QiDr

I was recently contacted via email by a man wanting to enroll his daughter in my tai chi and qi gong classes over the summer. She was to come here from England and he wanted to know what styles I taught and how much twice-weekly private lessons tuition for two months would be. He said his borther lived in the area and she would be staying with him. I responded with the tuition amount and he asked if he could pre-pay the tuition and asked for an address. I advised him that he could send a casheir's check ONLY, but my preference was that the daughter pay at time of lessons. His next email stated that he had sent two money orders, that both were for over the tuition amount. He wanted me to deduct the tuition and bank the remainder of the money until he gave me the address of one of his "agents" at which time I was supposed to forward the agent the remaning funds to pay for his daughters air fare etc. After the last transmission I forwarded the entire record of emails to the U.S. Secret Service Fraud Division. I had a similar thing happen last year when I was selling a motorcycle, some guy from England wanted to send me several thousand dollors over the amount of the bike and send the remainder to some agent so he could ship the bike to England. They guy never sent anything but this sort of thing is an obvious fraud. It is surprising me that they are now targeting teachers of something as esoteric as tai Chi and Qi Gong. This most recent character found me via my web site and I have to assume that he must have done quite a bit of homework to find me at all. The thing that really toasts me is, these guys think we Americans are greedy and stupid.

I passed this on to other teachers as a heads up, not to be commented on by every twerp in the peanut gallery.

Wishful thinking at best. One cannot get too far out of range either acidic or alkaline and live, if you are mildy acidic or alkline, eat a little (1 tsp daily), sodium bicarb, it will bring you back into balance either way.

Not from here it doesn't

I share office space with a PhD psychologist from Germany who uses Enneagram typing in his work. His suggested reading for any of you who are interested is: Understanding the Enneagram ~Don Richard Riso Discovering the Enneagram ~ Richard Rohr Personally, I do not subscribe to personality typing, There have been attempts made at this since ancient times (five phase typing), and none of it has been usefull to me as a clinician.

Just to touch on the original dialogue, the problem I have with the no teacher approach to Taoism is that of cultivation practices. Most of you have heard me before on this subject so I will keep it short. Cultivations, especially sexual, can hurt you bad. That is one of the main reasons a masterful teacher is needed. If one is learning the art of the sword, there is an expectation that one can and will be cut. Most of the novice solo practitioners of Taoist cultivation don't know that they can develope everything from semen in the urine to a psychotic breakdown by erronious practice of Taoist arts.

Buddhism and Taoism both refer to sexual union as needing to be appropriately motivated. The highest level of attainment in Taoism is virtue, and one does not do that which is unvirtuous. Virtue is responding to all beings from an ethical and moral place. The so called taoist sexual practices that are so compelling to many adolescent seekers are considered a rather base form of cultivation and culturally innapropriate even in China.

Although there is a long history of Taoist poets and drinking, there is no source that I have read in the last thirty five years that doesn't contra-indicate drinking and Qi Gong practice. Most sources give at least a 24 hour prohibition and many up to a week before and after practice. This makes daily practice and drinking impractical at best. As to the use of alcohol in TCM, it is an herb catylist (pao zhi) and is used to modify the effects of herbs. It's own properties are hot and toxic but that is TCM terminolygy and doesn't mean what you may think. The drinking of alcohol, like everything else (including peyote I would imagine), is addressed by the Taoist precept, "A little bit of everything and not too much of anything."

The books by Master Ni Hua Ching are very readable, explicit and informative.

The Japanese meridians are the same as the Chinese. There are still a small number of Japanese MDs who use an acupuncture system that was developed (I think in the Fifties), and since been discarded. The MDs developed a 2 cm grid that was overlayed on the body and at each intersecting point of the grid, there was the acupoint. Although this method was easier to learn, it was functionally inept as eventually fell into disuse.

I call on, and thank every Heavenly being I can conjure, regardless of religious affiliation. The way I figure it, it can't hurt to cover all your bases!

Welcome Yuan Qi, I am an L.Ac. also trained in Florida at FITCM and a thirty year martial artist. Glad to have you abord.

I would not mess with it if I were you. The Atlas-Axis does not "go out" and if there were some sort of "subluxation" at that point you would not be typing right now.

There are a lot of very straight forward taboos to paractices like: It is inadvisable to engage in practice when drunk or intoxicated, within several hours of having sex, when overly full of food, when overly hungry, during the mid-day (yang practices), during mid-night (yin practices), on solstices, new and full moons, When recently angered, close to hard, external martial arts practice, when having emphasis on outcome of the practice. The list can go on and on, The point is, if you are learning practices from a book or video and none of this sounds familiar, you might want to find sources that do list these, and other proscriptions.

Wow, Super Powers and, like, you'll know kung fu dude!

Yoda, sorry to get back so late, reishi is fine as a stand alone herb, as is ginseng. Both would be dosed at 9-12 grams per day so if you are taking an extract you can do the math. The bloke who said that his shou wu is a formula may be taking a formula called simply "he shou wu" but that would be a patent formula and is not a classic formulation. I would have to know the ingredients (there are several patents called shou wu out there) to know its effectiveness. While on the subject of patents, the dose on the label is usually very low, especially patents that come from Hong Kong. If you trust a Hong Kong patent, I would advise doubling the dose that is indicated on th bottle, the rule of thumb is that with patents you need 3-9 grams three times per day for a therapeutic effect.

The immortality/longevity issue is simply an extention of life span so one can get from here to there in this lifetime. "There" is what the ancients termed "Sageliness" which is a fully realized integration with ones self and the universe. There is nothing wrong with the Ego, self awareness keeps you from running into walls and tripping over things. The idea, over time, is to develope enlightened self interest wich is the precourser to enlightenment. But, hey, you're seventeen or eighteen years old, you shouldn't be worrying about this stuff, you should be getting into some good, hard martial arts like Kung Fu or Tae Kwon Do. You are at the peak of your yang energy and should be actuallizing that. Plenty of time for sageliness when you have more milage.

Standing: lightly packing Qi to the lower dantian then gently shake out the wristsw and ankles. Seated: bend forward on exhalation and touch forhead and palms to floor, hold and repeat two more times. Reconnecting to the earth energy so that I can function in this realm after meditation.

My wife teaches Eight Treasures (generally the same as eight brocade set), her lineage has the sets done in 3, 5, 9, etc. reps. the reason is the same for many Qi Gong forms, the Qi you are trying to manipulate is yang and so you are using yang numbers to enhance the qi movement. In othr forms, like the Spiral Dragon, the number of reps (21), are correspondent to the number of vertebral spaces you are opening in the form. In Five Phase Qi Gong it is common to use either reps that correspond to the phase tone or, again, to use the number five as a yang number and the number of phases.

Most of the taboos that surround practices are for the practitioner's protection. For those of you out there who do not have direct instruction, observing practice taboos can save your health, mental and physical. As I have opined, ad nauseum, this Qi Gong stuff is not passive or benign. I have been out for a while, happy Pig year!

Here's another one; Confucius' wife died and he and the mourners gave a very impressive demonstration of grief at the ceramony. Afterward, on the way home with his entourage, Confucious stopped to play with some children. "How can you play with children on the very same day your wife has been sent to the beyond? Is it not our custom to mourn one's wife for a year?" The master said, "At the temple, with the mourners I did what was appropriate at the time, now with these children, I again do what is appropriate at the time."

We tried out several of those machines when I was in TCM school. We tested eight different acu-points (galvanic skin response method), before and after the use of the machines and we tested the same points before and after acupuncture. The qi machines did not show consistant response change where the acupuncture did. the subjects all reported that the machine treatment felt mechanical (go figure), while the acupuncture felt natural. Our conclusion: the best technology for stimulating Qi is a needle.

I had solar hot water heater in a house in AZ a number of years back. Your hot water heater is one of the biggest users of electricity and yes, the savings was impressive. With more high tech innovation on modern solar devices, my guess is that the savings is even greater today.

In different circumstances, the positive energy or virtue of life expresses itself in a myriad of ways, these are all Teh. The Tao is the great movement or turning of the cycles, Teh is the outcome of that process. One is in a state of Teh when one is alligned with the posative outcome of the process, that can be everything from working for tennants rights, helping someone clean out their closet to making green choices when voting or consuming.

I wouldn't worry about lucid dreaming until one has a really good handle on lucid wakefullness.