Maddie

The Big Draw is what you do with the energy after you stop it from squirting out of your penis. Once you stop it at your perineum then you "Draw" that energy into your MCO and circulate it around till it gets to your Lower Dan Tien where you store it if your doing solo. If your doing it with a partner you circulate your enegy through her, and hers though you. Just a tip from personal expereince.... don't leave the energy in your head, always store it in your lower dan tien.

In the middle dan tien / heart center thread I was stating that I have a huch that in men the lower dan tien is predominate and that in women the middle dan tien is. So I find some of the above statements interesting as they seem to support this notion. I had not heard that women should avoid working with the lower dan tien except when they are menstrating at which time they are supposed to focus on the middle dan tien. But it is my hunch that womens middle dan tiens are naturally more developed and open, while for men its the lower, but thats just my personal hunch for now. Yet in my thread I felt that perhaps men should work on opening their middle dan tiens so that perhaps many "man" assosicated problems would find balance. Maybe if the woman focused on her lower that might help her to find more balance as well. I wish I could find a good source on this.

Ok so today I put this into practice as I'm not one to just rely on theory alone. I spent several hours today working on my heart center area, heart, and lungs (all middle tan tien territory). I did the inner smile and healing sounds for the organs in that area a very long time. Then as I was out and about today I noticed that my out look on the female gender was different. My views of and about them felt a bit more honorable today than usual (usual being my x-ray vision kicks in, their clothes desinigrate before my very eyes, and the imagination goes to work). It did seem that the energy in my heart area was less constricted so that I was able to feel more compassion for them, rather than to just want to feel them . They seemed more like someones sister, daughter, ect.. as opposed to (me love you long time). Likewise I felt less pressure in the lower areas, so perhaps with more energy moving through the heart area maybe the pressure in the lower areas was indeed lessened a bit. On the other hand I did feel a bit more emotional (not to the point of crying over soap operas and eating bon bons on the sofa) but more emotional nevertheless. I'll continue this tomorrow and see what happens.

In my own expereince after you stop ejaculation and do your energy circulation it tends to go limp a little, but I think that is just a sign that you have moved the energy from there to the places you want it to be. Once you begin the next session it tends to get right back to attention

I think there has been a lot of good advice on here. 1. Cardiologist, 2. Acupuncturist, 3. Your probably just becoming more senstive to what was already there. All those things have been already said and I agree with all of them, and though I'm not a pro so don't take this too seriously my intution tells me its probably 3. but I'd still start with 1. to rule out any possiblity of a more serious problem. good luck

From my personal experience and from what a lot of others have said .... I tried to do the Big Draw before I had a good foundation of other practices such as a good and flowing MCO and inner smile / healing sounds. The whole point of the Big Draw is to draw that orgasmic energy into your MCO. If the MCO is not really open well then its not going to work properly, and the energy will get stuck in your genitle area. This can lead to stagnation which then can lead to a whole lot of other problems. Check out this well read website [email protected] and look at the dangers of retention article under healing love.

any recommendations as to how to do this?

There are three dan tiens, lower, middle, and upper. The question on if you have sex and having to start over again depends. If you don't have sex too frequently you don't necessarily have to "start over" just replace what ever precentage that you lost during ejaculation. If your dan tien was very full then most likely returning your energy level to pre-ejaculation won't take as long. Of course if you over do things sexually then the rate you depelete your dan tien increases and therefore it takes longer to recharge it. It also depends on your age, health, general constitution, and the amount of pre-natal jing you are born with.

I assume we are talking about filling up the lower dan tien eh? It did not seem to take very long for me to fill up my lower dan tien when I first gave it a try ( a few weeks I think). Filling up/opening my middle dan tien seems to be more tricky to me by far.

I just woke up this morning and I had this dream that I feel gave me an important insight. There is the heart center which lies in the Middle Dan Tien, and the sexual center which is closer to the domain of the Lower Dan Tien. It has been my observation that people with blocked heart centers tend to be more focused on sex, while people who have blocked sexual centers seem to be more focused on the emotional aspect of relationships. Think of it as a PVC pipe with water flowing through it. Now lets say I drilled two holes in this pipe. As long as both holes are clean water is going to flow out of both holes more or less equally. Now lets say that one hole becomes clogged or blocked. This will have the effect of raising the water pressure in the remaining hole. So lets say one has their heart center blocked. Then that would seem to indicate that more pressure would tend to flow out of the sexaul center. Now it would seem that for what ever reason that a lot of men (and of course some women too) tend to be more straight foward "mission minded" less emotional in regards to sex as compared to women. Women on the other hand tend to be a little more problematic when it comes to achieving an orgasm than men (and usually are more sexually hesitant), but also seem to emphasise the emotional component of a relation ship then men. This would suggest to me that in general men have more problems with blockages in their heart center, and women have more problems with blockages in their sexual center (and yes I know there are always exceptions). The man with a blockage in the heart center would have more pressure trying to escape their sexual center, and vice versa with the woman. It is easy to see how this would not only create a great deal of internal frustration (sex obsessed man, emotional woman) but inter-relationship issues as well. To the woman the man would seem to not care enough about issues of the heart, and to the man it would seem hard to get into the womans pants. In my observations on homosexual couples, women who have become lesbians often tell me that their relationships with women are much more soft and tender than with men. Homosexual men seem to be highly promiscuous changing partners often. This behavior tends to reinforce my theory on where blockages tend to predominate in the various genders. A third category might be the serious scholar / nerd who might be blocked in both the lower centers and only open in the Upper Dan Tien, the kind of person who seems uninterested in either sex or emotional relationships, but only in study and contemplation. So then I suppose that the idea state is of course to have all areas unblocked so that in all aspects of life we remiain well blanaced. Yet if in a certain aspect of life we do seem to be unblanaced, then understanding why we have such an imbalance is likely the first set in finding a solution to that imbalance.

Flower remedies are a good way to determine a tree's personality, or at least the effect it can have upon your personality. Check out this description of flower remedies (a lot of "flower remedies" are from trees) http://www.anandaapothecary.com/bach-flower-essence-remedy.html

Actually today I had an experience that was the exact opposite of fireworks exploding. I felt unusually lonely today for what ever reason. On a hunch I began to do the heart healing sound and inner smile. I was breathing out that lonely feeling (kind of like on Top Gun) but the odd thing was, the "lonely" energy that came out of my heart felt like "anti-matter". It did not feel like something but rather the opposite of anything, almost like a black hole. As I was breathing out this energy it had a very imploding collapsing feeling, very odd. At the same time as I was breathing out this anti-matter feeling stuff, I was breathing in intimacy as I believe that is what a heart lacks with it feels lonely. Yet as opposed to seeking intimacy from another human being this technique seemed to have me connnect to intimacy within. It was rather unusual, and difficult to put into words.

I like Ken Cohen's book too, lots of good basic info. I'm sure you will get a lot of various answers here as you already have. So I can't tell you what is the "best" for you, but I can share my experience. When I first began Qigong I experimented with all sorts of various practices. What I found in my expereince is that starting off with the Physical Qigong (the movements) helped me to prepare for the more still sitting meditative Qigong. At first it was very hard to make my mind still enough to sit and meditate. Doing movements on the other hand took less mental concentration, yet had a very beneficial effect on my mind. After I had done the physical Qigong for a while (and I still do it almost every day) then it was much easier for me to move on to some of the still Qigong. Even now I usually do my moving sets first in the morning, and then do meditation. Ok I'm no master, but thats just my experience, hopefully it may be usefull. :-)

Does/has anyone done Kan and Li, specifically the lesser kan and li? I have the book from Chia and was hoping to get some tips and pointers from anyone's personal experience with it. Do you feel much or is it mostly visualization?

So.... does anyone know much about the middle dan tien???

That was pretty interesting and ironic because just today I was pondering a lot of the issues mentioned. I was pondering evolution and the purpose of it all. Additionally I was pondering the Jehova god of the Old Testament / Torah. This is just my most recent opinion, but to me Jehova seems like a rather immature yet powerful, yet unenlightened being. He does not seem all that well adjusted and on a constant ego trip. IMO he is just a being with some power but without Tao. One thing that has long baffeled me about Jehova is whats up with the animal sacrifices? For that matter why did so many ancient religions practice this? Does sacrificing an animal for a powerful entity give that entity anything? or perhaps it was based more upon human understanding? I don't know, as usual I tend to have more questions than answers.

I found this site http://www.namastecafe.com/edu/symptoms.htm , and I have noticed that I am experiencing a lot of those symptoms as I have begun to focus on my Middle Dan Tien/ Heart Center. I still do not really understand what this area does/is/is for, but I seem to be experiencing a lot of those same symptoms nevertheless. Now I do not think that this is any sort of enlightenment, but rather I feel that it is the opening and healing of something previously closed and blocked (at least that is my assesement). Anyone else have any experience with these symptoms and/or the heart center/middle dan tien?

I had a very ...er.."interesting" weekend. Late last week I just had this intuitive feeling that I needed to do Middle Dan Tien breathing. I have no idea why I had this feeling, but I did. Usually in my Qigong practice this is the most ignored Dan Tien. So for the last couple days of last week I focused on my middle dan tien while deep breathing and also did the Big Draw to that area as well. Well this past weekend I was an emotional wreck. I almost never cry, but I was a basket case last weeekend. I felts soooo emotional on Saturday, and was weepeing, and sad beyond description, yet at the same time I was thinking about my children and felt as though I had never loved them more. (This is all very out of character for me). On Sunday and today I litterally felt ill. I felt sick and could not really stand up with out feeling dizzy and almost blacking out, and felt nauseous. I'm not 100% sure if it is connected, but it would not suprise me if it were somehow connected.

Well I can't speak for others, but as for myself I have several reasons for wanting to decrease sexual desire. The biggest reason is that when my drive is strong it tends to be obsessive for me. I get a total one track mind and can not really concentrate on anything else. This is not blalance, and so I guess really balance in life is what I'm after, and it just so happens that a major area of imbalance as been sex. I suppose if it was gluttony or over eating then that is what I would be concentrating on bringing into blance.

Sexuality has long been problematic in my life, yet some aspects of it seem to be different than what I observe the majority of other people seem to experience. But first let me degress a little with some back ground that I feel is relevant to this topic. I grew up with a very abusive father physically, mentally, emotionally, and verbally. He was very harsh and seemed to almost enjoy humiliating and degrading his children. When I first started to notice girls in high school the emotional damage I had incured made me quite akward around girls, and thus my dating and social life was practially non-existant. After high school I joined the army and wound up in Ft. Benning GA as my first duty station. I met this slutty fluzzy but since she seemed to show intersted in me and because of my abusive father my self esteem was shot to hell I fell for her anyways. I stupidly got married to her at her insistence (she wanted an army meal ticket) and on my first training rotation to the desert she cheated on me and that ended that adventure. As a result of that trauma I joined a christian cult and due to its strict rules about dating I did not date another girl for about 6 years. After 6 years my future wife came to visit this church. She did not like the church but appearantly liked me. Since at this time I was sick of this church anyhow I left the church and got married to her (the second girl that seemed to show interest in me). Well needless to say this marriage hasn't been a rose garden either. By 2006 I was on anti-depressants, but didn't like the way they made me feel. In 2008 I began Qigong and became very interested in TCM and herbs. Due to this combination I was able to get off perscription anti-depressants. So what does all of this have to do with the topic. From the time I was a teenager, all the way up until after I got married to my current wife, I was totally sex obsessed in the traditional way (as far as unhealthy obsessions go). I would think about women all the time, wanted women all the time. The focus of my libido and desire was mainly centered in my genitals (not to say that I did not desire companionship very much as well). This is a nice way of saying I wanted very badly to stick it in a woman and relieve myself (crude I know, but alas that is how it was). It was always very straight foward, I saw woman, Mr. Happy got excited, I wanted woman, Mr. Happy did his thing, ahhhh now time to roll over and take a nap. But then shortly before the time that I wound up on anti-depressants things took a turn for the weird. My thoughts and desire about sex became more unusual. Strange unwanted fantasies would enter, and I began to want and do things that before would have seemed horrid to me. Additionally when I would get aroused in this new and unusal way no longer did I primarily feel desire in the genital area. It was more like it was in my chest core area in the center of me. I would not experience errections at this new and unusual stimulation. Instead the stimulation was deeper inside me, higher up, and more bizzare. This of course began to worry me extensively. I don't desire to go into too much detail, but many of these bizzare fantasies that would plauge me were of the BSDM nature, and I find that stuff horrifying. Yet I could not make it go away, even though I hated it. That was a large part of the reason I wound up on anti-depressants. This has been something that has been tormenting me for the last few years now. I can be going along minding my own business and then boom out of no where "it" will hit me, and hit me hard. When it hits me really hard, I might not be able to sleep all night because these thoughts have me so wound up. I have pondered what this might be for a long time now through the Qigong perspective, the TCM perspective, and many other wholistic and natrual approaches. This hit me again last night. I stayed up quite late due to this. At first I tried sitting in full lotus, doing MCO, testicle breathing in order to remove and transform sexual energy so that it would not be a problem for me. This did not help. So after that I began to do the inner smile and healing sound of the heart as that is associated with over excitement. This did also not seem to help much either. Eventually I went to bed, but when I woke up this morning the problem was still present. I tried the kidney channel instead, as this is related to sexual energy,but this did not seem to help either. Then the spleen for obseesive thoughts, and the liver for its relationship to libido and agression, but none of this helped as well. Finally with only the lungs left I decided to give it a try, but I could not see how sorrow (the traditional emotion associated with the lung was realted). So I began to smile to my lungs, and to do the healing sound. Amazingly I began to slowly feel better as I did this! I did not understand why this was helping, but the longer I smiled to my lungs and did the healing sound, it seemed the more I gained insight as to just what was hiding in my lungs after all. See besides sorrow and grief, the lungs also are responsible for personal boundries, personal pride, self respect, courage, and self esteem. These fantasies that had overcome me were almost always of some sort of BSDM, humiliation, submissive, type scenario; all the attribues that are the exact opposite of self respect, pride, honor, boundries, ect. Also I was dumbfounded at the sheer volume of negative energy that was locked up in my lungs. I literally did the lung healing sound for several hours today, just so much came out, it was unbelieveable. I suppose this also explains why I would not feel the stimulation in my genital area which is the normal area of sexual stimulation, but in my chest where my lungs are. Why the obsession, I'm not sure, but I do have a theory based on some personal observations from my own experience. Another issue I struggled with was fear. When I was a young child my father would make me constantly fearfull. People used to tell me that I would always look afraid. It seemed that when I went through my fearful phase of life, that I seemed to attract to myself things that would make me afraid. It was not until I began doing Qigong and began to remove that stored up fear energy from my kidneys that not only did I stop being afraid, but I also stopped attracting the things I feared to myself. Perhaps its a matter of like attracts like? So maybe in this case with my father constantly humiliating me and degrading me as a child, there was a lot of negative lung energy such as sorrow (which would explain the anti-depressants) and a sever lack of the lungs virtues of pride, self respect, boundries, ect.. BSDM is the total antithesis of those virtues. There is no pride, its about humiliation, and those seemed to be the scenarios that tormented me against my will. Now I don't know if its over, for in my Qigong experience nothing is ever so cut and dry, fast and easy. But I do know that as I started working on my lung channel that this obession faded away, and that I began to slowly feel better. I also know that sadness is something that has been a long time problem of mine, yet often due to the painful nature of negative energy stored within us we do not like to look at or acknowlege it, meaning that it was there all along, but I didn't want to face it. But the main reason I posted all of this is because I was wondering if anyone else is familiar with non-genital type sexual compulsions?

I had tried doing a variation of Testicle Breathing as taught by Mantak Chia in order to lessen my desire, but it did not really seem to work, plus I felt very lethargic. Finally I could not take it anymore and did the Big Draw instead. This helped a lot with the desire aspect as well as the lethargy too. At this time the only thing I can figure is that I did not do the Testicle Breathing correctly... You are suppose to breath into the testicles first, and then draw up the unaroused energy. I did not breath into them first as I was afraid that this might stimulate me too much. On the other hand the only thing I did differently with the Big Draw was to self stimulate and then draw the energy into my MCO and store in the Dan Tien. I had tried to do the same thing with my variation of testicle breathing but I suppose since I did not breath into the testicles first, there was not enough conversion? I'll try to do the full method next time and see what happens. Yet nevertheless now I feel more energetic, light and flexible, plus my desire is back to a normal/almost neutral state. Any input would be appreciated. P.S. I know that full lotus is also effective, but it is often very difficult for me to get into it, so I have to know alternative methods as well. I would also like to be able to do the method Drew does but as of yet I have no idea how to do that.

Yea I see what you are saying about doing the fussion practise first. I can definately see how that could carry over to Kan and Li.

I can't say for sure, but perhaps part of the reason that as men get older they seem to emphasize the physical less (at least some do) might of course be maturity over time, but another reason might be that as he gets older and has lost more of his jing, in the realtive sense he has different jing to chi ratio than that of a younger man (who are notoriously sex obsessed). And perhaps as people go through life and ponder life, this may act as a sort of mind yoga that may clear some of their channels. I'm not sure how charisma relates to this, but sometimes I feel more charismatic than other times lol.

Ok DO NOT do the Big Draw and leave the energy in your head overnight!!! Last night I did the Big Draw and left most of the energy in my head. Today all I could think about was sex, even though I did not have much desire. It was like it was all in my head litterally. I just spent the last hour drawing the energy down to my middle dan tien and the thoughts are slowing down.