SFJane

the truth in a nutshell. as a result, YMMV, there is more than one way to heal. Do not let anyone convince you they are the next jesus until they actually perform a miracle in front of you.

let's see When I started really trying to sit in stillness instead of doing some kind of internal chi gung like heavenly orbit I was 21 or 22. I could not sit for ten minutes. Somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes in my insides would go off like a bomb. I had such noise that my first attempt to really make everything in my being quiet scared the crap out of me almost to the point of giving up. It was like flying into a Cat 5 hurricane on the night side of the planet. Such noise and sound, lights going off in my head. A sense of the wind everywhere in me. It was very intimidating. Since I could not meditate at first I stuck with chi gung and tai chi. I would do a routine or a form. Then try to sit again. Bit by bit, day by day I kept at it. I found myself accidentally meditating during the moving tai chi form. I would end the form, stand, then sit. One of those attempts found me sitting for 20- 30 minutes. I was like AHA! So..using tai chi and chi gung I meditated through the back door so to speak. Tai chi enabled me to take up sitting. Once I could sit for 30 minutes things really started proceeding apace. That 30 minutes became an hour. A year later that hour became four. A year later that 4 hours could be extended as far as I wanted. I would do tai chi for an hour, and then sit for 8 hours, easily. By following the Water method of not striving while remaining persistent and being gentle and forgiving to myself, by following the 70% rule and erring on the side of caution, I avoided the burnouts I experienced in my teens. By the age of 25 I could easily and effortlessly sit for 12-14 hours, which I did every day for weeks at a time, before taking time to do more moving practices to balance myself out. These days I do not need to meditate every day to keep the lens clean. I do, I sit nearly every day because I can not not do it. I love it too much. It is so good and so fulfilling to have gained inner stillness after 25 years of noise in my head that I indulge in quietude all the time. Now in my 30s on an average day I sit for 1-2 hours or so. Always start at 4 am. At least once a week, I sit for the entire day. 4 hours, break for 30, 4 hours, break for 30 and 4 more hours. There is not a particular schedule for the long sit day, it just happens when I get completely comfortable inside.

I am a certified reiki III master teacher. That said I do not teach reiki, attune people to reiki or do reiki healing unless someone asks really nice and offers me money. Why? Because I think the whole kit and caboodle is a waste of time I first encountered hands on healing when I was a child. My mother and I were members of the Third Order Franciscans. We were involved in Catholicism and Christianity pretty heavily. We went to TOF meetings, once or twice a week. Very intimate mini masses. The difference between these quasi private mini masses is that in our prayer group, we did hands on healing and speaking in tongues. In my teens, I got involved in hands on healing again, this time through Wicca, chanting, raising power and ritual. In my early 20s I received Reiki transmissions and did hands on healing again. However during this time I got heavily involved with chi gung hands on healing. Not as involved as chi nei tsang, but powerful and effective. In my opinion, Chi Gung is more powerful and more predictable and more effective than either Channeling the Holy Spirit or Divine Energy. Really, how do you get more power than channeling the Holy Spirit? Thing is, in faith healing and reiki, there is no exacting methodology. Oh there is now in some systems like this Tummo, but that was not Usui's material, not then not now. Anyone adding these overt kundulini, tibetan or taoist energy practices is just altering the transmission to suit their own agenda or business statement or personal *eclectic* blend of thinking. Before I was attuned, when I met the people that I would later pay for the attunements the energy I could manifest out of my palm from doing Ba Gua was far far stronger than anything these mom and pops had going. The material in Opening the Energy Gate of Your Body will open your energy channels up to a point that most reiki people are not doing or getting. After I was attuned, there was no major difference. I could clearly sense the limits of my own energy and I was raised up not one milliamp during any of the attunements. These attunements are not as powerful as simply doing chi gung and meditation and mastering your own chi inside your body. They also depend on the energy of the person giving the attunements. When I learned Reiki I was 23, 24 maybe. I had a vegan diet, I did not smoke. I drank a gallon of water a day and practiced sitting standing and moving nei gung for easily 6 hours a day. Aside from a few neurological problems I was in near olympic conditioning and the people I met at the Reiki seminars were doing nothing like it. Mostly stay at home moms overweight, a group of them all went outside the building to smoke during the break. Not one of them had any ability to consciously control their energy in any way shape or form. Not the teacher/masters, not the participants. As a control, I managed to perform and receive some hands on healing both to and from a sample of of these attendees before we got started. During and of course after. Not one of these stay at home smoking moms had any more power when they left, then when they arrived. The teacher/master seemed to notice my energy right away and mentioned how he felt himself heating up and getting energized by standing near me or looking in my eyes. Without realizing what this meant about his own energy. He was not radiating or transmitting some high level reiki transmission. His body was doing a very real and noticeable chi gung phenomena. He was absorbing my chi like hot air moves into a cool space. He was an older man and did not practice any form of internal art or yoga at all. That is the thing. That is how all these energy phenomena really work in an unguided fashion. Something about nature abhorring a vacuum. How pressurized cabin space with a breach can leak air into a low pressure atmosphere. How warm air really moves outside of the house, not cold air coming in. Energy moves from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration. On a simple level, you do not even need to do chi gung or reiki or believe in the holy spirit to heal someone with your energy. If you were a non smoking mom or pop and your spouse was physically ill or injured, post surgical, something. If you go out and run a few laps around the block, and come back in the house and put your hands on your injured patient, then you may or may not notice the vacuous feeling of having the chi stolen from you by your patient. Completely unintentionally mind you. Physics, after a fashion, not transmission or divinity of any kind. Sheer nature. Energy goes from high to low. So, when I ran into these well meaning reiki master teachers and the other attendees, not one of them was a full time nei gung meditation and tai chi practitioner. Not one of them. In fact most of them stole my chi when I laid my hands on them including the guy that attuned me. All of them completely unaware of the subtleties. All though many of them said things about seeing my aura when I walked into the building and some said they could feel themselves being energized when I walked near them. This was because I was standing 3 hours a day and doing the small heavenly orbit every day and all sorts of stuff. With the exception of one student attendee, I got the distinct impression not one of them had any idea at all how chi works. At one point I had to ask someone to stop healing me. Not because their transmission was so powerful I could not take it. but because this person was super low energy, lethargic, and their hands sucked the chi out of my body the whole time they were *healing* me, and this person was blithely unaware of it the entire time. In short reiki is for bumkins. Sorry if that offends. It is unskilled, random healing based, not of divine transmission or channeling, but by the simple expedient of energy moving from high to low, which it will in a normal untrained unattuned individual who touches a lethargic or sick person. The way to make your energy stronger, and noticeable more effective and powerful, is manually take control of it, and start doing chi push ups so to speak, but practicing dissolving, kunlun, kundulini, chi gung exercises, tai chi, SHO, all these things qualify as chi push ups so to speak. For your body, don't smoke, eat well, drink tons and tons of water and stay peaceful, and this will make you stronger than any reiki person you meet. If you find a super powerful reiki person, chances are they are doing something behind the scenes. They are into Hatha Yoga, Tai Chi, Saimenjutsu, fasting, something. The volts for their reiki are coming from another source. I will be willing to show the difference between reiki or chi gung, and why reiki is faith and chi gung is a science. If you are in the SF area PM me if you want to feel internally the differences done to you free of charge. In short, if you are like me, you will not take anything on faith, and you are internally driven to test, test, test, experiment and find out how these things work on your own for your own curiosity. Hundun pretty much hit the nail on the head over and over with his posts on the subject, Faith healing and Reiki are like the astrology of hands on or hands off healing practices. Hit or miss. Maybe it works, maybe it does not. The practitioners of either, have no control of the process, believe themselves to be channeling. Now, you go to someone that does Chi Nei Tsang or Chi Gung Tui Na, or has gained healing ability from healing themselves through Tai Chi, Ba Gua, sitting, standing etc. The energy is directed. It is controlled. It is precise. The healer knows exactly how and why they are doing what they are doing. Oh, and the one reiki teaching attendee that I felt had power and skill? A woman that practiced Zen Shiatsu and Hatha Yoga, she was a vegetarian as well. *ps I feel like a came across judgmental with my phrase stay at home smoking moms. Truth is I would love to be a mom, I am getting fatter as I get older and I used to smoke 1.5 packs of Camel Wides a day when I was 18..so.. That was our main demographic though..some nursing and massage students too

Hello gang, This is Jane and until tonight I had no idea this forum existed so I am a total newb! Like many of you I was raised in an Abrahamic monotheistic religion. When I was 13 My real father spirited me away to Hong Kong and I spent over a month there. While in Hong Kong I visited temples and shrines and saw tai chi chuan being practiced anywhere and everywhere. Like many of you my first philosophical taste of Taoism came from the Tao Te Ching and I really took to the idea of the *tao* or the *force* running the universe as opposed to pantheism, polytheism or monotheism. In my early teens and very early 20s I was involved in Kundulini yoga, Kabbalah, Wicca and Crowley's teachings. I studied a fair gamut of occult practices like Celtic and Native American shamanism, Santeria, Enochian Mysteries and the works of many modern and historic occultists. As I got into my 20s I learned of the various Taoist meditation and chi gung/nei gung practices that are floating around and I read every book I could get my hands on. I am sure you are familiar with most of Chia's and YJM's stuff on Taoism. I use to live 45 minute drive from Yang's Martial Arts in Mass! However I moved to California and instead I did a little Ontology with Peter Ralston and learned Taoist Water Method meditation from Bruce Frantzis. In fact, I attended every Berkeley weekend seminar, every lecture including driving from Sacramento to Tempe Arizona to attend a 3 hour lecture at ASU. That was the first lecture BKF did after releasing Relaxing Into Your Being. Two years after Relaxing Into Your Being came out, I attended the first Water Method Taoist Meditation retreat on the West Coast with BKF. That was in July of 2000 I am not really a Taoist. I am not a Tao Shr or a Lao Shr. I am not a lineage holder or certified or anything. I do not practice religious Taoism. That means I do not pray to Immortals, keep a shrine or observe Taoist holidays. I am not a Taoist scholar, nor am I a Chinese linguist nor am I any more qualified to debate philosophical Taoism than most of you guys. Probably less qualified because I do not really study Taoism any more. I live Taoism on a middle path. I have practiced both extremes of Taoism. I took several years off from life, worked full time, part time, or not at all. I practiced Taoist meditation for thousands and thousands of hours, 4-8, sometimes even 12 hours a day, for months at a time. I lived very simply. No family, no friends, no relationships, no career, no college, just a really tight budget, and lots of standing, sitting and moving Taoist practices. For what it is worth, I am experienced in every phase of Taoist practices, from the lying down, performing nei gung and nei dan, the sexual practices, Taoist tantra and yoga. Taoist standing practices and the internal martial arts and of course, sitting, my favorite. In all honesty, I find practicing meditation to be at least as stimulating and interesting as martial arts, sex, entertainment, whatever. Meditation especially the sitting nei dan practices, are the love of my life and what I really love to do with my spare time. As a disclaimer, I am not a representative of BKF, or Energy Arts or the Water Tradition. I am not empowered to speak for Energy Arts or BKF on the topic of meditation. I was never his personal or indoor student. With that said, once again, I have spent the last decade practicing mostly the Water Method. If you are still interested in letting me ramble a few things or if you have questions about the practice or the internal energy work, you are more than welcome to ask, and I will answer as simply and unpretentiously as possible. Taoist meditation saved my life. The nei gung and the dissolving practices healed my mind of 20 years of depression permanently. The practice changed and healed my body, opened my emotions and calmed the racing thoughts and noises in my head as well as stabilized my chi from the years of occult meditation systems. Taoist meditation did more for my mental and spiritual development in one year, than all the years spent studying the occult. All combined, I have two decades of meditation experience, 7 years full time practice. I am hardly an enlightened master or sage but I know a few things about Stillness and I have done several meditation talks on Youtube, most of them geared to non Taoist beginners but there is at least a few videos where I talk about advanced stuff. Like yourselves I am just a student of the Tao, always learning and growing. that is all Jane

I will tell you something else. You guys are studying Taoism. The deal is here is change and changelessness, form and formlessness. I am about the least judgmental person you are going to find when it comes to different people. I value spirits, not bodies. I values hearts and minds, not catechism and dogma. If you are a freak or perv or a mutant or an alien, you will find shelter with me. I do not teach people based on their sexual, gender or chromosomal states. When it comes to sexuality and psychology I daresay you will find me more inclusive and accepting than perhaps many mainstream teachers. I love Mary Magdalene and St Paul. I love the sinners and the outcasts. I love the Fallen and the strange. One of the reasons I believe in Taoism is that Universal Consciousness is way too powerful to remotely give a shit about this discussion. Think about that when you choose a teacher. If this topic disturbs you in anyway. Then you are not comfortable inside yourself on these subjects. As a meditation student and teacher and volunteer therapist. I would tell you that if this thread disturbs you, you have a blockage of some kind inside your being, somewhere,mentally, emotionally, somewhere in you is disturbed chi that you have not dealt with. If I were your teacher, and you told me this thread troubles your mind, I would tell you go meditate and dissolve, until none of these subjects trouble you anymore. That's Taoism.

Fealty and unswerving devotion to a teacher's directions is considered by many a virtue. It can also be a vise. Not vice, a vise. Everything must be looked at via perspective. As a devotee of BKF's stuff, I have made it my business to read everything the man ever wrote, committed to print, anything. Every news article, every interview. Liu Hung Chieh was a conservative old man when he met Bruce. Bruce himself learned some of his sex stuff from Wang Shu Jin, a man with a hearty appetite for sex. Supposedly Wang himself was in a taoist sex cult at one point. I do not indulge in worship of the living or the dead. Liu Hung Chieh was an accomplished meditation and nei jia master with a depth of knowledge on the arcana of chi gung practices. He was still a human and I am going to guess his feces stunk like any other mortal. Respect and acknowledge mastery. Do not worship the feet and gospel of a teacher. Learn from a teacher, but you do not have to copy their personal morality and philosophy. Liu Hung Chieh was a hermit. He was not a perv nor did he live the scene in some all inclusive neighborhood. He never went to SF Pride weekend. He was a provincial. Olde school. He may have taught Fire and Water practices but he is not all knowing and infallible. I refuse to indulge in blind uncritical hero worship. One of the qualities I judge in a person is common sense and critical thinking. I lose respect for people that just nod and say yes without giving it a second thought. That is how lineage and religious schisms have been evolving for millennium. People have a doctrine belief, a differing opinion, a different morality. They feel so strongly about this, they split. They follow the teaching they learned, all of them, but they part ways on details details details. Now, you can believe the words of a conservative old taoist guy who lived in Confucian society. A man who by all account, did not care for sex at all! He only did the nasty to do his Confucian duty to family and state and have children! He was not a sexually liberated guy. He was anal retentive about sex. I am going to call a spade a spade. Who are you going to believe? Some guy that had hetero intercourse once or twice? Or someone that has done tantra with some of the more exotic of God's creatures? I have experience! Liu did not. BKF does not have my experience in this matter! Are you going to accept the word of someone that uses theory? Or someone that has actually done it and been there done that? Quite frankly I think Liu and BKF are full of it on this subject! That's where I stand. I have repaired physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and karmic problems with meditation, I have repaired my own chi several times. I know how these practices actually work with different genders. What does Liu say about people with XXY chromosomes? what about XXXY? Liu Hung Chieh was a hick, a provincial and he did not even like sex. Again who are going to believe? Did not someone mention what a shame it was that you guys did not have someone who has tried all this stuff? Now you do! There comes a point when you have to get beyond the magic spell that learning from a master puts over you. do your own critical thinking and experimenting, to get your own experiential answers to those questions and settle all dispute. There comes a point that any student bent on mastery is going to disagree with and form different opinions than their teachers, and stick to their guns on the subject. That is critical thinking. The ability to separate the master as a man or from their teachings is essential. I respect a person that disagrees with their teacher based on their experiments and conclusions because that shows they are trying to live the teachings and figure them out on their own. Edit. While I was editing this post, it occurred to me where I have seen the infallible master logic fallacy. On my videos! People do this about doctors too. It is a bias, an authority bias or master fallacy. I talk on my channel about how meditation and dissolving beat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. When I make comments on other people's videos, when I disagree with the party line on mental illness sooner or later I get a comment or an email that reads like this. "Umm are you a doctor? Did you go to medical school? Ok how are you qualified to talk about this?" When people who do not know me, see me voice an opinion counter to the standard catechism, they question my credentials. This entails a belief that either a doctor is always right or a doctor is never wrong. This is disproven on a daily basis with malpractice cases or new scientific discoveries disproving old theories. A PhD does not mean you are never wrong. Just because someone is a *Master* does not mean they are never wrong. If you believe that you are sycophant really. Really ask yourself this question, what if insert X where is X = some master, is wrong? What then? Why do I need a PhD to talk about my life with mental illness with authority ? answer, I don't Why do I need to be a Master to be right about trantra practices? answer, I don't Not being a master or a phd does not invalidate me if I am right. Knowledge is knowledge is knowledge, however learned.

Here is the deal. You guys all know by now that the small heavenly circuit is always on to a greater or lesser degree in most people if they are mostly neurologically intact and have reasonably relaxed breathing. anal sex send yang pulses right up the yang channels into the brain and beyond if you let it. in fact I dare say, like a super charger. what a lot of people do not talk about for whatever reason is their experiences with anal sex, male or female. I am an Aquarius, this grants me full perv license to talk about this. To enjoy anal sex, is to be able to relax. What most people will not talk about is how this is accomplished. To be able to allow a penis of any size and dimension into your body and then to proceed to vigorous intercourse is to surrender your body. You must relax and open and surrender inside yourself. This process of opening inward and surrendering inward creates a vortex. The act of complete physical surrender is so massively Yin, that it absorbs the Yang like a black hole. To the point of exhausting the yang invasion without having even been satiated. That is the secret to anal sex cultivation. Like with all power, you do not let it go to your head. Surrender into your being and your Yin will protect both of you.

I attended the first Water Method retreat with BKF in California after Relaxing Into Your Being. I have bee practicing Taoist cultivating for well over a decade. Ever since I started taking energy arts classes, Tai Chi, Ba Gua, Nei Gung, whatever, I gave myself over to the philosophy and path of the Water Method. These questions were all asked of BKF when I was there. Bear in mind, I have only the highest regard for all of BKF's stuff and am a *devotee* of his teachings, but I disagree with the Big Master. BKF is safely ensconced in heterosexuality. His master has been dead for some time and he had a chance to break course instead of toe the line. I have heard this *polishing the mirror* and how it's ok for girls to play with each other, but not guys. Well in ten years of practicing BKF's stuff, this is where I part ways. I am a freak. People's chromosomes mean very little to me. I have done tantra with men, women, and male to female transsexuals, and female to male transsexuals. I have had sex with just about every kind of deviant, genital configuration or hormone variation under the sun. I have even played with someone with Kleinfelter's I know things about practicing taoist sexual work that BKF only theorizes about.

What a judgmental, out of date, superstitious, ill- founded, incorrect fantasy. This topic is not offensive, but this mind set is. Anyone that wants to know how same sex energy practices are done correctly and without physical or karmic repercussion, pm me anytime. In fact, I will go one step further. I dislike this mindset so much that when I start publicly teaching, I want it known that anyone in the glbt spectrum is more than welcome to learn taoist internals from me. damage to one's cultivation and karma does anyone actually and truly buy this at face value without actually experimenting for one's own edification? Well, I have and I have never ever been in a better place spiritually, emotionally, mentally or physically in 33 years of being alive. Just because they were masters, does not mean they are always right. Masters can be biased, bigoted, ignorant, provincial and wrong! San Francisco Jane

So, I am sure some of you have heard the adage, there is as much space inside you, as there is outside you. As far outward into the universe you can expand your awareness, the further inward you condense your awareness I found a video that explains what that is like when you do prolonged sitting and inner dissolving. fgg2tpUVbXQ This is one of the things I do.

sweet thanks! that's much better

nightdog, SFJane on that channel I do talks about meditation and mental health, psychotherapy, that sort of thing. just a webcam and a laptop, not ILM quality but hey, substance over form eh? Hey Bodhi, I have met him George Xu! Actually but only once! It was very interesting and educational for me and I think you guys would get a laugh. He was super cool. When I get a chance I may tell you guys. There is a remote possibility something with Hsin I may materialize. Hsin I is the least of my practice and I do not know very much other than 5 element and gazing. Thanks Sean and everyone else too.

give everything and nothing your complete and undivided attention and you will be doing Taoist Ontology

I know exactly what you mean Don't take this the wrong way, but you sir know entirely too much for your own good. I mean that actually in a really good way. Now to really freak you out. Know this, If I was head of the Bene Gesserit, I would tell the Breeding Mistresses to make sure an adept accidentally bumped into you and your line would be preserved for the good of the species. The world needs more guys like you. You got with me with Tori. I love her. The song, "Here in my Head', yea you are dangerous.

One last thing before bed, mainly for Hundun. You seem interested in Taoist Fire Path stuff and the MCO I would like to mention that the MCO is actually 1 of traditionally 9 separate circulations that comprise the entirety of the MCO practice. Each circulation takes you through one of the 8 bodies and connects them. The practices are done in circulations smaller and deeper inside, as well as outside the body. Each circulation picks up energy from one range and takes it inward or outward along the same channels. This is done in both directions. The theory and practice is much like overlapping bowls or spheres and you fill one sphere and it spills into the next only to fill up and spill into the sphere holding it. That is also how you do the vessels as well.

Hey there! Thanks for having me. I am actually pleased to find you guys really. I did not think anyone gave a bleep about this stuff but me. I know that's myopic but that is what happens when you spend a lot of time in solitude Ok it's getting late for me so this will be all for tonight. I guess I can break that up into 3 components. 1, the MCO 2, reverse breathing 3 the philosophy of the water method. The reason you see it as quintessentially fire practice probably has no small reason to do with the fact that several books and teachers on both the west and east coast identify the MCO when performed with reverse breathing to be a fire practice. What you might consider is this. The MCO exists on it's own naturally and it sort of doing it's own thing whether or not you are paying attention to it. Intellectually knowing this will not do much for you though. reverse breathing also exists naturally in both the pre born baby and the post birth individual when exerting. Like say you are helping all your mates push the car to the side of the road after it got a flat or overheated or something. You are breathing one way up until the second that you put your arms on the car and everyone starts pushing at once, then your belly is sticking out even though you are blowing air out your mouth. You do it without even thinking about it, hence it is natural, but you tend to only do it during strenuous or straining activities. You notice you sometimes do it unconsciously if you do tai chi push hands the second you uproot someone a little. You may notice that you do reverse breathing during sex sometimes! You really do not notice it, it happens naturally but with imminent strain involved in some way. This sense of straining is pushing and going all out to get a release or an effort is what makes this practice fire. If you imagine your mind is a magnifying lens and you are focusing your chi like a laser, like a lens and you literally burn your mind into your governing and conception vessels while powerfully reverse breathing and doing this with a strong sense of intensity like a reactor lighting up. That is quintessential fire path. You are fusing energy with your mind exactly the way you will it. You make it happen. You will get hot. Your face may get red. Your hair may stand up and crackle if you do it long enough. You sweat. Reverse breathing and MCO are done in Water Method without any incongruity and without creating a force 5 chi shockwave through the local space time, well unless... never mind. The way they are done is congruent to the act of conscious letting go, relaxing, striving without tension, focusing by coalescing or congealing. Instead of burning your chi along the MCO in a laser light like fashion, you sort of trickle through your MCO like a single raindrop running very slowly down the bridge of your nose. you focus not like a laser but like condensation on glass. The reverse breathing can be made to happen consciously but if so should be done without strain of any kind. If done correctly by allowing the MCO to occur and sort of being present like a will o wisp, there but not exerting any more effort than what is needed to stay present in that circulation. Needless to say that it is suggested that one learn the inner and outer and dissolving process in order to safely experience the MCO and because practicing the inner dissolving will teach how to be gentle and attentive and present without overdoing it. The method prepares you so that when you get to MCO, you can make it cool and clear. Stimulating yet relaxing. Energizing without heating. No sweating, no red face. Only a sense of smooth circulation like a micro CCTV inside a tiny ball bearing rolling effortlessly through a magnetic track. Like water running off a leaf. So in the water method you can and do use circulations and ascending currents, hopefully after you have spend enough time doing downward inner dissolving so that you should not feel powerful or grandiose after the MCO, if you do, if you perform the MCO and feel intense and radioactive you are doing it in an appropriately fire path manner, that is the symptoms you are doing it right. Like a photon of the sun is rolling through your meridians. In the water method you mostly should not notice the MCO and when you do it intentionally it will feel more amoebic and cooler.

Also I made this video not long ago more designed for *advanced* meditators, but really more advanced than simply starting the path of meditation. Most of you guys from what I am reading would find this a fun workout. One that you can do as fast or as slow as you want. This video I describe in just over ten minutes, a truly mixed practice. Dropping and Raising energy along the central channel and some stages. I think you will agree that it is subtle to the uninitiated. This practice would be a good training practice for multi directional orbit circulations on the surface because those meridians are the echoes of the central channel anyway. You do not need to do the SHO in order to progress at IMA, meditation or chi/nie gung. This is true. However, these circulations are inherent in the practice and they are done in the water method as well. I do them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rpe1a2lcvo The practice here is both ascending and descending, heavenly and earthly. The SHO should be operating smoothly on it's own without your interference in the slightest, if you raise your skull, lift your occiput, let your belly out to relax omni directionally, and sit straight. This is the best way to apprehend the SHO on your own time. There is really only three reasons to get really involved with the SHO, IMO, and I stress it is my opinion. You have a problem in your energy anatomy or in your body somewhere, like a problem in your back. You do SHO to open up energy there. Give it a helping hand. Another reason, increased energy. If you do the SHO, you will get stronger no doubt about it. If you do it right, you get stronger without going crazy, an added bonus. The third reason, curiosity. You, like myself, are becoming a chi gung engineer and it is out of academic interest or a need to know what it is all about and how you go about doing it right or wrong. All three of those reasons have compelled me. So ask yourself too, why are you messing with circulations or mixing them. Exactly what is the goal. Be honest with yourself. Nothing wrong with simple naked curiosity

Hey folks, been reading your posts and seeing what you guys are chatting about in this thread. One thing I would like to mention about my practice of the water method, is that the method itself, how you actually go about moving energy in the body is what is water like. FWIW, I work with with MCO/SHO all the time. It is not really a big deal. The MCO done with reverse breathing, feeling, sound and visualization, intensely with 200% focus is an exceptionally potent practice. So is doing really any spinal work Go to any website on bipolar disorder, or schizo affective disorder/schizophrenia and delusions. Take a good look at every symptom of episodic mania. Mental illness is a real and present danger in meditation and you can create meditation psychosis very easily if you do these practice excessively and without controls like draining and centering etc. One very quick and easy way to give yourself a dose of meditation psychosis is to pretty much do anything that involves raising, circulating, spiraling, condensing chi or abstract patterns like geometry in the brain. It is certainly doable. But the tolerance level of the brain is...delicate. Doing these things at random is not good. Doing kundulini and practicing heavy upper dan tien practices led me to both fantastic psychic experiences as well as straight up psychosis and voices, uncontrollable deja vu and echoes. It took me several years to learn to unscrew my brain and mental energy and most of that, no, ALL of that stability I owe to inner dissolving. The practice of downward inner dissolving is taught first because it really is exactly what it says it is in the book. Working downward on the central channel will build a strong safe reservoir of stable and calm chi. Once I had inner and outer dissolving down, I spent thousands of hours practicing dissolving while sitting. In time I basically healed my own self of what I had done to it years earlier. pretty much the royal road to screwing up your chi gung practices is probably to mix practices until you have really got one of them solidly down. there is two important things to consider. One is, you want to find the various channels, meridians and vessels on your own by directly experiencing them with your mind. Find them on your own to verify their existence. Once you are sure you have found a channel, a meridian, an energy gate or what have you, spend time, days if you must, just letting it tell you what it's status is. Soon enough you will note whether energy is moving, stagnating or changing. That is part of the method. Deliberately finding your energy anatomy unambiguously and knowing what state or direction your chi is flowing on it's own, without interference from you. The second important thing to do, is to learn what stable chi really is. To be honest, unless you got out and get yourself hurt in martial arts practice, by doing manual labor in a dangerous environment, practicing extreme sports, it may be initially very difficult to tell inside yourself where calm chi is disturbed chi is. The basic signs are, calm chi is not noticeable and disturbed chi feels messed up. Somehow something *ain't* right. That something may or may not be chi, or some effect that chi is causing. If you meditate by inner and outer dissolving and sinking into your lower dan tien, you will be using a time tested method for strengthening all your meditation muscles and internal flows in the least unsafe and most productive manner you can do unsupervised. You probably will not mess yourself up much if you alway remember to bring everything down at the end of every practice. Let all that energy drop down into your dan tien and keep directing it there, even you think you have done it. Do it for longer than you did upper dan tien stuff, just to be on the safe side. This stuff does work which is why I make these cautions. I would not recommend mixing practices of any kind until, A, you can absolutely sink your chi. First and foremost, learn to put out the fire. B, find all those meridians on your own so you are not relying on visualizing them in your mind's eye, nor looking them up in a chart. Find them by feeling them. Look for them, knowing our elders found them before we did. C, learn how much is too much chi practice. That was, is trial and error for most, it is hard to get really involved with advanced meditation, unless, you are willing to take risks and chances and one of those risks is going to be circulating energy in your brain more than you know you are doing until it is too late. Again, therein is the genius of inner and outer dissolving is that if you feel your mind or head has too much pressure, you commence dissolving down and fix it yourself. If you can not sense what is too much, you will underestimate and that is when you are sticking the proverbial finger into the proverbial fire and waiting for it to be burned in order to experience a burn, so it is unmistakable in the future. If you can do all 3 for sure, then by all means mess around with kunlun or MCO and see what happens! It is fun stuff