Jetsun

I will try to convey the advice R.A. Jodjana gives in her book about "natural breathing", essentially if you are breathing naturally the rise and fall of your diaphragm will massage your internal organs, but for your stomach to move downwards-backwards the side-ribs must stay open on the out breath "When you let the ribs stay open while the breath goes out, and do not contract the out borders of the diaphragm, the air will be drawn in, and you will have learned natural breathing" "We should always remember that flowing out , the air finds support in the bottom of the pelvis, and underneath the outer borders of the lungs. The upper-front part of the whole thorax and the mouth stay absolutely free, without any concern about breathing the air." "Let your breath flow out evenly. The coming-in and going out breath will then become united in one movement, like the movement of the waves of the ocean." "We have only to feel and be conscious, that the human breath is in itself a force. Never take a breath, nor hold it while you act. Breath is a gift which we should humbly accept. We receive this gift, leaving our stomach low as we must not grasp at a gift" "You have not consciously accepted this gift and without it you can achieve nothing. How can we make this tremendous change of attitude, and become aware of 'doing not-doing'? What is the outcome of keeping the stomach downwards?" "We should not try to master Prana breathing. Breath is a gift. Prana breathing is the gift of life. We should receive the gift humbly and become consciously aware of it's working. It is important for many reasons throughout your life. At the end of your life it is this movement which will carry us from this life through death into the life after death" So my understanding of this is that natural breathing is something hardly any of us do but by practising it by keeping your side-ribs open and stomach downward on the outbreath and receiving the next breath as a gift rather than something that we own or something to be grasped at, it creates natural prana breathing massaging your inner organs while also creating the platform for natural expression and a change of inner attitude.

If you have anxiety don't use your heart rate as meditation focus, if it changes it can freak you out and make the anxiety worse

I saw his episode on China, he went to a big government sponsored temple which might have been the Shaolin temple, but found most of what was going on was for show and for tourism and there was nothing really spiritual about it so he left and went to a smaller temple in the mountains. He seemed to approach everything with an open mind and went into it with enthusiasm, i'm not sure he found a genuine teacher in China though.

If religion leads you to letting go and living through your heart then it is better than qigong imo, or even better do both.

I don't believe that you would ever become an empty shell by completely letting go, people will still have their essential characteristics, talents and interests. What is true to you will remain while all that has been imposed on you by conditioning will be gone. Young children still have their essential character or personality (which Sufi's call your essence) before adults have anxiously stuffed them full of ideas and beliefs about who they are, which is why all the Masters through history have had different characters and teaching styles even though they have fully let go, or died before they are dead, they still live through the individual personality in their body even if they are not attached to it. I think becoming who you really are by letting go of all that is false is one of the bravest things you can do because you are rebelling against all your parental and society pressures and conditionings so you risk loosing everything by walking on your own.

You don't have to let go of everything if you don't want to at least not until you die, but learning to let go is one of the healthiest things you can do otherwise you have all sorts of things from the past weighing you down, old traumas, grievances, fears can interfere with you getting the most out of life. But the fact is everything is changing all of the time so letting go is the sanest thing you can do because trying to hold onto something which isnt permanent will cause you stress and suffering.

Perhaps try some practice where you direct compassion towards yourself which includes compassion for your ego which demands perfection and compassion for the part of you scared by the panic attacks. This may sound cheesy but when you can connect with your own heart compassion you can connect with how much of an amazing person you are despite whatever failures or imperfections you have, and if those failure and imperfections lead you to living more from your heart then they have been your greatest allies in the grander scheme of things.

I always had the impression Hawaii was this tropical paradise where everyone lived in peace and harmony and did miraculous Huna practices to develop and heal themselves. But then I watched some Dog the Bounty Hunter episodes set there and the women absolutely terrified me let alone the men, so I thought maybe I didn't have a very accurate impression.

This is an account of when Gurdjieff met the Sufi master Ekim Bey - G.I. Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men - p.188

Yes it is possible if you take this stuff too far you can end up in a state which the Buddha called "falling into the pit of the void" which can lead to a pathological state called Depersonalization where you see the world as completely unreal and a dream, but instead of freeing you it cuts you off from your emotional life as you see everything as inconsequential. If someone says they have reached enlightenment or a realisation and they say they are no longer emotionally impacted by the world then most probably they have fallen into the pit of the void. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zIKQCwDXsA

I think they have the same intention, which is essentially undoing conditioning, breaking free of habits of mind, body and emotion and making us more conscious of what we really are. But I'd be a bit careful of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, i love the Fourth Way stuff and find it completely fascinating and study it a lot, but many people try to turn it into an intellectual practice which is the main criticism given to Ouspensky, they even have a conference every year to to try to analyse their works, but many of the practical methods of that system come back to working with the energies of the body, so working with the body is a good place to start in my opinion. Self remembering is quite a complicated subject though and I'm not sure I fully understand it after many years of trying so it is not as straight forward as many Taoist practices.

I think there is a huge difference between a philosopher or intellectual in this stuff compared to an actual practitioner, you can read the bible a hundred times without it turning you into a "good Christian" because nearly all the methods to transform your negative emotions and egoic mind have been lost from Christianity, similarly with Taoism if you just read and try to understand the texts it wont transform you unless you have a disciplined practice. There is plenty of scientific evidence now to show that things like meditation change and transform the areas of your brain to do with positive compassionate emotions and strengthen your resistance to stress, but these brain change results only show up in long term dedicated practitioners and monks and not the irregular or purely intellectual practitioner. I have done philosophy modules at university and it is interesting and I wouldn't mind studying more of it, but a lot of it is just intellectual masturbation and wont actually improve life at all.

The problem is if you expect a result and it doesn't arrive then it produces stress or discouragement. If you have no or few expectations then whatever arrives is a bonus or a gift.

Hi, to me it sounds like you are making great progress and are listening to your body for what it needs rather than blindly plowing forward with a practice which might not be suitable, which is a really healthy sign. Trust your own inner guru I recognise some similar issues with Buddhist practices you describe and I think Water Method is a good technique to deal with those as it can release a lot of bound up tensions and emotional baggage which can disrupt Buddhist meditation. Personally I found Bruce Frantzis audio programme and books quite good for the sitting meditation method which I think is far more simple than many people seem to make out, you just use your attention systematically on blocks and wait for them to change, from my experience the softer and more compassionate you use your attention the more powerful it is.

I think every person you ask will give you a different answer, which can be a teaching in itself, I wouldn't for example recommend hardly anything most the other people have recommended in this thread for a beginner especially things like artificial breathing practices. One tip is that I would definitely stay away from the sexual energy practices. For some basics though personally I think Bruce Frantzis is a good resource. Ideas from books are good in the beginning but on their own will do nothing without some sort of meditation or body practice. Best of luck in your practice, starting as young as 20 could be excellent if you could find a practice you resonate with and can keep up for a few years, you may find it helps you in many other areas of your life too. If I was to go back to when I was 20 I think I would recommend myself something as simple as basic breath awareness meditation or zhan zuhang standing meditation to prepare the ground, the more complicated methods cause more problems they are worth in my view.

Hi rainbowvein, I tried a bit of stillness-movement last week and had a really peaceful experience, but again unfortunately I seemed to have a counter negative reaction. Did you have any emotional reaction or realisation to resolving the blockages in your neck? I wonder if I try to read too much into my blockages and am over concerned about learning their lessons rather than just letting them go, Bruce Frantzis goes on about just letting this stuff go and forgetting about it, I just don't seem to be able to do it at the moment.

I am dealing with a block in the neck myself but it is on the left side, so I will tell you what I have learned for what it's worth. I don't know if a block on the left will be different than on the right but on the left for me it is certainly an emotional block and as such it is difficult to move it away with qigong as it just resists force if it is perceived even the slightest bit aggressive. From the body psychotherapy perspective a block in the neck is likely to do with some sort of blocked expression or not being able/daring to speak your truth or speak up for yourself, usually from childhood. From this perspective trying to get rid of the blockage through qigong may just another way of avoiding what you need to do to heal it, as the block needs to be understood and let go of rather than forced away, there may be a lesson within it which needs to be learned in order to heal. So I would suggest using your awareness with a curious intention without trying to get rid of the block and just go to the edge of it to see what is contained in the energy, just sit on the edge of it energetically with your awareness and see what comes up, what information or emotion is there. Trying to move the energy or get rid of it may be perceived as aggressive which is why sometimes these blocks can last for years despite regular qigong practice. Often emotional blocks are parts of your body or energy cut off from consciousness through repression and lack of compassion at some point in your life, so all they need to heal is gentle compassionate contact and to reintegrate it back in to consciousness, so using your touch very gently with the intent to just contact the area so see what is contained in it can be more effective than trying to massage it away and working lightly on the edge of it is more powerful than diving right into the middle of it. But if it's a physical or some other issue causing it I don't know if this will help at all or if a block on the right is likely to be emotional, it may depend on whether you are left or right handed or a whole load of variables.

Just being over 100 is quite remarkable for men of that era, from the perspective of my own family anyway nearly all of the men of that time who went through such a violent traumatic period in history died young with all the stress of the wars and destruction that they witnessed.

My understanding is that meditation is a method to show you that there is absolutely nothing you can do to meditate, there is nothing you can do to let go except set up the circumstances where there is more possibility of it coming to you either by accident or through grace depending on your perspective. So in that sense it is a waste of time, you would be better off just renouncing all life right now and letting go completely right now rather than spending years fruitlessly trying to make it happen when the act of trying is one of the barriers, but unless you are a Saint that isn't possible so most of us need to fumble around with methods like drunken idiots for a while.

None of them are completely accurate, there are always issues with translation plus to really understand them you would need to study the consciousness and mind set of the people they are aimed at and the time in which they are written. It's a mistake to assume the people of another culture thousands of years ago even thought like us let alone wrote in the same way. Plus many of the scriptures especially ones like Buddhist sutas are usually forms of advice for one particular person in their own unique situation, so to assume the advice given to someone in a different time and place is best for your own unique circumstances is just foolishness, yet many people take any word spoken by their prophet as law.

The role the Internet played in the Arab Spring has terrified the people in power in the main industrial economies so they are rushing through Internet regulation legislation under the guise of protecting the entertainment industry copyrights .... oh wait that ones true

Yeah while under Ayahuasca, it could be the rules are different then I don't know It appears the Tibetan Yogi's had various ways of approaching demons, Padmasambhava apparently used his siddhi powers sometimes wrathfully to overcome them and tame the demons of Tibet so Buddhism could flourish there. If you want to read some funny stories about how to deal with them you should look into how Drukpa Kunley tamed the demons of Bhutan, one story which has been enshrined in Bhutanese legend is how he lured one hostile demon to a house in a valley and when the demon came to the door he put his penis through the keyhole and shot it in the eye, if you go to Bhutan even today they have statues of his penis everywhere because of it's demon subduing power, I wouldn't try that technique at home though.

Nice story, thanks.

I have heard said that in Ayahuasca Shamanism if you come across a spirit and you are unsure about their intentions you can just straight up ask them if they are your ally or not and they will answer honestly. I'm not sure that would personally satisfy me but after than then I guess you can treat them like you would any person you met in the real world and judge them on their actions and what they tell you, if they help you heal someone or heal yourself then you can be pretty confident they are there to help you. Or you could take the Tibetan Chod Shamanism approach and just give the Demons what they want and give them compassion anyway despite their intentions. In my own experience with Ayahuasca and Shamanism "Demons" control you by making you afraid of them so you do all you can to avoid them and run away from them, but then if you turn around and face them and look them in the eye they loose their power over you.

Milarepa apparently only ate weeds and grass which turned his body green and only wore a small loin cloth and lived in a cave in the snowy Himalayas so he was probably quite cold, so he would do Tummo for heat. Not sure if this is the sort of person you were looking for.