Jenn

Changes and amends have been made, let's cut our blue-haired friend some slack.

A cat started it!

It's definitely not new - as long as I've been alive (at least in Canada). The real question is why do you over the pond'ers call bangs a "fringe"? 😋

Woof

It's funny, I am dog sitting right now, and I have met the dog many times over the years and she is a real sweetheart, but I noticed this time she had a lot more odd tendencies we would describe as toxic if in a person. Those tendencies unfortunately match her owners. I've been pondering the impact people have on dogs lately.

Are you on windows 10 or 11? The default photo app can do it: open the photo on your computer, then at the top, there are three dots ( ... ) there is an option to resize. Drop the percentage a bit or changing the quality from high to medium should do the trick. It will show you the new size at the bottom before you choose OK, so you can play until it is under the limit 😊. If your on apple, no idea, I'm allergic to digital fruit.

Your post made me think about this comment, does your mark look like the one in the video?

I think of it more like the shadow arises from our True Self because we suppress aspects of ourselves that for one reason or another (often simply just conditioning) we bury away and repress. And from that suppression, its opposite is created, the acquired mind and that is where we live most of our lives, safely away from all we are suppressing. Yet still completely at the mercy of our shadow self by way of automatic responses. One became two. Integrating the shadow self back doesn't hold opposites in one place or destroy the shadow; it removes the force that created those opposites in the first place. We were never meant to be a shadow and a truth, we were meant to be whole ourselves. Two becomes one, and that one is the True Self.

I wonder if it would be for similar reasons as not building the LDT near bodies of water? Maybe the pull of yin in the water from the rain overpowering the pull of the yin in the LDT so the qi is pulled outwards?

That has been my experience as well, unless you deal with the root of the problem, using willpower to overcome emotions is like a house of cards, great when there is no wind, but crumbles when the storm brews and you need it most. Like building up confidence after a difficult childhood by improving yourself, taking healthy risks, self-compassion, etc. It's good and healthy, you can rise out of your childhood and be strong and confident going forward, as long as life doesn't throw you more than you can bear and you find yourself right back to being insecure. Almost like you never stopped being insecure, you just found a way to not be affected it while times are good enough that you could persist. Digging through the tangled mess of emotions, desires, and social programming, at some point, you start finding roots, once you deal with one, poof, you are free from its influence. Instantly(Ignoring all the months / years it took you to get to that point hehe)

I have been doing a lot of shadow work, including an intense session last night. This morning I woke up early thinking about things that came out of last night and read this. The part about not just seeing / accepting but also integrating into who you are, a lightbulb clicked on, and I've been thinking about it all morning. This was so helpful and perfect timing - thanks for sharing!!

Does the gadget work on electronic devices or digital books? I noticed there is a kindle edition while looking at what this book was. On my kindle, I can adjust font size. I just read on a regular tablet with the kindle app, not sure if that would work for their needs / gadget?

Well, my hometown is supposed to become quite nice when "it all goes down". Of course, currently, we can swing between extremes of +40c and -40c annually with 1-3 feet of snow per winter, so it might be worthwhile waiting until we're deep into climate change. Incidentally, we get colder than Mars at least a few nights per winter, so if that is what you fancy, might be cheaper to live out that dream here than trust your life on something elon musk built just to find out anything colder than -40c is deeply unpleasant. I remember one year we had snow so high we could ski over the fence. In that spring we had a huge flood. I'm with @silent thunder - BC Coast is the retirement plan. I'll miss the summers, but man, to not be here for the winter... 🥰

The appropriate approach in the future is report the comment or explicitly say that the comment crossed a line and that it hurt you rather than lashing out. Never attack someone's gender, it is not okay in any circumstance. Had you responded by simply pointing out that you found the original comment offensive or reporting it this post, you would not see this backlash. Someone threw a fork at you and your responded with a nuke. Also this is a Daoism forum. Discussing whether immortality is real or not, is what this forum is for and is an attack on your IDEA not on YOU personally. An attack on someone's gender is an attack on THEM personally, not their IDEAs. Personal attacks and prejudice have nothing to do with Daoism or this forum.

This is a Daoism / et all forum, comments should be about those topics only. If you feel triggered or attacked, call out that comment or report it, do not attack people's gender(, race, orientation, etc). None of those qualities have anything to do with what this forum is about, and as you can see, those are qualities participants of this forum want protected (as they should be). Also we have rules specifically that protect participants from attacks on gender. Let's keep this place about Daoism, Buddhism, and all the wonderful religions and practices we have out there. I think we can all agree that we're all striving to be better people through our various practices and cultivate ourselves to the highest degree. To attain this, we must overcome the barriers of hate and prejudice or else we will always be stuck in our acquired minds and never reach the levels of cultivation we are here to achieve.

There is a help forum you can make a post in: https://www.thedaobums.com/forum/14-forum-and-tech-support/ You can also find it by clicking "Forums" then at the bottom there is a help/tech support forum. Unfortunately, I am fairly new as well and haven't tried posting a picture from a link yet, but hopefully, someone can jump in as many do post pics.

Personally, I think it would be next to impossible to free yourself of those things that limit you (desires, suppressed emotions, et) in a life of ease and wealth. For a few reasons: 1) When your life is already "good" and easy, is there really any reason to delve into the depths of your pain, obsessions, and societal programming? Would you even be aware of such things? Even, if you decided to do so, would you ever delve deeper than the superficial? How far would you really take it if it meant sacrificing your "happiness" and the comforts you have? I can say personally that when my life was easiest were the periods with the least personal growth, let alone purposefully dragging myself through the worst parts of myself, even if, in the end, it would have benefited me to do so. The real growth happened when life forced my hand. What stands in the way becomes the way - without obstacles to overcome we stagnate. 2) From my experience, a lot of the things we need to free ourselves from are things we are completely oblivious to. It is the hardships that open our eyes to what is really going on. To pain, we have been carrying with us, to the conditioning we have that is counter to our best interests, to ways in which we have become numb or hard, to the darkest parts of our personality, and to our ego. We spend our lifetime hiding safely away from ourselves and our pain even though it is only a temporary illusion and harms us much more than simply facing who we are. We need something pretty fricken powerful to force us out of our illusions to do the hard work within ourselves. If we don't face hardships in life, how would we ever know what illusions we have? Hard times cast light on things we don't want to see (even if seeing them frees us) or are completely oblivious to. 3) By stepping away from society and all its trappings, you start to realize how ridiculous everything is. When we're in society, it's too easy to stay caught up in the silly nonsense of modern-day living and stay blind to what is really going on and what really matters. It gives perspective. I don't think you need a terrible tragedy per se, but I don't see how you could do it without facing hardships. Most people are obsessed with power / control, at least to some extent; the only way to truly get past that obsession is to understand it completely and free yourself. How would you even scratch the surface of what power really is within us if you have never truly experienced powerlessness? Same with money, how can you really understand the hold it has on you if you have never faced a period of poverty? TLDR: We are lazy and happy in our illusions / acquired mind when times are good. We are satisfied, so we stay the course and stagnate. It is only when our sense of self is threatened or we face real hardship that we are driven to change. The deeper and more repressed the illusion / emotion / desire, the bigger kick in the pants we need in order to wake up and dislodge it. Ultimately it depends on how deep you want to go, you might find removing traumas / etc while living in society is enough to make you happy, but if you want to go as deep as you can / truly free yourself, I don't think you can do it without hardship and time away from mainstream life.

The problem isn't so much that they are unorthodox, it is that people are posting techniques and encouraging others to try them, yet they are untested. Many of the posts I believe you are referring to make many claims about what the technique will do (e.g. super strength or immortality) and encourage others to try them, yet the developers of those techniques have not achieved those final states themselves, so they are just guessing at what those techniques will actually achieve (and guessing that they are safe in the long run). A technique must be tested to its full completion before you can know what the technique will achieve and that it is safe; this is the bare minimum that needs to be done before encouraging others to do it. Those techniques might be amazing, but it is way too premature to make claims about their safety and efficacy, hence the pushback. I can't speak for the group, but I don't think the issue with that particular thread was because it was unorthodox. I believe (at least for me) the issue was two things: 1) it sounded like you were taking credit for discovering grounding/earthing which is well known across many cultures for its healing benefits and 2) you called yourself a master. You might not know this, but generally speaking, someone is a master only when they are recognized as a master by others; it is not something one can decide to be. You might get better responses on the forum if you participate without claiming any particular status. If your thoughts are good, people will naturally start to see you as skillful or a master, when you are ready, the role of master will arise naturally of its own accord, it can't be forced. It must come from the community.

Haha, where I am from "touching grass" is a euphemism for f-off. In that case, "touching grass" *may* harm your qi if you are choosing to retain a hostile, angry demeanour all the time - negativity are not great for health or qi. More to your question, I have heard that a certain type of grounding can drain qi. It involves (in before you ask, yes, seriously) putting a wire in (on?) your perineum and burying the other end in the ground. Personally, I recommended taking this at face value and not putting a wire in or near your hoo-ha regardless of whether that is true or not 🤭

couldn't get anyone else to believe it was real?

Talk about something you can't unsee... 😨

Once you see something, you can't unsee it

I wonder if some of the confusion / differences in location is due to the challenges and imperfections of looking in the body and how the ability to look within grows and strengthens with time. We spend a lifetime orienting ourselves in space by sight and have access to pretty elaborate information on anatomy, but "seeing" in the body with the mind is not so straightforward. I noticed as I first started to be able to sense individual organs, my internal sense didn't line up perfectly with where anatomy places the organ, sometimes I would even feel my focus on the organ was actually slightly outside my body (even though I am fairly sure my spleen is not on my outsides 😋), but that is where I felt the organ. As my internal sense got better, I started to feel the organs closer to where they are physically, although probably still pretty rough. Like my brain needed time to learn to figure out orientation and scale inside. You can find it using your inner sense, but trying to reconcile that sense with the whole different system of senses we use to operate in the outside world (with sight/sound/feel/etc) likely takes time and might not even be fully possible. Like comparing someone who can see and someone who cannot, likely they can both move through the physical world with confidence, but their internal frameworks of orienting in space would be very different and fairly incompatible with each other. We build that framework internally, and as we build it individually within ourselves and that framework adjusts as it strengthens in time with practice, no two would be identical instead just roughly similar.

My apologies, I was actually thinking of this link and got the posts confused, although that other link is interesting / related too