Green Tiger

Creepiest shit I have read recently. Thanks . . . ?

Yeah, he demos the stances and shows how you can collapse into them and then fill back up from the collapsed position into what he calls the 'zero' or optimal position. He also demos how you could work with a student and help them to relax their arms and legs in each of the stances. It's kind of a long video with lots of good content. I think there was even a helicopter gunship battle

I started working with the DVD this weekend. I definitely like the drawdown/buildback training technique. I feel like what he shows is an exaggerated version of something I do repeatedly when practicing standing. I'm always collapsing a little bit and the filling back up. I've mostly just done that in the double-weighted wu chi stance and also in santi. Practicing drawdown/buildback in golden rooster stands on one leg and stretch kick is really tough! Even ward off was a lot tougher than I expected. I definitely think it helps to start with the single-weighted stances and then move to the 70-30 stances. After golden rooster and stretch kick my legs were already turning to jell-o. Ward off felt fantastic! A big relief, too. Also the comparison of cloud hands to the sumo leg lift exercise was really interesting. I liked that he ended on that one. After all the static standing it was nice to have an easy moving exercise to close. By the time I finished my 25-30 min session I was feeling pretty whipped. Definitely felt the hard wave hit me, but not so much the soft wave. I think I may have some misalignment to work out before that will flow. I'll be looking forward to my next standing practice session.

I've already made up my mind concerning your practice. I'm not interested in self-induced hallucinations.

Do you post there? I occasionally prefer the locker room to this place, which reminds me more of a high school cafeteria sometimes.

If anyone is looking for the opposite (a forum with more martial arts guys and fewer people who want to talk about their kundalini awakening) The Rum Soaked Fist is a great one. Their emphasis is on internal martial arts, but most of the people there approach it from a pretty materialistic, Newtonian-physics oriented viewpoint. I don't always agree with their perspective, but I think it is a nice change of pace from this forum. They aren't nearly as interested in immortality, semen retention, enlightenment, and all that jazz. Mostly they talk about how to train to use the body efficiently in a martial arts context. There are some good discussions about standing meditation and other cultivation methods, but anyone who starts talking about 'empty force' usually gets smacked down pretty quickly. They have one section of the forum where only people with 500+ posted are allowed to post. Really weeds out the riff-raff.

If you want me to order and re-ship, I've got shipping connections. Just PM.

A little sumpin fuh tha ladies.

I didn't! It just, like, went away. EDIT: I uploaded it instead of linking to it. I think the URL changed or something. I think some people thought I was being facetious with a blank post and liked it. *shrug*

I think this thread just got re-appropriated.

Scott is not your typical Tai Chi instructor. When he talks about the purpose of practicing Tai Chi, he says that its really all about getting a powerful natural high. Sure, you could get some health benefits and learn some self defense techniques, but really it's all about getting high. I'm paraphrasing, but he did a great job of motivating me to practice more.

I watched the video once (well, actually, I watched about 20 mins of it, fell asleep, then watched the 7 poses). My first impression was that Scott seems nervous at the start of the video. His voice sounds higher (and he is not a bass to begin with) and his body language is saying "I feel really uncomfortable in front of a camera." Not that it really matters, probably, but I thought that was odd. From what I've seen so far, the content is great! Like Cheya said, he explains some of the concepts from the book in more detail and shows 7 tai chi postures that he does in the cheng man ching style, but they are really universal tai chi poses that any tai chi practitioner should be familiar with. Looking forward to watching it and practicing with it. Also looking forward to the next book.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a Google image search with the word 'meditation' in it, inevitably brings up a lot of half-naked models sitting cross-legged on the beach . . . No wonder its becoming so popular . . .

More like .5MB . . .

this is pretty rad . . .

and another . . .

That's strange, the original post .jpg seems to have disappeared . . . Here's another one.

MJJ Becker made a statement a while (a long while) back on a thread here saying that he knew for a fact that not everything in the book was factual. He didn't specify, but that scene immediately came to mind.

I would lurk on TaoBums all day and still get a nice paycheck. Wait . . .