Wearing metals

[Henchman21]

Are there metals that would negatively affect your energy? I heard plastic fabrics in clothing damper your qi.

If I wore chainmaille would certain metals affect certain organs positively or negatively? I couldn't find much information on this.

Commonly used metals include aluminum, stainless steel, copper, bronze and brass.

I'm trying to learn the european 4-1 weave, I'm getting stuck right as it gets good.

[Marblehead]

I used to wear medals.

 

But yes, much has been said and written about this.  I don't have the knowledge to be able to share anything with you but I do know that there are some here who can.

[silent thunder]

Nice topic.

 

I deeply appreciate and resonate well with many metals.  I wear them often.  Best way I can describe it, is that they seem to sing.  Metal sings to my inner hearing.   There are a few that I have on or around me all the time.  Silver and Copper are ever present, I wear or handle them daily..  My son gifted me a pair of Copper Baoding balls that are often in hand.

 

Right now I'm wearing one of two pieces I wear daily, it's a Tibetan Vajra made of brass, fastened to a necklace I crafted out of copper rings.  Tungsten and Damascus steel also carry a deep resonant draw for me, very soothing and stimulating simultaneously.

 

The other piece that I carry with me, or wear daily is a pendant with the Flower of Life design, inlaid and mounted in a Tourmaline disc, wrapped in Silver.  The inlay of the design is filled with the dust of rubies, saphires and amethyst. 

 

Gold was often too potent and I hadn't worn it much in the past, though my Father passed a few pieces to me and I'm wearing them regularly and keep them close and in view

 

But where the songs really take off for me, is with crystals and minerals.  They bring a depth and breadth of resonance that is staggering and awesome. 

[Taomeow]

From the wuxing perspective, it depends on the individual.  For some it is very beneficial, for some it's neutral, for some it's harmful.  Depends on your auspicious/inauspicious phases of qi ("elements").  

 

The metals I wear are silver and gold, which is a feng shui recommendation for those who benefit from wearing metals.   Precious and semiprecious stones are also in the phase of Metal in wuxing (with some variations depending on color and brightness -- Metal-with-Fire, Metal-with-Wood, etc.).  The exception is jade, which is considered balanced and represents all phases working in harmony, with emphasis on Water and Wood (Kidneys and its "child" Liver).  Jade that has some green in it is considered particularly nourishing (Wood), while white jade is healing to the bones and blood, and "warm jade" (only read about it, have never encountered it, it's exceptionally rare) facilitates magic.  Don't let me digress any further, jade is a large area of study in taoism and I only know a bit.

 

Before taoism and Chinese astrology, I used to test stuff kinesiologically to determine if it's harmful or beneficial or neutral.  The most reliable version of this method requires an assistant -- and is pretty reliable with some practice and getting the knack of it.  I even did a double blind placebo controlled study of this method at one point, with accuracy of about 85% (which is much higher than that for most mainstream lab tests).

 

[thelerner]

In a similar vein, as I recall Michael Winn, a Healing Tao usa teacher won't wear watches.   I believe he said the quartz vibration of modern watches interfered w/ his chi. 

[Brian]

I stopped wearing a watch several years ago. I do carry a quartz crystal in my pocket.

[liminal_luke]

I like the writeups this company does on their gemstone necklaces.  I`m pretty sure the jewelry itself is overpriced, and whether or not their take on energetics is accurate I can`t say, but it sure is interesting.

 

http://www.gemisphere.com/

[Taomeow]

In a similar vein, as I recall Michael Winn, a Healing Tao usa teacher won't wear watches.   I believe he said the quartz vibration of modern watches interfered w/ his chi. 

 

Wang Liping instructs students to remove all jewelry for meditation, this would include a watch if I wore it.  I have a humongous Swiss watch (didn't buy it, found it in the bushes on a trail when hiking... had to fight off a humongous cactus to get it!  A very mysterious gift...) which I only wear when I want to project a business-like attitude, which is to say, once in a blue moon.

[Henchman21]

Thank you for all the replies!

[Aeran]

Wang Liping instructs students to remove all jewelry for meditation, this would include a watch if I wore it.  I have a humongous Swiss watch (didn't buy it, found it in the bushes on a trail when hiking... had to fight off a humongous cactus to get it!  A very mysterious gift...) which I only wear when I want to project a business-like attitude, which is to say, once in a blue moon.

 

Damo Mitchell makes the same recommendation in White Moon.

 

Personally, I'm not huge on jewelry, but I do wear a silver pendant and have never noticed any effect from it consciously. Now that the subject has been raised, I might try removing it for a while just to see if there is any difference.

 

What I have noticed as having a strong effect on my energy is a magnetotherapy wrist band I experimented with for a month or two. There was a definite sensation of energy having to swirl and loop around the wrist band as the energy moved up and down my arm during qigong, although it didn't have a negative impact on the practice that I noticed. It, however, seem to correlate with a period in time in which excess heat seemed to build up as a result of practice - I can't prove a causal relation, but the woman who sold me the wrist band said that they could cause dehydration (and I experienced this effect myself), so there was definitely something going on.

[Taomeow]

The tinfoil hat is an urban legend, but there's a Russian method to use the aluminum foil to treat various inflammatory conditions.  I tried it a couple of times on something weird -- a few years ago something sharp and heavy was dropped on my big toe, and ever since, I would get episodes of intense sudden pain in that toe, which a doctor friend told me look like an inflamed or pinched nerve.  Nothing ever helped for that pain, which I dubbed "the Crocodile" because the sensations invoked the image of a vicious crocodile suddenly biting into my toe.  It would just come and go, quite unpredictably, and it never lasted long but it was so excruciating!  So, the next time it happened, I remembered, by chance, about that aluminum foil remedy and thought, why not try it, and wrapped a piece of foil around my toe, shiny side down.  The pain stopped instantly.  But instantly.  It returned in about a month, I wrapped the foil around the toe promptly, it stopped instantly again.  I never had that pain since, it's been about a year.  Knock on wood.  Posting in case someone else might discover the miraculous effect.  

[silent thunder]

Watches are odd things to me.   They never last long, no matter how precious. 

 

I've always had an adversarial bend away from mechanical time and it shows in my many dead watches.  My wife gifted me an engraved watch on our first anniversary.  It stopped working within a couple weeks, so she took it in for repair and the answer was, "there's nothing wrong with it". 

 

This scenario was repeated a couple more times with that watch, until we stopped taking it in and went with several others we purchased as replacements until I just gave up on watches and kept the original as jewelry, never attempting to set it, or refer to it for accurate man time.

 

It's the same with every watch I've ever owned, they all soon wouldn't keep time accurately, or stopped dead, except one...

 

This watch I purchased on the streets of Manhattan, an impulse buy.  A nice looking cheap $5 knock-off.  It worked perfectly for a few years for me and then I gifted it to a friend.  This buddy at the time was a counselor at a summer camp every year in Vermont.  One of their rituals at this camp, is to canoe out to an island and stay there for a couple days tenting.  My buddy told me years later, that he took the watch off, and hung it around a branch to go swimming as it was not water resistant, then he promptly forgot it and left it. 

 

Two years later, he was on the same island and found it sitting on the branch when they went to the same swimming hole.  He called me and said, "I wound it up, put it on and it's still working now."  Two Vermont Winters couldn't kill that thing.  I still wonder what company made that knock off. 

[Taomeow]

Yes, watches are a weird thing, I've noticed too.

 

Aside from the Swiss one I found, I also lost a watch under very mystical circumstances which I may have described here at some point.  But instead of stopping watches like you, I get them going.  This is not characteristic of my overall relationship with technology items, just watches.  When I was very little, perhaps 3, my grandmother gave me a pocket watch to play with that used to belong to her father and stopped in some supposedly unrepairable state before she was born -- she used to play with it too.  Similar to this one:

 

   

 

After examining it and opening all the lids (it had several as I recall) and exploring it every which way, I just started swinging it by the chain.  Round and round it went, and back and forth like a pendulum... and then all of a sudden it was working again.  It worked since that day for as long as I remember.  It was there on the periphery of my childhood for a long time, and then I don't know what happened to it, no one in the family was interested in antiques (my great-grandmother's heirloom silver was thrown carelessly into a toolbox with hammers and pliers -- what an insult to Metal! -- because it was tarnished and no one was into doing anything about it. Today, of course, I would...  I've seen lower quality pieces in the same style, from the same period and area, displayed in the Metropolitan Museum...  lower quality, less interesting artistic execution, but polished bright and shiny...  ) 

[Seatle185]

This is an interesting question, one that i have wondered about for a while too. Alot of different opinions on it. Regarding clothing, I was reading a YMAA article saying that unnatural fabrics can negatively effect your qi, cotton is much better, also it said that the best fabric to wear is silk for its conductive properties.

 

In the vedic tradition certain gemstones are enhanced if set in the proper metals and some metals naturally resonate with people more than others depending on your charts.

 

I also have "stone medicine-a chinese medical guide to healing with gems and minerals", it says that aluminum clears Heat especially in the liver, copper moves qi and blood nourishing the liver and kidneys, gold is tonifying and silver is dispersing.