GrandmasterP

Better 'as for free'. I make no comment as to individual advertisers wares and have no idea what other members value in these areas. HTH

It is free. Free beats paying out your hard earned money. QiGong is QiGong. I appreciate that this forum carries advertising.

Idyllic village life is never so idyllic once you live amongst it and begin to see the ripples beneath the superficially calm surface. Have a Google around 'Utopian Communities'. We moved here to the 'Heart of Rural England' (it says that on the roadsigns) six years ago from the grim and gritty northern industrial wastelands. It is truly 'picture postcard' beautiful and yet if anything there are slightly more social problems per capita than where we came from. Up north they tend to go out on Friday and Saturday nights, get royally pissed, have a fight and then go home. Round here many sit in lovely homes in splendid isolation, drinking themselves into a stupor and weeping. Every feckin' night some of the 'poor' beggars. The knock on effect of the downsides of affluent rural isolation carries through into their kids whose anger is palpable.

Save your money bro... All here, better; as for free. Enjoy.... http://jsqg.sport.org.cn/en/index.html

There is no such thing as a wasted youth just as long as the youth in question packs in as many experiences as possible prior to the onset of geriatric decline. Wise chap once said... "An it harm no one. Do as thou will".

Quite a few are in the waiting room (bardo).

Clinical trials have done for many traditional herbal remedies here in the UK with some herbalist companies of very long standing going to the wall. Just a few big players now who have been able to buy certain well known herbal remedies and have those passed. In one way it's been a good thing as the charlatans were effectively weeded out but to some extent they threw the baby out with the bathwater in that some old fashioned medicines are no longer available. Mucillage of Squill for example which cured chesty coughs for generations. Gone forever with a pretty poor licensed substitute, containing next to no Squill at all; in its place. We make our own herbal potions, that's legal just so long as they are solely for our own use.

Happily, Philosophy of Education provides a sinecure for wooly dreamers. Long may it do so.

I'm no expert but I do work in a university wherein scientists roam. They don't undertake speculative research any more because there simply isn't the money available to pay them to do so. Research is sponsored by companies and / or government funded and the paymasters don't pay for wooly dreamers to chase fads. the funders want product or super improved product. The biggest ambition amongst academic science bods is to bale out of university research and into a big bucks 'spin off' company out in the science park on the edge of town on a cut of the huge royalties from licensed discoveries. That happens more often than you might imagine.

........... An excellent piece, valid and deserving of a far wider audience beyond it's pagan context. Those attributes and warnings are relevant to anyone following a 'path'. Thank you for posting.

........ Chicken soup is decidedly unhealthy for chickens.

You are never alone with obsessive compulsive disorder bro. :-)

I like Rumi, he told jokes. My kinda holy man is a jokester. http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/rumi/pages/20.htm

Let me check your teeth. If they look OK you can have an apple.

Free QiGong resources at.... http://jsqg.sport.org.cn/en/index.html

Whatever happened to that "Right now"? Surely it was here must a moment ago.

"A cultivator without a teacher has a fool for his student". (Grandmaster Chang)

There's a wonderful story of Popper reported by Ray Monk in his bio of Wittgenstein.... Popper and Wittgenstein were in heated debate in Russell's rooms in Cambridge. So heated did the discussion become that Popper, an excitable sort; picked up the poker from the fireplace and brandished it threateningly at Wittgenstein who calmly responded... 'Whilst we all have feelings Popper old man, sadly; intellect is less equitably distributed'. I quite like the trade name for our friends in white lab coats prior to the moniker 'scientist' being coined. They were called 'natural philosophers'.

.......................... Crikey that's a bit of a broad statement buddy. I have no idea what the 'original' Tai Chi was, wonder if anyone does. It must have been adapted quite a bit over the millennia it has been around. If someone popped up claiming to have the original version we'd maybe view their claims with some scepticism. M'colleague returned from a TCUGB jolly in China the week before last and reports on an interesting phenomena in Beijing where, since the state has eased off then at least discussion of some of the spiritual aspects of Tai Chi that were purged under the old regimen, if not officially approved seems to be increasingly tolerated. Not the Falun Dafa though, they aren't tolerated at all and not to be mentioned in the presence of state officials, which is more or less always in the case of delegations.

Orapples too.

........ My bad. Failing to clearly define terms. Appanges sound tasty. :-)

Thank goodness we can still buy Tiger Balm. Wouldn't be without a pot of that wonderful stuff in the house.

.................... DL likes a laugh. Why wouldn't he? Can't be all bad. Like the old Mel Brooks song says...'gee it's great to be a king'. Mr Nat Hahn I have not read but did hear him speak in London a while ago and was most impressed. Our PL cousins are a jolly lot to be sure and the ethnic Buddhists in general seem to get through life without too much fuss and bother. Then we have the converts. Always more zealous are converts, in any path; it sorta goes with the territory and I am not aware of any or many ethnic Buddhists going in for the angst ridden hand wringing and sheer picky gloominess you can readily find in places like Dharma Wheel every day and on here from time to time fluttering under the (usually Tibetan) Buddhist prayer flag.

No issue with that at all YM. We say that 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' and if someone is good they hardly need to advertise as word of mouth brings people flocking for treatment. It was the unregulated sometimes self-deluded shysters to whom I was referring. Once one trusting patient is injured, then the damage has been done. Our centre offers spiritual healing which is unregulated by statute but the centre has been in its present building fifty years this year and prior to that was the old building for over a century, folk keep coming even though we have free at the point of demand state allopathic health care in the UK. What we do have in the UK is compulsory professional indemnity insurance for healers and in these litigious times the insurance companies will not cover anyone as a practitioner unless that person has bona fides from a list of approved therapies, all of which must meet certain standards of training, safeguarding praxes and of course a track record of not being sued.

One of the problems with complementary therapists is that anyone can hang out their shingle. Some complementary therapies are regulated but it depends on where you live as to who is licensed by what to do which. Some treatment regimens are self referential, therapist A sets up a school, sells his woo via books and DVDs and issues certificates to the high rollers who then continue in the same vein in their part of the forest. Classic franchise setup and Tao help their victims in some cases. Now that's not to say that all complementary therapies and therapists are snake oil and woo, many are tried and tested. Our own dear Queen is rumoured to favour homeopathic remedies for certain ailments. However the fact remains that anyone can set up. TCM in China is pretty well regulated and it would be a brave practitioner who attempted to simply announce one day that he was a TCM expert unless he actually was. That doesn't apply here in the west hence TCM or its variations as advertised and sold needs to be approached , along with its potentially self styled 'doctors or therapists' with the greatest caution.