Jetsun

Maybe I don't do enough as most of my day is spent in my head but most of my official practice is body practice, I am naturally a mind centred person but I am not any longer trying to get anywhere through psychological introspection, at least not through practice but it does happen through habit. I don't particularly rate most forms of Yoga and Qigong as they are too aggressive and blunt for this sort of work, so my practice at the moment is mostly subtle body mindfulness/vasebreathing/lungjam as taught by Tsoknyi Rinpoche. But even if you work with the body it is pretty difficult to ignore the mind and its attachments and beliefs without using repression, so as far as my understanding goes one of the main purposes of bodywork is so it is easier to observe the mind without being taken by all its whims and motions, so it doesn't claim your identity as easily.

I have heard that the entire Hermetic tradition and lineage is encoded in plain sight in the Gothic Cathedrals like Chartres and even Notre Dame. Some say Chartres is a temple to Isis just in another guise to avoid destruction by the Inquisition

Thanks for all of the replies and advice. To be honest I don't really feel like I am in charge of the process, I understand clearly as a mental concept how it only harms me to cling onto resentment and doesn't do much good to be attached to my personal story, yet it is a different matter for that understanding to sink into the deepest parts of me for me to let it all go, so all I I feel I can do is observe how things are. I am even unsure if wishing things to be different is a good way to proceed, isn't wishing things to be different and trying to change things just another way of avoiding what is really happening?

That sort of music has a lot of power and anger, they are parts of life, those people who are afraid of it are usually afraid of their own power and anger and there is nothing spiritual about that, although some people will try to convince you otherwise. Hate is different, if the music is cultivating hate then it won't lead anywhere good, but power and anger are not hate.

Then where did the Chinese get their knowledge from? I heard that there is evidence of there being an Aryan European blonde hair race in the mummies in the pyramids of China but the Chinese don't like to admit it as it could mean that their knowledge may have originated from outside their country.

I don't really believe it, but I have to pay attention to what comes up and what takes over when the actual prospect of letting things go becomes a reality rather than just a mind concept, in a sense these are my deeper beliefs or attachments which I often like to deny. I see it as a possibility, but not yet a reality.

Meaning may well be the most important thing that exists for us in our lives, if you read Victor Frankl's book about him surviving Auschwitz there were many people who let go of everything and gave up, and the result was that they died in despair, while Vicor managed to survive because he held onto a glimmer of hope that despite the horrors of everything precious dissolving around him his life could have meaning and purpose if he survived. Just about everything we do is a search for meaning so maybe giving up the individual meaning you have attached to your personal story is just a nihilisitic act. I know it's not logical, helpful or anything like that, it is emotionally primitive, but there is no point in pretending any more that it is different from what it is.

Maybe when you die you have to let go of it all whether you like it or not, I understand how if you do this during your lifetime it will cause less suffering and make this a smoother process when you die, but so far I have not been convinced that the result of not letting it go when you are alive is to be born again to have another go, I know a lot of religious texts say that but I see no obvious reason to believe them at the moment.

It could be that you are doing what Master Nan Huai-Chin calls 'dead tree zen' where you sit and dull your mind and repress your thoughts into a state of no thought.

I'm not confessing to having special time with a Catholic Priest or anything, i'm just talking more in general about all the old patterns and left over resentments which I prefer to hold on to rather than let go. Letting go is scary, who are you if you let go of everything which you consider an integral part of yourself? there is plenty of time to merge with the void and nothingness when you are dead.

Yeah I was sort of joking as I would say there is 0% chance of anything like that happening, yet I still don't want to let go of all the internal dramas and grudges which aren't even the slightest bit relevant to my life any more. Forgiveness and letting go is usually such a relief and so beneficial yet for some reason it is difficult to do. I am starting to see the benefit in those paths which do everything for the sake of others, you can forgive and let go for the sake of others but doing it just for yourself is a lot more difficult, most people I see like myself don't bother they prefer to hold on to it all.

Oh they have stopped doing it, they probably stopped and forgot about it over ten years ago, although I will have to see them over Christmas, maybe finally they will recognise what has happened and apologise, fingers crossed!!! maybe I should stop putting my happiness in the hands of others.

If someone like Jesus came along and tried to take away my precioussss I would probably string them up too

Bruce's CD set on the Water Method is quite good, might be worth getting if you are finding the book instructions are not clear. But you have received some excellent advice here. I can only add that it sounds like you may be trying to do too much too quickly, I have heard that it takes weeks to dissolve the most obvious blockages in the head, personally (I am an extreme example and this is no exaggeration) I have been trying to dissolve some of the blocks in my head for many years! and that is considered the first stage! I haven't even made it to the main part of my body yet. The point in the top of your head is open as a baby then closes as you get older so many primal blockages are held there, dissolving that gate is very important. I have personally found the softer you are, the less you try to do the more powerful it is, so the process is opposite to most other things you do in life. I began by trying to dissolve with effort and make things happen, but it only started to work when I stopped my doing and just allowed the process of my attention and breath to do the work, the lighter you do it the better. Snowmonki once told me you use your attention more like caressing your body and blockages with light silk rather than attacking them with an aggressive lazer beam of your attention.

It is good exercise though

What sort of demonic force is convincing so many people that such lax gun laws are a good thing? most of the rest of the world sees that as the real insanity and evil going in your country

That is your position but not the position of many prominent Sufis, like Idreas Shah who says that Sufism existed way before Mohammad. Many scholars say that they had to hide Sufism within Islam in order not to be persecuted rather than because they are integral parts of each other.

I get the impression from the film that Norbu was damaged by his monastic upbringing and as a result has somewhat stunted emotional relationships with many of his family, some say it is some sort of spiritual or cultural thing and isn't important and nobody is perfect, but personally I would have hoped his practice would have healed many of those wounds. I also got the impression that he only really started to take his practice that seriously when he became ill and thought he might die. There were a few scenes with the Dalai Lama and the DL seemed full of energy and delight while Norbu seemed kind of depressed to me. Yet that is all my subjective take on a short film, I have not attended any of his teachings so I may change my mind if I did. Tsoknyi Rinpoche has some good articles on his website http://www.tsoknyiri...art-one-of-two/ and you can get a good 30 page talk of his here www.buddhistmala.com/store/Lung.doc for free from one of his retreats He has written a few good books, he has a new one out called 'Open Heart Open Mind' which is really a beginners mass appeal book and seems very simplistic but I think it is excellent http://www.scribd.co...of-Essence-Love , and he has a few others which are more focused on Dzogchen like 'Care Free Dignity'

I would avoid any method which is going to add energy or speed up your nervous system, so stay away from Pranayama, vigorous yoga and powerful movement Qigong, I say this because when I was trying to deal with the worst stage of my dissociation I was being treated by a Cranio-Sacral Therapist and she was treating me by slowing down my nervous system in areas where there was excessive energy, but one session I asked her to do the opposite thinking if the energy was sped up I could discharge it, but the result was that I went away and was so dissociated and spaced out I could barely talk or think for a good few days, it was very unpleasant. So I would listen to what everyone else is saying in this thread about taking it easy, getting into nature and grounding and not doing a lot of energy work or meditation. The Shamanic approach to Soul Retrieval is another area which could be looked at if its your sort of thing, Shamen have seen that we lose parts of ourselves or we protect parts of ourselves by hiding them when we encounter a great stress or trauma so as a result we become split and dissociated from the present. The main thing I have learned from this is that it is usually a childhood part which has become lost but in order for it to return you have to create the environment in yourself where it feels like it might want to return, so if you are never relaxing, never having fun or playing, over working or abusing yourself the child part will not return to your energy because it will not find living in that way any better than being cut off, just like a real child would hate living in that sort of way. So you might not be able to heal yourself whatever method or amazing healer you find to help you if you haven't created this more loving hospitable environment in yourself.

Yeah I agree with what you are saying, but but then on the other hand resting in the natural state I imagine would clear many of the blockages faster than most other means; Tsoknyi Rinpoche says that many Buddhist teachers need to have more guts and point out the natural state far more quickly to their students without such long preparation, but many people need a clearing of their subtle body first and to get lung back into it's proper place below the navel. I never really got a strong pull towards Norbu though for some reason, when I watched that film about his him and his son I felt a great sadness more than anything else, whereas with some other Lama's I sense a greater freedom. Maybe that is just me though, it is wonderful that he is making these teachings so accessible and available to anyone .

Dissociation is something I have looked into quite a lot, one Taoist I have found who talks about this problem clearly is Bruce Frantzis who talks about four main types of blockages you encounter during his Water Meditation which are strength, tension, contraction and something which doesn't feel quite right but you can't work out what is is. This 'something which doesn't feel quite right' he is talking about he also calls 'fog' which is basically the result in your energy of shock and trauma and he goes on to explain the many ways it can get trapped in your nervous system through things like birth trauma and pre verbal trauma, even womb trauma and all sorts of overwhelming experiences. But it can be dissolved in the same way other blockages, although more tricky it can be done with his Water Method. A woman named Jane Alexander has a blog and book about her healing her traumas using it. Normal mind meditation may make this condition worse so I would be careful, Bruce Frantzis is the only one I have found who really talks about this in any significant way but I would be interested if there is anyone else out there . There is more I can write but will have to later on.

If you put on the light then you can be illuminated to the truth that the snake in the corner is in reality a harmless rope, if you keep the light on you remain enlightened to your illumination, but if the light goes off you can start imagining there are dangerous snakes in the darkness again ... or something like that , I don't have personal experience so I probably should stop talking about things I don't know about.

In some schools this is true, but in others a single technique might all that is required, maybe some techniques do all of the stages simultaneously.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche is my favorite Dzogchen teacher, he is the holder of various lineages and I really like his style and admire his spirit. He gives teachings in the UK and US every year. From his experience of teaching he says that many westerners need to deal with misplaced lung in their body before they do excessive Dzogchen practice otherwise it can just space you out.

Who cares what spirit is when half the posts here are talking about spirituality?