Jetsun

Psychotherapy can be good but a lot depends on the therapist, if you can find one who does their own inner work and spiritual practice then that is a good sign, my advice is to stay away from the analytical head based approach, psychoanalysis itself is just another form of dissociation from your feelings so I would stay clear of that. You don't necessarily have to understand mentally what is causing your blockages but you may have to feel the feelings within them. There is progress in the body psychotherapy area these days which is similar to some Taoist practice in principle, as it is about brining awareness to those areas of your body which are cut off from your light. The therapist helps with grounding you in the moment and with support when facing difficulties. I have been doing a fair bit of this myself and the technique is that you ground your awareness and presence in a "safe" part of your body then you pendulate your awareness imbetween the safe area and the edge of the blockage and back, which means you can work slowly and safely in moving into your blockages in a balanced non threatening way. If you just try to dive into your blockages with Qigong or a master tries to blast them away then you are likely to provoke a defensive reaction from your body and contract which means you get nowhere. I was basically told that because most of your blockages are created in relationship with other people then the only way to heal them is in relationship with other people, becoming a long term student of a qigong master might provide such a healing relationship but just having a few sessions with a healer I doubt can do much for serious psychological issues.

It might not be as big an issue as you assume, just about all of my friends smoked weed every day for a few years when they were teenagers, nearly all of them have gone on to become healthy fully functional adults, they grew out of the weed smoking and got bored of it after a few years. It is possible to change people's habits by means like hypnosis but you are getting into severe manipulation territory which may well do more damage long term to your relationship with your brother. That sort of work is considered the dark side because you are overstepping another persons boundaries which I think in the end can only create a negative reaction in response because all of us know on some level when we have been violated by covert manipulation.

After reading what Fulllotus wrote about perv attacks and how people are always trying to suck your energy I was wondering how you would defend against such subtle attacks? I imagine crossing your arms will help seal your energy off but what else can you do. Someone said something about connecting your index finger and thumb together seals your energy? Seeing as it's Christmas I anticipate I will be facing some situations where I would want to be protected and not open as all the unconscious family status patterns come back into play, I'd like to find a way not to be dragged back into all those patterns like I usually am.

I was talking more the Hatha Yoga asana based type. I practised it for a time and I know many people who have practised it for years and the main benefit I can see is fitness and stress relief. There are Yoga classes down almost every street theses days, if it really was an effective tool to transform people's consciousness then half the world would be enlightened by now.

I don't disagree with you CT, most of what we do is an attempt to try to find this unobtainable stable ground, but one thing I have learned is that spiritual practice is best done from a place of mature ego, the Dalai Lama has said the same thing in the past and Ken Wilber explains why in a number of his books better than I can. If you haven't dealt with your wounds and blockages from your childhood they will emerge and may well sabotage your spiritual practice at some point and practices like those in Buddhism may not be the best option to try to deal with those sorts of issues because that is not what they are meant for.

1 - He more or less tried everything available at that time in India which included a lot of extreme yogic and meditation methods but it was only when he completely let go and completely relaxed that he gained enlightenment 2- Very important, perhaps more important than anything else imo, facing up to your own suffering and problem emotions is the foundation of practice in my view, I don't know about the methods you mention though but unless you get the foundations solid you will always be on unstable ground 3 - Qigong and Yoga are excellent exercise and health methods but I don't think they will lead you very far spiritually 4 - Psychadelics can break through fixed perceptions but they will only give you tastes of different ways of being, on their own they can do nothing and often cause more trouble than they are worth. 5 - There are methods within some systems you can practice while working in any job or in any situation, with many other systems you are meant to try to take the consciousness you get from meditation into your daily life but it is very hard to do.

The problem with some psychological issues and using Qigong to try to help is that often you get secondary gain from your blockages and you may not want to let them go because you feel you need them as defences, so Qigong can just stress the system by trying to work through blockages which on one level you don't want to be released. This is what I have found from personal experience anyway, I sought out a few masters looking for them to help me but they couldn't do much because on one level I felt I needed my defences and blockages, one master said that when he was working on me he felt me energetically try to lash out and punch him to try to get him to stop. I guess it depends on the type of problem you have, there are cases of Qigong helping with ptsd type cases and moderate anxiety and depression. The one master I have met who is a genuine healer is a guy called Yap Soon Yeung who visits Canada quite a lot and has documented success with things like shock trauma. Hundun wrote a good topic of someone using Shaolin Wahnam Qigong to cure depression if that is your issue http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/20719-depression-kills-qigong-saves/

It's not such a silly question, many methods of meditation may just be self hypnosis and other may just be worthless or ways of repressing yourself. Many masters within lineages like Dzogchen say what most people practice isn't actually real meditation yet they are called meditation methods, so it depends on your definition of meditation.

Many meditation methods may not be Taoist in nature at all "The Tao is natural. All forced manipulations and concoctions are in vain. Some people guard their minds and settle their ideas and thoughts, some people hold their breath and keep it in the abdomen, some people perform psychosomatic energy-circulation exercises. When these people come to the end of their lives and find everything they did was useless, they will resent the gods, also uselessly." - Liu I-Ming 'Awakening to the Tao'

I have been looking at some of the empath protection videos they have some interesting information, one of them says that the basic hand gesture is putting your thumbs and index fingers together like a star, a bit like the Jay Z diamond Apparently you see business people like Donald Trump do it all the time when they are in meetings and want to collect themselves. They also recommend keeping your feet flat on the floor and some say cross your ankles too. Ideally I would like to be able to take the Tonglen route but i'm not sure it is always the best option at all times for me at the moment. When I was having a rough time in my personal life I went to see a Buddhist who was also a psychologist for advice and guidance and I expected him to tell me to do some opening heart meditations to connect with others and practice Tonglen, but he said to me "the first thing we are going to do is to get your barriers and defences up" which surprised me and it is something i'm still working on to be honest.

You can question your own reasoning and thinking, but you have to work with what information you have and your own feelings about an issue otherwise how else do you live your life?

Well it depends on where you are at, most of us aren't sages or mystics and generally I tend to think those people on this site who think they are are full of it (not meaning you personally). I do sort of agree with you that by trying to protect yourself you are reinstating you are being attacked so it may just make you weaker, but then what do you do if you feel you are being attacked or pulled back into patterns you want to get out of? Perhaps this isn't a problem for everyone but I suspect it may be for a quite a few people.

From the Dzogchen perspective all the methods people practice like focusing on one point, or on the dan tien or the breath is not real meditation, they can lead to real meditation but they are not the real thing. Essentially trying to do anything with your mind and attention creates a duality and a disconnect, so they say in Dzogchen that meditation only begins when you rest in the nature of your own mind, all the other methods are just preparation or training wheels so you can do this.

The actual Water meditation is not very difficult, so I wouldn't worry about it being too advanced to try. The books and cd set explain it pretty well and by the sounds of things it might be be more straightforward than what you are currently doing. Essentially you just observe your blockages systematically and any emotions or sensations are regarded as good in the sense that they are "water" or moving energy which is a step closer towards freedom than "ice" which is a frozen still energy and whatever you experience can be let go of.

I like that, replacing ignorance with the concept of Satan makes it even more difficult for people to discover it's existence because it brings in fear and terror so people do all they can to avoid it, whereas the concept of ignorance may hurt your pride but it isn't that terrifying.

I like the way the Dalai Lama describes the relationship between compassion and suffering in that on the fundamental basic level all people want to be happy and avoid suffering, so in that respect we are all the same and can relate to one another from that basic compassionate wish even if you have had little obvious suffering in your own life you can still empathise with any other persons suffering from this level because you have the same wish. If you explore this idea further then it is possible to extend your compassion to almost anyone perhaps even extreme cades like Hitler if you see their motivation came from the same place that they do what they do because they want to be happy and avoid suffering but lack the wisdom to make their wish come true and only create misery for themselves and those around them. But everyone has suffered to certain degrees, when you were a feotus you were warm comfortable and secure, then the first thing you do when you are born is cry out as you enter into the cold hostile world so you have already suffered a loss and pain as your first experience in life, then you have to face the suffering that the world isn't perfect and your parents don't love you completely, etc the suffering goes on and on for all of us, so I don't believe people when they say they haven't suffered so they can't relate to it, I just think those people haven't faced up to their own suffering yet.

The Essenes interest me too, apparently they would infuse their regular day to day work with their spiritual practice so it would energise them so they could work all day long without tiring and seeing as we all spend so much time at work it could be very valuable to learn how they did this. Which of the vids do you think is the best? I would like to watch them all but you have linked quite a few.

What is the energetic difference between having the foot on top of the leg rather than underneath? I would have thought the energetic connection is just the same, your legs are still crossed so the left and right sides of your body are connecting.

In terms of what you can do or what action you can take to help another with their suffering personally from my own experience I have found those people who are just present with you and your problems without either running away or trying to "fix" you are the most helpful and compassionate. What action can you really take to help another? sometimes it is obvious of course if someone needs feeding give them food, but in general I have come to understand that just holding the wish that another be free from their suffering generates a lot of compassion and is enough, trying to "fix" another persons personal suffering usually causes more problems than it solves.

Philosophically and intellectually Westerners can understand Eastern ideas just as well as anyone, the problem I think comes when you try to apply those teachings to your own development as they may not be suited to your psychological/developmental state which is highly culturally influenced. Which is why I think the Buddhist concept of skillful means is so important and it is best to find a teacher who understands the blockages which come from your culture.

Yeah I agree, also it shows the value and importance of having a mature ego as it's less likely you will perceive minor social attacks as threatening and you will feel more able to deal with any attacks that come your way, so less activation of the kidneys, less stress and turmoil going on in your body, which will make meditation and spiritual practice smoother as well as being much better for your health. This might sound like a bit of a contradiction that you need to reduce and mature your ego but what I mean is that it is important to have the foundations of adequate mature ego defences to deal with life before you try to dive into transcending it or you will feel too vulnerable and threatened by being opened up by spiritual practice.

If the yang energy isn't immediately burned off or processed at the time of trigger then it tries to find it's own way out later, so people become violent, abusive have road rage and get into fights etc, which is common with combat vets who have these survival energies still stuck inside of them trying to find a way to be released. On a less extreme scale with survival states most of us get trigered into every day those left over yang energies will put people in a bad mood or give them anxiety until they can either exercise them away or sleep them off, which is why exercise is so important for your health on so many levels. I have seen some experiments that show that your body reacts to an ego threat in the same way a physical threat, so say you get into a public argument in the office or someone knocks your pride a little even with something as small as being insulted on a forum like this then your body might kick in the same survival energies it would if you were faced with being physically attacked even though there is no actual mortal danger. So if we want to stay healthy we need to move beyond this state of consciousness of trying to protect our ego with extreme survival energies.

I don't expect much to change from this because I doubt China would allow it. The whole reason why China got involved in the Korean war in the first place was so the USA wouldn't have direct land access to their mainland to threaten them with a ground invasion and I dont think that has changed, they need North Korea un-unified and hostile to act as a buffer zone.

I have been reading that book, I think Lama Yeshe understands the western mind better than many Buddhists. But like Pheonix says you need to do a lot of basics before you move onto the practises like Inner Fire, Lama Yeshe emphasises this that you need to do a lot of preparation with cleansing practises and prostrations to prepare the ground. I myself was thinking of skipping all of that and moving onto the hardcore practises but I have reconsidered and am just doing basic cleansing instead, but I think it is common for people to think that they can skip all of the beginning stuff especially when they are told it may take a few years of preparation, people want the goods now.