SFJane

You are very welcome. Thank Mal too because I missed this thread and a chance to add to it at least twice already.

Peter Ralston is one of the few masters other than Bruce Frantzis that I've ever been interested in. I took a few of his seminars quite awhile ago and let me say that the feeling of being pushed by Kumar and being pushed by Ralston is different. You get moved if either guy touches you but how they move you is what is so interesting. Bruce uses this whole fa jin methodology based on opening and closing and nei gung principles as well as pung and ji and other energy. Peter just pushes you and you go. What he showed us is that our connective tissues can compress and elongate a great deal. For example, Peter can punch you and hit you much further away than his reach would seem to indicate because his arms are like rubber bands. He can push and pull with the same principle of effortless power. First he outreaches and makes contact with you. Then he loads his connective tissue and then releases it gently and you just move. Like BKF, Peter espouses deep relaxation and good biomechanical alignments as a way to generate power. I showed my brother this effortless power concept once by having him put his car in neutral on a flat road and I pushed his car without any strain or heaving or huffing and puffing on my part. I outreached into his car, compressed my tissues, stepped forward into the standard Tai Chi push pose and my tissues strung out relaxed and effortless power. It got his car rolling (albeit very, very slowly at first) and I didn't even break a sweat. Of course getting the car moving was the hard part anyway.

I watched the video and it was pretty neat. Talk about left brain overdose though. So much science to prove to me what seems obvious. I'll give you an example. During my time as a ward of the State, I did not have a lot of control over my life. At one point, during a transfer from a foster home to a more restrictive group home the social workers lost almost everything I owned. I had already lost my home, my family and contact with my friends. When I first heard that all my stuff was gone I was just so angry. After awhile I realized that I no longer had anything to worry about. Losing all my belongings freed me from them. A year later they found some of my stuff but not all of it. I could not remember all that was missing. I let it go when I thought I would never get it back. Getting some of it back was neat, but now I owned stuff I could lose again! That lesson carried me into my adult life. One of the things that used to make me both angry and depressed was that I had been set back so badly from a 'normal life'. Most of my friends were in college. Teachers had told me when I was young that I was smart enough that I might go to an Ivy League School someday. When I became an adult I wasn't prepared for life much less college much less a competitive college. My mentally ill parents passed their emotional and behavioral crap to me. I lost my shit and got put in lockdown and an entire possibility of my young adult future was taken from me. As a young adult I felt all these conflicting, subconscious compulsions that I had been programmed by society. Get a degree. Get a job. Get a family. Make money. Buy stuff. Be happy. I couldn't do any of them though because I didn't know how to acquire those things. When you can't even keep a job at a fast food restaurant because of your mental health problems, that whole making money, buying stuff, having kids thing seems out of your reach. You start to suffer from wanting what other people have. Such as the seeming happiness that their accomplishments ie Master's Degree, 6 digit salary, new home in the hills bring them. I got involved with the Water Method practice of letting go of our desires and our past programming and in time I became very happy being alone, living by myself, being poor. When my friends were working on their thesis or getting their first mortgage or acquiring credit card debt I was practicing meditation and letting go. By the time I got into my mid 20s it was clear that I was much happier and far less stressed than my friends who had so much 'stuff' and financial means with which to amuse themselves.

I see you are new at this. You don't realize what you gave away with just this.

A Buddhist and a Taoist are walking a path. Buddhist says: "there is no Self" Taoist says: "Orly?" Buddhist: "Yea, it's all illusion." Taoist: "I disagree and I think I can prove you are wrong." Buddhist: "Surely, prove me wrong, if you can." Taoist picks up hefty rock and drops it on the toes of the Buddhist. Buddhist screams. Taoist: "Who is it that screams? How can you be hurt if there is no Self? How can you feel pain if it's just an illusion?" Taoist: "I posit that you do have a self and that it experiences and partakes of reality." Buddhist: "F&$@ing ow dude." Variations of this joke/parable abound here and there. It's primarily used to highlight the differences in basic premise. Buddhists are trying to transcend the Self and it's problems. Taoists are concerned with learning how to live fully as a Self. I generalize and it's not meant to belittle Buddhism but it does highlight how the Taoist works with the reality of the actual living experience of being a squishy bag of guts draped around a skeleton encased in a water filled sack. Taoists do not deny the obvious human condition because the human condition is there to continually remind us that we can not transcend basic reality for a philosophical or intellectual construct such as Self or No Self. Not without being brought back to our senses by simply stubbing our toes into a rock and observing our mental, emotional and physical reactions to that event. FWIW, I disagree with this line of reasoning. Our thoughts are not inherently flawed, they are just thoughts. Affinity and aversion are not the only mind action/response that can occur. I don't agree that people are walking around, perfectly centered. I could probably walk with you through a crowded place like a mall and point out all the people who are not centered. Centering does not come naturally to people. In America the concept of centering is largely a New Age energy related term or you find it in pop psychology. Present company aside I doubt most people even know what it really means to actually be centered so...

All I am going to add to this is please...please use critical, skeptical thinking and know how to evaluate evidence when talking about 'powers'. Too often these threads are about mental masturbation with no proofs of any kind, just heavy on the biased anecdotes. If you have a real power, it should be repeatable and testable. If it isn't you are a bullshit artist with delusions of powers with hypnotized group thinkers (aka nutriders ) who are basically really into the whole confirmation bias thing.

Oi. The simplest explanation is that the word 'pressurize' is synonymous with breath for this particular example. Unless you have a structural defect you're breathing into your thoracic cavity all the time. If you are new to paying attention to your breath, you may or may not have noticed that the pressure from breathing extends downward into your belly and genitals and also upward into your neck and head. When you inhale and exhale, various cavities and vessels as well as the spaces between joints are being modestly opened and then closed from breath pressure coming and going. To pulse, open or otherwise get some movement going into other parts of your body using your breath you follow your breathing with your mind into the part of your body that you want to deliberately open up. To that end you can 'breath' into your hands, eyeballs, ear canals, armpits, elbows, wrists, palms, fingers, urethra, anus and rectum just by guiding your mind along the subtle pressure wave that breathing causes. It's something that is easier shown then explained in words. If you had your hands on my belly it would be obvious in about a second or two. But perhaps I've explained it enough to get some kind of sense of what I am talking about and to further explore breathing into your limbs or organs in such a way as to cause them to pulse and pump a little on your own. There are refinements to this and eventually you can cause some degree of opening and closing by manipulating intent as well as internal pressure. Good luck.

I'll bet he was a Winston Man and a closet Chunner.

Very short yet sweet description of sinking and lifting Rainbow_vein.. Sloppy and Creation, I fully agree with this summation of lifting and sinking. You can not go wrong following Rainbow's post on this. Surely, as this ties into number 2 on your list. Breathing is the first step to pulsing. What pulsing really is is, opening and closing. If you make a fist you are closing your hand. If you tighten that fist, you are closing more. If you relax your hand you are opening. If you gently stretch out your fingers you are opening even more. Pulsing is the oscillating flow of opening and closing. If you keep playing around with the mechanics of how you open and close the shape of your hand you may become aware that blood and synovial fluid is moving, pulsing, in your fingers and palm. The pressure increases and decreases, just like the pulse you can feel in your wrists and neck or groin for that matter. Breathing oscillates air as well as various fluids in your thoraic cavity. The pulse is so large that it is really a pump. Now if you can direct your chi at all, you may find that the chi leads the blood. What that means is that if you can oscillate the yin and yang aspects of your chi you will get the blood and other fluids pulsing and pumping. Part of the reason you are just feeling your breath is to get acclimated to and become aware of, the fact that your entire body is pulsing with each breath, including the chi in your dan tien. If you place your palm in front of your dan tien and breath and listen with your hand, you may feel an ephemeral pressure moving out to your hand and slightly tugging on your hand, in front of your belly. That pushing and tugging is the natural flow of chi from your dantien, pulsing with each breath. So breathing is linked to pulsing and opening and closing. And listening carefully to your breath will allow you to not only detect these pulsings but also determine if your pulse pattern is interrupted at any point during the inhale or exhale. If that is the case you want to find out why right away. That could be too much stomach tension or it could be tension in your shoulder blades or it could be you've got a good case of what Bruce calls 'geek neck' from sitting so long that your occiput closes down on your cervical vertebra from compression and bad posture/breathing and stops pulsing cerebro spinal fluid in and out of your skull leading to headaches and chi stagnation in the head.

Wang Shu Jin lived to be what..77? Before he died of complications of adult onset diabetes due to being overweight. Seventy-seven is not a bad run. My grandmother died when she was 77 and she was a smoker who had emphysema and her primary exercise was tending roses during warm weather. Still, we imagine that someone like Wan Shu Jin, who Kumar described as being 'like an oven' with his chi would have somehow made it into his 80s or 90s. Speaking of Kumar, as much I love the man's teachings I worry about him. He's getting pretty big too and I hope his heart and other organs remain strong and that he doesn't have weight problems effecting his health so he can continue to teach us until he is 200. And there was Bruce's other teacher who lived to be 89? That's also a good run but maybe it could have been longer. I think Bruce told us once that Liu did not eat a lot of food and I don't have any stats in front of me but perhaps Liu had survived various food shortages in China which, had they not happened, could have led to Liu living to see 100. It not just these internal guys that die young either. Jim Fixx died of a heart attack and there was a praying mantis guy that died of cancer not too long ago but his name eludes my poor memory atm. There is just no guarantee that because you cultivate chi or practice exercise systems that they are going to prolong your life. Caveat and all that.

HA! I wish I had been around to tell me this at age 18 when I thought I had met THE ONE. Ten years later I couldn't imagine myself chasing someone like that. I know, I know, but still... It used to be so simple. Sixteen year old boy could meet fourteen year old girl and they would be adults. Their parents having perished due to Cholera or small pox or Indian raids or something. But the girl knows how to pluck and dress a chicken, how to sew hides and weave and do basic cooking for her man. The boy would know how to make a basic earthen hut or log cabin and how to rotate crops, slaughter hogs and when the best time to hunt venison was. They were grown up at that age back then and if they were literate and sophisticated they might have had a bible. Now, we need like two decades of school and huge amounts of socialization before we are even slightly grown up. Knowledge and information about culture, religion and philosphy is easy to come by now. It's so easy for people to grow and change in a very short time. People go off and do some time in the military or peace corps or maybe they join a commune or go on a spiritual quest to either find or lose their religion. With so much potential to grow and change your tastes in people are going to change to! So it's cute but quaint to get infatuated with someone and want to settle down early in life. A throwback to a time when people changed very slowly and were not exposed to new ideas and theologies or spiritual paths. I am the offspring of divorced parents who married when they were 18 and 20 respectively and they didn't last long. Both of my parents have been divorced and remarried more than once. And why? Whatever happened to the days when our grandparents would celebrate their silver and golden anniversaries? The truth is, if you asked my mom and dad why they are not together, thirty years after the fact, they'd tell you they couldn't stand to be in the same room with each other! What happened to all the love and lust? They changed as people. My dad went to college and he changed very quickly as a person. My mom sat and prayed with the rosary in her spare time and sooner or later they were having philosophical and theological arguments about how to raise their children and on and on it went until they got divorced. I learned my lesson and after the Big Giant False Alarm at the age of 18 when I thought I had met my OMGSOULMATE. I stopped trying to find LTR and just started playing the field and it was not until my early 30s when I seriously gave thought to settling down because I had settled down as a person. I matured to the point where I could be there for someone. I had had so much crazy sex with so many interesting people that I felt like I overindulged at the buffet and I have no regrets that I didn't 'sip and taste' enough when I had the chance. I could still sip and taste if I wanted but I don't want to anymore! lol. It's enough that I've had more sex than my mom, dad, brothers and sister combined. Aquarius ftw.

Now I know where I've seen Aajonus Vonderplanitz before. He looks like Jurgen Prochnow! He totally has the Duke Leto Atreides thing going on in the Ripley Video and in his clean shaven image on his website he looks like the images I linked. :D

You are 26 and she is 20. There is no shortage of people on this earth right now so there is no need to be in a hurry to settle down and or breed. At your ages you should be screwing like animals and just worry about becoming mature adults. I've always been pretty forward and candid with people I was in a relationship with. If you find someone you'd rather fuck than me, please by all means pursue them. And tell me about it, so there is no deception, and you'll have my blessing. The problem with LTR is that you are committed to one set of genitals. Once that happens every other set of genitals becomes forbidden fruit or undiscovered country begging to be explored. So explore now. Because you are going to change as time goes on. You may find that in a few short years you've changed so much that you can't even imagine being attracted to girls like her because your tastes have changed. Even if being committed to one set of genitals doesn't sound daunting you are both still going to change and she may outgrow you in a few years. There is no hurry. Learn to be happy all by yourself first and get sexually sated so you don't feel like your wasting your prospects for sexual exploration by not feeding at the buffet table when you had a chance.

Damn the internets. You can't say anything online anymore without someone finding an exception to the rule or a loophole or whatever. I kid. That was a neat find genmaicha, thanks for posting it. What I learned is that is possible for some humans to get away with eating rotten food. Crows and vultures were mentioned as carrion eaters who thrive on dead stuff. Alligators and crocs too, seem to like their food somewhat rotten. I think the video just goes to show that humans are so adaptable to diet that you can eat like a crocodile and do OK. I read somewhere that in Medieval times chefs would use a variety of spices and garnishes to conceal the smell of spoiled meat that was served at the table. Obviously the guy in the video has become acclimated to that kind of diet. I'd be willing to bet a lot interesting medical and nutritional science could be learned from studying his intestinal flora and immune response. But I don't think anyone can just up and commence a rotten food diet w/o consequences, perhaps debilitating ones. Like I said in my last post, if you want to avoid energy sapping rounds of bloody diarrhea while you are trying to attain inner stillness or cultivating chi there may be some wisdom with going veg for a little bit.

From what I hear, China is going through a real renaissance of smoking. I've read somewhere that it is apparently considered 'manly'. In the book 'The Way of the Warrior' by Reid and Croucher is a section on the 'Soft arts of China' and on page 100 in that section is a B&W image of Bagua master Hung Hsien-Mien smoking a cigarette. I wonder what this Californian anti smoking ad would look like with Chinese characters.

Hey there Sloppy. That sure sounds like you did some dissolving to me. I've had similar experiences that I'll try to talk about later. For now I want to just answer this question from Creation. Hello Creation. This is a more common problem than you might think. I've had to deal with similar issues as well. First let me mention where in Bruce's stuff you can find some more information about your question. In the first edition of 'The Great Stillness' on page 217 is Appendix A. On those pages Bruce explains how to sit and deal with sitting strain and alignments. In the first edition of 'Tao of Letting Go' on page 41 is Chapter 3. In that section is similar but more fine tuned and detailed information on maintaining alignments. In a nutshell: Think of the whole of your insides as a kind of cloth. You don't want it to be too loose or too tight. You want it to be comfortable. When you feel strain or tension building in an area you want to shift slightly away from immediate discomfort by adjusting your posture. Then you want to move the tense area and get the chi and fluids pulsing again. To do that you breathe into the area of your body that feels not quite right and you guide your attention and intention into that area and slowly release and dissolve. After awhile that area should start to feel 'squishy' or at least no longer painful if you do it right. In your case you know where your body is out of whack so you can prepare yourself in advance that you are going to have to deal with your internal landscape or cloth. One of the things that will help is understanding opening and closing and lifting and sinking. You've probably heard of those things because they are used in internal martial arts like Hsin I and Tai Chi. In terms of sitting you want to keep your structure lifted and your insides sunk. You use your breath to open and close your body cavities or to make waves and stretch your internal cloth, well in advance of when you think it's going to get painful or misaligned. You can also breathe into surrounding structures and get them to move in small pulses and that can help open up the closed down areas. Another way is use your intention to make tiny circles and spirals into those uncomfortable area of the internal cloth. In my experience the way to do that safely is to adhere to the 70% rule of gentleness with regards to how much you practice. You want to grow your alignments and mental poise incrementally and naturally. When your body is out of alignment it sends interference into your tissues and energy channels that is interpreted by your brain as neurological noise that occurs during and in between those thought packets. Those distortions limit your cultivation, sap your energy and interfere with clarity so it's important to be always be mindful that you are not short circuiting your body's energy during sitting or standing practice. That's all for now! I am off to catch the sun setting.

The top of mountain Washington is awesome and maybe the most powerful place in all of NH. I am a NH native actually, gone Californian. I was last on Mt W in 1998 and I spent hours practicing inner and outer dissolving while absorbing incredible gusts of wind. Nice pics Eric. I'd say I was jealous but, the pacific ocean is a two minute walk from my home.

To the OP, I appreciate that you've brought us some Tao canon. With that said, I thought I might chime in a little on this. I am not a vegetarian. I've tried it. I liked it somewhat. Then I gave it up in fits and starts. My original reason for going veg was about energy vibration. It seemed to me that meat was dead stuff when compared to fresh apples or carrots. You can feel the vibrant chi that is in plant-life. Plants decay slower than animals. (I think.) When I first went veg I definitely felt a little lighter and that I had more energy. At first. After awhile of sticking with it I began to feel hollow and tired. I gradually reintroduced poultry and seafood and I felt solid and energetic again. So I did what a lot of you do. I experimented with how often I needed to introduce meat into my own diet. I still don't eat beef. I just can't bring myself to try it again. It's been 15 years roughly and I don't miss it. I can't stand the smell of it raw or cooked. There are a lot of problems with our modern food supply when it comes to factory farming and animal husbandry. With that said, I don't have moral problems with killing animals for food. Morals and hunger do not mix well in the arena of life especially if you happen to have little or no choice. (Which may have been the case in ancient times for humans.)Taoism asks us to witness and really apprehend what is going on with reality. When we observe nature doing it's thing, the consumption of lifeforms by other lifeforms is completely natural and ordered under the universe. In fact I rather like watching animals eat because feeding is just raw primal intestinal pleasure. I think the dance of life and death when it comes to animals eating animals is really beautiful underneath all the trauma and violence. Spiders, sharks, lions, birds of prey, praying mantises, jellyfish. They each have a wonderful evolutionary strategy in order to feed themselves. Some of the earliest human settlements are on the coast of Africa and shellfish remains are invariably found in their midden heaps. Science has shown that humans are very well set up for eating a wide variety of food. When crops fail and there are plant blights, we can eat meat. If meat is scarce then we can forage. The biggest reason to not eat meat, to me anyway, both now and in ancient times, comes down to health. Humans can eat rotten fruit and veges and be ok. If we eat rotten meat we can become quite sick in a hurry, not to mention get infestations of worms or other parasites. It's probably a lot harder to sit in meditation and cultivate chi when you are dealing with multiple, energy-draining rounds of bloody diarrhea. So there is a wisdom to keeping your diet vege-full, mostly. I know I operate better when I eat meat sometimes. I love seafood more than any other food. One of the best crabs I ever had I bought live from an Asian market. I studied the crab tank and I took the mightiest crab I could find that was bullying the other crabs and I decided I wanted his Chi in my system. So I picked him out and boiled him with an almost Naavi-like reverence for taking his life and then I fed on him and could feel that even dead, his lifeforce was still there a little bit, just like plants, and that I was absorbing it because it was a fresh kill, which is what a lot of animals are getting when they kill. I think eating meat is the way of the Tao. Why should it be so with every predator in the world and not with humans? Armchair philosophy or health? Nor do I have any problem with wearing animal skins. I used to think it was repugnant but I've changed. What, you are going to eat the meat and abandon the hide? Waste not want not. The only reason hunting and animal husbandry is unsustainable is due to gluttony and over farming/fishing in order to make these foods available to everyone in developed countries. So by all means please go veg so that I can eat your serving of fish and fowl. edit: About animal skins. Isn't it swell that modern fabric making allows us to apply highfalutin moral yardsticks and self righteousness when it comes to clothing? Take a look at what Otzi was wearing about five thousand years ago.

Thought you folks might appreciate this. Don't know if it's been posted before. http://www.nfb.ca/film/mystical_brain/ Mystical Brain reveals the exploratory work of a team from the University of Montreal who seek to understand the states of grace experienced by mystics and those who meditate. Filmmaker Isabelle Raynauld offers up scientific research, which proposes that mystical ecstasy is a transformative experience and could to contribute to people's psychic and physical health, treat depression and speed up the healing process when combined with conventional medicine. In French with English subtitles

Well I have run into quite a bit of that. During my research and even before I started writing I was a member of most of the major bipolar, depression and schizophrenia support forums. I've tried to share my ideas with some of the people who could use it the most but it's really quite amazing at how much group think and pseudoscience I've had come way about my recovery. It's been my experience that for most people popping a pill and dropping in on counselor is about as far as they are willing to go. The idea that you might be able to reprogram your operating system is just mind boggling to some of them. Like you said, very few listen. So I know that most people are not going to try fix themselves. But people like to be inspired and inspiring stories of recovery sell. I stopped posting on most of those forums due to their learned helplessness and the mutual reinforcement that goes on there. My ideas are dangerous because poor bipolar Timmy might stop taking his meds and wouldn't I feel horrible if I inspired someone into a relapse? I am tired of hearing that shit. You have to take responsibility for your internal world if you are going to make changes to it. To that end, you can't be blaming nebulous, unspecified chemical imbalances or your astrology sign as the reason you can't change. If Timmy is not ready to face the whirlwind and discover the country of his own mind complete with all the depression and psychotic thoughts waiting to come back, well then Timmy isn't ready to recover without meds. My case was such that I had no choice but to find an alternative path to healing. It was either be bat shit crazy forever or work on trying to fix myself. I was unable to bullshit myself that being turned into a palsied, overweight vegetable with terminal dry mouth and a serious drooling problem was some kind of beneficial therapy or healing process. So meds were not going to work. When that happens the mental health docs put you in a nice neat box called 'treatment resistant' mental patient and they don't express a whole lot of hope for your future. Internal alchemy is the process of changing. If there is one group of intelligent, open-minded people who are going to understand the usefulness of using mind-body training to heal yourself it's going to be you folks. I feel like at least here I am not wasting my words. You are the kinds of people who might actually try to figure out what's wrong and want to fix it. So, that's why I have gone at length about these topics lately. This is an amazingly generous offer. Thank you very much for showing so much support for this Markern. It really does mean a lot. Thank you mjjbecker, for your suggestion. I have heard that some authors get signed from places like lulu, booklocker and others. Thanks everyone (Ya Mu, et al)that is offering ideas and assistance in publication. I can't thank you enough. A savvy self promoter with a good POD book can get noticed. But there is a lure to being published by Big Publishing. LATimes for example, does not review self published or vanity published books. They have a list of big time publishers like HarperCollins and Random House and if your book is not published by one of the ones on their list, you don't get reviewed by these major publications. There is still a lot of research to do. Getting back to Aeon for a moment. They don't call it mental illness for nothing. I personally think that those exercises just quickened it. My sister with the bipolar diagnosis showed signs of mental illness while we were still children but she didn't have her first real breakdown until she was an adult. As to the second question. Well, there are testimonials on BKF's site from people who have used meditation and /or chi kung to bring emotional peace into their lives. For that matter, supposedly a woman was cured of bipolar by having her bad energy sucked out her by Gary Clyman. In all seriousness to my knowledge there are no stories on Amazon about someone completely curing themselves of several mental health conditions by going into solitude and meditating. With that said, there have been numerous studies which show meditation to be much more effective treatment for depression than a placebo. We've all heard that the process of meditation and cultivation can cause us to transcend our suffering. It's spelled right out in Buddhist ideology. Meditate to get over your problems. The Buddhists and Taoists have known for millennia that meditation can make you a happier more well adjusted person. Most people with mental health labels who buy into the biological reductionist explanation of suffering don't try to see if it's really true that there is nothing they can do to cure themselves. Believe or it not some people actually like being mentally ill. They think it's just their character and the way they were born. I have had people tell me in correspondence that they would not want to be free of manic depression because it defines them and they identify their personality as being diseased. It's very saddening for me to hear people give up before they've even tried but, what can you do?

In this case I am just going to say, if said person wants to. Everything that I mentioned in the prior post is pretty safe. In such a situation it really depends on the individual, the way their psychosis manifests and what their energy work background is. Forms such as Marriage of Heaven and Earth and Dragon and Tiger can really help. More or less. It shouldn't be an issue. You generally end energy practices by bringing everything back into your lower dan tien. It might help to try finish by having the mind distributing equally between feet and dan tien. Most chi kung books usually show anywhere from three to seven places where your foot should contact the ground. The main thing to know is that sinking the tailbone into the balls of your feet causes energy to rise up and that sinking your tailbone into your heels causes it to sink down. The act of tucking your tailbone a wee tiny bit causes energy to drop. I don't want to use the word 'rock' but you want to play with how you can move your tailbone back and forward and cause your body weight to shift into different places in your foot. You can imagine an invisible pendulum pulling your tailbone 'tic' into the ball of your foot, 'toc' back into your heels. It's two things. Well, three actually. It's just a variation on five gates breathing. The fifth gate you breath into and out of the top of your skull. Omit that instruction for your friend. He's got plenty of energy in his head. Part one is simply putting your awareness into your palms and soles. Do that for awhile and you indirectly send your chi into those places. Part two relies on intent. Using intent you are pushing down with your hands and feet. If you do it right you may or may not feel actual vacuum and pressure sensations in your hands and feet. Even if your friend can't actually move from intent yet, practicing directing your chi down in your hands and feet will help some of that chi to drop out of his head hopefully. I am going to break here and answer other people's questions or reply to suggestions in another post. You are very welcome Aeon. I hope this helps your friend.

You are very welcome Trunk. I know my posts are tl dr but I'd rather say too much than not enough. Aeon and I chatted for a bit and I don't think he would mind (i hope not) if I shared my thoughts on it. Psychosis is a funky subject. The simplest definition is: Cognitions or thoughts that are not based in reality. That is pretty broad. Psychosis is often considered to be the end product of a manic episode. It can be caused by many different kinds of drugs, toxins and even diseases like encephalitis and lead poisoning. Many spiritual experiences seem to mimic clinical psychosis. The subject of whether or not so-called spiritual or religious experiences are psychosis is hugely polarizing and controversial. How do you tell the difference between an enlightenment or quickening experience or a psychotic experience? Very tricky subjectively speaking. There is not a whole lot of literature about it. As we all know the processes involved in meditation and chi kung can cause both psychosis and spiritual experiences. For us, it's even more critical to be able to tell the difference. Some factors to consider are: How does the aftermath of a spiritual awakening experience effect you and affect you? What are the immediate ramifications? What are the long term consequences? Caution: generalizations ahead. A spiritual experience usually leads you to a healthier relationship or understanding of your life, other people or the nature of reality. That kind of experience can come with a huge rush of energy that races around your insides for seconds or even days. That may be a sign of opened energy channels, freed energy blocks or a higher vibrational state has been attained. A psychotic experience can also have intense energy sensations. When I had psychosis my thoughts subjectively felt like barely contained rage fused with lightning. It felt godlike. I once became obsessed that if I stared at anyone for longer than a few seconds that I could make them explode. I had a fixation that if I looked at cigarette lighters or cars they too would explode. It's awesome to feel like that. My temper was explosive. The training I was doing at the time I had those kinds of psychotic experiences involved a variation on what is commonly called 'cleansing of the 5 senses' or something like that. I was taught this exercise when I was 13. I had an interesting twist though. After I would do an hour or two of stopping every stray thought in my mind for awhile I would focus on objects and try to make them move. Not too long after I started those practices I began to hear voices. I have also had spiritual experiences and I've occasioned to call them either quickening or stillness experiences. Quickening experiences makes your hair stand up in places. It feels like liquid electricity is running up and down your spine and you feel like you can fly if you just exert a little effort. Usually, after such an experience I felt calm and had a better understanding of whatever I was contemplating or working on at the time. You settle back down pretty quickly. Stillness experiences are exactly what they seem. Some giant frozen chunk of dark matter calves like a glacier and falls away out of your interior landscape and the noise in your mind spontaneously or gradually abates. You feel real and peaceful and centered and totally happy just Being. After both those kinds of experience you carry on with your life. Usually for the better. You have a better attitude or become more attractive or successful. Spiritual experiences and psychotic experiences can both make your energy intense. People will notice it and may comment on it. That you fill up a room all by yourself with your presence. Cultivation and madness can both have that effect on you for different reasons. A psychotic experience can morph into paranoia and delusion. If that happens your social and self care skills can go south in a hurry. Some of the more obvious incidences of psychosis are people you hear about walking around naked at night claiming to be Jesus or the Virgin Mary. There are subtle forms of psychosis where your mind just interprets everything wrong. If you really want to see a good example of a continuously psychotic mind take a gander at those EBM videos. I am sure you all have heard of the phenomena of Epic Beard Man by now. Despite his actions and the popular support he enjoys as a meme right now, that guy is not completely in this reality with the rest of us. His mind interprets data differently than what the rest of us see. For example Tyrone (michael) approached EBM with a cigarette in his hand. In EBM's mind it became a knife. EBM stated that he knocked out Tyrone for 22 minutes and some seconds. We all saw that Tyrone did not get knocked out at all never mind 22 minutes. Nor was Tyrone a murderer on parole. EBM is quite clearly psychotic. There is another video about Soulja Girl "I'm pressin charges!". She is also psychotic in that video. Those are examples of psychosis. Cognitions not based on reality. What I did to deal with psychosis was learn to sink my chi. If you sink your chi into your lower dantien and your feet the chi will drop out of your mind. It will naturally complete the downward current. If you practice sinking your chi it will keep you grounded. You end up feeling more real. More here. More solid. When you practice the downward current and sink it will severely curtail so-called manic episodes. Folks, I respect the fact that a lot of you have some experience with internal energy. Consider these symptoms: Inflated self esteem. Pressurized speech. Irritability and or psychomotor agitation. Derailment. Incoherency. Flight of ideas. Grandiose thinking. These are some of the classic symptoms of mania. The so-called manic portion of bipolar disorder. Using the TCM model, what do you think causes that? Excessive energy running around loose in the brain has a spillover effect in our subjective experience of the mind. Which makes more sense.? Cover up those symptoms with drugs that don't change the reason for the energy imbalance? Or correcting the imbalance? You can practice working with the downward current by doing palm/sole breathing. And by focusing on the Yin aspect of the microcosmic orbit. You can project energy from your tailbone into your feet and move from the balls of your feet to your heels again and again. There are some moves in Dragon and Tiger chi kung that cause you to move chi downwards with your hand movements. You can use the breath. (longevity breathing) You can literally place your hands in front of you and wash your chi downward from your head to your belly. Marriage of Heaven and Earth does that perfectly. Ba Gua walking and putting your mind in your feet and below the ground can drop your chi. Just doing The Commencement of any tai chi form causes energy to move up and down both inside and outside your body. The book 'Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body' has several techniques that are useful. There are many ways to direct your chi to sink down. Start with one of them and work on it. Make it a habit to sink your chi into your belly and feet and use that as your maintenance drug or as a counterbalance for energy building and circulating practices. If your chi is stable and flowing well it won't race around uncontrollably to the point of making your thoughts and emotions go crazy. That's been my experience.

I will never recommend them to anyone, ever. You don't learn a damn thing about your mind or emotions from using them. Not only that, the longer that you use them the more you flirt with disaster. SSRIs? Lead to being divorced from the ability to feel love. Causes weight gain. Can cause acute suicidal or psychotic impulses in people. Cause sometimes irreversible impotence in men and women. Nice. This will be remembered as the era when we medicated people who were suicidal with drugs that cause suicidal impulse. Asinine. Antipsychotics. The leading treatment for bipolar with psychotic features and schizophrenia. Proven to cause brain cell death. They perform an effective chemical lobotomy. Totally not holistic or healing. The worst drug you could ever take if you are a spiritual person. Causes death of personality and organically damages you in mind and body. Seriously poisonous. I've been on them. I know. I felt it first hand. Lithium. Has some kind of effect on people with severe mood swings. Over fifty years of treating manic depressives with lithium and still the exact mechanism of action on the mind is unknown. Causes obscene weight gain. Damages your nervous system right away. Hand tremor, jaw tremors, mental fog. Seriously folks, all that drug induced mental fog has to be dealt with when you get into meditation. That fog stays inside you and obscures your consciousness. Have any of you, Mr West, anyone? ever been on lithium? How about you take 500mg of lithium 3xs daily and watch as your body becomes toxic. Your sweat and your tongue taste like metal. If you didn't have a chemical imbalance before, lithium will give you one. Causes kidney, thyroid and nervous system damage folks. Sometimes permanently. I've been through it. I know how it feels to be utterly divorced from thinking and feeling as a consequence of being forcibly treated with both lithium and antipsychotics and consequently tried to kill myself while I was on them to escape. Anti-seizure meds. Neither schizophrenia or manic depression have been proven to be seizure disorders. Some folks have beneficial results from them. Anti-seizure meds work by reducing the sodium channel ion action that causes an electrical impulse to result in a physical action. Every thing you do with your body from masturbation to sparring to using your keys to open a door uses these sodium ion channels to induce movement. Some people come down with CFS and permanent muscle and nerve damage as a consequence of using anti-seizure drugs. Folks, these drugs do nothing but harm you. Big Pharma is not interested in your well-being. They want to make money and they will lie through their corporate teeth to convince you to take their drugs forever. They call it 'maintenance treatment'. Absurd. I am living proof that it is possible to overcome manic depression without using polypharmacy or counseling. I have a mother with chronic depression and a sister who takes lithium for bipolar 1. Neither of them are happy nor do they have my training. Mental illness flows in my family. I've heard all the bullshit pseudoscience on this. I've been told, while inpatient, that I had an incurable genetic disease caused by a chemical imbalance. What a crock of shit. There is no proof of these chemical imbalances. The serotonin theories have been debunked into the ground. The real honest to god truth is this: No one on this planet knows what causes the symptoms that end up being called manic depression. No one knows. In over a hundred years of science there has been zero advances in understanding what manic depression is or what causes it. Having new drug treatments is not an advance in understanding causes. Having a few well designed studies that show some shared genes in people with the diagnosis is not an advance either. What is known is that the prefrontal cortex acts a 'referee' for thoughts and emotions in the brain. The prefrontal cortex has been fingered as being underdeveloped in people with both schizophrenia and bipolar. Meditation has been proven in many studies to directly effect the prefrontal cortex. It makes it denser. These brain changes stick around even if the person stops meditating. You take lithium and antipsychotics for bipolar and you will move further and further away from being healed. You meditate long enough and your brain may simply grow out of it. Your brain will grow controls over your emotions and your thoughts and psychosis will be a thing of the past. I was diagnosed with manic depression with schizoaffective tendencies at age 14 in 1989. I started with BKF's stuff in 1996. By 1998 I had been depression free for 2 years. By 1999 the mania and the Voices were gone too. In 2001 I celebrated my victory over my dual diagnosis with five years depression free without the use of counseling or polypharmacy. It is now 2010 and I am still fine. I've written a book about how I recovered. I've done exhaustive research into the state of modern mental health science and meditation brain science as part of the background for my book. It's in the process of editing and getting it published will be the hard part. I am neither antipsychiatry or antimedicine. I am not even antidrug. I am pro personal responsibility. I am pro self-healing and I have absolutely no patience with people who trot out all the latest Big Pharma sponsored studies on chemical imbalances or their skewed and slanted clinical studies that show their latest Blockbuster drugs as being effective. Especially since the inevitable class action lawsuits will prove in the course of discovery that Big Pharma was cooking their studies and lying wholesale to the public about negative side effects or actual efficacy versus placebo controls. You want more information on how badly the consuming public is getting railroaded by Big Pharma's lies I can go on and on. I can machine gun this thread with a deluge of studies and exposes on Big Pharma's lies and bullshit. I shouldn't need to. Google is your friend.

Don't those ten precepts seem to be 'rewrites' of the Buddhist ones to you? It is my understanding that at certain times and places in China, Taoists and Buddhists have influenced each other in both ideas and meditative practices. One such location may very well be Tian Tai Mountain. http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/zhejiang/hangzhou/mt_tiantai.htm I am not sure those ten so-called Taoist precepts are in fact Taoist canon but a hybridization of Buddhist thought. Number 6 looks to me to be a result of Confucian influence.

Very disappointing. I am a huge fan of science and the scientific method. Ever since I first put my hands 12 inches away from each other and felt the pressure on my palms during my first psychic energy workshop book from the Berkley Psychic Institute I have been hungry for a real scientific test for chi. Photonics is Kirlian 2.0 There is faaaar too much telling and not enough showing, (not any showing) in that video Steam. Kirlian stuff has been debunked up and down the block years ago. There is still plenty of time to find a real instrument test for chi but Gas Emission Photography ain't it.