Maddie

I think I noticed doing the cool draw laying down is more difficult than sitting up.

No.... sorry, but no lol

When I first got into Buddhism it seemed that every monk or lay practitioner was a "rational" westerner that pooed on anything "superstitious". The western monk at the local monastery flat out told me there was no magic when I came to him for help from my ex that was cursing me. He told me to ignore such things and focus on meditation during the retreat I was doing. Funnily enough I didn't get relief all day during the daytime until the evening chanting time. Then I would suddenly feel a rush of relief as the Burmese monks would do the partita chanting to ward off the black magic and evil spirits that supposedly didn't exist.

I just want to make sure I am understanding this correctly. Are you saying just make sure you are doing the forms correctly and the qi will take care of itself?

I never realized how much repressed emotions I had in my life until I started doing Taoist practices like the inner smile and healing sounds.

I noticed a little over a year ago around the same time I began to reevaluate a lot of things that the very top vertebrae where it meets the skull began to pop a lot and very loudly. Now of course this could be totally unrelated but I have noticed in the past when I've been dealing with issues on a mental level that the vertebrae that relate to the chakra most associated with those issues tends to pop a lot and now I've been reevaluating the big picture in my top vertebrae is popping a lot and I'm wondering if there's any correlation?

That's a perfectly valid and good use of a mantra.

I agree, I think a lot of people think if it does not look like one of the extreme cases like in the movies then its not possession.

Is anyone doing these here now? The cold draw not the other stuff. ** reason I ask is because I had not done this for a long time but for the past couple days I tried it again and I feel like I have so much more energy, my mood is better and my back does not hurt after leaning over patients all day.

http://www.meditationexpert.com/comparative-religion/c_Song_of_Songs.html

Of course I wonder that about a lot of stuff. Like if the guys that wrote the bible must wonder about evangelicals and are like "I can't believe they are taking this stuff literally?!"

I've often wondered if there was not hidden cultivation lingo in the TTJ?

Maybe Wai Dan was the wrong terminology. My goal is to purge the "phlegm" and heat that my meditation kept digging up but was not resolving.

Seduction.

Often times in Buddhism the texts become the practice as well.

Yes but this isn't random experimentation. I'm not trying to "cultivate" but treat.

But in all seriousness I am currently trying to expand the boundaries of TCM to a deeper level at the moment, and see if an can get into the area of Wai Dan a little bit. *for myself, not my patients.

With as much outward manifestation as I've been experiencing this sounds like a great first step lol

The goal in Buddhism isn't the elimination of lust. It is the elimination of suffering.

I agree. I seem to have found this in TCM at least finally.

Not just wasting time, but harming ones self as well. I felt like this stuff was about to drive me insane at times.

The thing I always found odd about the various Buddhist centers I went to learn meditation from was they would say watch your thoughts but do not interfere and I thought okay what do I know but it never quite made sense to me because now that I'm approaching my childhood trauma from a TCM point of view it looks like I was just watching the phlegm and heat without doing anything about it. Ajahan Braham points out an example in the flaw of mindfulness of a security guard being told to be mindful of burglars and then when the people return to their house the entire place has been robbed in the security guard assures them that he was mindful of the burglars going in and out of the house. I think mindfulness is very useful but it seems like by itself it's not enough even though for years I was told it was.

So are you saying that nihilism comes from too much yin? and too much yin comes from inappropriate training methods? Also I wonder if this is why a lot of the Theravada monks look like walking corpses to me?

I think this is a good question but also a vague question which makes answering it difficult. Had you asked me this question ten years ago I would have just said yes. In a very very general way I would say yes still, but its much more complicated than that. Let's break down your thesis and then proceed. Taoism- energy work Buddhism- psychology Ok so yes that is one way of looking at it, and this is how I also saw it before I went to TCM school. There I noticed there were roughly two general categories of TCM students which were the westerners and the Asians. When asking the westerners about Taoism they would say that its about doing qigong and neidan and cultivating and reading the DDJ. When I would ask the Asian students they would say it was about doing to the temple now and then and offering the gods some incense and chanting and ceremonies and honoring the dead. As a westerner you might imagine what went through my recently disillusioned with church mind, (oh so like going to church). Many of the Asians knew nothing of qigong or cultivation. To be fair when I would ask the Asian Buddhists the same question I basically got the same answer, Buddhism was about rituals and ceremonies and going to the temple. Later on I eventually did run into a few of the Asian students and teachers that seemed to be a little more in the know about these things and they more or less explained it like this. The distinctions of Taoist or Buddhist were less important than the cultivation method one chose to approach these things. There was the scholar approach, the yogic approach, the medical approach and the devotional approach. Most of what is discussed here would fall under the yogic approach of qigong, meditation, and alchemy. They also shared how for since the beginning of time each approach tended to condescend to the other approach as "quaint". So unfortunately for the purposes of your question I don't think there really is an easy cut and dry answer. So maybe more like: Taoism- scholarly yogic medical devotional Buddhism- scholarly yogic medical devotional

I think I might have figured out what has been going on in my case, via the TCM route. I think due to the large amount of trauma from my earlier years meditation has been digging this up. I got into meditation to help me deal with it, but it has been rough because there is a lot there to deal with. The TCM explanation would be "phlegm and heat stuck in the deep level" (a TCM practitioner from China would probably say I'm butchering the language, but I've found I have to make this more understandable to the western mind based on experience with patients). Anyway the phlegm and heat get stuck in the deep level where they can stay theoretically for someone's entire life (thus the deep level). I think this is why when I would get into "deep" meditation I would come into contact with this stuff. Buddhism wouldn't really quantify it but say "its just thought observe and let go". TCM on the other hand would say "you have stuck phlegm heat in there". Since meditation made me feel like I was on a merry go round and not really getting anywhere I decided to try a TCM approach. I recently began taking several herbal formulas based on purging phlegm and heat at the deep level. The interesting thing is, is that with out any meditation at all I am having some of the same effects as meditation in one sense, but its also different in another. When I would meditate long and deep I would later have weird thought, feel hot, and have to urinate frequently. Now that I have stopped meditating I'll take my herbs and have weird thoughts (though they don't seem as out of control as when after meditation) feel lots of heat, and have to urinate frequently. This is an indication that the purging of phlegm and heat is working, and that it is being brought up from the deep level where it was stuck. It is still a little rough and uncomfortable but the progress seems more linear now as opposed to going in circles with meditation. I'm curious to see how things continue to progress.