Astral Monk

Yes to Basil, Cilantro, and Balm plants!! I will be getting some Bee Balm/Lemon balm for this season for sure. Balm is anti-viral and can be used to treat wounds. I also have some yarrow around, but haven't used it medicinally. To keep the weeds/grass out of your lawn garden, just add a layer of thick cardboard or several layers of ordinary newsprint under your soil or bags of soil. These will prevent grass from growing through and kill it off. The paper products will eventually breakdown and return to the soil. This works really well. Its the first component of 'sheet mulching', where you build a garden bed that composts itself in place, by adding a layer of green, a layer of brown, some manure, and alternating to make a lasagna-like mound. 8)

A real treasure of a vid for sure! Too bad there's no English titles. 8)

Well, highly trained monks being able to raise their body temperatures to a high degree is real and documented. Actually starting fires with the highly focussed energy is not a difference in kind, only degree. 8)

yeah, better keep the horsetail well contained. If you let it go to ground, you will never, ever, ever get rid of it. Probably better idea to go find it in the wild. According to my herb book, horsetail can absorb gold dissolved in water! Stems are used, with treatments for things like arthritis. I love a god variety of fragrant herbs. Lavender is lovely and comes in many pleasing varities. Good for teas and sleeping aids (but not for pregnant women). I'll have a bunch of mints, a cooling herb, and a good addition to fresh salads. Likewise sage is another nice and generally hardy plant that adds great flavour to dishes. If you can grow cyan pepper, so much the better. Rosemary--good for digestive aid, tarragon--has uses for toothaches, chew fresh leaves. St. John's wort is another herbal goldmine, but practically one might have it on hand to use for treating wounds with fresh leaves and flowers under a bandage for instance. Don't forget to grow a nice assortment of greens--lettuces, chinese greens, kale. And if there's space, as many berry plants as you can--raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, huckleberry--anything that can provide a nibble. Some folks are really getting into growing seabuckthorn. If you can grow your own ginger, horseradish, and other roots, so much the better! 8)

Guanghua Gao style bagua uses a heel step for basic circle walking. Like the mud step, there's a push forward, but in this case it's with the heel of the leading foot pressing vigorously against the ground, grinding its way forward until it stops and flattens. This is a very powerful step and good to practice, but I found it very difficult to do on concrete surfaces. Easier on dirt or gravel, but you will wear the shXX out of your shoes for real. 8)

Do you suppose one could get the same benefits of horse stance from actually riding a horse? Bareback, not with a saddle holding you up. I would imagine the stimulation of the tailbone area from riding might be beneficial. Has anyone practiced the horse form where the knees are drawn inwards? In the Korean sword art Haedong Kumdo they practice such a stance (kima-se) as part of basics. It's interesting that Japanese martial arts seem to use a higher horse stance (kiba-dachi). 8)

Spinoza! Certainly not light reading. Infinite modes of Being for God, with each one being infinite. And never shall any of them interact in any way. My current read: Jonathan D. Spence, The Seach for Modern China I've finally made it to the 80's. 8)

Standing posts are the foundation of all martial arts practice. Before you learn to sit, you need to learn to stand. Zhan Zhuang, however, is more akin to qigong than tai chi because motion is not required. Any type of Zhan Zhuang will improve your tai chi practice because it will help you improve your balance and rootedness and patience. You can use any pose as a standing post, but I'm not sure of the energy impacts of using random postures. An excellent posture to practice for tai chi is this: feet, knee, and legs together, sit with legs bent, weight over the center of the feet, tailbone slightly tucked, head straight with chin slightly tucked, arms relaxed at sides, fingers naturally open. This posture is like a high-horse stance but with the legs together. My sifu called it wuji, but as wuji is usually standing straight, I'm not sure if she was referring to just standing poses in general. I don't know if this posture has a common name, but once you do it, you'll see how it is found in virtually every tai chi movement as a starting point. Only difference is for this posture you place your weight evenly on both feet, rather than on one side or the other. If your balance and sit is weighing correctly, you should feel it in the inner thigh towards the knees. You'll see a similar transition posture in Sun style tai chi, although the weight, as in most movements, is more toward one foot. 8)

Constructed things are given a purpose by the intention of their creator. Once this purpose is fulfilled, the created thing is no longer necessary. The fulfillment or not of a created thing's purpose is an objective measure of its value, whether it is good or poor. The poor thing is annihilated because it is useless; the good thing is annihilated because it perfectly fulfills itself and is no longer needed. True existence is a presence of neither fulfillment nor negation. Perhaps true art is a pure spontaneous act and not a product at all! 8)

'Purpose' is for tools, for artifacts constructed by specific beings to fulfill specific ends. It is a utilitarian concept. Purpose refers to means that achieve ends outside of themselves. Living beings do not have purpose. They are ends in themselves. SInce human beings are free, we are free to make ourselves tools if we want. If being an instrument of an exterior end is your thing, then by all means become an existential chisel. 8)

Great vids. The one where BKF explains how all taiji movement is an expression of stretching and bending was very helpful, especially for such a seemingly innocuous motion as 'commencement'. Here's another series of videos that I found helpful, featuring Ian Sinclair teaching the finer points of various movements in the Tai Chi 10 form: Tai Chi 10 form is a condensed form using 10 moves done both to the left and right, taking place within the space of about 1-2 steps. Great form for appartments, limited spaces, time constraints, as well as promoting balance. And accessible for beginners too. And, if you know some taiji moves, you can make up your own 10 form set. 8)

Well I reckon it's a bit of both. http://http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/mpacms/at/article.php?id=31918 Bear in mind that there is a 'type' of qi for just about everything. There is a big difference between pre-natal and post-natal qi, for instance. These are energies that can be accessed and manipulated within the body. The key thing being that if you can experience and observe a change or transformation, then something 'real' is going on. Many types of qi refer to overlapping systems of processes. And observing these depends on your worldview. 'Organs' in TCM are not 'organs' of western medicine, although there is often overlap. So 'heart qi' is not, say, just about the quantity of blood moving out of the arteries. If, as the above article suggests, we want to talk about the internal transmission of coherent light, then centers of qi in the body might be areas where light and information are compressed or gathered. In that case, the 'qi' of those areas refers to this type of movement of light. Is there a ubiquitous 'qi' underlying it all? Is energy energy? 8)

Interesting question. In Islam it is said that people with tattoos are 'cursed', unless they repent of course. I wonder if it has something to do with God reserving the power of creation through words (symbols) for itself...? Personally, I think tattoos ought to have personal significance. It ought to be a symbol that stands for you or that continually inspires you. Cosmetic impulse tattoos don't have much value for me. Even 'artistic' tattoos aren't useful if they aren't connected to a deeper sense of meaning. So it's important to choose a symbol wisely. The great thing about symbols is that they don't have inherent meaning. They only have the meaning we give them. I'd rather choose a symbol than an image. A nice bagua, for instance, versus a picture of a Buddha. Moderation is the key too. Too many tattoos is not cool, imo. I don't care for sleeves etc. But that's my taste, I guess. I wonder if placement is a thing, considering key energy points around the body. However, given that everything is energy, the amount of energy from tattoo ink would not be enough to rewrite your spiritual nature, lol. And eventually it resonates with the rest of the body, becoming one with it. Some might see tattooing as a kind of sigil magic in practice. Hmm... 8)

Good ref. I'll have a listen. I'm tuning in to Chun Yi's 'Deep Healing' broadcasts, happening at the end of each month this year. 8)

Agreed. Finding the root is the most important. If one does step on uneven ground, I suppose you just try to move your foot over the contours as best as possible, making sure every step is totally solid. Or would you change it up and adopt a more normal 'rolling' step with the leading foot to be able to find the ground then plant the weight...? 8)

No, but I have a bit of forest nearby, which is certainly not level, lol. There are park spaces around with grass like that, but even then the ground is uneven prone to have dips, etc. Seems to me like good practice for balance, but it makes mud stepping a little challenging... 8)

What do yall think about bagua stepping on uneven ground? Walking around trees is popular but they usually have roots and dips and rocks and all kind of stuff. 8)

The bagua symbol is composed of 8 trigrams, each of which are associated with natural phenomena, numbers, powers, etc. It is used extensively in feng-shui geomancy and finds its way into martial arts in Bagua-zhang. The trigrams, made of of broken and unbroken lines, reflecting yin and yang, are also arranged as hexagrams (two trigrams together) in the I-Ching. The bagua has traditionally two configurations--pre (or early)-heaven and post (or later)-heaven. Now, why is this? Why is the bagua limited to these two diagrams? Why is it not built as a visual representation of the I-Ching, with, for example, an inner (lower) bagua and an outer (upper) bagua that can be shifted around to form any of the 64 hexagrams? Even still, there out to be at least 64 versions of the single-layer bagua. But we only see two, and these are routinely used for feng-shui and other purposes. I'd be interested to hear any ideas about this. Even the positions of the trigrams relative to the bagua are important, ie, do the trigrams face 'inward' (lowest (bottom) lines at the top) or 'outward' (lowest lines at the bottom)? One question we might ask is what the significance of the positioning of the trigrams in the existing bagua, eg, the pre-heaven bagua? For instance, why is 'heaven' at the top (south), opposite to 'earth' (north)? 8)

Why would the top line of fire react with the bottom line of water? What is the logic for this? So far we are seeing a transformation of symbols on the opposite side. This sort of shifting doesn't seem to account for how mountain and lake turn into heaven and wind. 8)

Interesting. 8)

What I want to know is whether there is a special reason for this OR is it just a convention? If there is a reason for it, then flipping a trigram creates a new bagua configuration. If its just a convention, then it doesn't matter how the trigram looks, because it is the symbolism of the force being present in that relative location in the octagon. ??? This is cool, I like it! 8)

Well, you can't get everything online, and you can't get everything from books, and you can't get everything from videos. And, unless you are the favorite son, you won't get everything from most teachers, and even if they give everything to everybody, it's unlikely that you'll get it the same way or to the same degree as Joe beside you. So you really can't get everything anywhere. Best to find the simple and practice it to exhaustion. Horse stance is looking good about now.

Chunyi stresses that the root of disease and discomfort lies in energy blockages. Unblocking means releasing the energy that is in excess or stagnating or whatever. That energy itself is just energy, and has, inherently, neither a good nor bad effect. Only when it gets backed up etc and the balance is thrown off, do we see sickness arise. He teaches that qigong healing is message healing, information healing, and as such it has as much to do with directing your mind as literally moving energy. But this also plays into beliefs. If you believe that you need to store up energy before healing, that you can exhaust yourself through healing, or that your energy can cause sickness or damage in others, then this is likely what you will experience. OTOH, if you recognize that the energy you are tapping into, the primordial source of energy, the fundamental energy of the universe, is infinite, inexhaustible, and that you, in the act of healing (yourself or others) are merely directing it to move in one direction or another, then there is no problem with healing people all day and night without losing any of your own power and strength. In that case you are not using your own personal stored energy to do anything; you are directing the energy of the universe and the patient to line up and move in harmony and balance. Your intent in moving energy is the key here. You can't send someone 'bad' energy, because there is no such thing. What will happen is, should you intend this, that you will send energy to a system that can't handle it, will create a blockage, an overload, a failure, etc. Think of this--there is no 'good' water and 'bad' water, only water. Water is a lake is quite passive, but if you shoot it through a narrow gap it becomes quite destructive and powerful, with absolutely no change to its nature. Changing the circumstances of its motion makes the difference. And that, I believe, is what can happen when directing energy to heal or harm. 8)

Indeed! There's a section that discusses the mudras and recommends a set of movements associated with them (pg.157-173). Some of those are really difficult to do. I reckon a naturally long finger would be beneficial... 8)

The first step to ninja-hood!!! Interesting article. It would be interesting to see some diagrams of how the channels line up through those mudras. 8)