idquest

Seeing that your diet includes a lot of beans, I'd look into this in more detail. From my experience, whenever I eat beans for dinner, I feel elevated level of agitation through the night. You could try excluding beans from the meal for 2-3 weeks and see what happens.

YOu can check out sun salutation from vinyasa/ashtanga yoga. And then make your judgement.

I use pressure cooker exclusively to cook chicken feet. I cook them for about 1 hour and the cooker makes all the tendons, ligaments, and small bones in the feet eatable and (hopefully) digestible. And ridiculously tasty. My theory is that tendons and ligaments are composed of the type of protein human bodies need to build its connective tissue. Whether it is true or not, the upside is that I get very tasty meal. I use bouillon from the feet to cook rice, on top of that. Never tried beef tendons even though have been watching it in the local Asian store for a while.

Have you heard somebody reading out loud DDJ in Chinese? It is like nails being hit by a hammer in your head. If this is your idea of poetry then sure, why not.

Frantzis has had different packages for his online course since he first launched it like 4-5 years ago. I subscribed to the very first one; and I was on subscription until I realised that I was not getting anything new out of it. Then I dropped off. DOn't know how old you are but if you are more than 35, you can't do qigong only and hope you would go far enough in your practice. In my practice, I follow Damo Mitchell's advice that yoga should take around 30% of the movement practice time. The point is that with ageing, the tissues in the body become increasingly frigid (see Dao De Jing for reference) and to release the frigid tissues, which is one of the major goals of any internal practice, you need something more that soft movements of qigong. But again, everybody builds their own practice based on their goals, needs, and abilities!

I tried some of it several years ago and eventually dropped off. If you want to add something to what you learned in Dragon&Tiger and $97/month is a stretch (totally agree with you here), you could subscribe for a good quality yoga streaming service like $10/month and see how your performance skyrocket.

This is interesting as my experience is that garlic irritates the mucous membrane in the mouth. DO you have any support in studies or is it you personal experience that garlic can prevent mouth ulcers?

I liked five-minute eye massage that all Chinese children must do in school, you can read it here: https://www.yoyochinese.com/blog/four-selfcare-skills-i-learned-growing-up-in-china Not sure whether it is TCM or not, but certainly it is deep in Chinese culture.

There are numerous versions of the Brocades. If you do any of them long enough, you'll notice/realise that they are in fact fundamental level exercises working with qi. THis is what jiben qigong means. Regarding the goal - the goal is to release tissue, first external and then going deeper. As such this is an endless process - there will always be new levels of tissue to release, deep to the bones. So you start with Brocades of any sort and then you move on to something deeper. In his classes, Mitchell and his senior students show how to better and more efficiently achieve this release. If I were in driving distance from his classes, I'd certainly attend.

It was intensive. It is not just an adjective in the description. It is hard work, achieving gong.

Meditating in caves has its own qualities which are not connected to a lack of sunlight. My experience has been that in the cave I could attain a deep meditating state literally in 5 seconds. Whereas in a regular quiet room I need 30+ minutes to get there.

In my experience, any practice is a moving target. What I mean is that when I train I first I feel some tissues in the body, with practice that feeling goes to deeper levels in different parts of the body, and this is endless process with new and new tissues involved and opening, down to the bones and perhaps to bone marrow. In my view, saying that a specific movement is designated for a specific organ - this is a restricted and limiting approach. Because when somebody says this movement is for organ A, you start listening to your organ A when in fact you could be miles away from that level of practice. Damo Mitchell says that neigong is a process. I interpret his words as 'moving target' - if you train on a consistent basis, every week you will have a new opening in your body, a new targeted piece of tissue - it's a process rather than a static state. The other point I keep reminding to myself is that there is a theory and there is practice. In theory, a specific movement could be designated to a specific organ. And who exactly knows whether it is true or not? Even when people can feel how a movement affects a specific organ, it does not necessarily mean this will be good for that organ. Because we have 5 element theory with feeding organs and destruction cycle - if your organ A is out of balance it does not necessarily mean you have to train this specific organ. It could be that the feeding organ requires support. Or it could mean that arresting organ requires calming down. So I personally find it misleading and potentially dangerous focusing personal practice on specific organs with reason being that vast majority including myself have no idea how it all works. As for yoga and its place in overall practice - my experience is that yoga is a great tool for stirring and building fundamentals, for basic training. But then I have to conceptualise newly achieved skills, new openings in the body; and with this come sitting meditation and movement practices. I must say that sitting meditation, to my great surprise, contributed more to the internal work on tissues that any movement practice I had been doing before I started to sit for 60-90 minutes. How much of yoga to do? For somebody younger it could be less, I need more yoga as I'm older. Damo Mitchell's guideline is 30% of training time should be yoga and I think it is a good starting point before you personalise your own practice.

1) Aerobics is designed to train heart and muscles. Sets like Ba Duan Jin are designed to train connective tissue (fascia, tendons, ligaments) and connect the tissue through the whole body. 2) It does not matter much what specific set you do. What matters is HOW you do it. Many people do Ba Duan Jin in the same fashion as simple physical exercise and fail to achieve its goals. You can do whatever spontaneous movements you want as long as they achieve your goal which differ from person to person; but if you want to train connective tissue and connect it, verified sets like BaDuanJin are better than the others. 3) Your connective tissue changes and transforms to the better when you do any Dao Yin. Not so much muscles. If you want to train muscles, do weight lifting, not qigong. As for blockages, they can be different: physical and mental. For physical blockages, think of it as tensed and/or frozen muscle groups and undeveloped/shrinked tendons/ligaments/fascia. TO get back to normal, you have to unfreeze all that stuff. In my experience, qigong is too soft for this. This unfreezing is better achieved by dao yin sets or yoga. But this is personal of course.

I have this book. Such practices as tree qigong, sleeping meditation, walking qigong are described pretty close to how Wang Liping teaches in the retreats. More complex practices in the book, even though described well, are better studied with the teacher.

Politically incorrect but true...

I agree with this. If a teacher wants to teach here on the TB, they can do that in PPD or as Flying Phoenix teacher does. Because there are people who consider themselves teachers but others do not necessarily agree with such a claim. So a Teacher corner will just create tension.

To OP. When you start every day practice (at least 1 hour but every day), you will notice very quickly a natural tendency to simplify your life habits. Damo Mitchell writes very well about this in his Neigong book You are right in your question, your inner energy is better to be preserved and not scattered all over the place. How to do it - don't force yourself in limiting enjoying the life, this limiting should come on its own and without effort in wuwei way. And it will come if you practice diligently and regularly.

Depends on how far you are from the lotus and how long you intend to sit in this pose. If you are far and your plan is to sit for an hour or more, it is better to use paid content streaming yoga resources for systematic training, I use Ekhart Yoga. Otherwise, general youtube will be enough.

One of the signposts in cultivation is placing shen into qi. When you do subtle breathwork, this is what you do: you place the shen into qi.

Depends on how deep you want to go. Surface channels are not very difficult to open, standing still would perhaps be the easiest way. It is a different thing if you wanna go deep, to the bones and inside the bones. This is where the pain issue likely comes up. I believe the deep channels can be opened by a combination of 1) yoga 2) sitting still crossed legs on the floor 3) movements like dao yin or taiji. The advantage of yoga is that you can isolate and target specific tissue in the legs - there is lot of it there and it is dense. Sitting still is the best (IMO) for getting song and release tensions and blockages. And then you need some movements to actualize your achievements. I'd also add that talk about legs should include hips and buttocks

Is it Egyptian?

Humans' first alchemists were likely similar to these: I have watched quite a bit of documentaries recently about apes. One of the things I noticed was how apes will sit very still with only eyes moving a bit to observe environment. The apes are not like monkeys in this regard at all. And here is another picture: This is a sculpture which is called 'A Meeting' by a Chinese sculptor (sorry can't remember the name). This sculpture was demonstrated in several city parks around Vancouver, BC. Can you see similarities?

With the light, I must say that I've met very diligent and hard working students of the art who after many years of practice still were not able to see the light. What I want to say is that focusing on the light could be discouraging for sincere students in such cases. There is plenty of work that can be done without working with light. I mean, light is good and is a very important part of the practice, but it is not a single focus of the practice - IMO anyway.

The heat in lower abdominal is only one of the possible signs of jing to qi transformation. THere could be warm sensation, movement, or light.

Specifically for males - a good and tangible response of reproductive system. This statement is based on statistical observations during retreats of highly regarded masters. The evidence was gathered incidentally and verbally - in case you have some inappropriate thoughts about it.