Yoda

great testimonials Chad and Rainbowgirl!!

thanks for pointing out his updated site! I like his writeup on black tourmaline. I was inspired to buy some, but I've not played with it. I'm a believer in black rocks and I've heard that black tourmaline is the best.

welcome to taobums!

Thaddues said: Wang Xiangzhai was a truly exceptional martial artist who is arguably single handedly responsible for the standing post craze. He was a Xingyi master who arrived at the truth of standing post training after spending his life training hard in Xingyi. Please note that his practice of standing came as the fruits of his lifetime of practicing Xingyi. There is no one of note who has gotten anywhere by just standing. I'm sure I have just pissed off all the Yiquan people, but c'mon, let's be realistic here. If standing post was such a cure all, there would be no heart disease, no strokes, no cancers among the leading proponents of the practice. Wang Xuanjie, who was supposed to be 'the successor' died young from a stroke. If standing post created superior martial artists, you would see them and hear about them. If it was such a great training, olympic athletes would be doing it for the extra edge. Lance Armstrong would be all over it. Standing post is not part of the traditional Taichchuan curriculum. It's a recent development. All the elements of a standing practice were incorporated into the form and were used to correct the form. Chen Fake for example was not teaching or practicing Zhang Zhuan as a separate training. This focus is recent by people who jump on the bandwagon and need to make a living here. I watched vidoes on the net of people who claim to fight with Yiquan. It's just a bunch of bitch slapping. All these yiquan experts would get creamed by a decent high school varsity wrestler. There is no magic power, just hard intelligent consistent training. Do a search on Richard Mooney and get all the facts you before you start following him and buying his stuff. A number of fun points are brought up here: Wang Xiangzhai didn't live very long. I've seen Sam Tam demonstrate yiquan with his students. It seemed very effective on the DVD, but maybe the students are just brainwashed. It does seem that the ability of a pure IMA guy to win against a varsity wrestler is a rare and wonderous thing, but I believe that it can be done. In my experience standing, it pulls in a tremendous amount of energy that really builds many martial qualities. I simply wasn't able to handle the quantity and quality of the energy and I'd bet my experience is pretty typical of many practitioners who must either limit their time standing or blow off the extra energy somehow which keeps them in the more modest levels of achievement with the practice. Not that the practice isn't extremely powerful, just it's very hard to digest. -Yoda

Portcraig had recently had some deep experiences and Max recommended that he not talk about the experiences so as not to dissipate the energy. I think that brings up a good point that applies towards any special experience or insight: Jesus would heal people and admonish them to "tell no one." Esther says that doing so not only dilutes the experience but invites backlash and disbelief from others which can undermine one's experience. The self help movement says to not share your business ideas to minimize second guessing. But then again, this is taobums... I think that sharing experiences is a very valuable thing that has great potential in helping others (like inspiring me to check out Kunlun for instance) but can be very depleting and the mixing of energy it creates can be disorienting as well. Like with giving blood... you have to be strong and stable physically and energetically to give blood, but if you can do it, it's a good thing.

Awesome! Keep us posted! I'll be arranging a DC area get together with Max before too long!

Vortex, Just search it at the taobums index. It's good stuff. I just wonder "where" in terms of Vastu it would be good to place it. Yoda

My vibe is that we could get Max to any small/medium town if we could score 20-30 people to attend in order to cover their costs, so having a taobum who lives in the town in question who'd be able to drum up some participants and an event location would be a huge plus. So do look into Asheville. I can easily attend anything DC or South. I don't know anything about Chapel Hill, but I've heard that it's nice.

Thanks Ian!! Posting etiquette is definitely a practice of mine... yoga for the Internet! It got a lot easier after I put everyone on 'ignore'. Your pal, Yoda

Ben, It's great how you really know how to track down a good practice without wasting any time!! And on top of that, you really dive into it. We need to find Max a nice small town or retreat center in the east that's drivable from a major airport. Yoda

Karen, I just can't get enough! One thing about these Vastu folks... they don't know about orgonite. Btw, if orgonite were an element which one would it be. I'd say metal, but Vastu/Indian system doesn't do metal though. Yoda

How long have you been doing Kunlun and how did you hear about it? Welcome to taobums! -Yoda

Swami Kaleshwar has a cool breakdown of the spiritual path he calls the 3 stages of illusion: 1st is where one can do a spiritual practice and not feel that anything is happening. This is the hardest stage as there's not much good encouragement to keep practicing. 2nd is where one can feel the results of one's practice. This is a pretty easy stage to make progress in... it's easy to tap into the power of the practice and of one's guides, etc. 3rd is where you experience textbook results of the particular practice... obtain the groove or power in question, the angel and lights appear, etc. This is a little trickier... on the one hand you can really tap into some power to make strides but hubris is a constant danger if one gets overly attached to the process itself. At this stage, practicing humility, and not discussing one's experiences may be important, really watching one's thoughts, and controlling one's anger is important. At this stage, one's practice is going at 100mph so one has to be very mindful of the road. Siddhis and anger are a bad mix, for instance. Once one's experience in the 3rd stage becomes very stable and high with no danger of ever crashing, then that's when one progresses out of the life of illusion. It's just a cool way of looking at things, and not a hard and fast rule. Also, one can be in stage one one moment and stage 3 an hour later... that kind of thing. Swami related that when he first got into the healing biz in India, there were many times that he really didn't feel like healing anyone. So he'd sit down to do a mantra... couldn't feel anything. Then a 10 minutes later he could feel it and then a while later he'd get a stage 3 experience from it and he'd be charged up to help others. I've pretty much live in stage 1 and bump into stage 2 when I practice. Never been to 3ville for the most part. Now, with several new practices I've found this year, I'm certain that I'll be able to experience stage 3 in this life, so just thinking about that.

I've never been aware of this story before. My brother says that this happened the night before Ali was to fight Andre the Giant, but the fight got cancelled after Ali got owned. Apparently, Ali got angry about how staged the match was, but it didn't follow that he could have beat the guy. Starts at 2:00: http://youtube.com/watch?v=s4OiBbEditM My brother said that Ali's portion wasn't staged. I can believe it... I can't see Ali's ego consenting to go down so shamefully at the very height of his career (1 year after his Foreman victory).

More bandwidth for the rest of us... one less guy in line for squirt queen montage!

Taobums and America is all about kiss and tell, which has its issues, but I think that the old fashion tradition of never ever telling definitely needs to go. A balance needs to be found, but it is a trial and error thing too... experiment with either way to get the hang of it. I like to think that Taobums is moving from simply playing bumper cars to actually getting our paws on some ore, so this may be a growing issue for us to keep our eyes on.

So even a mega ego like Ali could stage a loss... anything that happened in the 70s doesn't count... point well taken.

I used to love standing practice. But the high energy that it brought in made me too tense. If I backed off on the standing practice to a level I could tolerate, it just wasn't as worth doing anymore. So the whole practice got shelved. Happily, Kunlun was the missing ingredient... Now I can do as much standing as I like and just follow it up later in the day with Kunlun. Kunlun benefits from the higher energy level and, in turn, processes the energy as needed. They are a great team! I'm just doing Max's 5 element standing, but I'm sure other forms of standing would work nicely too. In the future I'll revisit sungazing and retention to see if Kunlun can help out those practices too. But for the time being, I'm set.

Welcome to taobums!!

I agree, it does appear to be staged. I just don't understand why MA would put up with the humiliation of being beaten. Lost a bet or something?

I'm sort of surprised about how many taobums that have been to see Max but have disapeared. Little Max, Trunk, Thelerner come to mind. Others like Bindu and Turbo will just occasionally drop in. Maybe they like Kunlun so much, they don't have time to post anymore? The space lizards ate them most likely. It sounds like Cam and Vortex are the two taobums who have gone the furthest in our group in a very short amount of time and I'm glad they are still posting! K--The standing will be discussed in Max's next book due out in 2 months, btw.

I'm way too dense to tell you what was happening on the transmission side of the equation, other than that it's very powerful. My posture was way off. I had read the book and focused on the position of the hands and feet but the position of all the body parts are important to activate the energy. Read and reread the instructions closely. Both were very helpful, but I think the transmission was the key. It sounded like the book does come with a transmission energy too, just not as deluxe. If I lived on the other side of the planet, and seeing Max just wasn't in the cards, I could have figured it out if I was motivated to by paying very close attention to the directions... every word... and regularly practicing once a day for an hour, I could have figured it out. I didn't try very hard, myself, as I knew I was going to see him.

Max said that if you look for it, you can pretty much find a practice similar to Kunlun in a great number of cultures. Here's a book reviewed by Ken Cohen alluding to an African perspective. http://www.amazon.com/Shaking-Medicine-Hea...5345&sr=8-1

Y'all are too funny!! I, personally, needed to see Max to get anywhere with the practice but I'm glad there are plenty of taobums obtaining great benefit without making the trip.

Drakke1 had posted this in the lobby, pretty cool about Reiki: http://www.xtrememind.com/AttunementManual.pdf