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I never knew about the old site. So...which is it? Those links go to completely different sites.

Yeah, the opening quote is where I got all my info from. Well...it and my own personal experience Ask me how I'm so familiar with what it means to be passive aggressive. It's something I've known for a while, but reading those quotes made me think about it hard again. It was refreshing to see, after just growing up a bit and cultivating without really working on that stuff specifically, how much of that crap I don't do anymore. I'm damn near reformed!

And this kind of behavior is EXACTLY the sort of thing you target with self cultivation, and try to get rid of. It's not "how I am". It's a defense mechanism I've unconsciously developed out of fear and insecurity.

No, I'd say that's by definition NOT. You sure you understand what it means? It means that rather than directly confronting people on things you disagree on, you instead pretend to agree, then talk shit behind their back. It means that when someone you really don't like talks to you, you're all smiles and friendly, then talk shit behind their back. It means when someone who is mean to you and degrading comes up and talks to you, you're all smiles and submissive and nice to them, then complain to friends and talk shit behind their back. It means when you have a problem with someone, friend or acquaintance, you make sarcastic backhanded "jokes" which weakly insult them, rather than being confrontational. It means you're afraid to speak your mind, so you submissively avoid confrontation but do a lot of complaining and shit talking behind backs, and make sarcastic, joking insults to people's faces.

I'm with you, H.E. There are a lot of traits I've picked up that are counter productive to being the best human I can be. Passive aggressiveness is not a virtue. It's something people hide behind. Now, feeling aggressive, identifying that I'm feeling aggressive, being ok with that and not afraid to to express it, yet restraining from expressing it because I feel that it's truly uncalled for...using discretion...THIS is a virtue. The thing with passive aggressiveness, which your first post pointed out, is that it's done out of fear and malice, not confidence and virtue. There's a big difference between being passive aggressive, and using discretion and wisdom in how you react to something or what you say to someone.

I'll need to check out some horse stance instruction. There was a time that I thought zhan zhaung and horse stance were the same thing, but clearly not. There's a ton of online info on standing properly. Similar resources for not hurting myself (really actually hurting myself) in horse stance?

Too bad for you! That's not a thing I'll choose to live without.

I hope that at some point, my high sensitivity to crappy foods wears off as I progress, and learn how to turn any random crap into fuel. But I'm not there yet.. And really I'm not all that sensitive...but I can definitely tell when I've eaten stuff I shouldn't have. I'm really not sure that pre-packaged meals are cheaper than buying fresh veggies and rice/quinoa..? With some occasional fresh meat thrown in.

I think anyone can do it, but some thrive on it, others...not so much. Oildrops, I'll look into the hemp seeds. I've been mostly skipping breakfast, for the first time ever in my life. I have some hot water with honey before I leave the house, and that's it till later morning. Sometime around 10 I have a handful of nuts and an apple or something. I'll throw some hemp seeds in with the almonds I've been eating.

That's not a bad idea. I know the one time I managed to get into the group meditation room thetaoiseasy set up, and he was in there...WHOA! I had just come back from a yoga class and was feeling pretty loose and light anyways, but that's was some pretty strong stuff.

Interesting! Yeah I've always gone with the health advice that garlic and onions are good for you, and since I love them, I always use a lot. But then I find this stuff on a spiritually healthy diet avoiding those things...so I'm cutting back a little on them. I limit carbs pretty naturally...just don't eat a lot of them. Since I didn't get a deer this year and store bought beef etc scares me, I've been just eating fish a couple times a week. I always eat a lot of nuts, and get avocados whenever they're good. And though its probably mostly genetic, my cholesterol is GREAT. That's with eating more cheese than I should, and eating out probably twice week...usually a burger one of those times, and a potato/sausage/cheese/egg fat bomb once a week. I have cut back on the hot peppers, too. The more things I cut out of my diet, the more sensitive I get to eating bad foods, or any of the foods I've cut out, whether they're inherently "bad" or not. That's the annoying part of this. Some things I used to eat a lot, just kind of destroy me...getting harder to go to friends houses for dinner...

I think this is what my friend was trying to explain a few years ago...apparently, for her, watching people write throws her into an immediate meditative state. It weirds those people out... she gets all concentrated and zoned in on their hand while its writing. Funny you mention that rainbowvein, I just had this same feeling last night, during & after embryonic breathing.

On other sites...the ones with the most posts often are the ones who are there to socialize. This is not pointed at you, Marblehead! But say you take a banjo site, and some guy has 20,000 posts in 3 years. Often, he's just a guy who plays a little banjo, but really isn't accomplished at all. Banjo is secondary; he's there to socialize. There are professional players on that site with 25 posts, after 6 years. So while the two aren't necessarily correlated, we can just say that post count says nothing about accomplishment in the forum topic. It just says they spend a lot of time on the site and have a lot to say about a lot of topics.

Music Camping/backpacking Travel Walking BaGua Playing with the dog Friends Reading Drinking tea Owning and working on old vehicles

Ha! Nah...I've been spending enough money lately as it is. If I start buying things like special cups for hard boiled eggs, there's no end to what I should buy! I've actually been clearing tons of stuff out of my house lately, and specifically not buying anything unless I absolutely need it. All money is going into an rv. And there's no room for things like egg cups in a tiny rv.

Thanks for the link! I tried it (before logging in to TTB) this morning, and it was a little underdone...Runny yolk, but too much runny white too. That was about 3 min boiling, 2 or minutes sitting in the hot water. I've been waiting for the water to boil before throwing the egg in. I wonder...I checked out the first hard boiled egg link you posted in your first post. Is she saying that overcooking is what causes green yolks? She says "here's how to get yellow yolks" but never says what it is people do wrong to get green. If it's a time thing, I guess I don't need to worry about it, since I'm going for kinda runny yolks, and will probably never boil eggs for as long as 12 minutes.

Anyone see this? Maybe even someone here really knows something about it. I kind of stumbled onto it tonight... Maybe it's already been posted, but you can imagine that when I type two words like "opening", and "tao" into the search engine...basically every thread on The Tao Bums comes up in the results http://www.lifeartsmedia.com/opening-dao-taoism-martial-arts-documentary It's only about 25 minutes long. Some good footage of Wudang Bagua. It's crazy for me to see, because I've actually met some of the people, if sitting at the same table eating with them, and having them acknowledge my presence when I walk by them qualifies as having "met".

I'll definitely check out that aoli recipe. It's a great sauce. I randomly happened to cook a perfect egg, for me. Maybe it'd be considered a soft boiled egg? I was messing around with boiling for a few minutes then just letting it sit with the heat off... Anyway, when I took off the shell, it was exactly how I like my fried eggs, only boiled, so no oil. Hard white, and still a completely runny yolk. I need to perfect that...don't remember now the exact times of cooking and letting site. I was in my late 20's before I started, but cooking up something great specifically for lunch left-overs is definitely my thing.

I've always had whatever bed a friend is nice enough to hand down to me. Someday when I actually buy a new bed this will matter more, but right now I'm buying new cushions for a little camper. In Chinese culture, they seem to believe that a firm bed is best, and big soft beds suck the energy out of you. During my short time there, in all but the nicest western hotels, the beds were little more than a very thin mattress on a board, and when I stayed at someone's house, it was literally a thin cotton comforter on a sheet of plywood. I didn't mind it at all. I think some level of compromise would be good...very firm, without being so firm that no woman would stay in my bed. This material will also be the seats of the table when it's not a bed. So, I'd be interested to hear your opinions on firmness of beds in general, as well as what I might be able to use for cushion material in my camper. There may come a time I'm more or less living out of this thing.

Thanks for the link! Still pricy, but the latex covers are affordable...wonder if I could get away with a 2 or 3" mattress cover.

Fair enough... Yeah, we'll see how it goes, if it happens. Will be a year from now if it happens, but there are a lot of things life could throw at me between now and then that would stop it. Either way. I hope it happens, but most of the things that would keep me in town and in a house would be good things, too, so, we'll see. My friend suggested latex foam padding. Her quote, at wholesale prices, for just the latex foam, was $900. This is just for two 2 1/2' x 4' pads, and two 1 1/2' x 4' pads. Crazy. Between that and the new upolstery and stuff, it would cost almost as much as I paid for the camper.

Thread ressurection. I'm already convinced that it must be better than a thick mattress on top of a thick boxspring, suspended in the air by a frame, but... What do you think about a 3" foam pad on top of plywood? Too thick? Less foam? Maybe 2", firm foam? It would seem to me that since it's only 3" thick, and completely supported by a wood bottom, it would be pretty good? This padding would double as a seat and seat back (2 seats, actually), and arrange into a bed at night, in 4 pieces. I almost think I'd want the padding more for sitting than sleeping...but I'm trying to find a compromise.

Exactly what I'm looking for, thanks! I think that in my camper, I won't be too bad off. Because there is no mattress, per se. It's foam, on a solid wood platform. So it's some cushion on top of a hard, flat surface, unlike a mattress which would be easily a foot thick with springs and stuff. So I think...I'll start with thin foam. If nothing else, I'll probably want that to sit on. If I find it's too soft for sleeping, I can always just lay some thicker cotton material down on the boards and sleep on that. And I'll have the foam in case I have a friend who likes more padding No matter what, it's going to more firm than my current bed I sleep in every night, so that's good! Which gets me thinking...maybe it's time to toss that old used mattress and get myself some plywood and cloth..!

Well, that was a pretty manipulative video. I agree with most of it, but manipulation is manipulation. Thanks for posting it! Good to know there's action on the other side of these topics, even if they're using the same lame tactics as the gov.

...I think if you're looking for a cultivation-linked, enlightenment-oriented exercise, you're barking up the wrong tree. If you go into meditation and cultivation, what you're more likely to find is that you've found something else, and aren't interested in creating vain, superficial sex appeal. You'll have found more of yourself, and not worry about such things, creating a much more stable, grounded, attuned, deep, confident person. Thereby creating the sex appeal that you no longer grasp for... Life is like this a lot. It's letting go of immature desires and allowing yourself to become something real, and suddenly you realize that you can be, or are, all the things you wished you could be when you were young and possibly had no confidence and now...now that you are those things...you don't care. It's kinda cool to look at it from outside yourself and smile at how you are what you wished you could be, but in such a deeper, less egotistical way, that it almost spoils it...but it's better this way.