Jetsun

Why not ?

If you are attached to your opinion and it is shown to be false then that experience can be perceived as being annihilatory as you have placed your sense of self and self value in your opinion; so the solution is to either gain a deeper more stable sense of self or relax the grasping at a sense of self altogether. No quick fix were talking years of inner work.

Aren't all monks men?

'Opening the Energy Gates of your body' is a good place to start, his meditation books are good too like 'The Tao of Letting Go', he has a fair bit on his website also.

Maybe look at the Bruce Frantzis dissolving method, he had back and neck issues and other health problems from a number of car crashes which he helped resolve with his meditation and Taoist practices.

The reason is to stop them from getting horny because once the sexual energy is stimulated it is very hard to control and deal with in a healthy way if you are celibate.

Not very important, in nature if fluid becomes stagnant it becomes toxic so its probably the same in your body.

I would definitely message or email YaMu as he will be able to give you advice from experience I would try Zhan Zhuang too see if it helps. Personally I find the White Skeleton visualisation method by Bill Bodri to be really effective but it depends on the individual , I like it because it covers so many different areas in one technique and is very powerful. But you have many recommendations so it might be best to contact a trained healer or master.

Most of the Buddhist lineages which focus on the Dan Tien take that focus from their fusion with Taoism rather than from the Buddhist side of things, Ch'an took that focus from Taoism then transmitted it to Zen. I don't know of any Pali Sutras or other old Sutras which talk about it.

"Taoist and esoteric practices begin from the perfection of ch'i, thereby overcoming all the obstacles of the physical body. Their first result is excellent health. The second step in such cultivation is to reach samadhi. Confucian and Ch'an (Buddhist) practitioners do not begin with cultivating ch'i, but on the contrary, they start from the cultivation of mind. The circulation of ch'i is automatically regulated by cultivating the mind, and thus improved health of the physical body naturally follows." - Grass Mountain: A Seven Day Intensive in Ch'an Training With Master Nan Huai-Chin

I think it was somebody else, although i'm not sure who, I feel it was someone familiar. I remember the feeling that other people thought it was foolish for the monk to try go on retreat out of his own country in the winter on his own, so they had no sympathy when he froze to death and I was the only one who was sad. I wondered at the time if it was a sign that I shouldn't follow the Buddhist path and should stop studying it.

In my experiences blockages at the root level are often to do with power struggle and being able to claim your power over others and submit to others in a healthy way plus all sorts of extreme fears like fear of loss of love, abandonment and fear of death. If you only focus on the sexual side you may not go deep enough as the sexual stuff is often just an expression of the struggles you had to process in the first years of your life.

I guess it could be a controversial view but humans are at a higher point of evolution than animals so potentially when a human eats an animal it creates the potential for a transformation of the energy of its body to a higher vibration, so its life potentially serves the progression and evolution of the wider world. This process is explained scientifically using the law of octaves and system of hydrogens within the Fourth Way system, but it is dependent on whether a person is cultivating correctly otherwise food just serves lower needs like anxiety and pleasure rather than being converted for higher purposes.

I would have thought the Dao has quite a lot to do with the Dan Tien, otherwise why is is focused on so much by Taoists who want to harmonise themselves with the Dao ? All I'm saying is that Buddhists don't regard this of such great importance in most lineages and prefer to focus on mind training and I think it would be useful to understand why this is the case.

Buddhists don't seem as bothered about the lower Dan Tien as Taoists, I wonder why that is. Depending on the lineage there appears to be quite a few differences, for example the Taoist tendency to try to store energy, to bring it in and shield yourself from others appears to be in contradiction to the Bodhisattva path of complete openness and giving away all you can.

There may not be an eternal unchanging agent but there might be temporary fluid one. Just because a sufferer and a walker is not found it doesnt mean there isn't a sufferer or walker it just means you can't find them or define them.

Maybe you don't need to sense energy flows at all, rather you just have to let go of the blocks to the flows so they go where they need to and harmonise themselves, so there is the action of natural harmonisation within you without you doing anything. For example I have been doing a pure mind awareness exercise which appears to allow my body and mind to start to return to a greater state of harmony and balance, but I don't sense how it is done I just trust the Tao currents will do their thing if I get "me" and my story about myself out of the way.

I had a dream that a Buddhist monk froze to death, I wonder what that meant? it felt like a far more real dream than usual.

They say in the Fourth Way system that free will has to be earned and worked for, if you are bound by all the rules and conditionings that you are subjected to while growing up in a family and society at large then you aren't really free unless you have done something to remove them or transcend your identity so it isn't controlled by them. So I agree some people are free and others aren't , I'm not free yet by a long way but at least I see that I am not which creates the possibility that I could become free by working towards it, while those who believe they are already free without having done anything to earn it are more imprisoned as they see no need to do anything. Edit: but how that relates to no agent I think the teachings which say there is completely no agent fall into the nihilistic side of the middle path so I don't believe they are correct, the self identity and agent is self evident, it just gets polluted with the taints and habits which then claim the identity of the person and imprison them and give them no free will , my understanding of the purpose of many spiritual paths is to show that you are not this bundle of taints and conditionings so you are not what you think you are , but that doesn't mean that there is completely no agent its just the self isn't what most people think it is.

Why don't you tell us your understanding of Stillness Movement from your native sources ? I am genuinely interested as at the moment there are only a few sources of information publicly available in English about it so more information is always valuable. I don't practice the system or want to defend it so am not trying to lure you into an argument or anything.

Nothing wrong with swelling the ego, it is important to exercise your brain and to feel good about yourself otherwise you stop growing, but just look at things from the fact that you and everyone else around you could die at any moment and in the light of that what really matters?

If done incorrectly without proper sublimation it can make you fat like a pig or lean and mean in your psyche

Master Nan Huai Chin talks about this is his book The Anapa Chi conversations with Peter Senge, which is a good book worth checking out.

Gopi Krishna got Kundalini Psychosis by focusing on his third eye, I don't have the details here but he wrote a book about it

That is true I have found that the case for me too, I have often made things worse by focusing on them, the difference may be that with some of these other techniques you are not actually trying to heal anything rather you are trying to bring the energetic pathways back into strength and then if any healing occurs it is a byproduct. The basic premise of these methods (my interpretation) is that you bring any weakness into an unlimited space and let whatever happens happen, then healing is up to the gods or up to heaven