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Maybe you're tensing the area? If ur shaking trying to hold the position its difficult to be in a medatative state when you can be aware of tensions in your body. Try to relax the area that is hurting. Do some sitting meditation too. Standing and sitting are both good with different angles

The fact that you said your eyes felt like they were about to explode would indicate to me that you are doing something wrong Don't keep trying to make the explode or eventually they might!

haha yeah me too. Blocking out nagging voices. The ultimate would be imposing your will over the others without them even realising or being able to fight it.

Yeah i think it's the best way and yes it is super powerful. But you can improve your method by not blocking by force, just relaxing and feeling the energy develop into a thought, then reversing the process so it goes back into energy and bringing the energy down to your dantien so that you recycle the energy of useless thoughts into healing energy. The more you practice the quicker you can do it and you can move the energy before it even changes into a thought. Later you won't get a thought unless you want to and you will actually feel your brain tensing as you try to 'think'.

yeah i think walking meditation is very important. As you begin practice you do it in a quiet environment and by yourself but finally if you persist you can do it all day in your every day life. Your stress is then reduced dramatically increasing your healing greatly. Sitting in meditation is healing but if you do it too long i really feel you are wasting your life. It is useful to grasp the foundations of meditation and also to still your mind effectivly but eventually you should work towards having the same effect in your everyday life.

Normally u get a certain amount in each packet for each day. If u don't have just grab a handful of each, boil them gently for 20 mins in enough water so that the herbs don't burn with the lid on. The less water in there the less u have to drink cos it's bound not to taste nice. Don't boil in a metal saucepan. Ceramic is good. I hate boiling herbs. Always burn at least one dose

I think the quote would be better put - "Why do only a few choose the good things in life"

Since all the literature you have mentioned i guess you are fairly well learned in these things. I'm not so it's quiet possible i'm doing it wrong most of my time has been spent in practice. I've read the pdf article you posted and i've got some thoughts for you. When you start to have an emotion comming, there is a change of energy within your body (always) and usually some tension. Releasing the tension doesn't remove or release the emotion it just sucks it back into where it came from. So like squeezing a wet sponge, the emotion comes out with some energy 'flavour/colour' (the type of emotion) then if you relax, the sponge is released and all the water goes back into the sponge (even the surrounding area isn't wet, it all goes back in), unless you let it linger on for some time or have some physical emotional outburst. Of course the earlier you stop squeezing the sponge and release it the less water needs to go back into the sponge, the less strained your muscles and so the process is much easier. But after you become more and more relaxed finally the delay of your muscles to squeeze the sponge increases. You have more time to relax and stop squeezing before any water comes out. Further later your muscles don't even tense at all. You can see something very disturbing but not be affected at all. Yes i believe you become indifferent. INDIFFERENT: lack of interest or concern. If you get a feeling you lose your balance and infact it's an effort to have a feeling or thought. It's work! I believe spiritualality is about relaxing and being taken by the divine or the tao. Not fighting against it with your tensions thus creating emotions. If you relax all the energy can join together in the perfect white light, love, or peace as it is put in the pdf you posted. If you have tension some light frequencies are blocked and an emotion is experienced. So its not a total lack of interest that you dont' care about anything, but you have no desire to change anything. Your not emotionally attached to the things and you don't get the emotional pain. Why would you? everything is perfect how it is! There is no better or worse, good or bad it's just all one and the same, the one and ultimate. We DO however need emotions to keep our physical bodies healthy and have a good physical life. I need to get angry (anger is the most useful one i find) or at least act so, so that people listen to me or they try to take advantage of me. I do need to have some tension when i get hungry so my body can stay healthy. I do need to act sad or people think me uncaring. To be honest when i've been practicing so frequently that i get to this stage i even have some tiny feeling that i should be feeling guilty for acting and pretending these things, though i dont' actually 'feel' the guilt. It's like i feel surprised i feel nothing. It really is unbelievable sometimes. I mean you could see emotions and see emotional pain in others i'm sure, but you wouldn't experience it unless you wanted to, by tensing up and fighting the tao's love. The Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader. If he acted indifferently people wouldn't follow him. He's also a king too. His monachy had their own country and his and other lama royal familys have ruled large areas of land for 1000s of years. I don't think his people would follow him if they thought he was indifferent. They wanted to be a part of china a long time ago for protection because his millitary wasn't so strong. To be honest, reading my own post i feel you have read too much into it and have none of your own ideas. Maybe you can print it out and give it to your teacher. I'd be interested in what he has to say because i don't have a teacher, except my chinese taiji teacher and he only speaks chinese and through the translator we end up just talking around in circles for hours and i can't get some clear answers out of him. If you know the chinese way it's always circle circle circle Going to Tai shan the taoist mountain tomorrow morning n won't be back till sunday but i'll look for your post when i come back.

I don't believe enlightened people experience emotional pain. When i've been practicing lots something like almost breaking up with a very long term girlfriend gave me absolutely no emotions at all. My emotional feeling was like it was nothing, like i didn't care at all it was just happening infront of my eyes. I didn't like the experience of not feeling anything and consciously began trying to feel sad and smoking cigarettes and drinking so that i would begin to have some 'feeling'. It only took me a day or so but i really had to try to make myself sad. I didn't care and i didn't want to throw away so many years of being together with her just by seeming cold and uncaring. Thankfully we are still together and i think showing some emotion did help. If you look at the movie someone posted about a real enlightened person (forget his name probably only a couple of pages back in the list "The real deal" or something post) he says that he didn't get a single feeling for nearly 10 years. It took him years of sitting and watching tv and reading newspapers to get his first feeling back.

When i first came to China 2 years ago i stumbled accross some little place and some chinese lady urged me to come in. I tried the machine, it worked just like qigong. I put my feet on some plates, then it had like a probe i could hold in my hand - instant MCO and i could also put the probe anywhere that was sore and i could feel the qi healing it. It felt the same as qi. Infact it felt better and stronger than the qi i could produce at the time. After i came off the machine i could continue to feel the qi in me and the quality of the qi in my meditations were improved over the next few days because of it. Now i think i can produce a much stronger sensation myself and i feel that the machine was very yin energy and there was no yang energy in it at all. The machine even had a dial though so you could increase how much qi you wanted running through you. It was pretty cool. Extreemly expensive though! Anyone else tried one of these?

The thing is i'd spent hours over a year every day training, at least 2 hours minimum up to 8 hrs, with 3, 1 week retreats meditating 9 hrs a day and i still didn't have the quality of qi i experienced from this machine. There is a control switch and 2 dials, one controls strength of qi, i dunno what the other does. For the uninitiated it's a godsend. Mannnn, u could drink go out and party like no tomorrow and still gain some benefits from this machine. You can't meditate well when you do that. It definately has some application. I'm sure the natural way is better, but the benefits of this machine can't be overlooked. Yeah the machine i used is a bit bulky but i've seen smaller versions that you can use while travelling. It's like going to uni for a year to learn 5% of what you need for the job your doing. Or getting it in a machine and learning it along the way. Not that you even got to learn it the way we did, u just got to learn how to use the machine!

Here's a website with details on the technology. IT IS NOT JUST LIKE USING NORMAL MAGNETS http://ezinearticles.com/?Ultra-Long-Wave-Magnetic-Therapy&id=76050 In my experience, it is like having excellent qigong healing abilities but put into a machine, so that you don't need to practice, you don't need to still the mind, you can just watch tv and be recieving healing energy. Much stronger energy than i have ever recieved from any healer in Australia or China. It really is very cool. Get excellent results without any effort.

The unknown and new things always seem mystical and amazing. Once you understand you realise there's nothing special about it at all. As i get older i find it increasingly amazing how uncommon common-sense is.

It's your brain. Your brain is your problem. Because that is what you are concentrating on. Purposefully or unintentionally. 1 month later you'll say "I FEEL IT MORE THAN EVER! EVEN MORE THAN BEFORE!!!" As long as you keep concentrating on it the feeling will build and build and it will become even stronger indefinately. Do you like the feeling? No, you said it is 'somewhat bothersome'. So why do you keep feeling it? Do think you are going to get some secret blood superpowers? I don't think you will. Just relax mate, sounds like you have no real physical illnesses so don't focus on it. Being worried about it means your stressing and due to this you will be causing yourself some damage. Relaxing and not thinking about it is the best thing you can do. It will reduce your stress and get you further on your spiritual path. Then one month later you'll say 'i can still feel my blood if i want to, but it doesn't make me feel weak or uncomfortable. Usually my mind is at peace thinking nothing'. If it's hard to not think about, the greater the challenge. If it's the hardest thing you've ever had to stop thinking about then that means once you have mastered this one you can not think about anything and you'll be almost enlightened! Now don't try to force the feelings out of your head, just realise all the effort your putting into thinking/feeling them and don't waste that effort any more and enjoy the peace that will fill it's space =]

Hrmmmm.... why is it not natural? There is a muscle there that can be used for semen retention without using your fingers externally or anything. Infact when your channels are open enough and you are relaxed enough you don't need to tense any muscles at all you just do it all with your mind and it works fine. There is no 'forcing'. Equally you could argue that martial arts are not natural. That iron shirt is not natural. That eating a heap of boiled strange herbs (TCM medicine) is not natural. But all these things improve your health. Thats what taoism is all about. I think the sexual practices empower the man to control ejaculation so that he can better pleasure the woman, therefore not being selfish at all. I guess it's the same as anything - it can be used for different uses depending on the user. I believe sexual energy can greatly speed your spiritual growth through my own personal experience. I don't mean a little, i mean exponentially. Well it has for me. You'd have to give it a good try yourself and see if it did for you. Thats not how it's done, and it wouldn't be benefitial in that way. Imagine you have 1 cup of hot water and one cup of cold water and you want to have a nice luke warm water. You can't just try to blend energies while they're in individual cups can you? You need to let them both flow together, then they simultaniously blend energies and both benefit. Like yeah u can try suck energy out of the woman but deep down will you feel good about it? No, and your energy and channel openess will reflect this and reduce your personal benefit compaired to if you shared.

1 - A house in asia? They all live in cramped apartments on top of each other. 2 - Wouldn't have been built under these conditions? 99% of people wouldn't have a choice on how their house was built and no feng shuai would have been considered in building anything, just whack the building up in the cheapest possible manner. Although in china everyone is aware of feng shuai, very few people know how to practice it. However some people who believe in it will employ a fung shuai expert to re-arrange things in their house to be more harmonious. Only banks, big jewelry shops or big restaurants etc are the only things i see using feng shuai in china.

Thats the thing though. In the west (or at least where i'm from in Australia) we're so on top of things like saving the planet that we have the best of everything while still not defacing the planet. In china everything comes in a plastic packet. If i buy something it first comes in a decorative box 3x the size of the product, then i open it inside it's plastic cover, find another box inside with the product, open it, the product is then wrapped in plastic, and has several smaller portions that i can then devour, each in it's own plastic packet!! The shop owner gives it to me in 2 plastic bags doubled up because he thinks it's heavy (probably because of all the packaging). I then fill the two plastic bags the shop has given me with the plastic wrapping and have no other choice but to give it to landfill (apart from not buying anything) We are taoists, and we live in the west. We don't need to search any more for the answer, we already have the secret and have done the work for a perfect and luxurious (should we choose it) life. Enjoy guys! "We" don't create poverty. The small people are not the problem. It's the big companies that create problems. Yes we use too much energy. But after this wireless energy comes to surface which has already been designed we can use natural energy for our luxury needs without destorying the planet on such a rediculous level. Then we will be living at one with nature in our great cities. Any tigers wearing sexc red underwear yet?

I've had spirulina which is pretty damn good too. dunno about the detox problems i dont' think you should have anything wrong unless ur only eating super healthy food and you eat heaps of junk or haven't detoxed in like 10 years. I think these kinds of things dont' detox you unless ur only eating healthy which will detox u on your own. Check the used by date at the bottom, these kind of things usually have a long time shelf life and slow sale so you might have an old batch.

I dunno i'm 27 and if i drink my energy runs better. It's like it relaxes me and it just runs. Depending on how much i drink... if i drink more the next morning it runs well too. If i drink not too much the next morning my energy is less. Drink lots and energy is the last thing i think about! It was chinese new year here the other day and my chinese sucks so i couldn't speak too much only drink. Drank a bottle of grants scotch 750ml and a few beers too and woke up feeling fine the next morning. Just normal. Couldn't believe it. I did eat before i slept though but didn't drink any water. Normally my eyelids would be sticking to my eyeballs after that much alcohol and no water. Wasn't so good climbing over the equipment at the park the next day though, but i still managed it alright and my balance was still better than those around me. Strange. Maybe something to do with the moon of the chinese new year. Gods were looking down on me =] My thoughts are that alcohol is fine for cultivation. Cultivation is lifelong and alcohol is a part of many peoples lives. Don't fight against your desires, just follow what you want to do. Alcoholism is a different story though. Especially after you realise and you begin to stress in an attempt to stop. The stoop into addiction would be fine. The climb out is hell.

That is very weird. I never think about ghosts i would just think 'god damn noisy house, can't wait till i go home and get a good sleep'. I got told a story the other day about someone thinking there was something wrong with their house. Guy went in (incidently the doctor from another thread i mentioned) and the feng shuai compass pointed to something... then he threw something at it and ran away? huang shu lang is the chinese name for the thing. Supposed to be invisible to many people. I dunno i'm sceptical but he said it happened and i've seen many things i've been sceptical come true infront of this bloke. Supposedly after that the house was ok. Don't know if the compass moved after the animal moved. Will have to delve into this further. I dunno - an invisible monster that only special people can see and chase away sounds like a good oportunity to make money. But the doctor has been right many times before. 100% right? even after all i've seen i'm not 100% sure. I'll start training with him in a couple of weeks and let you know what the go is. Do i believe in ghosts and haunted houses? I don't know, I don't disbelieve. I believe in spirits though. *shrug*

Chinese new year might be thought of as something really cool but after 2 chinese new years, when during those times i have stayed with 4 different chinese families.... compaired to western christmas - they suck. Why is christmas good, why is it different from any other day? because of the festivities. Western new year and christmas are 10x better than in China. Maybe just because the chinese are behind in development of their socieites and culture they are also behind in their festivals. I feel we still have just as much (if not more) emotional connection to our festivals as they do but our materalistic is much better. Not that you need to spend lots of money on christmas but it's great to give presents however small they may be or decorate your house. Here the old people give money to the children. Thats all, only one way giving. If you visit a friend in china it's expected you will bring them something, and nothing small or it's looked down upon. They're all about impressing each other with how much they can give. It's not that they give from the heart it's that they want the others to think they are so generous and they get a kick out of it. Whats more, you'll be lucky if you ever get a thankyou for your present. Although they may try to express their thanks in other ways. I thought the chinese way... the home of the yinyang/taichi/bagua was perfectly balanced and had high expectations for it. Now i see they are just the yin, we are the yang neither are no more advanced in spirituality. They have just put it into a science. The west is still well aware of the yin/yang but it has not put so much focus on it. But hey, just because all our festivals are bigger better and nicer than theirs, they're still happy with their mediocore ones so long as they're happy thats all that matters. The happiness is in the mind. Just it's the biggest backflip being here. Integration of east and west is so difficult. Don't come to the east to exciting festival celebrations. Australia day which is one of our smaller festivals obviously and it makes chinese new year look like sunday church

Yeah i think thats interesting too. I've read that after practicing qigong lots some people say they don't dream and have deep sleeps. Not me though. I've been at a similar stage to you with my dreaming and i've practiced qigong alot in the recent years but i still dream. To me i have 3 different kinds of sleep, not relating this to any scientific REM or anything cos i haven't read up about it. 1. light sleep/dreamy sleep Easiest time for this is when i wake up in the morning after a good sleep, then fall back asleep again in a light sleep. Here i can dream very easily. If i wake up again i can even just kind of hold that dream there for a little bit while going to the toilet or something, then lay back down and continue the dream off from where it left off. 2. deep sleep Takes a while to get into but feel totally relaxed and since i'm not normaly a relaxed person when i wake up from this i feel so nice, refreshed and good. Usually don't remember these dreams, unless i've been practicing or i wake up in the middle of the night halfway through a dream. After a giant 14hr walk up and down a mountain or something it's easy to fall into this one. 3. light sleep After i do qigong this is typical, yet not only after qigong. I sleep but am easily woken up, don't feel totally relaxed, like i have too much energy to go into a deep sleep. Don't dream. Has your sleep quality changed apart from the dreaming since you've been doing qigong? Just something u can try doing in your dreams too. Flipping coins and making them land on the side that you want. When i could do that i knew i was really cooking with gas. Should have stuck with it but as i had less time to remember my dreams after waking the ability slowly dwindled.

I feel, GOLDISHEAVY, as per usual has the best overview of things. But i also feel it is unusable to the normal person. I understand what he says is so right and correct but using his advice i can't cure any of my problems. He is too far advanced and his suggestions are too diffuicult for the normal person to reap any benefits although he has some excellent suggestions - none of which i could think of to suggest myself. I suggest keep in mind his thoughts and ideas as you continue on your path and each step of the way you will realise more and more merits in his suggestions. The mind is mysterious and out your rational thinking ways. What he suggests is not an instant fix (although it could be) but it will happen in the future if you follow his ideas. The physical is slow to to change so give it chance. Continued, extended persistance is required to change what you think is impossible! Goldisheavy is ulimately wise in many many things.