Maddie

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.

I was curious because I'm finding that the effects do not go away quickly for myself either. Most Theravada lay practitioners don't actually do much cultivation as its mostly a merit making religion for lay people so there is probably not much to undo for most.

True but just to be fair there are jealous men as well.

It's a decent theory, the only problem is that before I would do the meditation I might be feeling more or less neutral and then after the meditation was over feel pretty rotten.

Inner smile was one of my first practices. I liked it but also found it that it dug up a lot of emotional baggage but I also combined with the healing sounds so I'm not sure which one was doing the digging. So are you finding that it is taking time to undo the effects from Theravada practice?

One more thought. I would like to know what other's think about the theory that in this day and age chanting is the most beneficial practice? Such as the Kali Yuga/ third age of Buddhism theory.

I was pondering if people that get more out of chanting than other practices benefit from "help from above" so to speak more than others?

It occurred to me that meditation is a broad topic and word so I thought perhaps if I were to add a little more detail to how I specifically practice meditation it might illuminate things better. So typically I was doing basic Buddhist anapanasati breath meditation. I would just focus on my breath. After a while the thoughts would generally calm down quite a bit and I would be very relaxed and feel extremely peaceful. That part was great. What was not great is that maybe later that day or maybe the next day I would begin to feel either very anxious or depressed and have really random unpleasant thoughts bombard me for several days to a week until the effects of the meditation would wear off. Over the years this pattern has repeated itself enough to become noticeable as a pattern. I think some of the side effects and explanations for them were in the article the OP had posted.