LBDaoist

Bach's violin concertos are no joke. There is real power in them.

There you go, fixed that for you.

Really?

No matter what you do, or choose not to do, you will fall into hardships. Just as life will bring you joy, it will also bring you sorrow. It will bring you success, and then moments later bring you failure. You will be high and you will be low.

Then what? It seems to me that you are proposing a disdain for society simply because we all die eventually.

It is a self preservation mechanism. Those who are cast out from society are left to fend for themselves. We are all one. The purpose of life is to perpetuate itself, and to do that requires being with others. Now sure, you could go hermit styles by yourself but in the end, that would be the unnatural path.

I had to think about my response for a while, and having done so I realize that working with internal visualizations of the light is not any less deep than focusing on the breathing. Both of them are equally shallow, and far from the ultimate state of mindlessness that can be achieved. I just relax my eyes when the lids are closed and after a few moments the light begins to manifest. It is not at all unlike what happens when the eyes are closed and you rub very hard on the eyelids. I'm not sure about internal visualization to heal broken bones, but I have used it for muscle sprains and other injuries related to kung fu training after speaking with someone else at the temple who mentioned doing the same thing. Basically it was just a practice of relaxation and focused breathing, combined with an intent to will the hurt part of the body to be calm, peaceful and healthy again.

In my experience it was dedicating the time to doing it. That is easy enough to overcome. The second challenge for me was allowing myself to simply be and paying attention to that. I still struggle with feeling like I have to "do" something, rather than allowing my body and mind to relax and become settled.

I wholeheartedly agree. If you want to, read my previous response to Hagar regarding the headaches I was having. The awareness of light / dark became manifest to me as I was focusing on the pain and letting it go.

On the subject of light I was dealing with some headaches after taking a flight to the east coast earlier in the week. When I closed my eyes and started to relax with the intention of dealing with the headache, I noticed a dark spot in the part of my head where the pain was. Through calm breathing and focused internal relaxation, I was able to dissipate the darkness and allow light into the area. There was a direct correlation between the amount of light / lack of darkness in the area and the amount of pain I felt. Also lately during meditation, I have been paying attention to improving the quality of internal light (as perceived upon the back of my eyelids) instead of my breathing. My impression is that it is a less deep practice than breathing, but it is easier for me to maintain at this point in my life. The visual stimuli seems more engaging and easier to maintain than the physical stimuli that comes from maintaining awareness on the breathing.

Appreciate what you do have. Life is very short. Ask yourself, do you want to waste your time focused upon what you do not have? Make the most of what you do have, cherish it. Develop an attitude of appreciation. You do reality a disservice by shunning it and yearning for something else. Life is what it is. Enjoy it.

In my experience the metaphor of "breathing" is the easiest thing for a student to grasp and apply to the internal processes of the body. All of the organs have their own "breath" and their own "respiratory rate". If not the breath, the other internal sensation that comes close is "pulse" or "heart beat". Just as the heart beats, the organs also beat with their own pulse. Respiration is simply the easiest metaphor for the mind to grasp. So much of qigong, especially in the beginning before a strong flow has been established, visualization and imagination are key to the process. Without breathing and/or respiration, how do you guide the student to the sensations that they are looking for?

The point that I am trying to get across is that at some point during the practice of qigong, the practitioner has to focus on the breathing. It is one of the first steps along the path. The example I offered was that a person needs to crawl before they can walk. The muscles need to be built up. In the same way, the mind needs to become acclimated to the breath before the deeper, internal practices can be grasped. The reason I'm even in this discussion is an attempt to keep people without basic experience from being misled. Internal circulation detached from the breath is a very high level practice. On my own journey, I spent a lot of time reading some fairly high level manuals like "marrow and brain washing" and tried to practice it without the necessary foundation. By the time I found a master and began training under him, I had to unlearn a lot. Not only that, my beliefs about what I thought I knew got in the way because I was trying to fit what I was being taught into that previous structure I had come up with on my own. When I see comments in this thread along the lines of, "Qigong does not have to involve breathing." I feel the need to jump in and clarify things.

I am honest about my dishonesty and my fear of the truth.

Mal, I practice qigong a couple of times a day. It is a good way to start things off in the morning and when you focus on the internal dynamics it strengthens the muscles and tendons. I also do sui lim tao (a Wing Chun form) and both 6 and 36 dynamic tension exercises. Those are great for tendon training.

So you're splitting semantic hairs, with a guy who does not speak English as his native language and is trying to positively contribute by translating the native Chinese? Nice.

Yet it still refers to breathing and respiration. What point are you trying to make by separating breathing from qigong? Qi is life force. Qigong is about cultivating and improving the quality of life, the quality of energy in the body. The body breathes. That is what it does. I just see a bunch of silliness here. What's next? Talking about circulating the blood without the heart beating? Maybe we can talk about digestion-gong that does not involve the stomach at some point.

Watching this thread has been tiring as I observe a few strong egos trying to assert their interpretations of how things are supposed to be. Here are some things to consider. One of the most basic internal practices begins with using the mind to tune the breathing. Through that practice, the mind and the body become harmonized. It has been my experience that only when the mind and breathing are tuned can the mind then be EFFECTIVELY used to lead the qi to extremities and circulate it. Now, once a person has practiced for some time and developed some ability, the mind can be used to lead the qi by itself. Yet that point CANNOT be reached without first going through the practice using the breathing to lead the qi. It's like expecting a baby to run before it has even mastered crawling. The legs are not strong enough and it will fall flat on its face. Given that, when I read people here saying "Qigong doesn't have to involve breathing." I laugh. It most certainly does. It's like saying, "Drinking does not involve swallowing." Or "Walking does not involve lifting your feet." And for the record, I practice both iron shirt and iron palm, along with dynamic tension exercises from Hung Gar... in addition to less strenuous, 8 brocade style qigong, and tai chi ball exercises.

1. Fate brought us together. or 1. We were brought together by fate. 2. We were destined to be together. or 2. It was our destiny to be together.

Anyone who claims to be practicing qigong without breathing is not doing qigong, they are doing something else and have simply stolen the term and applied to what they do. There are a multitude of energy practices out there, so maybe Ya Mu is into one of those. He / she isn't doing qigong.

The continuation of any lineage has been a sticky subject going back centuries. So many of the ancient teachers expressed concern about deviant paths and deviation from the way as students vied for position. Thomas Cleary has done a lot of translations of old texts, and the first two volumes of his collection "The Classics of Buddhism and Zen" contain many thoughts from old teachers about lineage. I found them to be prescient.

I think the most influential "green" source right now influencing the collective conscious is the intentional destruction of the United States dollar (the green back), and the global redistribution of wealth as the paradigms for resource control that have been in place for the last few generations are beginning to crumble.

That guy has some good jin.

The list seems more like ten phases of qigong practice, as opposed to ten phases of qi. I was anticipating something perhaps more akin to the "qualities" of qi. Heavy, light, pulsing, steady, floating, sinking, etc.

When I read this the subject of timing comes to mind. It has been my experience that all of the teachings are very simple. What often occurs seems to be that the student does not yet have the capacity to accept or appreciate them. In the subject of training martial arts this comes up quite frequently. The sifu can show a student a "secret" kick, or in the tradition I study, the three inch punch. However without years of repetition and training, simply knowing the technique is worthless. It has often been said, "The sifu can only take the student half way." At a certain point, the student needs to build upon the foundation provided to them by the sifu. I spend time studying baguazhang. It is a complex art. There are many layers of intricacies and subtle movements. There are questions that I do not even yet know to ask, and even if I did, the answers would be worthless without the physical conditioning and muscle toning to make use of them. Just as a student might have the right to "request" something, a teacher has just as much right to laugh at them. What right does a student have to a master's time? A master is just a student, with their own studies to pursue and their own questions to answer for themselves. I've only been teaching for a few years, but I've already had students come up to me and say, "When you told me X a long time ago, I didn't get it. But now that I've been training for a few years, it makes sense." Often times, a teacher is presenting lessons. The students are too focused on what they think they want and they fail to absorb what they are being given.