SFJane

Yeah. A. It's worthwhile. B. There is wisdom in the ten precepts. C. The path need not be a dogmatic, slavish devotion to an ideal. D. You get out of it what you put into it. E. Philosophy differences aside, in terms of the journey of the mind, Taoism and Buddhism are not all that different in their understanding of the condition of the human psyche. How interesting. I felt that way about my trip through Wicca and Reiki years after the fact. In the end I accepted that I learned things from both paths and so could not chalk it up as a complete waste. It was my path. Plus, it was fun.

Welcome You have reached a place where the one major consensus is that there is more than one path to finding out those answers.

This is my understanding as well. I agreed with Stig's idea and did not agree with sykkel that this does not constitute valid evidence. You can detect the existence of something by it's effects on something else that is being observed. Like the way they discover planets now. Scientists can't image planets but they can detect the presence of a planet by analyzing gravitational perturbations of the star that they orbit. Even if the magnetic chi that we feel in our hands and bodies can not be measured with a device (yet), the effects of focusing it in certain ways can be detected by changes in the states of the objects being targeted. If someone can use chi to reliably vacuum someone's physical or emotional blocks that can be determined with strict protocols.

Explain why please.

I was about disagree with you Hagar, then Rain answered with a simplified version of what I was going to say. Then this reply here clarified you and I have no argument. Here is where I come from with the blocking thoughts issue. Starting from the opposite of an empty mind. A full mind. This is where discursive thought comes into play. I think. I feel. I remember. I want. I need. I wonder. All those thoughts are discursive, projective thoughts. Let us consider that a person can have this running dialogue inside themselves while they are doing the dishes or showering or whatever. Now, in addition to that dialogue you have sensory stimulation from the 5 primary senses. In addition to data input you have now a sense that your mind has pressure. As if your thoughts themselves have velocity and power. Imagine that you are in an isolation room (the privacy of your mind). In this room we are going to pipe in sight, sound and smells. We are also going to turn on a radio to one station and play that station in the background. That is your inner dialogue with self. Your average person may or may not turn on a few more radios tuned to different stations. Let's go one step further. How many of you have heard of mania? It means craziness. It is typically associated with manic depression. With mania you have an acceleration of mind. Instead of 1-3 radios going on in your head you have 10, 20, even 30. As this happens that sense of power in your mind becomes stronger. The volume of projective thoughts attains a level of subjective noise. Sensory stimulation can be vastly increased. Meaning that everything from taste, touch and smells can be engrossing. At some point the thoughts in your head seem to be lightning that is just barely being contained. Now, if that goes on long enough you may acquire a specific set of cognitions that are loosely called 'thought broadcasting delusion'. Your mind can become convinced that it's thoughts are leaking out and being transmitted to other people's minds. Conversely, you also seem to think that you are picking up other people's thoughts uncontrollably. At this point you are as far away from a calm, still or empty mind as you are ever going to get. You've crossed the line from being hyper and intense into subtle psychosis. You are not completely in touch with reality anymore. You feel experientially like your mind occupies ten dimensions. That may sound neat and all but for some people it can cripple their ability to make decisions or it may make you extremely impulsive. It can make you extremely grandiose ie, Lex Luthor is a good example of a thoroughly grandiose guy in love with his own genius. That's mania. If you ever talk to a psychiatrist about having thoughts like that, you will be given a prescription for brain damaging drugs called 'antipsychotics'. They shrink your frontal lobe and interfere with your neurons and can quite literally disrupt that sense of mental electricity and leave you mentally fogged and sedated very quickly. They used to call it a chemical lobotomy. It can change the underlying problem by reducing bio-electrical firing in your frontal lobes. Those drugs don't teach you anything about how your mind works or how to fix it. Let's say you get into meditation. It is possible to get some mental stillness through sheer force of will. In terms of deliberately trying to block your thoughts. What you are really doing is trying to contain a fusion reactor. Pressure is going to build. That pressure is what leads to what people call siddhis but I personally think most siddhis are delusion. You may become adept at blocking your thoughts. At some point I was able to hold mania in complete stasis for hours. Kind of like a stasis field from science fiction. However, whenever I was not holding my mind in stasis my thoughts would charge back up again. They would get some speed. One radio would get turned on. Then another. Then 20 all at once again. I was a million miles away from stillness within minutes of stopping my meditation sit. That is not real meditation. It does build up your Will and concentration to practice that. There are many ways to do that though. Microcosmic Orbit is a good one. It's still not meditation. It's artificial control. To meditate you want your thoughts to arrive at stillness naturally. From a truly technical scientific POV, it's almost impossible to stop all brain activity and if you did you would be dead. You can learn to relax inside yourself to such a degree that your mind becomes quiet all by itself. If you work at this relaxation of the mind, being present and so on, those discursive (I call them projective) thoughts will slow down, decrease in felt sense of power and intensity. Those radio stations get turned off one by one. The inner agitation that caused all those radio stations to turn on inside you changes. That's the beginning of alchemy. You change your mind from being this 'monkey' to being a spider in a web. When that happens, you can abide and there will be no projective thoughts. If you have enough sessions like that, that stillness hits some kind of emergence or critical mass and stillness becomes a part of you. Having an empty mind becomes vastly easier. If you practice like that long enough then your mind will actually change your brain. It will change the various balance of neurotransmitters and the firing of your axons and neurons. Your prefrontal cortex will grow incredibly intricate connections into the surrounding brain structures. Like the amygdala for example, which sends all sort of impulses into your conscious mind as well as storing emotional conditioning. If you practice like that long enough, manic episodes quietly go away. Your brain forgets how to be manic. It evolves new, better controls over those thoughts and feelings. Other thoughts. When it comes to witnessing the play of thoughts. You do not space out like watching TV. Nor do you get involved with your thoughts. Don't give energy to them or become immersed in them or try to block them out. Witnessing means just that. Witness. When it comes to thought broadcasting delusion, it's easy to think that mania has made you special and that you can learn to control your telepathy like Professor X. Before you get too excited about being a mutant do some reality testing to be sure you are really hearing other people's thoughts and that you are really projecting your thoughts into others. Set experiments for yourself. If you are deadly honest with yourself and you are as objective as you can possibly be with such a subjective phenomena, you will realize that your mind is bullshitting you. If you can do that and you keep at the stillness meditation you will overcome those kinds of delusions.

Not to detract from OP's direction but this post is really interesting and I wanted to respond. Until recently, I didn't care too much about Buddhism either. When I first really got into meditation I was in my early 20s. Like a lot of you I was at a crossroads. I was a shopper in a spiritual market and everything looked good. Tumo in Tibet? Zen in Japan? Kundulini in India? I wanted to do them all. But I knew it would be best to pick one and run with it. At some point my choices had narrowed down to Buddhism and Taoism. I realized, like many of you, that Buddhism is based on hero worship. What would Jesus do became what would Buddha do? Instead of accepting Christ into your heart you want to find your inner Buddha nature. There was the ten precepts and I knew I couldn't adhere to that sort of thing. I had deconverted myself from years of hardcore Catholicism and I did not want to trade one set of 'thou shall and thou shall nots' for another. To be fair, I was about nine months past a serious suicide attempt. Surviving it made me realize just how much of life I was going to miss out on. The idea of that level of asceticism (ten precepts) seemed like excessive straitjacketing and just not practical. As I got more into Buddhist ideology I found the same kind of dogma that disturbs you, Lifeforce. I mean overcoming reincarnation? Screw that. I want to play again. And again. On this planet and on others. Taoism gave me permission to just keep doing what I was doing. I could still smoke pot or have a beer with my friends after work if I wanted. I could have sex with whom I wanted or eat whatever I wanted. I could have a normal life and still keep working on my spiritual evolution at my own pace. Taoist meditation caused me to become comfortable being me. Living in this life. After ten plus years of having Taoist ideas roaming around my brain I see Buddhist teachings much differently. Especially in terms of the 8-fold path. Taoist concepts are pretty simple and at least to me anyway, not ambiguous or confusing. There is a lot less translation. (I think so.) The vocabulary of Buddhism is enormous and convoluted but if you can read between the lines, Buddhism is really quite beautiful. I am still not down with the whole reincarnation thing. I still think for most people, Buddhism may very well be hero worship. Buddha is an elevated personage that gives you a bar or bench mark so-to-speak. That's great and everything but that's not what I find interesting. Much of life's confusion is caused by suffering. That is a truth. A life without excessive distractions, over-stimulation, drama, conflict combined with mindfulness will gradually empower you to apprehend your consciousness and perceive what is going on with reality and how you relate to the world both as a social human animal and as an awake Presence or Being. To that end, you can work on the Chan and meditate and don't worry about the next life or being an arhat (aranhat?) or whatever. Just be mindful and carry on with a low stress life and many of the noble truths will become really quite obvious. I don't need to be in agreement with all of it to see that it is really quite brilliant. In that way, the older I get the more that I respect Buddhism.

This is patently false information.

Firstly, don't apologize for the length of the post. I love long posts personally. It was a very open and honest post and it resonated with me on several levels. You touch on many subjects from the subjective mind to the cultural memes. I was a product of abusive upbringing. I got programmed on multiple levels from my fanatically christian and mentally ill parents. By the time I was fourteen I hated myself and my life. I couldn't do anything right. I failed even harder as an adult. Just detonated my life again and again. My relatives thought I was hopeless. They felt that I would either be dead or in jail by the time I reached the age of 21. I just knew I was a failure. I couldn't even keep a job at a Dunkin Donuts without going off on customers, employees or my boss. I had no coping skills for any stress except to either assault people that pissed me off or sulk in my apartment and abuse drugs. When I first met Taoist master Bruce Frantzis it was to learn chi kung and meditation. He explained to me how my own programming was messing with me. How every word that came out of my mouth revealed how badly I was programmed. Bruce was the first person who didn't tell me to just pull myself up by my bootstraps and think positively. He told me what to do. Go dissolve and deprogram yourself. What else could I do? I certainly couldn't surrender my soul to a higher power, I am an atheist. Using my understanding of the Eight Bodies of Being and the inner dissolving technique I was able to excise all of that programming. I located all my issues, one by one, and I got rid of them all by myself. I might also recommend Ba Gua. The main premise of meditative Ba Gua is to free your internal energy so that your insides freely interact with the outside and you embody the ability to change from one thing to another. You can combine all three practices. Walk the circle, dissolve your Being of it's triggers and blocks and learn how to change from the inside out under your own power. I would hardly consider myself enlightened but I was definitely able to deprogram myself of all that BS that my parents programmed into me. All my other brothers and sisters have similar programming and they continue to fail pretty hard at life years after the fact. None of them have the training that I went after. They pretty much still blame everything and everyone else for their problems and they sit around expecting hand outs because they can't get their shit together. Using meditation to heal yourself is not easy to do but it can be effective. The way I see it you can either seek out other people to help you deprogram i.e. Cognitive or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. You can wait around for the gods to grant you a miracle. Or you can possess your own mind and use meditation to find your weaknesses and apply dissolving to remove those blocks at an energetic level until they are gone like they were never there.

Demonic possession even? Wow I was not aware that demons, beyond the metaphorical ones, actually exist. Be sure to catch that on video next time it happens. His jedi powers must be far beyond mine. On his site Sarah P testifies he sucked her bipolar disorder right out of her after a few treatments! It took me five years of dedicated nei/chi kung practice to get rid of my bipolar disorder. He seriously needs to take that show on the road and start doing seminars for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. There are millions of Americans suffering from a variety of mood disorders who would love to have their issues sucked right out of them so they can dispense with the endless therapy visits and the ten different meds they are slaved to for the rest of their lives. I imagine they would pay a great deal for his treatments. Then there is the little issue of scientific testing. He is just THAT good eh? Oh I get it alright. Hero worship. Gary is your deity. He can do no wrong in your eyes. Wouldn't matter if he told you he could beat up your parents. That can be explained away. He's just misunderstood. He's just enthusiastic. You are in love with his material and you have such loyal fervor that skepticism is not in your vocabulary when discussing the man. Yes. Yes it does.

Starting at 5:00 My first intuition is: This is wrong. Upon analysis, this is why. 1. He has his left hand behind the lady in black's spine, priming her or scanning her or both. 2. he primes her and everyone else with suggestion. 'When I touch you it will be terrible' Terrible. Terrible. It's repeated and reinforced. 3. The set up. Touch her here and there. nada 4. Shocks her internal organs and she reacts. This IS terrible. Study her hips, arms and face afterward. He really did something to her chi. Next lady, the cheerful african american one. She has seen what happened and is primed. 1. Never get it on the first try. Lead into it. So, the first touch, nada. But the subsequent touches starting at 5:30 remind me of a cold reader, palm reader, fortune teller MO. He is leading her and seeing if she'll give him the answer. She doesn't because she doesn't quite realize how many levels his is playing with her. He is looking for what is called 'subjective validation' if he gets a lead from her, he'll run with it. 2. He makes the next one up. ABANDONMENT. Reminds me of the people that channel the dead like John Edwards. 3. He shocks her in a pressure point. She reacts. Terrible! Proves GC is right on the money! Doesn't even ask her if she actually HAS abandonment issues to confirm. Doesn't need to. Her reaction to his zap proves it. Alternately, he knows her from before and has talked with her about her issues. If so, then he already knows in advance she has abandonment issues and once again it looks like GC is spot on the money. That's straight out of Xtian faith healer MO. Black lady with orange hair. She has had several treatments. Naturally nothing to find. 'See? No TERRIBLES coming from my patient!' She is a testimonial. About 8:00 Old lady with red blouse. She is kinda spacing out at first and he figures, engh, he can get her on the first touch, or at least, he'll get her attention and reaction. He hurts her. Perhaps I have a more flexible definition of violation and what that really means to be violated. GC doesn't just have real kung fu, he's also a hypnotist and a natural at nlp. That's what I see.

Truly, from what I can tell simply by observing him, this is the case. For me the issue with GC isn't his skill. Or his Kong Jin. (which relies on compliance, leading, being led and grossly overreacting to, the felt sense of 'magnetic' chi) His practice has gone to his head if he feels the need to tell people that he can defeat the Gracies or BKF. I mean.. wtf. Maybe he can! The point is....why do I need to know that. Why is that on his mind? Frankly, watching the body language of the women he does his liposuction stuff on makes me shiver. He doesn't get how he comes across. Is it me folks? They look revolted and even scared. He is violating their chi. Zapping them, not in a good way. Am I projecting here or does anyone else see that? I wouldn't mind learning from him and assimilating his wave stuff but I think after five minutes of being with him in person I'd want to kick him in the nuts.

Let's be clear about what we are talking about. As I stated in my previous post. I am quite sure from what I've seen and heard that he has some skill. I specifically said, that his Iron Shirt and wave energy stuff looks legit and effective. With that said. When I said his jedi powers won't work on me what I meant was. His empty force stuff does not impress me. I doubt he could either help or harm me in any way. He could wave his hands at me at any distance and he would just look silly. I personally, find his nei kung interesting. I was willing not only to try take time to analyze his routine but to practice it as best as I could for a bit despite Bruce's warnings. I am like the Borg when it comes to learning internal arts. I was quite sure that I would not hurt myself just by playing around with it a little. However. Empty force demonstrations generally make me /facepalm. I am one of those skeptical party poopers whose aura somehow magically turns off other people's abilities whenever I ask for a real demonstration. Apparently my 'disbelief' chi is always stronger then their 'believe that they can' chi. I've felt my share of Jin when it comes to being hit from people like George Xu and Bruce Frantzis who threw me around like a rag doll the first time I touched arms with him. I know internal power when I feel it and I can tell if you have it pretty quickly. You seem to feel strongly that GC has helped you. I notice you are in Roseville, H. That's not so far from me in SF. You are more than welcome to email if you have any questions or if you want to demonstrate anything that you have learned in the way of Jin from GC on me.

Alright, alright. Let's see, it helps if you know the background. I was watching a Clyman vid and his moves looked pretty interesting. He was demoing wave energy nei kung or something. He was vibrating his arms and making growling sounds, like an engine revving up. As soon as I saw that video, I recognized his form as something Bruce Frantzis warns about in his Energy Gates book. Out of technical curiosity, I tried to emulate and reverse engineer GC's moves just to see how it felt. Then I decided to call GC up myself to find out where he got his stuff from. That's where the lulz begins. The Good: He was very polite to me and seemed quite forthcoming. He learned some of his nei kung from Waysun Liao and it is the real deal in as much as, he does central channel work, dan tien work, spiraling work and breathing. He can also take quite a punch from most people. He seems very enthusiastic about chi/nei kung and obviously loves practicing and teaching it. The Bad: I appreciate confidence in one's own abilities but his arrogance and braggadocio is....repellent. It is possible that his ability has made him a little bit psychotic and definitely over confident. The Ugly: At some point in the conversation he started bad-mouthing Mr. Liao's school, skill and personality. He asked me who I had trained with and I named dropped Bruce Frantzis and Peter Ralston. He didn't know who Ralston was but he knew about BF and told me that 'just between me and him' he could lay the smack down on Bruce at any time. ! At that point I wrapped up my end of the convo and thanked him for his time. I think he does have some real skill when it comes to absorbing energy and iron shirt type stuff but frankly, his empty force stuff was quite a laugh. Faker than fake was one reply. All I can say to that is, his jedi powers would not work on me. As an aside, I was watching his emotional liposuction vids and for a guy who is so into emotional energy he seemed utterly clueless to the body language cues coming from his female attendees. Personally, I think his wave power stuff is neat but I would never in a million years go to this guy for emotional problems nor recommend him to others for such.

Years ago when I first got into tai chi and was a newb at fa jin I was demonstrating tai chi style pushes on some aikidoka. I put my hands on one guy and barely pulsed him and he flew, like five plus feet, arms pinwheeling, hopping and finally near-falling. Thing is, that wasn't me. I did not do that to him. At best he should have gently been displaced about three feet back like a small wave coming into shore moving someone who is hip deep in the surf. Sure, it made my push look like power level 9000 but it was incredibly embarrassing. It was all in his head. If this had happened privately, I would have said something to him but it was in a dojo with other people present. I had an interesting chat with Mr. Clyman once.

Hello Non, Not sure if you are still reading this so I'll keep it short. Your problem is not with women. Your problem is with you. You are not the only person to ever have problems attracting members of the opposite sex or with feeling suicidal. I am not going to tell you that suicide is a bad option. I've been as far down that road as a person can get before they are in the ground forever. All I can say is that I am glad I didn't. I ended up very happy later on. I can tell you what will happen if you seek out psychiatric services. You are most likely going to be told you have a genetic chemical imbalance and that your only solution is to take meds for the rest of your life. You get a nice diagnosis. Now you have something to blame for all your problems. Maybe you get some ECT. Whatever. You never get to the heart of your issues because it's just some mental condition that you have no control over. At the risk of doing armchair diagnosis all I am going to say is that you are not a complete spirit. The way I see it, your inability to get a woman in your life is driving you insane. Therein lies your problem. Brief anecdote. I got rejected pretty hard once by someone I thought was my soulmate. It led to stalking and restraining orders and all sorts of bad stuff. I was so sick for so long physically and mentally over that loss that I thought I'd never recover. One day it came to me that my happiness and place in this world should not be bound to a connection with another person. The reason I was so broken and so ruined after that relationship was that my entire being was latched on to that person. I was a not a complete human being to begin with and when that relationship ended I was energetically ripped apart. So I took ten years off from relationships to get my head on straight. During that time I worked on nothing but becoming a complete and whole person. Chi kung and meditation have the power to unify all the energies of your Being and make you quite comfortable being you. All by yourself. When that happens you will radiate a different kind of energy and sure enough people will start to get attracted to you. I was not celibate all those years. As taoist practices made me stronger, calmer and more confident, it got easier to have noncommittal recreational sex with people I was not interested in getting to know long term. (especially since I still had some issues) Your inner war with yourself and your brokenness is obvious to women on a subconscious (or conscious) level when you try to interact with them. So, they feel how disturbed you are. They feel your lack of confidence, self possessiveness and emotional grace and that is the sign of an immature human being and that my friend, makes you non breeding, non caretaker material. You can feel sorry for yourself as much as you want but that's not going to change your situation. The reality is you have to change inside before your interactions with women are going to improve. My advice is to drop all ideas of getting in a relationship and grow up first. Find yourself. Don't be dependent on someone else to be complete or happy. When you are comfortable with yourself life will get better.

Hello Creation I want to say the book is done. I am very happy with where it is atm. Biggest problem is publishing. I live in a query quarry. It's like a full time job trying to get literary representation and you need a rep to break into Big Publishing. I hope you are well and your practice is coming along. Hi Art You are quite welcome. Thank you as well for sharing and I am very glad to hear that you've overcome those issues. That's a great achievement. It's easy to get caught up in all the opening of psychic powers and attaining bliss states and immortality when discussing esoteric Taoism. It's good to remind folks that Taoism is about becoming comfortable with yourself, in this life. To that end, before we get to superpowers or enlightenment some of us have very mundane problems like anxiety or rage or ptsd or depression, loss etc, that need to be dealt with first. I think it is a testament to Taoism that we can overcome those base issues with this ancient and wonderful tradition of self healing. Ronko If you have any more questions or if your friend does, ask her to make an account and send me a message.

Hi Makyea, I thought I might add a few thoughts to the discussion. The three different types of Taoism have been fairly well covered. Myself, I have zero interest in religious Taoism and only passing interest in philosophical Taoism. I practice the esoteric aspects. Cultivation may mean different things to different practitioners. In a nutshell, Cultivation really means to be mindful of and nourish. For myself, I cultivate The Three Treasures. Jing, Chi and Shen. Very simply: Jing is bodily fluids. Chi is both the electrochemical reactions in our body and our awareness. Shen is our spirit. Sexual energy practices can be fun. It is not necessary to know a single one of these techniques to get as far as you will ever desire to go with meditation. I definitely consider sexual energy techniques to be advanced and as such, don't worry about learning them until you've had years of practice. Learn them as a curiosity, to see if you can take your practice to another level. On the nature of food I feel very strongly that you should not worry about it. The word 'must' was used earlier in a reply post to you. With all due respect to that poster, there is very little you must do in Taoism aside from relax, let go and breathe naturally. With that said, diet can have a profound effect on your practice. My advice is to forget what all the books say and experientially, ontologically if you will, find out for yourself. Don't worry about what other people are doing diet wise. At some point, experiment on yourself and find out what foods work for you. In my practice over the years I've done everything from raw food vegan diet and outright fasting to eating like a little pig, anything I want. The important thing is to listen internally very carefully to what food does to your thoughts and feelings. You may find, as I did, that juice fasting and long meditation sits go very well together. I personally don't like spicy food. I don't go out of my way to avoid spices but I do not eat foods like mexican or thai. It just makes my insides go crazy. When it comes to books and ideas, I am very biased. I started learning meditation and chi kung from Bruce Frantzis in my early 20s. Like you, I didn't have a lot of money. I wanted to take every retreat this guy was offering but it would take months to save up for just one on my wages working blue collar in the Industrial sector. I like some of Mantak Chia and Yang Jwing Ming's stuff but hands down, as far as I am concerned, Mr Frantzis is The Man when it comes it understanding and teaching esoteric Taoism to Westerners. Some of his books have already been recommended, 'Relaxing into your Being' and so on. Bruce's books were my bibles for many years and I was able, not only to heal myself of some serious neurological damage in my spine and arms but I conquered 17 years of depression and insanity within five years of training with Bruce. I'm not even one his better students or certified or anything like that. Bruce's teachings were a ball that I picked up and ran with on my own and I got amazing results from my practice. Enough to write an entire book about. Some of the other suggestions were good too. Once, I got myself hugely motivated to learn the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching from an academic, scholastic point of view but ultimately, I dropped all that instead to pursue real personal practice more than anything. I am especially fond of tai chi, ba gua circle walking, chi kung standing and sitting practices. I understand there are some very good books out there and some of the teachers named here come very highly recommended. But in my opinion, you could go as far as you ever wanted by purchasing Master Frantzis CDs and books on Longevity breathing, water method dissolving and opening the energy gates of your body. Take those books and cds along with your portable CD player out into the woods. Find a nice tree to lean against and start taking those lessons, one at a time and practice. Later, when you do eventually take a gander at texts like TTC you'll find that your practice has given you insights into some of those passages. Which is really exciting when it happens. I wish you all the best in your journey.

Hello there, My name is Jane and I cured myself of manic depression with Bruce Frantzis's Taoist meditation training and chi kung. Psych meds and internal energy development practices do not mix. Drugs like lithium and antipsychotics are known causes of nervous system degeneration and brain cell death. Chi kung and meditation are both excellent vehicles to finding and working with your chi but they both use the mind's connection to the nervous system to accomplish that. The ideal way to use chi development practices to effect the mind and emotions is to be able to feel acutely what is going on inside you. Psych meds not only retard your ability to do that, they become an insurmountable obstacle if you ever have any desire to get serious about deep meditation. Those drugs cast distortions that obfuscate the more subtle levels of consciousness. There is a conundrum here. Going off those meds, especially after you've been on them for awhile, cause emotional and thought disturbances that you must suffer from. No way around it.Then, after the drugs are out of your system, the old symptoms of depression and mania come back. Hard. You suffer that too. If you are willing to suffer and endure through all of that you will be in an ideal place to really to start making changes to your internal energy which without doubt will have profound effects on your mind and subsequently your emotions. The key issue here, is taking responsibility for your internal world. As long as everything is bipolar's fault, no progress can be made, drugs or no drugs. It took me five years, once I seriously got involved with meditation and chi kung, to cure myself of a supposedly incurable genetic disease. It's been over ten years since I've been depressed or psychotic.

demo and talk

Dear Dave, the movements that I did were the beginnings of a chen TCC routine hope that helps

Thanks Karen. Feel free to call me Jane. I was really hoping for links to browse to get a gist of the science of it though. I agree that not all true science is solely the realm of mainstream literature. However most good science that is relied upon is usually tested and confirmed, duplicated and otherwise significantly peer reviewed. In my studies of physical, emotional and mental health, wellness and nutrition I have been fairly open about a lot of ideas. Overtime some have just seemed less likely than others. It just does not sound right. There is something that bugs me about this *emotional trauma, holding mercury bit*. It does not jive. It does not resonate with me. My Universal Truth detector is silent. I don't believe it. I have had my share of traumas, physically, emotionally and mental and I also happened to have a fair amount of time spent exposed to metals. Much more than most of you I am guessing. I worked in the metal industry. I worked with, in, near or around many different metals in different concentrations from large solids masses of it to dust, powder and particulate in the late 90s. During the early 2000s I had series after series of blood work and analysis performed and I was not found to be toxic in any way.

Hey Dave, Not sure what to tell you to be honest. I was not entirely sure where you meant exactly time wise. After several watchings the entire routine looks awfully Shaolinesque. My first thought was withing seconds of the first watch was that I was viewing something *external* done with several internalesque attributes. Not my realm of experience really. Typically in my mind, slowings in external arts are to change the frequency of breathing, to synch something up, to increase either tension or relaxation, to perform an open or close or to direct chi first. Great place to train though. Would love to train there for a few weeks just for the vibes

I tried various forms of experiment light therapy in order to deal with repetitive seasonal affect disorder and depression back in the late 90s. None of them as high tech as led panels. More light wall colors and light bulbs. Frankly I found being exposed to or viewing different colors or being bathed in different colors to be largely noneffective long term. In the end being bathed in any other color besides amber or blue eventually bugged me somehow cognitively and emotionally. I did find out over the years that I was not just imaging that certain forms of *white* light actally bugged the shit out of me. Fluorescent lights have always hurt my brain, my eyes and with old fashioned leaky ballast types, my ears too. My mother never believed me either. It turns out I was not alone. I would say 99% of fluorescent light set ups wig me out eventually with the primary symptom being irritability. I used to be able to escape it when I lived in the boonies but here in the city it's inescapable at night. It's like frikkin krypton rays or something. If my super powers ever get out of control just put me in a room with all ultra bright and flickering fluorescent lighting on all the time and I will write, foam and twitch in the middle of the floor. Afterthought edit. The best lighting for me is indirect sunlight > all other forms. Coming through trees, clouds. reflected off buildings, water, that sort of thing. Candles at night or small low watt incandescents. Sorry Gore I won't be switching to all fluorescents efficiency lighting in my home. My sanity comes first.

Thanks Hundun I have heard several such stories as well and it seems most were before the back accident. He never injured anyone at any event I attended. He did Fa Jin on me more than once and never harmed me. I can also say I have heard more recent injuries on the west and east coast to students. It never happened in my sight so. You are welcome. The most generous serving of humble pie I received was psychological. He taught me the mindset needed to self cognitive behavioral therapy in the space of 5 minutes. 12 + shrinks and 10 years of therapy had never yielded that mind set from any of the so called mental health pros. I don't know who trains with K these days I've really been away from current events with the TEA crowd for awhile now. As for any other times that he has dealt with the middle dantien. In passing in the spinal chi gung retreat and around the middle of the water method sitting retreat back exactly 8 years ago August 2000. I can never forget it either. I knew I had plenty of dark stuff in there from past events. In retrospect, I found the lower and upper much easier. Working the middle use to leave me off kilter for awhile before it stabilized. However I did not fall apart at the retreat. Actually quite the opposite. At one point, dissolving the heart, over and over, longer and longer, something broke loose. For most of my life everything had always been serious business and I was cut off from joy in a way the seriously crippled me. So it was ironic that it was not fear or pain or sadness but good, healthy spontaneous chuckles which built rapidly to laughter. I had nothing to laugh about but that had nothing to do with it. It was at times giggly and others guffawish and it took some restraint not to lolzorz at lunch and dinner with the others. I did not want to detract from anyone's groove or anything. Each laugh spell allowed me to relax deeper and deeper inward into an area that I was previously reluctant to go. It was great stuff. I was changed after that. I was never as serious ever again and I allowed myself to be amused and entertained without restraint in front of others as a result. Buy another copy now. Sleep with it under your pillow to psychically absorb the information. Bruce was able to learn a great deal because he learned Chinese fluently. If you were fluent in Chinese, I daresay it would be easier to get *in* wherever in happens to be get the good stuff. I first saw tai chi with my own eyes in Hong Kong at age 13. I knew it was tai chi because I read about it and was looking for it when I got there. After seeing it I wanted to learn it myself. At age 15 I bought his book about Energy Gates and read his bio of course. I knew I wanted to study with him then and there. Bruce has already done the work. He's collated the data and tempered it with experience. He has done the Pilgrimage quest. It just makes sense to train with him. Training with him one day can yield a treasury of knowledge greater than a year spent with other teachers. It really is worth it if you can mange it.

That's what folks do on the boards. nothing wrong with that Bob.