Starjumper

I read those too, but White Ninja was my first. I hadn't heard of him and just bought it on a whim at the bookstore. I think White Ninja was his masterpiece and was lucky to read it first. Right now I'm reading one by him called The Testament. I read the whole book Path Notes, it's all good, but couldn't get into the Shadow one as it seemed to have to much of the free association he did a little of in the first one. I think maybe he was trying to be a little too poetic there. I found it interesting to learn that the Ninjas descended from chi kung masters that migrated to Japan long ago. It figures. If it's the same cover as the one I have, with his back to the camera, it's to show off his jacket patches, and they are pretty cool jacket patches. He wrote a couple of long winded and very imaginative and colorful Science Fiction books: Ring of Five Dragons I think is the name.

Thanks, I enjoyed watching that, and I watched some other you tube videos of JKD.

I liked path notes a lot. ... and I was really impressed by White Ninja by Eric Lustbader, has anyone here read that one?

This is exactly the kind of thing we learn in Yueng Chuan. You try to punch and you get all locked up, at which point you are shown all the opportunities at their disposal that will kill you or break your bones. More later, got to work ...

Yes, and one of his main ones, who is in his nineties now, is still teaching. Yes, and I'm one of them.

That makes sense that tension exercises will make your bones stronger, but does it also make your muscles harder?

Why does chi kung make your muscles soft if you don't mind me asking? I'm only referring to soft chi kung, the kind you do for health, not the kind of chi kung where they try to bust a blood vessel. I'm not sure why soft chi kung makes your muscles softer.

Bruce continued his Wing Chun training to extreme levels while living with one of his teachers in Seattle. The style was the very internal and secret style taught within the Chinese opera. Bruce learned the expertise he had in all the weapons as well as tai chi, ba gua, and a whole bunch of other kung fu arts from him. His other primary teacher is a Shaolin grandmaster who lives in the Seattle area. So Bruce's main teachers were two of the deadliest guys on the planet, and their styles are both very internal and remarkably similar. That Shaolin master has the most astounding special abilities. I think some wing Chun styles (or maybe it's mostly levels =) are a lot more external and hard style than the really soft internal wing Chun of the opera, the one that is said to have been originally developed by women to control larger people.

Bending the wrist joint to and past 90 degrees by pressing back on the fingers. Same as pressing your hands together flat (prayer fashion) and firmly at heart or solar plexus level and then raising your elbows so that the forearms are in a straight line or above a straight line. After it heals I'm going to have a lot of lost ground to retake with wrist flexibility. Hopefully I just strained it rather than broke something but symptoms seem to be pointing to a break, tendon, not ligament.

He didn't do any chi kung because chi kung makes your muscles soft and he wanted to have hard muscles so he would look good for the movies.

Speaking of pushing it, interesting timing on the thread. I was stretching my wrists last week and overdid it. I ended up ripping some ligaments or tendons off my left elbow. So now I need to wear a wrist brace for six weeks at least, and probably forgo applications class, which is happening now, and I'm not there. It's funny (ha ha) how you don't feel the pain right away, only later, when you move it again.

Yip Man was his childhood teacher in Hong Kong. He had couple other teachers in Seattle as an adult, and they are relatively unknown outside of Seattle.

Cool! Lucky girl. Once I was at the zoo in Belize, which only had chicken wire cages for it's animals. A panther came up to me and lay down against the fence right next to me and started purring, so I reached through the fence to tickle it's neck and pat it's head. I hadn't ever expected to hear purring froma big cat so didn't recognize it for a couple of seconds.

I was looking for pics of places I've been in the mountains and saw this. I haven't been here but always thought it was a well done picture. I've seen similar. I was planning solar but the neighbors down the canyon have it but they found that it's too cloudy during the winter and they paid a lot of money for gas to run generators, so this summer we dug a trench up the road with a tractor called a Ditch Witch and put power and fiber optic conduit in. There are many big hydroelectric dams nearby so electrical power is dirt cheap around here. There is power now so there's finally heat in the trailer. I also used the Ditch Witch to dig ditches for power to the house , water line from the well to the house, and drain line to the septic tank. The house will have a bathroom, two actually, one bathtub room open to the bedroom and a separate toilet room w. shower. Right now the toilet is outdoors, a little wood box with a toilet seat on it, sitting out under some trees, without walls or roof, with a very nice view. There is a nice stream that runs down the bottom of the canyon, the length of the property, but we aren't supposed to take water from streams.

I'll share some views of places I've been around here There are a bazillion trees around here but I prefer the views and the feeling at higher altitudes. These last two picture are from a place called the Enchanted Lakes Wilderness, which is one of my favorite spots.

Yes it's wonderful, but rather than it being a retreat house I'm planning on living there most of the time. At first I had picked a dramatic vacation retreat cabin location for it but I realized that would be a mistake since the feng shui for comfort wasn't there. Dramatic and comfortable don't mix that well =) I worked on the feng shui of the house and the landscaping to make it a comfortable family home, so it seems like it would be a shame to live there alone, and it would be such an ideal place to raise a kid too, perhaps a child that could someday become a most powerful chi kung master. I've been thinking of using it as a location for a chi kung camp during the summer, and I do mean camp, at least at first. It could be you were picking up on it from people from the forum that were viewing it. OK, I like photos too.

You can push your luck with other kinds of stretching, but the first post asked specifically about back bends. Push your luck with bending backwards and you get serious long term injury, unless you start as a very young child. I say don't EVEN try lower back bending stretches at all, ever. I'm referring to lower back, as is shown in the first post. Stretching upper of middle back backwards can be done more safely.

Once I made a set of four swords for a circus performer's act. They looked sharp from a little distance and at the end of the act the performer used one to cut a watermelon, but they weren't sharp.

Practicing back bends is really bad for your back, unless you start at the age of two.

Here's a picture of the trailer that was my home. The property has forest land on opposite sides, over on the other side of the ridge that you can see a little of at the top. I'm sorry to cause the feelings of envy and jealousy. Remember everything has it's good and it's bad side ... and I'm going to use this idea as a lead in to a final explanation of the way I dealt with the kunlun thing in case it will help anyone let go of it as that will help me let go of it too. I already forgave myself before I did it. Being out there in the little trailer all alone was easy for me because I am good at being solitary and a hermit. These last months I have worked on pulling myself out of a laziness rut with my practice and started working on ramping up energy levels and on getting a lot more energy in my head. As I described in my third post (#20) in the En*light*enment thread, getting a lot of energy in your head can make you much more emotional and a bit crazy =) and so it was with me, maybe still is. Being alone out there every night, with the dim lighting and nothing but the sounds of the night, lots of crickets in the summer, strange birds that sound tropical, coyotes howling, Owls, deer moving around in the dark, small dying animal cries fading into the darkness, changes you. I did plenty of meditating and chi kung but I also had plenty of time to think, too much time in a way. I was trying to figure out what was going on with the kunlun seminars and always thinking - what if. You know, when you are worried about someone, as in when a relative is late coming home, you wonder what if, what if, what if something bad happened. Raise your hand if you've never done this. So then I got the email about Max. I realize now that it may well have been a Halloween trick and I fell for it. We all know it doesn't matter if a demon story is written or not, it is hard to believe, but still it made my 'what if' thing go through the roof, it all fit together, didn't it, and I freaked out. I went to the trailer but couldn't meditate and could hardly work, I felt it was more important than anything to come back and warn my friend (and everyone else) before she went back, you know, just in case. In retrospect it was good for me to go through that crisis as it has helped me release my concerns about it and I feel I now have a more level headed approach to it. I was really pissed off at the idea that she could have been abused in such a way. Where a Taoist would say they were pissed off a new ager would say they need healing, so ya, healing. I hear that takes time, and time is doing it's work. So ... Yes it does sound like she is doing well with it and I hope you are right about us being pals again. That's pretty close cat, but with a twist in it that made it seem worse than brainwashed. You know, sometimes I like to go back through threads and read things I've said about people and see how they apply to me. I truly believe that anything I say about another is about me too in some way and so i like to see in what way it fits. This thread is rich with those kinds of resources =) Speaking of cats, we have these things around there, they like the rocky cliff areas. and here is a pic of the lower end of the driveway, showing a rock outcropping through the trees, the neighbors call this rock the sphinx.

I've wanted to follow through on this thread but been a bit reluctant at the same time .. anyway ... I'm hoping to get back out there in early December and put exterior doors and windows in. It is a beautiful area for sure but I don't really feel like I own it, it feels more like I am just a visitor there. It will be hot, and you are welcome to visit any time. You live in Australia, don't you Stig? Thanks Yoda, I hope your dream comes true, and I'm glad you are my pal. I've always admired your energy.

I just read a few chapters of one of his books ... of all the pros and cons I heard about him what felt like truth to me was that he met several shamans of the tradition, who he learned from, but lumped them all together under one name. One thing that impressed me was that Don Juan would go out in the desert at night and see if he could locate energy fields caused by some shaman practicing in that location. I know that is probably true because wherever I practice the location remains energized for quite a while and most people would probably not know enough about it to make it up. Scanning an area with my hand can reveal to me where people have practiced. I can also go to camp sites in the mountains and I can tell, by scanning with my hand at waist level, which ones were slept in the previous night and whether there was one or two people in a tent, due to the energy they left in the ground. I can also tell if they were healthy or sick. Backpackers in remote areas all leave healthy and energetic imprints, but I scanned a tent site in a car camp area and could tell the person was sick so I only did that once.

I didn't get much out of it but then it could be because I wasn't tuned in to the right thing and I only practiced it a couple of times, not a fair trial. What I like to get from doing an energy practice is to get a lot of energy going in my body and head and I didn't feel that. Have you tried it? Of course magical passes does not describe itself as chi kung but it does describe energy work as being done. One thing that is a bit funny is that during part of the program they yell the word 'intent', and they do it with a lot of intent =)

I enjoyed The Sorcerer's Crossing a lot and saw in their training some good parallels with some Taoist methods of chi kung and kung fu. My #1 student and I did their chi kung a few times when I rented the DVD. The movements are more sudden than chi kung and the intents they use are very interesting. There are three women in the video and my student calls them the scary women because they never smile.