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Greetings Dao Bums! I have been working on esoteric Buddhism primarily the past few years. That said, I keep up with my Daoist gong fu training. Nelson Ma is offering a Northern Praying Mantis Luohan Gong as a foundation. It is a direct neigong for releasing the spine and unifying the body. Nelson has much to offer and is filming the main 66 form of the style - currently the first quarter is available for purchase. My own training is peripherally related to this art and I've started on the Luohan Gong myself. So far the material is very clearly demonstrated and you can test the body method for the stretch locations as he teaches. I hope to see you guys in the discussion board of the training site. https://liuhebafa.thinkific.com/collections

There are a lot of pictures, in books, online, in charts and diagrams, that show where the dantian (or lower dantian) is located. Almost all of them are side views, almost all of them show no bones, or show them so symbolically as to not really allow identification. I'm hoping someone can definitively help with where the lower dantian is. Most verbal descriptions say, 3 fingers below the navel and 3 fingers inside, with the number of fingers for each varying, and some people actually using thumbs instead. The navel is roughly at the illiac crest, which is the bone pictured at the front of the top of the pelvis in the following picture, so the vertical location on this picture seems like it is correct. It would say the dantian is in front of the sacrum (picture from seeds of longevity): Quite a few pictures lead to a conclusion more like the one below, however, which shows the dantian below the navel, but also above the sacrum? The following picture is one I've seen quite a lot (this and the previous are from this site which has a ton of pictures including the top one). It does the triangulation more carefully, but it's unclear in the diagram on which it is superimposed what we are looking at for spine, but does seem to be again in front of the sacrum. I've seen diagrams with female torsos, and it seems to be put in the "womb space", which seems lower. I am also reading Damo Mitchell's White Moon on the Mountain Peak, which says that the dantian is vertically aligned with the baihui and the huiyin, which puts it far back, but also on a line between the mingmen and the qihai, which seems like it would be almost above the navel. I have always "left it indistinct" when doing my exercises, it has been sufficient that it was below the navel and inside, but that place only warms for me, it never gets hot, and multiple sources talk about the dantian getting hot when fed energy. I did his correcting exercise, moving up the line from the huiyin, and I did another person's exercise, using warm hands and moving slowly inward, Mitchell's put it against my sacrum, the other put it a little forward from there. I got my indications of these by feeling for the bones, and somewhat by comparing to the iliac crests, which are easy to find. For background and disclosure, I am trying to complete Mitchell's and some other's visualizations/meditations. I can't penetrate that area with visualizations for some reason, when I do a Tibetan style visualization of the nadi it fades in that area, when I do more Daoist visualizations the area responds but I can never seem to see it. So I'm looking for a more concentrated location point than what I've visualized in the past and want to know how to "narrow it down".

Hi, glad to have signed up for Dao Bums, I've been reading for a while. I signed up finally because I'm excited about the thread Water Over Fire, I haven't read it all, but I am working on that. I learned Hwa Yu T'ai Chi (liuhebafa) from John Chung Li, and have been doing it off and on since, and have been doing standing almost all that time with some breaks. I recently got interested in re-translating some of the Five Word Song, and got interested in the water above fire and small heaven and earth passages, which are references to Kan Li and to Microcosmic Orbit. I have been working on both. I will save some for joining that discussion, but I have had some progress.

Hi, What are the difference in physical objectives and energies cultivated by these traditional internal forms. Taichi Hsing I Bagua zhang Liu He Ba Fa I chuan