Lozen

Can I get put on the free money list, too?

Origato!

What does Be Genki mean?

i just saw it today, too. i think i get part of what you mean, but tell us more!! you mean that he was really struggling to do the right thing but didn't really feel it or understand it? i just thought about how ego takes over (ego + power = evil) and how he was just upset at these perceived injustices (not being made a master, etc.) and also a lot of fear (the death of his wife and child) and helplessness at being unable to stop it.

Thanks everyone! I will watch all of these eventually, just trying to decide on an order. I watched Snatch yesterday and wasn't that impressed. I forgot to say I am ridiculously picky which is probably why I'm not a movie person--I usually only rent or go see stuff that everyone tells me is really really good. My favorite part was the quote about London cos I lived in Oxford for 8 months... "fish and chips, day old tea, bad food, worse weather, mary poppins, london!" i thought that was classic. I think next I'm either going to watch Operation Condor or Spiritual Kung Fu. But who knows. I've been doing so much processing lately that I just want to watch some kind of Dumb and Dumber equivalant, but I just got tickets for Star Wars matinee, so there goes that idea.

Interestingly enough I just hung out with someone who did. He said he smoked the other day and hallucinated for 6 hours and first he became lungs and he became his body and then he realized the innerconnectedness of all things. And he said a bunch of other stuff I couldn;'t understand or relate to at all. He has excess yin, I think.

I smoked pot a little in college, maybe once a month or so, a lot more my senior year when I was freaking out over what I was gonna do when I graduated. I quit on Halloween '02...haven't smoked it since. Okay, I'm lying, I smoked it once since then, but only because I had a crush on a girl and we went to the labyrinth and it was a perfect couple of moments. But I didn't enjoy the weed. I actually really feel a lot less spacy and more grounded since I stopped. Well they say it depletes kidney jing in a couple books I read which I agree with, esp. people who can keep smoking and never get stoned. But I love marijuana oil used externally for things like fibromyalgia. Ate hashcakes once and had a really bad trip, I mean really terrible, and I actually think I lost a lot of soul parts, I remember when I completely lost my peripheral vision, it was like having blinders on. It was scary. I did shrooms once and I forgot most of it except that I made my boyfriend at the time walk for five hours (or so he says) and that I became plant (not a plant, but plant! i insisted, to which he told me i wasn't really plant, i was having a physical reaction to hallucinogenic drugs. party pooper) and i saw faeries in the floorboards and asked him to bring his guitar out into the hallway to keep us company. the next day everything was normal went to class and everything but the day after that i got totally depressed, worse than i've ever been. it was really terrible. i wanted to be plant again. i guess drugs just don't work well with me, i don't know how to integrate the visions/experiences i have when i am on them. i did feel a lot of qi when i smoked pot and same when i have caffeine but i wonder if it is qi i am using up or depleting unnecessarily. I guess I am sorta anti-drug, though I enjoy drinking occasionally and even getting rip roaring drunk occassionally. I also play with all kinds of herbal relaxants... What else, oh yeah I smoked salvia once and nothing happened.

Check this out, yo! www.sonshi.com

HEY RON JEREMY IS COOL, MAN, HE BROUGHT ME ALL THAT DREAM BEER.

I saw Rami Shapiro, a Jewish mystic, speak a few months ago, and he doesn't believe in life after death or any of that stuff. He said it was like the waves trying to figure out where they go after they get to the end of the shore, is there another ocean on the other side? He wanted to tell them, "you ARE the ocean, get it?" I guess I believe in reincarnation in the same way I believe in compost. But souls and that whole business, I have no idea. Sometimes I can feel the presence of those who have died so strongly. But I don't know if that means they are there, or if I can feel them in the primordial soup, or what.

Lord of the Rings: YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is this a trick question? What do you think it is?

I don't know yet. Right now I'm just fighting tooth and nail to get to this ceremony I know I need to be at because I dreamt it. Everything else is temporary. Everything else is a gesture. But I've been really WANTING to *believe* in immortality ever since my grandfather died. At times it seems like I can feel his presence so strongly... But no dreams yet... I used to feel like I was hollow, like an archetype or a shadow or an -ism or a wisp of smoke or even a spirit... But now I just feel like a person. Not sure if this answers anything.

Okay you got me, RedFox. love, Subhuti "Whose thoughts are vaporized, well-dealt-with within, without trace -- going beyond that tie, one who perceives the formless, overcoming four yokes, does not go to rebirth."

I thought death was optional...

I guess it's kind of pretentious to assume this exists just because I had a dream about it, but I figured if anybody would know if there's an 8th chakra, y'all would. I took a journey through the chakras yoga class probably about five or six years ago, and I ripped out the pictures of the seven chakras (with the sanskrit) from the manual, and they are up on my wall in order. In my dream I saw those seven chakra sheets of mine, but on top there was a new one, which was this beautiful pink flower with a million petals. It looked rose-like, only bigger and with more petals...

Ha ha, obviously you haven't been reading my log.

I drink occasionally. Actually haven't had a drink in quite a long time (couple of months maybe), so maybe it's time, soon. I like making my own medicinal wines and beers... And mulled wine in the winter is to die for. I know that drinking in small amounts is stimulating to your circulation and appetite. I do try to keep it to one or two glasses of wine a week, and don't really feel it if I'm eating enough, etc. When I go for the hard liquor, then i can feel it for sure. But I'm not sure it's any worse than all the other things I do when I'm self-destructive. Also I use tinctures which of course have alcohol, but I think this is healthier than the triglycerites in glycerin-based tinctures...

I'm curious as to whether any of you actually try to eat according to your imbalance, or what do you do to complement your qi gong when you're having issues with a particular organ, to help bring it back into balance quicker or at least not swing to such high extremes... I have a chart on my fridge about the five phases of food, which basically breaks down the grains, beans, vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts, dairy, seafood and poultry into the five elements or flavors or organs... It's kind of a neat tool, whether I'm trying to make sure I get all five flavors in each meal, or specifically focusing on elements that are imbalanced... But the chart seems off to me because it says heart and small intestine are bitter, and I just don't get that, you'd think liver would be bitter...but I'm sure there's an explanation... Anyways, I wonder how much of this is really about the actual physical food... I've been wanting to experiment with drop doses of herbs based on the flavors..but I'm getting really into vitalism and physiomedicalism... It is interesting though because for me if I'm following the perfect Ayurvedic diet for my dosha, I go insane, so I wonder if my body is just attuned to TCM food and not Ayurveda...and I've met people who have experienced the opposite.

You buying?

Okay, I'll bite! I work at the public access TV station as the front desk as a glorified receptionist aka "member service representative." We keep getting our budget cut and have a hiring freeze and people quit, so we get the joy of more work for the same pay. And my hours are really bad... So sometimes i hate it because most of the people that come in are crazy and draining and want to talk to me about aliens or government conspiracies or how the jews control the media...but then I just started getting into it when people yelled at me, feeding off that energy, and now I realized--and I've been experimenting with this--that when people direct tons of draining or angry energy to me, I can just take a deep breath, and breathe it in, and it feels SO good!!! Like today this guy totally yelled at me on the phone for no good reason and hung up, and it was SUCH an AWESOME chi blast!!! It made me smile for about ten minutes... Then there was the woman who spent about fifteen minutes telling me she wanted to get a pen to her daughter upstairs, but she didn't want to leave the pen here, or leave the pen with someone upstairs, or leave the pen with her daughter upstairs, or anything. Normally this would have frustrated me to no end (as I juggle the six phone lines on the switchboard, do my piles of data entry and deal with five zillion people asking me, 'do you know where so-and-so is?" as if i have the capability of monitoring the whereabouts of three dozen people. But today I just couldn't help laughing hysterically about the absurdity of it all. ANd then I said, "Just go upstairs! You can do it!! We'll be here when you get back! Okay, I'm gonna count to ten!" So maybe my job is really a blessing in disguise. And I get a lot of free time to check e-mail... Also it gives me a lot of really great comedy routine material. You wouldn't even believe the shit that goes down here on a regular basis... I still want to work somewhere else, though. I've been toying with ideas to get supplemental income with things I have been doing for free/donation for years, so that should be fun... The UK is really expensive, btw...

I haven't had a lot of experience with tantra at all, other than just trying to focus massive amounts of sexual energy and letting it cycle through my entire body instead of just staying in the lower chakras. But I'm really intrigued by non-Buddhist and non-Hindu tantric practices, because in my *extremely limited* experience with tantra, it's actually quite difficult physically, it's quite exhausting, and in my experience and people I've talked to about it, you actually start to get a little grossed out by the actual physical act of sex, sex and food starts to become dirty, everything seems so mundane because you are in this higher physical plane, and your concentration is in your inner body, watching your own winds, etc. It seemed unbalanced to me, but the argument that I've heard is that we're so often MORE focused on our lower chakras so the focus on the higher ones brings some kind of balance in a theoretical way. I'm really curious about how the whole lucid dreaming thing applies to women if anybody knows. I've been working on strengthening my control over my dreaming body (aka aura) and trying to move it up and down and around...it's kind of difficult and is sort of wavering a bit and hard for me to do it consistently. But what I'll feel is TONS of chi, and it feels like I've slept for hours even if I just do it for a short period of time...but sometimes I do fall asleep when I do it, and then I'll have like five million dreams--I mean one time I had seven dreams, and they were like dreams within dreams, like I'd have a dream and then try to write it down in another dream and realize I'm still in a dream. It was pretty bizarre. But the content of them (except for the one where I was flying with my basket picking oak trees off of the top of the tree) was fairly mundane.

These are more about TCM than qi gong but this is my list o' books... Free audio downloads on TCM (and lots of other audio downloads on various Buddhist topics--I was the only person at Diamond Mountain who wasn't a Buddhist....) http://www.dmes.org/terms/2004-2005/Fall/ChineseMed/ http://www.dmes.org/terms/2004-2005/Winter/ChineseMed/ Dr. Elson's health tips: http://www.elsonhaas.com/health_tips_archive.html Books: The Way of Qi Gong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing by Ken Cohen Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine (Beinfield and Korngold) The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine by Ted Kaptchuk Staying Healthy With the Seasons by Elson Has Staying Healthy With Nutrition by Elson Haas Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford (beware the herbal advice tho) Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan Energy Medicine by Donna Eden (a bit fluffy but still good) *Wood Becomes Water: Chinese Medicine in Everyday Life by Gail Reichstein (probably my favorite, pretty easy to understand) I also like Michael Tierra's books, which use TCM diagnostics and Western herbs on my to-read list: Oriental Medicine and Cancer by Myung Chill Kim Bodymind Energetics: Toward a Dynamic Model of Health (Seem and Kaplan) No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth by Ken Wilber Secrets of Yang Style Taiji there's a few more titles my qi gong teacher gave me that i haven't read yet What else...Oh yeah, convincing the cute new shiatsu students to trace yr meridians is a great way to learn...

SHAOLIN SOCCER!!!!!!!!!!! Princess Mononoke I Heart Huckabees What the !@#$ Do We Know Braveheart Lord of the Rings Dead Poets Society Dogma

I will be after I finish saving up for Initiation Camp!! I did the free class and it totally blew me away. I love all the WS folks I've met... They all are so radiant and glowing. And they are helping me get it together. I wonder if I know anybody you know...