dogson

The Shocker by Silk the Shocker

yoga & chi gong this morning followed by zazen

This is the great variable schism - we have a deep, soul-directed impulse to evolve; and simultaneously, we have this quasi-dreamlike experience of individual self that wants to survive and do well, which means amassing power to some extent - power being the ability to DO THINGS - power to have a great life! Whatever that means individually. As a cultivator and jing-retaining, herb-eating maniac, I discovered this thread "100 days retention" which really struck home. It isn't about just not excreting jing for 100 days - it's literally existing in nondual consciousness for 100 days straight. That's how you actually cultivate. From a scientific perspective, enlightenment is a wave function of the brain. Our limited self is vibrating one way - a very limited way - and that actually "takes" energy to maintain, whereas when the wave function changes, you become one single force with the greater energy field of the universe. That's when "miracles" start happening, because your intent and the intent of everything around you is in harmony. It looks like superpowers, but in reality you have simply dissolved the barrier that comes with the illusion of separateness. The fish wants to be in the ocean. It's not arrogant. The fish is meant to be in the ocean. If you take it out of the ocean as we have done psychically/spiritually, and put it in a bowl of tap water, it doesn't really thrive.

I'm not really down with the "D", but I've become used to Asian words being spelt all fuckt up in English. Also, thanks to the digressions of this thread I've taken the dharma name "DJ Iron Crotch" and will be demonstrating at various nightclubs. PM me for my tour dates (ladies only thanks).

I'd say probably 21 days of practice since this thread began in November. But I didn't start posting until way later. Still! I'm happy to contribute. I really like the spirit and intent of this thread, I think it gets to the core of why we're all here - solidarity in the path - and furthermore I request another 100 days of practice once this ends. As for today - played foosball with some down-and-out kids and then they watched me do tai chi at sunset. They also said I looked like a girl with my long hair. What the hell is wrong with kids?

fire puja last 2 nights.

I really gotta say, chef or no, fasting is the best way to do this. Especially meat. When I was experimenting with 80/10/10 or raw vegan / fruitarian diets, I had massively less sex drive. I run a bit low on jing to begin with which is why I get crazy with the herbs, but yeah... slide out animal products and you can definitely expect your sex drive to go down. Permanently, I'd be really careful about this. Also, as regards to this chef friend, I respect wanting to do it privately / not making a big deal out of it ... but if you wanna make a change in your life, being willing to talk about it and make a stand for that change is a clear measure of how badly you want it to happen. That's just how it goes with making major life changes... when you change something as dramatic as sexual energy or diet, it changes your whole world - everything and everyone around you. Which I think is really cool. And that's why both of those things are regarded by many as sacred, and truly worshiped in this world by almost everyone, consciously or unconsciously.

wrote insane zen-inspired poetry for about 12 hours straight.

Half hour of tai chi yesterday, followed by a solid run, yoga afterwards, and another half hour of tai chi at sunset. It's cool how I can feel when the energy of sunrise/sunset comes, even in gritty downtown LA. It's like the whole planet gets covered in this beautiful energy, and I *have* to practice. It wakes me up even if I went to sleep at 3AM. Also had crazy dreams about mushroom extracts Maybe my reishi elixirs are getting a bit out of control...

Anti-War is still getting people focused on war. This is a movie about someone who kills people, released on Christmas day. The message is very clear.

They made a documentary a few years ago about the philosophical and religious influences used in the matrix. It's an elaborately decorated movie for sure, they source from all over the place. http://vimeo.com/53000177

Great interview with David Wolfe about organic food, soil, and toward the end of the interview gets deep into alchemy, ormus, synchronicity and the real reason we care about eating healthy - our ennobled human spirit. A lot of people in the raw/vegan community talk trash on David Wolfe for selling expensive health supplements, but they miss out on how passionate this guy is about really doing whatever it takes to unlock our full potential. I've had the great privilege to train with some very powerful and dedicated chi masters, and it's always tragic to see that many of them eat crap. I often wonder how much deeper their realization would be if they ate like David Wolfe, and conversely, what David Wolfe would be like if he was a hardcore energy arts practitioner. It's kind of my mission to go as deep as I can into both of these fields. The combination is astounding. Every day I see a new reality from just giving a little more effort to upgrading the energy fields within me. anyway, putting this video out there for people to chew on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRBpvsYmffQ

Been focusing on 3 hours of practice right upon waking. In the past it's been tough to maintain discipline especially if I wake up too late - I feel sensitive to all the rushing and working people around me. The decision to train no matter what has totally shifted my psychology from being hypersensitive / receptive to a more male oriented focus, of doing exactly what I want regardless of the conditions around me. Could be all the xingyi I'm doing too EDIT: Went for a hike and did another hour of training. Found a hidden canyon near Hollywood with a HUGE stone labyrinth in it, totally mindblowing. I'm only in LA for a short period of time, and I'm finding that when I hold the intent of just being in the flow and holding a high vibe (like driving through holding a mudra and blessing the karma of millions of people in traffic) I seem to stumble upon really epic, sacred spots that I never would've found if I was focusing on being tied into the drama and fashion of the "scenes" here. Pretty cool how you can find real magic anywhere.

Hit the gym really hard today. no other training.

Also Vanir, I'm also into retaining, agree that it's not the easiest thing in the world, especially because I'm constantly drinking maca / ashwagandha / tongkat ali smoothies - kinda like playing the video game on "nightmare mode"difficulty But I truly live in a different reality anywhere north of 15 days. Like on my hike earlier there were these black helicopters circling the mountain where I was training. As soon as I started practicing I felt into the sphere and cleared the whole mountain with my intent; the choppers left immediately. I do it with traffic, movie theaters, anywhere the energy feels tight / stagnant / tense. It's totally effortless, but if my own internal force isn't really built up my ability to do stuff like that is nonexistent. And I don't get cool intuition like knowing when packages are being delivered and when cute girls are looking at me across restaurants

Tai chi 25 minutes this morning, followed by San Ti 25 min each side, then yoga. Went for a hike and did same amount of training again barefoot up in the mountains. Had weird psychic moments twice today where I felt compelled to walk out to the street and talk to delivery people; both times they had packages for me with the wrong address. Had another spontaneous urge to go hit a yin yoga class around sunset and it was one of the best of my life. The teacher must be a reiki or chi gong practitioner, her hands were burning hot but I didn't feel her projecting anything into me, as some do, I only felt it on the shen level. Like she was putting shine on my energy. Really beautiful. Good practice day

I'll start keeping detailed records... most days I do tai chi, followed by san ti or ichuan standing practice and I try to get yoga in to keep my knees/hamstrings open. Let's just start from today to be fair... I'm not out to win anything, just love the intent of this thread I'm experimenting with the Pomodoro Technique (doing 25 minute chunks and then a 3-5 minute break) so I'll be posting my practice in tomato-sized chunks: 1 pomo tai chi 1 pomo san ti L side 1 pomo san ti R side 1 pomo zan zhuang 50 minute yoga podcast This is so true for me Vanir. The days I wake up and immediately flow into action, I get way more done than the days I lay around thinking about what I want to do / should do. This is my complete understanding of zen, just bypassing my brain in favor of a deeper level of knowing, and really cool synchronicities show up when I'm in that mode. 5D?

Is it too late for me to jump in? I'm getting really into san ti standing and I could use the accountability. What are the rules? Just post what you practiced every day?

Trolls use a kind of magic...

hitting a yoga class is the most effective in my experience - it's 60-90 minutes of deep breathing with a group of really vital people. the collective field of intention is very strong, stretching opens up so many blocked spots. it's just a really solid session. other stuff: 10 seconds of sungazing, barefoot on the raw earth, right at dawn, or the last 10 sec. of sunset. cold showers. making out with someone beautiful? just saying and making great art that you're proud of. love and passion and creativity are why we're here. that deep soul connection and expression is the hugest source of internal energy, better than any practice or technique. do what you love!

I am literally left-handed, so maybe my brain is wired differently, but I've seen a lot of benefit in taking the left-hand path to things. Especially because "eating cake" really demonstrates, in a very direct way, that cake is actually kinda...gross.

At the risk of seeming too simple, taoism to me just means being your most authentic self and being close to the way nature designed us. Epigenetics is now proving that we can rewrite our own DNA via our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, though - the idea of who, and what we are is very plastic. I think it's crucial to think about what kind of food works best for you, and if you don't know, experiment! My own diet changes constantly depending on what I'm doing - how much physical exercise I'm getting, how much mental / creative work I'm doing (in which case I eat very light, mostly berries, fruit smoothies, raw honey, etc) I have found it very helpful to stop eating around 6pm or earlier. The more "live" food you get, the more your body will stay in enzymatic balance. We weren't born with kitchen supplies, and it's my own personal belief that our diet should consist primarily of raw plant foods. This runs contrary to the Chinese theory that food should always be warm, not cold, but again, it really depends on your climate and your specific metabolism. As far as raw diets go, many people do well on a fat-based raw diet, ie salads with lots of olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds. A few thrive on a high-carb, mainly fruitarian diet. These diets are very powerful *AS AN EXPERIMENT* for a few weeks. Clearing out everything and going back to basics will teach you your body's real cravings for certain things, ie sugar, fat, salt. Superfoods and Herbs are great and can be potentially life-changing. As I've gotten deeper into diets, I try to eat more "essence" and less "substance". IE, I'll favor raw chocolate and a smoothie with goji berries, maca, hemp seeds or spirulina over a very heavy macro-calorie based diet of sandwiches or a lot of bread, which is high in calories but very low in nutrients. When you start taking things like eucommia bark, deer antler, ho shu wu, ginseng, shilajit, those are very high in minerals and in subtle essences you just can't get from stuff at the grocery store. Ginseng roots for example, some of them are 10+ years old and, from an energetic perspective, absorb much longer cycles of energy than a plant which may only have lived for a season before being picked and eaten. Food and dieting is an art, not a science. It's all about feeling, how do you feel ABOUT the food, how do you feel when you're eating it and afterwards. Do the aesthetics of eating meat bother you? What specific goals are you eating for? More physical stamina or more mental / creative ability? There are specific foods, diets and supplements that target this. When you say Taoist diet, that (to me) just means, your personal diet. Something that's as close to your specific needs as possible.

Yeah I have a copy. It's good. It'll make you want to shut yourself in a cave and meditate for a long time. The Chronicles of Tao by Deng Ming-Dao is also really good. I wish there were more books like this... the old school taoist wizards and alchemists and superhero martial artists, that world is really hidden. I sincerely believe that it still exists, but it's so underground. It's either people living under bridges like Diogenes, or people who make a lot of money and then retire to cultivate themselves in chateaus and stuff in Switzerland. I suggest reading books like this with a grain of salt, if you're trying to project a new reality. I read Opening the Dragon Gate in between bouts of driving through the mountains blasting skrillex. And I thought to myself, I want to do this taoist wizard thing, but in a modern way, and I did a lot of freewriting about how to make that come about. I'm really into hitting spiritual books with a practical intent. Not just as entertainment. With these practices in general. We're cultivating life energy, cultivating physical power, training, but training for what? What do you want to use the energy and the consciousness for? Training for its own sake is very blissful, for sure, but the world needs more than that. You don't see a lot of sages in shopping malls or walking the vegas strip (though many on here would argue they're "incogneto" and "you'd never know them") ... maybe so. But that's to all of our loss. If the sages weren't being so DL and "inner tradition" I think the level of consciousness would be a lot higher on this planet.

I just got back from o-tsukimi, "moon viewing" at the portland japanese gardens. 3rd eye started vibrating just sitting quietly drinking green tea, looking at a raked gravel garden. do any of you have regular full moon practices? how do you work with the huge energy?

I'm taking beginner's mind approach here, I'm going to start asking really, really stupidly simple questions to the community. Sometimes my phrasing will be stupid, too. Please be gentle! #1: Ba Gua circle walking. What is it? What is it supposed to do? What does it actually do?