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A friend of mine asked me to help her find some qigong practices that can help her bone health. She is an old lady with bone fragility. Do you know of online courses that is either taught live or recorded or tutorials on YouTube or similar that teaches Qigong for bone health/for strengthening bones and that you would recommend?

When you say that one of your practices seems to stimulate Kundalini and the other only stimulates chi, how do you differentiate between them. What makes you believe what the yogic practices stimulates is Kundalini?

Nonsense. Lots of people have fixed their sleeping problems both through meditating and doing qigong and for far smaller amounts than one hour a day.

How wide stance are we talking about here? I always find it confusing when people talk about one hour horse stance and stuff like that. Surely the widest stance must be something only extreme practitioners can do that long.

I am considering learning Qigong/Nei Gong and Tao Yoga from Jesse Lee Parker that used to post here under the name Dao Zhen. Mainly because I really, really like the examples of forms on his webpages and YouTube channel. They look very appealing to me and it is very important to me that the forms I do are enjoyable for me to do. I was also always impressed by his posts so I have some trust in his judgement and experience and it is an added bonus that he operates out of Japan that is the country I most want to visit. But I don't really know much about his system or the lineage it is connected to and virtually nothing about his teachers. So I am interested in hearing perspectives from other bums. Have any of you studied with him or do you have opinions on his system, his lineage or teachers? These are the websites of what looks to be his two systems: https://taoyoga.jimdofree.com https://www.immortalarts.org

Yup

Externally pressing on the perineum is a technique a lot of men have damaged themselves through. Not a good idea.

The Karezza people that ran the site reuniting.info and wrote Cupids Poisoned arrow had a series of touch/cuddle exercises for partners called the exchanges that I think are perfect for this with an intimate partner. The site is down now but maybe there is some way you could dig up those exercises. It may have been in one of Marnia Robertsons books and I think they may have made a pdf with them.

How are things going with this issue? Has it been sorted out?

You may want to look into trauma regulation techniques and trauma sensitive mindfulness. There are quite handy techniques for making overwhelming emotions calm down when lots of trauma gets activated. You may also benefit from trying to be aware of when these things start and then immediately stopping practice and doing something else where your mind becomes absorbed into something else. That way you may stop the releases at an early stage with just more manageable levels of emotions and you avoid exacerbating the emotions that do come up by not getting too drawn into them. Often when painful emotions come bubbling up we automatically become hyper focused on them, drawn into them with a sort of tunnel vision. This amplifies them A LOT. Avoiding this hyper focus by broadening awareness towards the whole body can help get us out of this hyperfocus. So can focusing outside of ourself on our physical environment or getting our minds more focused on some other activity.

How do you know that the system does not have that strong connection you are talking about? How familiar are you with it and with Jesse Parker? What do you base this claim on? Your claims seems dubious to me. The system does contain standing meditation. It obviously contains grounding. It most certainly contains opening meridian pathways and removing Qi blockages at all levels. It most certainly contains the development of equanimity and overcoming desire. What do you base the claim on that this system does not contain spiritual insight and wisdom? It is a an alchemical system. It would be strange for it not to contain spiritual insight and wisdom. What do you base the claim that it does not contain opening meridian pathways and overcoming desire etc. ? "Let the system sell itself with your OWN EFFORT." What does this mean concretely and why do you say it. Because it has a webpage selling the course? Practically everyone who teaches these days has a webpage selling their course. What do you suggest doing instead?

I think the price is quite reasonable compared to other similar types of courses. The rest of your reply I find rude and silly. I think calling it 10 hours of hand waving and qi-babble is needlessly rude and disrespectful. Why do you write "...lineage...lol"?

Thanks for your perspective! Why would you advise against the system this teacher is advocating if I want to go deep? If that is your advice, surely you must have some reasons for it and those reasons are what is potentially interesting for me to hear. I don't think Xingyi and Ba Gua are good alternatives to a broad system of qigong, nei gong and meditation that is aimed at "laying the foundation" and then taking you through the traditional alchemical process. Bruce Frantzis basically says Xingyi gives immense health benefits but not really spiritual development. Ba Gua might give more but I don't think any martial art, even a spiritual one, is an efficient replacement for a broad system of qigong, nei gong, meditation and alchemy. They are good and beneficial for their purpose but not really what I am after here. I like Vipassana (though not Goenkas style) and it will probably be something I practice in the future.

I think Damo Mitchell says that he finds those students he has that are vegan struggle in certain phases of the alchemy process because they have a harder time building up certain energies that are required. I don't remember if he advises eating meat only for a particular phase or permanently. I think it is in one of his YouTube videos.

I know so many people who were vegans for years that had to start eating meat because it eventually made them unbalanced or gave them a health issue. They knew and practiced all the advice vegans usually claim will compensate for lack of meat but it didn't help. The issues they struggled with where also often quite severe and ended completely with resuming eating meat. None of them needed to eat a lot of meat though. They are usually still moderate in meat consumption compared to the average person. I spent 5 weeks at an Ayurvedic health clinic in India where every meal was tailored perfectly according to what they thought I needed to eat. All meals where vegan. After five weeks I had lost at least 9, I think maybe 11 kg (can't remember exactly), and I was weighing 75 kg at the time. I looked like a skeleton. It did not seem like a good diet for me at all.

I eat a lot of meat and the most enlightened person I have ever met suggested that I instinctively did that in order to help feel grounded because I naturally go upwards very easily and needed a downward force. I probably would be better of eating less of it if I can stay grounded in other ways. meat is probably more healthy than its reputation: https://bigthink.com/health/red-meat-cancer-not-health-risk/

If such leakage is actually happening it may be because of weak anal sphincter muscles. You may want to exercise these muscles by contracting and holding them. There is one at the entrance/exit and one a bit further in. Additionally it may be useful to exercise the perineum muscles close by in the same way. Muscles here can easily get tense when exercises this way and that easily creates some issues. So when you do it focus a lot on firstly not doing the contractions in a tense way but be as relaxed as you can when you are doing it. Secondly, try to relax the muscles after you are doing it. Thirdly, tension seems to build less if you do other exercises that indirectly train these muscles as part of a more general form of exercise with broader effects such as doing squats. So maybe do exercise that trains the muscles in the area alongside with muscles other places in the body as well. Fourthly, be moderate in how much you do it. Start with just a little practice and build up moderately and don't go up toa. very high intensity of practice at all. And have days where you take a break.

I have a back injury that is taking a lot of time to heal and that prevents me from doing a lot of movements. Before the injury I was doing the eight brocades but after it there are two or three movements that I can't do and I am wondering if it is ok to just do the movements I can do and not the whole form. I feel reluctant to do only some of the movements because I fear it might create imbalances. I notice that one movement really work the lung energy and another really works the kidneys etc. and I'm afraid that taking some of the moves out may lead to the building up of imbalances if I practice like that for enough time. I would think the set is supposed to be a whole where everything works together and taking out pieces may be bad. On the other hand each movement on its own does me good both physically and energetically. And these are very basic exercises with very simple energetic effects. It's not like this is a complex and dangerous alchemical practice. For a couple of reasons it is hard for me to find other alternative forms where I can do the whole form/sequence. I have struggled with severe Chi deviation issues for many years and have gone years without practicing any form of qigong, yoga or meditation because it just made things worse. Instead I did lots of stuff to get grounded and balanced such as physical exercise, lots of walking in the forest, therapy, practical work, bodywork etc. After years of this my chi deviation issues had reduced enough that if I did one set of the eight brocades a day (takes about 15 min) I would not activate my issues but if I did any more than that I would get worse. As long as I stayed within that amount of practice I would instead get more and more grounded and balanced over time and it felt like the issues would eventually be sorted out and the brocades did this work way, way faster than all the other stuff I did. When I tried to find other forms to do as a replacement they all either also gave me back issues or triggered my knee pains or they triggered my chi deviation issues. It seems like there are very subtle differences between froms that seem quite similar that decide if my energy imbalances get activated or not. And the brocades has been the best so far at not triggering them and making them better. I also struggle with the effort required to keep looking for replacement forms because I also have severe chronic fatigue that makes just the effort to look through YouTube for forms and trying them out difficult for me on top of managing basic daily tasks and exercising. So, I'd rather initially just do the brocades as they helped both helped very quickly with both the chi deviation and the fatigue. I also welcome suggestions for alternatives to the brocades. Simple short forms that have some gentle stretching, are quite grounding and pretty basic in terms of energetic effects and not too challenging for the spine. Super slow is not good because that tends to trigger my deviation issues. The type of tempo the brocades is usually done in is good.

Standing meditation/Zhan Zhuang plus an internal martial art like Tai Chi will do the job normally.

"The book by Wang LiPing seems to have a more secure and known lineage (I know there is a 2nd edition of the book, but I'm going with the 1st edition). But the book by Jerry Alan Johnson looks a lot more detailed. So I'm kinda stuck." I think Freeform says that Wang LiPing teaches a lot of advanced stuff without focusing enough on the students developing the bodily foundations (the Qigong body) that make them work properly. Without the bodily foundations properly in order people tend to have strong experiences when practice is as intense as on retreats but struggle to maintain them afterwards. Witch the bodily foundations more in order one both progresses faster and makes the results more integrated and permanent. I may not recall this entirely correctly. You can ask him about it. Freeform also says that Damo Mitchel teaches the bodily foundations properly. So that might be someone to learn from.

Great to see they are studying this! I have been waiting for it for a long time.

Everything is on sale for 10-15 bucks on Udemy every other day

So, what is this Stephane guy up to these days? I've been watching a lot of cult documentaries lately and find the topic of what happens to cult leaders after their cult or attempted cult breaks down interesting. I tried to google him but seems like after 2009 or so there is little about him online.

I have injured my spine a bit and now get pains doing the brocades, which I was practicing, and planning to continue to practice. I've tried a few five animals forms of Youtube and a couple of others but have so far gotten a bit of pain from all of them. I am looking for a form that is between 5-15 min long. Longer than that and my chi deviation issues will flare up and that involves very little movement of the spine, especially backwards. Preferably something "all round" that works all the five elements/five organ energies rather than something targeted at something very specific. It is also good if it involves some degree of gentle stretching but it does not have to. I basically need something that helps balance my energy overall, won't aggravate my chi deviation but helps ground and don't give me spinal pains. Does anyone have ideas for forms that could fit this description and that I can find on Youtube?

Thanks. I will try that. I remember him talking about how important it was