT/AQAL is great for mapping the world(s), but Taoism provides the tools for our physical development. "Integral Ecology" will no doubt be on every serious Taoist's reading list as the subject of ecology is THE portal to the Tao, especially for western scholar/practitioners. But alas, I've only skimmed it. Still getting through "Ecopsychology" by Ted Roszak and "The Web of Life" by F. Capra. "A Theory of Everything" by Wilber was awfully fun too. Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Hope this material generates some interest in here!! Regards, B.

I commend your grasp of our Constitution. I'd love to take an intro class on the subject someday. It's interesting that we both have suspicions about governmental institutions but seem to have acquired them from different trajectories. As I've been steeped in Chomsky, Zinn, and James Kunstler I have different ideas about the role of education in America; I pretty much see the Dept. of Ed. as charged with creating moderately educated and obedient factory workers (but that's another story). I also don't know what to think of States Rights. Whenever a Southerner starts in on the subject and lambasts the Bill of Rights in the same breath, the hairs on the back of my neck start vibrating. Somethin' tells me you ain't one of the good 'ol Southern boys. I also see the American Progressive movement in slightly more legitimate terms than our recent Neocon uprising. William Kristol has been wrong about Every Thing for over a decade now. His PNAC doc will go down as one of the most toxic ideas in history. http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm Thanks for posting. Hope you check out the "Resilient Communities" post. For a region-by-region forecast of the American crash, check out "The Long Emergency." The South doesn't fare well, but neither does the SW, or the NE.

If/when this process gets underway, I suspect we'll be harvesting building materials from abandoned suburban slums.

Gassho. This is precisely the quality of feedback I so often crave from this board, since I cannot often participate in the LA Buddhist/Taoist community without endless automobile commuting. The way I connect Taoism with this subject matter is by unraveling the political and cultural themes of American life, which I define as consumer culture (I don't give much credence to American political mythology.) Americans had the dubious honor of being guinea pigs in the world's first domestic consumer market. We've been bombarded with commercial advertising since the late 1800s, and the technology has only gotten more sophisticated, more pernicious. If the capitalists' wet dream is to turn the world's resources into pure liquid capital, a vast consumer culture is the fastest way to do that, and toward that end, the process has performed admirably. We consumers have treated our masters well. Unfortunately, consumerism just about kills every authentic human impulse we have and obliterates creativity and imagination, including the spiritual impulse. Indeed, David Loy suggests that globalization (global consumerism) IS religious, in that it elevates the gratification of the instincts to a sacrament. I know I run the risk of being a hopeless romantic but Jeffersonian democracy and the agrarian ideal could conceivably be resurrected if the citizenry could ever break free of the tractor beam of Fox News and Glenn Beck. I see the historical accounts of ancient Taoist villages providing an intriguing template for a post-industrial model that in many ways is (was) as American as apple pie.

Hah! You may notice that the unifying factor of all these products, with the exception of coconut oil, is total cheapness! Wheat grass and BG algae is way beyond my budget.

Today marks the 15th day without sugar madness, with the following exceptions that I fell prey to while on a roadtrip up to San Fran; two homemade bluberry muffins that my mother-in-law baked last Friday morning: an ice-cream cone following a visit to my mother on Sunday (wretched): a bag of peanut M&Ms last night at the movies. Every one of these instances left me feeling not too good. The First three days were a bitch but by the 10th day I was feeling very energetic. I'm back home in LA and have no desire to eat any more of it at all, since it just feels better to be off it. I just gotta say, if it weren't for my four sprouting jars going full time in the kitchen, I probably wouldn't have been able to pull it off so easily, but I really needed an exercise in Will Power development, and this test really foot the bill.

My guess would be that it could disrupt your digestion if you used too much for too long. Green tea alkalizes the bloodstream very well and has dozens of other documented benefits. I'd get busy on Google!

Daniel Reid's books are a fine choice for westerners just starting out, in part because he's such a great writer. I've read "The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing" and "The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity" and would recommend reading them in that order. The latter gets specific with issues that are beyond the scope of beginners. "Scholar/Warrior" is also a terrific choice, and they're both inexpensive online. As an aside, I would be careful with how you solicit advice in this forum. As you found out, you asked for a simple book review/suggestion, and what you got instead was a lot of unsolicited spiritual advice and presumptuous nonsense by people trying to sound clever. Of course, there are a handful of people in here who know what they're talking about too! Be well.

I noticed a certain lightness in my wallet, but nothing more. It was disappointing given the amount of literature, but I was still eating plenty of excessive carbs and caffeine when I took it. Maca, however, was a different story. It's the only product I found during my days working at The Vitamin Shoppe that really gave me a boost. Taking it was like having the 4pm slowdown extended to around 7pm.

All the more reason to pick up ""Scholar/Warrior." The chapter on the historical context of ancient Taoist communities is very inspiring. These folks dug deep roots into their villages and refined independence and self-sufficiency into artforms. With your resources at hand you will only find greater opportunities to bring a pragmatice Taoist ethic into your life on all levels.] There's a sub-thread in here dealing with post-oil, post-industrial, post-econ crash issues, along with the various skillsets necessary. Sounds like you're well-positioned to make critical choices when SHTF!!