New 100-Day Challenge!

[the1gza]

Dope. Remember to do back raises/extensions if your ab strengthening stuff is like crunches/situps etc. If you make the front of your abs strong but not your back you get into postural issues down the road, I only mention this because you seem very consistent with your training

 

I didn't do shit today, but resting can be training, too.

Thanks, luckily the ab strengthening exercises is not a crunch type. It's a exercise, and while it's doesn't have the backward motion of extensors, it doesn't really have a forward motion. It's more of a power breath that is very concentrated. I found that I actually felt my back engage before the abs... I can't really explain it unless you know the exercise or unless I could find a video (which I can't, and I sho'll did look). But there isn't that concentrated forward bend that is seen in the crunch or sit-up movement, and the only thing that moves "forward" is the arms. You raise them in front of you on the inhale, and then lower them to the sides on the exhale. This really is actually maintaining the whole upper body, and I found it broke up a lot of tension in places like the shoulders, ribs, and spine. These exercises are devastatingly easy to approach, but the are working a lot of stuff for the person who pays attention to it. I feel the benefits come from actually paying attention, which is stressed a lot in the book ("Concentrate on what you are doing"). So thanks for suggestion, because if I was doing crunch-style stuff, that would be a concern.

[Leif]

back to 0 after short weekend vacation with kids, starting this week with 1:00 logged

Eigth brocades, Ten essential qigong exercises, teacups, Flying phoenix, kap chi set and some Blue dragon medical qigong

my first Eight brocades ever, resisted checking this famous form for a long time, finally dropped the ego factor and smelled the thousands years of history

[dogson]

Two yoga classes today, and some trampolining

[the1gza]

Day 7:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 45:00

Deer Exercise: 3x/day - (25:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 3x/day - (15:00)

Crane Exercise: 3x/day - (30:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 3x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 7 days

 

Accidentally slacked off with the ab and solar plexus exercise, but my progress is still feelin' pretty good. 

[dogson]

1 hour of yoga and some sunset tai chi

[the1gza]

Day 8:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 45:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (10:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (10:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 8 days

 

This was a "light" day, as the energy was pretty intense that I was cultivating, and I wanted to give it a chance to even out. I might do things like this tomorrow, and then go back to having things the way I had it on days 5 and 6.

[the1gza]

Day 9:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 45:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (10:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (10:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 9 days

 

This was a "light" day, as the energy was pretty intense that I was cultivating, and I wanted to give it a chance to even out. I might do things like this tomorrow, and then go back to having things the way I had it on days 6 and 7. I'm gonna be back to my original routine tomorrow, but this was definitely a good rest. I can't wait to see how it translates into the upped practice tomorrow!

Edited March 19, 2015 by the1gza

[the1gza]

Day 10:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 3x/day - (25:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 3x/day - (15:00)

Crane Exercise: 3x/day - (30:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 3x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 4x/day - (20:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 4x/day -(10:00)

 

Semen Retention: 10 days

[dogson]

Your consistency is beast. I actually ordered the Stephen Chang book out of curiosity about your training. Any general thoughts/commentary on how consistent training is effecting your day to day stuff overall? A lot of what I'm doing with my music project is thinking about how to convey how reality is totally different when you start doing some kind of energy work consistently. Like that stuff about interacting with big cities like LA.

[the1gza]

Well overall, things are a lot different. For one, I am a lot more "lucky"... just today I found $10 lying on my countertop and no one in the house was missing any money. I wasn't either, so this stuff really came "outta nowhere". At any rate, I find that the things I wanted to do are getting done regardless of when or where I have to do them. Even if it is late as hell, I can still get stuff done without feeling really shitty about it. Even though I have been getting to bed REALLY late, I have also found that I have been waking up in the morning pretty refreshed. Mind you, I have only started to capitalize on this today, because even though I could start my day with no problems, me not being used to waking up in the morning just let's me fall back into sleep.

 

Overall, I have had a massive improvement in my digestion. Since I started looking at alternative diets, I have had a battle with my digestion that resulted from trying too many different things without implementing others (i.e no exercise and energy work). I was a raw foodist (raw vegan), mainly trying to see if I could utilize the diet to help me cure diabetes. Overall, I went back to eating cooked food, which wasn't really helpful for my digestion either. However, once I started utilizing this work, my ability to assimilate food got drastically restored. I have been getting slimmer, and yet I still eat a decent amount of food in a day. 

 

One thing I have to point out is the semen retention. I don't know why, but for some reason, this experiment into doing it has been REALLY easy. I also can say that I had been doing work from that book for a few months, but when I included semen retention... it's just a whole different ball game. My energetic awareness in my body is going off pretty much 24/7; I can feel things being corrected all the time. There is a LOT of deeply ingrained musculoskeletal and even organ/gland tension that is getting broken down with this stuff, and things I had been trying to work out for years is finally getting dealt with.

 

Finally, my ability to enter deep states of consciousness is steadily increasing without any real strain on my part. I had worked with an entity that was helping me transmute sexual energy, but I did not really have the maturity or personal constitution to work with her in an intelligent manner. Now, I can actually communicate with her, and the anxiety I felt when I was working with her 3 years ago has vanished. Even without her in the picture though, I can enter deeper states that I had been trying to entrain for years, but lacked either the ability to consistently work with it, the patience to see it through, or both (it was actually most certainly both). I don't know where my patience is coming from now, but I am able to let the stuff develop naturally. I guess it helps that the improvements are coming day-after-day.

 

That's it in a nutshell, although it is way more than that. It's just the surface level stuff I can break off the top of my head   . It's really hard for me to think that this whole thing started just 10 days ago, but I think it really started in November when I actually started to at least do something from Chang's work consistently. So it did build from there, but still... just 10 days so we'll see how things like just one day at a time, na'mean?

[the1gza]

Day 11:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 3x/day - (25:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 3x/day - (20:00)

Crane Exercise: 3x/day - (30:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 11 days

 

I only got 2 combined forms in today, but I added more Turtle to it at the end of the session, due to me experiencing that the Turtle really helps with the distribution of energy. I also only managed 2 of both the Solar Plexus and Abdominal exercises.

Edited March 21, 2015 by the1gza

[the1gza]

Day 12:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (18:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (14:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (20:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 12 days

 

I felt done for the day, so I did not get a 3rd performance of the exercises that I normally perform 3 times a day.

[the1gza]

Day 13:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (22:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (20:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (20:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 13 days

 

I had a healing session with my HS, so I don't know if that counts as cultivation although it was based heavily in energetics. However, what I did find was a definitive increase in my ability to perform these exercises. So even though I only did them twice, I found that each performance of the exercises lasted quite a bit longer, and I had access to my body that I did not have prior to the healing. I also only chose two because the Crane Breathing activated a response from the HS healing that lasted for nearly 2 hours (this is on top of the hour that instigated the healing). Since I do the third performance of these exercises right before bed, and also because the HS healing session involved using sleep as a time to heal, I opted to leave the bedtime performances out, so that I could reserve the healing for sleep, and get to bed earlier.

Edited March 23, 2015 by the1gza

[the1gza]

Day 14:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (22:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (20:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (20:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 14 days

[dogson]

Your consistency is awesome dude. I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Stephen Chang's book, I really want to see what these exercises are all about. Also, welcome to a new reality... at least for me, when I get up around 14-15 days of retaining, energy starts to majorly click on in a cool way. How's your need for sleep, food etc been? I find that these things decrease dramatically after a couple weeks of retianing, especially in conjunction with herbs like ho shu wu, shilajit, shizandra etc.

[the1gza]

I haven't been taking many herbs consistently aside from triphala and ginger. I do have some shilajit, in it's black tar form but I haven't been utilizing it for whatever reason. However, my food need has been diminished, or should I say my food proclivity has diminished with my food need. I haven't had "need" to eat a lot for some time, but my appetite had remained pretty substantial and therefore a lot of attempted diet changes devolved in see-sawing between "healthy" food and "SAD" food. I found that I first felt that I could eat food that was pretty heavy because my digestion improved, and that actually proved to be true. I rarely found myself with the "pregnant belly" that is associated with eating too much food at one time. However, I found that I just didn't want to anymore, so I been eating oranges and sunflower seeds for the past 3 days. 

 

I have been waking up early, but again, the familiarity with the morning is something I gotta get used to. I just go back to sleep outta habit, but today I was waking back up several times, so I woke up about 2 hours earlier than normal. I documented that occurrence about a week ago in this thread, so sleep was probably the first thing i noticed. I am able to sleep even if I am wide awake, so it's easy to extend what was a perfectly content 4-hour sleep (lately it's been 2 hours) into 9 hours. I'm fine with it at the moment, because I am doing some intense healing work right. However, once that's done, I doubt I'll be indulging on sleep again.

[the1gza]

Day 15:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 50:00

Deer Exercise: 3x/day - (30:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 3x/day - (30:00)

Crane Exercise: 3x/day - (30:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 2x/day - (25:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 15 days

 

In having made contact with my HS, I am find that the HS is capable of creating just as much, if not more complete, empowerment and adjustments to my primordial self than the cultivation exercises I am doing. I am not stating that I will stop these exercises, but rather that the HS is capable, depending on the person, of creating empowerment that is superior to any ancient practice that has existed. I hypothesize that the origins of these techniques are, in fact, birthed from the ancients ability to commune with the HS. It's just a thought, but it's a thought that is now experientially-based rather than theoretically-based.

[dogson]

Interesting, definitely interested in hearing more about this. When did this contact originate? What form does it take?

I got the Stephen Chang book today, it's excellent. I'm going to start in on them tomorrow in addition to my xing yi and tai chi practice.

 

And still trampolining. It really helps in the mornings especially.

[the1gza]

I made contact on Sunday, and the form was mostly a tactile interaction. I did not "see" or "hear" it, because it was through a medium of hypnosis, which I had my brother instill for me. With that said, I do feel that the natural progression of things will lead to complete sensory experience, as I have had interaction with the HS that is focused on the head region with attention placed on my ears and third eye areas. But the focus was on healing, so it was not outright necessary for their to be anything other than tactile interaction, which has been ridiculously substantial.

 

Again, I'm not going to brag, but considering how much my body has benefited so far, stuff that I did not expect to happen at all, let alone so soon... I feel that the HS is where it is at. However, I would add that it helps to have far small exposure to normalized views of the HS or Holy Guardian Angel, because if you go by that, half the time you'll think that this being is a straight up dick hahaha. I've had a lot of exposure to those ideas, however I never really could internalize them seriously. 

[the1gza]

Day 16:

 

All of the below exercises are from Stephen Chang's Complete System of Self-Healing: Internal Exercises.

 

General Maintenance Exercises - 30:00

Deer Exercise: 2x/day - (20:00) 

Turtle Exercises: 2x/day - (20:00)

Crane Exercise: 2x/day - (20:00)

Deer/Crane/Turtle combined form: 0x/day - (00:00)

Solar Plexus Exercise: 2x/day - (10:00)

Abdominal Strengthening: 2x/day -(5:00)

 

Semen Retention: 16 days

 

This was a really inactive day for these exercises, primarily because my focus has shifted due to the events of the past week. Because of what I have been experiencing and learning with my current work, I am wondering where these exercises stand in the work I am doing right now. I will refrain from getting too detailed about it, but I will be taking the rest of this week off to see how this works out for me. Dogson, if you would like to message me about what I am doing, feel free to do so   .

 

I am also just a bit shocked that this thread only has had about 5 participants in it, and only 2 consistent ones. With all the theory discussions, I would hope that there would be some enthusiasm for a post that advocated practice. This work is about nothing but practice, you could spend years reading an mentalizing this stuff and not gained an iota of the knowledge that practice gives. But hey, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles. 

[dogson]

I'm pretty disappointed in the turnout for this challenge, too. But it does help to remind me that the internet can't take the place of anything - maybe, in the best case, TTB people recognize that and just practice, and probably people think it's redundant to post here as well as in their personal practice threads. Still, I think having discourse about actual practice and experience across time is the best way we can all grow, so thanks for contributing here I will PM you and see what's up.

[the1gza]

Day 17:

 

 

Semen Retention: 17 days

 

As stated earlier, I am refraining from doing the Internal Exercises for the remainder of the week to see how things flow with my current exploration. However, I am going to at least continue to post the retention because it was a vital part of the work and is still vital to how I am living right now.

[Leif]

I have just skipped a day, back to 0 after 10 days in a row.  Not overly worried about that, as I'm now not working with single system consistently after all, then IMHO consistency has only psychological effects.

 

Real magic was consistency and 1+ hours of Flying Phoenix in the past. When the number fell down to 30 minutes, it still felt good to be consistent but the magic mostly disappeared for me (same as with 1-2hrs here and there inconsistently).

 

I have more or less turned to exploring various systems and their combinations for health reasons recently incl. modalities that not quite fall into this thread.  Tried a bit from Stephen Chang's book and considering incorporating it into daily routine once experimentation period ends.

[the1gza]

Day 18:

 

 

Semen Retention: 18 days

 

As stated earlier, I am refraining from doing the Internal Exercises for the remainder of the week to see how things flow with my current exploration. However, I am going to at least continue to post the retention because it was a vital part of the work and is still vital to how I am living right now.

[the1gza]

Day 19:

 

 

Semen Retention: 19 days

 

I will probably start back with the TIE if not tomorrow, then Monday. I will know for sure by the end of the weekend if or when I will be picking them back up.