Nei Dan: A Beginner's Experience or How I Learned to Stop Asking a Million Questions and Love Meditation

[AugustGreig]

I just tried this today and was finally able to duplicate results I'd had in the past naturally. I had to go against some useful meditation suggestions I'd been given, which I suppose is why some say this shouldn't be introduced to people as meditation or they will get the wrong idea.

 

Anyway, I just want to check with my favorite community to make sure I'm on the right track, as I have no teacher, and the problem with looking something up online, especially something as esoteric and hidden as Taoism still manages to be is that you get a lot of different sources from a lot of different perspectives, difficult to discern. So I fall back on you guys.

 

All I did differently from regular meditation was clear my breath out of my lungs first, and start stoking my belly like a bellows, first shallow and fast, but then longer and still fast, focusing on pushing out and letting it draw in naturally. Then after I felt some heat there, I settled into stillness and observed for a moment. Once I was able to focus on the LDT and let the thoughts drift away, I began to observe how the breath in expanded the perineum and the breath out let it contract. Building from this, I started to squeeze it in with the exhale and let it expand with the inhale. This was extremely clumsy at first, but I have practiced squeezing the perineum quite a bit in my life for sexual reasons, so it came quite easily to me I think.

 

Anyway, basically this: fire, pull water in, steam fills the body,keep pumping, more heat, more steam, fire grows. When it got to the heart I panicked and stopped, but continued back on for a bit before sitting back and just observing how I felt, which was warm, pain free without medication (a miracle) happy and...whole I guess, like I was my whole body and not my thoughts, and at moments the sound of falling rain became indestinguishable from the "sound" of my own body buzzing, both in distance and as an object apart from my self.

 

TL;DR- pumped my LDT and squeezed my perineum, felt with everywhere. Just looking for guidance and thoughts, or encouragement if it's due. Practical advice basically.

[Cheshire Cat]

Is there anything that an anonymous guy on this board could say to discourage you from pursuing this kind of practice? 

 

 

[AugustGreig]

14 minutes ago, Cheshire Cat said:

Is there anything that an anonymous guy on this board could say to discourage you from pursuing this kind of practice? 

 

 

I don't know. I listen to all suggestion. Humble, open minded and willing are three things I pray for daily.

[idquest]

Are you serious when you call yourself a humble one?

[exorcist_1699]

 I wonder why people  pay so much attention to their  breathing ,better  breathe naturally .

What kind of breathing we  get is dependent on  what kind of a mind we  have  , which is not anything  by  a  deliberate effort . 

[Mudfoot]

1 hour ago, idquest said:

Are you serious when you call yourself a humble one?

He prayed for it. 

 

We pray for what we do not have, and give thanks for that which is us given. 

[Apech]

21 hours ago, AugustGreig said:

I just tried this today and was finally able to duplicate results I'd had in the past naturally. I had to go against some useful meditation suggestions I'd been given, which I suppose is why some say this shouldn't be introduced to people as meditation or they will get the wrong idea.

 

Anyway, I just want to check with my favorite community to make sure I'm on the right track, as I have no teacher, and the problem with looking something up online, especially something as esoteric and hidden as Taoism still manages to be is that you get a lot of different sources from a lot of different perspectives, difficult to discern. So I fall back on you guys.

 

All I did differently from regular meditation was clear my breath out of my lungs first, and start stoking my belly like a bellows, first shallow and fast, but then longer and still fast, focusing on pushing out and letting it draw in naturally. Then after I felt some heat there, I settled into stillness and observed for a moment. Once I was able to focus on the LDT and let the thoughts drift away, I began to observe how the breath in expanded the perineum and the breath out let it contract. Building from this, I started to squeeze it in with the exhale and let it expand with the inhale. This was extremely clumsy at first, but I have practiced squeezing the perineum quite a bit in my life for sexual reasons, so it came quite easily to me I think.

 

Anyway, basically this: fire, pull water in, steam fills the body,keep pumping, more heat, more steam, fire grows. When it got to the heart I panicked and stopped, but continued back on for a bit before sitting back and just observing how I felt, which was warm, pain free without medication (a miracle) happy and...whole I guess, like I was my whole body and not my thoughts, and at moments the sound of falling rain became indestinguishable from the "sound" of my own body buzzing, both in distance and as an object apart from my self.

 

TL;DR- pumped my LDT and squeezed my perineum, felt with everywhere. Just looking for guidance and thoughts, or encouragement if it's due. Practical advice basically.

 

Hi,

 

Don't force anything - even reverse breathing etc. Should be gentle and harmonious.  Don't push or pull (in my opinion) but rather allow your body to establish a new rhythm with the different stages.  If you can locate the LDT (which is actually not that easy for many people) spend some time just resting in it.

 

Don't target experiences and don't force to the point of panicking.  Perhaps you can see the irony of doing Nei Gong practice and then panicking when something happens.  This is very common but points to inner conflict i.e. something in you wants it - but another part is scared of it.  Nothing to be scared of, of course, except that forcing practice can disturb your energy.  So take it easy and step by step and without urgency.

 

 

 

[freeform]

Ahh Nei Dan - the pinnacle of Daoist internal arts. The practice that you reach after decades of intensive neigong and Qi gong practice. This is where you move onto once you’ve found, activated and built your Dan Tien (the real, physical thing), cleared most of your channels, built the soft tissues into the correct shape and set up a smooth, strong circulation. You’ve also cultivated the correct quality of mind and breath through thousands of hours of sitting practice and now you’re finally ready to go onto firing the furnace... few ever get to this stage...

 

But hopefully this is an accurate picture of your current level of development! But something tells me it may not be (I’m certainly not there yet!) 

 

Red flags for me:

1) doing internal training with no teacher (it’s like learning surgery from medieval books written in Latin)

2) lots of perineum squeezing in the past (Chia?)

 

I really don’t mean to sound harsh, but it is what it is. My best guess as to what’s happening is that you’re stimulating your perineum and it’s creating internal heat. If you’ve done a lot of Chia’s stuff, you’ve probably built a connection between perineum and heart. If I’m accurate (which is not that likely to be fair) and you carry on full-force with this practice you’re most likely develop sexual deviancy and then fuel it until you go nuts  

 

Or just find a good teacher and you’ll do great!

[Taoist Texts]

10 minutes ago, freeform said:

through thousands of hours of sitting practice

hmmm

[freeform]

8 minutes ago, Taoist Texts said:

hmmm

 

 okok - that might be setting the bar a bit too high. You can certainly get started with Nei Dan earlier - but only with the supervision of an excellent teacher and after you develop a quiet (not necessarily completely silent) and balanced mind state. For most people this will take thousands of hrs of correct practice - not all of it seated.

[Taoist Texts]

i donno. if you sit say 4 hrs per day, then how many years you need to get somewhere?

[dwai]

I'd recommend practicing some qigong and becoming comfortable with the flow of qi (and open up your channels) first. Cultivation should be effortless (after initial effort of learning the movements and breathing). 

[Apech]

26 minutes ago, Taoist Texts said:

i donno. if you sit say 4 hrs per day, then how many years you need to get somewhere?

 

As the earth is rotating at about 1,000 mph in 4 hours you'd get 4,000 miles and in a year 1,460,000 miles which is quite a long way.

[Taoist Texts]

yeah, and considering that its a rotation you will be back where u started.

[dwai]

54 minutes ago, Taoist Texts said:

yeah, and considering that its a rotation you will be back where u started.

wherever you go, there you are  

[freeform]

2 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

i donno. if you sit say 4 hrs per day, then how many years you need to get somewhere?

 

Depends what you mean by somewhere. Depends also on the quality of sitting. Depends also on the other aspects of practice - moving, standing etc. 

 

The ‘fastest’ way is doing all three for a total of 3 to 6hrs a day (sometimes more isn’t better, sometimes is) - it would take about 3yrs to get the foundations down. (That’s the physical structure, fully active DT, most obvious blockages and stagnation dealt with etc)

 

At this point you can start Nei Dan which will work on the deeper aspects of your acquired mind and deeper channels and aspects of your energy body.

 

Keeping your practice up for 10yrs would ‘build the qigong body’ almost completely. From then on qigong is mostly redundant and your practice tends to be more sitting and standing - Nei Gong and Nei Dan.

 

At this point you’d be well past the 10,000hr mark, but still only the early stages of alchemy and meditation (and intermediate stages of neigong).

 

So yeah - it’s a long road. It also means quite difficult, focused practice every day, not just taking it easy and enjoying the floatiness. That’s why ‘gong’ is translated as ‘skill acquired through dedicated practice over time’.

 

Saying all that, with the right school you should experience some ‘extraordinary’ effects within a few months. It just takes a long time to achieve the deeper more profound transformations we hear about. Like the De (the virtues) - which according to Chia is achieved in a few breaths by making sounds and imagining the inner smile

 

 

[Piyadasi]

5 hours ago, freeform said:

I really don’t mean to sound harsh, but it is what it is. My best guess as to what’s happening is that you’re stimulating your perineum and it’s creating internal heat. If you’ve done a lot of Chia’s stuff, you’ve probably built a connection between perineum and heart. If I’m accurate (which is not that likely to be fair) and you carry on full-force with this practice you’re most likely develop sexual deviancy and then fuel it until you go nuts  

 

I myself fortunately was turned away from Chia quite early on, but I'm very interested, what would you recommend someone who has developed the connection and the exact problem you described?

[freeform]

1 hour ago, Piyadasi said:

 

I myself fortunately was turned away from Chia quite early on, but I'm very interested, what would you recommend someone who has developed the connection and the exact problem you described?

 

I’m afraid it’s quite technical and beyond my full understanding.

 

Best bet would to work with a very good Chinese Medicine practitioner. There are protocols for sexual deviancy involving work on the pericardium, heart and small intestine.

 

It goes without saying that all practice should be stopped as it’s adding fuel to the situation.

 

Anything  to do with powerlocks multiple orgasms, working heavily with the perineum are red flags. Although it’s very appealing to our base nature, sexual practices and spiritual cultivation do not go together. (A normal, moderate sex life is perfectly fine of course)

 

 

[Rocky Lionmouth]

Hmm. Imho and afaik, fire and water as mentioned in the OP are not the nei dan initial ingredients. Fire is not meant as forceful heat nor is water meant as supple cold to my understanding, do object if im talking nonsense.

The method described seems more like a jing exercise where you use qi and shen as fuel.

 

Kan and Li are the trigrams that illustrate two specific states. Inner emptiness opens the way for cultivating outer stillness, where the inner yang manifests clearly in due time. When those two states are established the process of inversion is set in motion where transformation to Heaven and Earth are possible. This is a physical and energetic exercise at first that paves the way for becoming spiritual when heaven and earth are established. Again, the trigrams are whats important to describe the idea, not the referred things. When you get the idea forget the trigrams, it’ll become self evident whats what.

Later on you can see the symbolisms of fire and water around you in many interactions and relationships, but the nei dan aspect is specific.

Liu Yiming describes it well in his writings, i’m still dealing with eastablishing the prerequisites of the main ingredients, namely the fire and water to extract their inner qualities.

 

Ime strenous exercises like OP describes need to express the power and force that is generated with the core, such as gong fu striking methods. If you take force and power from somewhere it must go somewhere else or it will stay and affect you instead of being applied for a purpose.

I’m personally not pro sexual arts because i think its far too easy to imprint disruptive patterns and potentially pull a muscle in the lower abdominal area, causing a hernia or something like that.

If you leave all that buildup inside of you with the pumping and locking perineum then that force will act on your internal structure instead of massaging it into sustainable health and strength. Thats my personal theory on the matter in relation to what i read in your description.

 

But gently following the motions of perineum with awareness and yi first and then gently adding power isnt bad, it helps in developing the LDT and use it as the origin of movement. Key word: Gently. 

 

Idk, i might be totally off on this though.

[AugustGreig]

On 10/18/2018 at 8:51 AM, freeform said:

Ahh Nei Dan - the pinnacle of Daoist internal arts. The practice that you reach after decades of intensive neigong and Qi gong practice. This is where you move onto once you’ve found, activated and built your Dan Tien (the real, physical thing), cleared most of your channels, built the soft tissues into the correct shape and set up a smooth, strong circulation. You’ve also cultivated the correct quality of mind and breath through thousands of hours of sitting practice and now you’re finally ready to go onto firing the furnace... few ever get to this stage...

 

But hopefully this is an accurate picture of your current level of development! But something tells me it may not be (I’m certainly not there yet!) 

 

Red flags for me:

1) doing internal training with no teacher (it’s like learning surgery from medieval books written in Latin)

2) lots of perineum squeezing in the past (Chia?)

 

I really don’t mean to sound harsh, but it is what it is. My best guess as to what’s happening is that you’re stimulating your perineum and it’s creating internal heat. If you’ve done a lot of Chia’s stuff, you’ve probably built a connection between perineum and heart. If I’m accurate (which is not that likely to be fair) and you carry on full-force with this practice you’re most likely develop sexual deviancy and then fuel it until you go nuts  

 

Or just find a good teacher and you’ll do great!

I don't know why I never said notifications for responses to this thread. But it's quite funny, you're fairly close there. Actually, Cheshire cat's question was enough to make me take a look at what I was doing. I was going to apologise for my foolishness and delete this thread.

 

Yes, it was Chia. No, I hadn't studied anything of his. But I practiced martial arts, some sexual Qigong , Tai chi an meditation for several years at varying levels of dedication with what I could find in books. I practiced reverse breathing so much it became a habit, and I didn't like condoms, so I learned to at least delay if no stop orgasm entirely with basically breath and squeezing. My point is, years later, I'm dedicated, still no teacher, and I come across Chia's teaching actually from a student of his, so I tried it.

 

It felt wrong, that's why I stopped. It felt unnatural in a way, I mentioned in another thread about this, it felt unearned... Just off. Which is why I stopped when the heat rose to my heart. To me, this is like trying to drive a car by cutting a hole in the floorboard and pushing with your feet. Your forcing something, and just ignoring the purpose of the entire system.

 

So I wasn't not-humble, just not skeptical enough, hence a fool. Am I to believe that if I would have continued I'd have had a DMT trip? I doubt it.

 

Also, the most scary thing you said was about the sexual deviancy. I actually had to call my ex GF and have her come over and fuck me and I gave her some money because my sexual appetite had become voracious. I was practicing semn retention before that. After we had sex an I relaxed, I realized what was going on, I made the connection Immediately that this behavior and the thoughts prior were so out of character for me.

 

So I'll leave this thread here as a warning. There's another teacher too who teaches nei dan like it's just a series of mechanics and then voila. Can't remember his name. An here's a question no one has answered me yet. Why is important to have a teacher? I homeschooled myself, and have taught myself various skills over the years, like music, art, cooking. Why is a teacher so important? Genuinely asking.

[Taoist Texts]

5 hours ago, AugustGreig said:

Why is a teacher so important? Genuinely asking.

Its a good question, but needs to be asked with a complete sentence. Why is a teacher so important for what?

[Nintendao]

12 hours ago, AugustGreig said:

Why is a teacher so important?

I have a feeling this gets discussed a lot here. I have some two cents for now.

 

7 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

for what?

Yes, maybe good to break it down to some more specific facets. AugustG mentioned arts, cooking, etc.. In any discipline the development of individual expression is very important, but also there is certain things a good instructor is invaluable. This hold specially true for martial/energetic things, if nothing else to avoid injury or at least embarrassment . I am super thankful for this online forum, but one-on-one in-person is that times ten.

 

Safety - Good teachers have surely made lots of mistakes already, and can steer the student away from pitfalls they might not even know existed.

 

Efficiency/accuracy - Teacher can literally hold your hand and place it into a position that may not be apparent in even the best images or descriptions. You'll instantly "get it" whereas it might take lots of trial and error pouring over details on your own. Either way has merit, but there is only so much time after all.

 

Thus each generation has the potential to grow even greater than the last. When this is realized, it is easy to feel humble gratitude.

 

Now, If you believe in prayer (or whatever you want to call it where there is more going on than strictly physical or even mental interaction) then there is an even greater benefit to "sitting at the feet of the master"

[Nintendao]

15 hours ago, Nintendao said:

there is more going on than strictly physical

 

I mean, i guess biophotons are technically physical, but their behavior is not yet officially defined.

[Taoist Texts]

15 hours ago, Nintendao said:

 In any discipline   there is certain things a good instructor is invaluable. This hold specially true for martial/energetic things,

The common mistake you guys make is to equate '" martial/energetic things" with "any discipline". The latter produce ordinary results, while true M/E is supposed to produce extraordinary results. One can try and study M/E without a teacher but that would be only a pretend study,  which will produce only ordinary results, or more precisely no results at all.

 

Hence when asking

On 10/27/2018 at 5:14 AM, AugustGreig said:

Why is a teacher so important?

one needs to specify the results you are expecting. If you are expecting ordinary results a teacher is not important at all. But if you want to get extraordinary results then a true teacher is a must. 

[AugustGreig]

11 hours ago, Taoist Texts said:

The common mistake you guys make is to equate '" martial/energetic things" with "any discipline". The latter produce ordinary results, while true M/E is supposed to produce extraordinary results. One can try and study M/E without a teacher but that would be only a pretend study,  which will produce only ordinary results, or more precisely no results at all.

 

Hence when asking

one needs to specify the results you are expecting. If you are expecting ordinary results a teacher is not important at all. But if you want to get extraordinary results then a true teacher is a must. 

Extraordinary. I've been gifted a masculine, energetic, sensitive body. Shouldn't I use it to defend the weak? Or at least, to be prepared to?