freeform

There is some disagreement of whether a lot of Daoist sexual classics are indeed classics or derivative works from the likes of Kama Sutra being brought into China (at which time any Indian literature was considered ultra spiritual)... Not a debate I’m particularly interested in though

Yes exactly. But it’s not just the loss of Jing - orgasm in men also has a damaging effect on the organs. A little damage is fine - life is damaging

For 'normal' (aka 'vulgar' ) people, Jing powers all the fun stuff... Be moderate with the fun stuff and your jing will be well... The fun stuff is - staying up late, overindulging in food, sex, emotions, drugs, alcohol, thinking, imagination, relaxation... So moderation is key... although what's 'moderate' might be surprising to modern humans... It's the basics: sleep well and keep regular hours - don't sleep too little and certainly don't sleep too much. Exercise - not too much and not too little - listen to your body, but also keep in mind that if your body is sedentary you'll need to consistently push beyond the edge of your comfort barrier - but not too far. Allow for recovery as well as for intensity. Eat well - eat local and seasonal... don't eat too much - and don't eat too little... Eat lots of different vegetables. Don't overindulge in food - it's fuel, not sensual pleasure... fuel can be tasty, but needn't be theatrical - simple is best. Be moderate in sexual thought and activity... Orgasm (not just ejaculation) is damaging for men (orgasm is actually beneficial for women - although penetration is somewhat damaging)... Too much sexual thought is damaging for both men and women... moderation - not abstinence. Remember - you're in charge of your thoughts. Overworking, overthinking, too much emotion, too much sensual pleasure can all damage jing... but then again - not enough of these things can also damage you So yeah - boring old moderation. Just remember that jing is there to be used - there is no point 'hoarding' it and there is no point squandering it... just be skilful and efficient.

😄 I think society runs on all the things spiritual cultivation tries to bring to equanimity... Spiritual cultivation is for the very few. But you can still be a master - just not of spirituality. You can still be a good person. You can still lead a very worthwhile life - be kind, generous, considerate etc - without spiritual practice! too many people think of spiritual practice as something to support their life and identity - but true spiritual cultivation does exactly the opposite.

precisely Also - although the meridians themselves aren’t physical, they flow along lines of physical fascia type tissues. These are the ‘river bed’ for the flow of water that is Qi. In fact in a practitioner who has developed their channels to a great degree there is a physical change that takes place along the meridian lines - the tissues there build and pressurise in a certain visible and palpatable way.

Not only that, but I’ve seen teachers purposely give the wrong instruction - leaving an ‘opening’ in their students just so they could get a bigger, more impressive Fa jin reaction out of them.

yes exactly. We’re just using this as a mechanism to absorb into the body at ever deeper levels. Hard to describe

no - not quite... you’re looking at someone’s energy - but more accurately - it’s not “you” looking at someone’s energy... the aspect of you doing the looking is free of the distortions of the acquired mind. If that makes sense 😄 I don’t have this skill - I’ve only had a few experiences with this - and it felt completely out of this world... but apparently it gets normalised and becomes easily navigable. So I assume the information is gathered by your preheaven self and then navigated by your mind - and this is where the ‘skill’ lies.

Yes... although in certain traditions there are ways to further tune this knowing to an aspect of ‘the third eye’... You use the Shen Ming (or the light of the original spirit) that comes about from entering a certain ‘samadhi’ state to create this skill. It is beyond the ‘local’ mind - and accessing a kind of ‘causal’ knowing. Ting, in the tradition I’m in is different and is developed differently - it’s closer to the process of absorbing awareness into an object (until the subject-object duality disappears) - but it’s functionally different for the above.

You always have a great way of penetrating deeper into a subject. Yes - you can think of someone’s Qi to be a vibration in a tuning fork... one way to perceive this vibration is to notice how your own tuning fork is attuning to that of the other person. However - unlike tuning forks you can buy, we, as tuning forks haven’t been perfectly tuned and standardised. Our tuning fork is covered in all sorts of detritus that’s been accumulated over your lifetime (and lifetimes before)... So although you do get a signal back - the signal is full of distortion that it is not accurate at all - at least not accurate enough to do any powerful medical treatments. Secondly even when you read your own tuning fork, you’re perceiving it from the perspective of the self - so it also has all those distortions added to the already inaccurate reading. Regarding direct perception. Using the tuning fork metaphor - you measure the signal directly from another’s tuning fork - and not from the tone reflected in your tuning fork. The apparatus of this measurement is a certain aspect of your ‘third eye’ that has been developed to a point where it no longer references the self... The further development of this skill includes various attainments such as the various levels of ‘opening of the wisdom eye’... where eventually you’re able to perceive the complete cause and effect chain leading to the moment of the perception. So with a person you could get an immediate insight into what’s causing some outcome in that person - including all the details within their life path (Ming) - from this life and all others...

Yes exactly. We tend to experience Qi one step removed... our body/mind will interpret some subtle sense of Qi in various ways - from thoughts to feelings to visions -even tastes. However there is a stage of development (specific training to achieve this skill) where you can perceive Qi directly - by seeing it very objectively and specifically. You can tune to different ‘depths’ and see Qi in all its various processes. When I experienced a taste of this skill (I haven’t worked to develop it though) - I could see Qi flowing (or not) in people and I could tune into the different levels and depths by using Ting... I could even ‘zoom in’ on Qi itself and see what it is and how it manifests in the moment. Quite amazing and a little overwhelming as I had no prior reference point apart from the standard meridian charts everyone has seen (I can say that the reality is a lot more complex and multilayered than the commonly taught meridian pathways). One of my teachers used this skill to diagnose patients before treatment. He’d be able to give very specific in-depth diagnosis down to the tiniest detail without even taking a pulse. In fact this skill was the preliminary skill before he taught Qi projection for healing. He was quite strict in that for a healer, the perception of Qi ‘one step removed’ is never to be trusted. Especially when the health and well-being of another person is in your hands. Yeah - there are different levels and applications to Ting... The Ting of Taiji and the Ting of Neigong have a crossover, but in Neigong the Ting skill is taken to a much deeper level. (Taiji takes Song to a much deeper level though)

You may well be right... I’m not sure what’s more complex. For me, the strength of the eastern approach is that it invites you to prove its premise by experiencing it in yourself by following a process... Wheras you’ll have to take a physicists word for it when they say they can prove the existence of quarks, leptons, bosons and all the other weird and wonderful ‘building blocks’ of reality

Honestly - I’m not sure the eastern system is any less complex - especially once you get into the details within each system. However there’s this funny clumsiness of science when it comes to studying living beings or processes... scientists claim to understand a lot, but in reality understand almost nothing. When it comes to the less ‘alive’ aspects of matter, science is clearly exemplary. But living systems - almost nothing... That to me is the bigger evidence for the materialist world view being flawed.

I assure you that you didn’t... It doesn’t happen by accident - just as you can’t build strong pectorals by accident. It takes specific exercises to do and you don’t have them. Unlike muscles, this is working with the fascia like tissues in your body - and they take far longer to grow than muscles do. So you have to have correct methods (which you don’t) and you have to do them in a dedicated way over 7 to 10 yrs (with specific milestones that need to be achieved beforehand) - which you haven’t done. However quiet breathing is always a very good idea. The way to do it is to simply pay attention to your breathing without interfering in it in any way... the practice is basically awareness of the breathing process and constantly noticing how you’re interfering with your mind and letting that go. This is a very good practice for smoothing your Qi flow and for stilling and building Jing eventually. Edit: reading back it sounds a bit harsh... but that’s not my intention - my intention is to be real and not pander to delusion - which can come across harsh, but is actually meant with respect.

Ting in the system I train in is quite different. I’ve explained it to a couple of people on the forum and if they choose to they’ll be able to attest to both the difference and the depth and power of working in this way...

Train with listening instead Developing the skill to ‘listen’ is a pretty important one... There’s a process to developing it - but even then you will have lots of sensations and experiences before your listening skill matures. (I’m saying ‘you’, but I’m talking generally - I’m sure you have Ting by now, Dwai) Most of my teachers made a point to discourage attaching any meaning, importance or significance to what you’re feeling on the Qi level in the early stages (early - meaning the first 5 to 10yrs of dedicated daily practice). The reason is: experiencing the ‘8 touches of Qi’ is not a direct experience of Qi - it is the experience of your body’s reaction to Qi... That might seem like pointless semantics - but it’s important - because you might feel a warmth travel up your spine and think that Yang Qi is moving through the governing vessel - but what may actually be happening is your Nei Qi has touched some nerve that sends a warm sensation up the back... or it’s a tiny bit of Qi moving and you’re experiencing resistance that manifests as heat... but either way you’d be making an error in thinking Yang Qi is moving up the spine - and you might base further training on this error in judgement and cause yourself issues down the line. When training with an advanced Neigong teacher you know you felt Qi because your body will react very strongly - with spasms, shaking, vibrating or other weirder experiences... but you won’t have the skill and sensitivity to know what actually happened on the level of Qi until much later... usually not until you can see it

Keep focus soft and diffuse - and be only partially interested in what’s going on. Also - sensations or sensitivity to this stuff is both fraught with delusion - and not particularly useful at the early stage anyway.

I think this whole accreditation thing is moot... the question to ask is - would you get surgery from a doctor that learned through dvds... even the very best dvds from the very best universities and read the very best textbooks on the subject... The reality is that Neigong is just as tricky, precise, dangerous and a lot more difficult to master... If someone’s teacher is a bunch of videos and some documents - then I’d stay away from them - just as you should stay away from a distance-learning based doctor.

That’s true - to an extent... In some schools you build a physical Dantien and you shape the tissues around the lower torso in a particular way to contain and interact with the ldt... But Welkin doesn’t have this built... could’ve pulled a muscle or given himself a hernia though 😕

your strong mental focus (further focused and directed by the fingers) is stimulating the nerves in your hand.

He’s posting while high...

Yes most certainly - the arts won’t be lost. In fact they’re thriving outside of China... But sadly the situation is that the ‘appearance’ of what these arts are will be coopted into a media publicity drive. The ‘appearance’ stays and is pushed into the public consciousness but the real value leaks away underground... In my experience the real masters don’t wear robes and topknots, perform acrobatics and have cigarette and phone breaks in between their ‘performances’.

Yes - inner door - outer door. By accepting an inner door student you’re implying that you will take care of that person through a really difficult process - this means years and years of personal care, attention and much of your own ‘juice’ that you expend to help the student along. It’s a huge responsibility in both a normal personal sort of way - but also in a karmic/Ming entangled way... allow a student to fall down one of the many pitfalls that could turn them into a monster or a deviant and you have to deal with the consequences... Although there are special circumstances where some teachers don’t have to deal with karma in this way - but that is very rare. In Asia there is a certain ‘numbers game’ element... There are always more students than a teacher can handle. So this inner-outer door method is used. In outer door training you’re given the most basic instructions and are left to practice... most people quit... some people follow the instructions without getting anywhere - others, whether by luck or talent begin to develop along the right lines - and these ones are often eventually invited to ‘join the family’. Even then there are several sides to this - an honorary member might not be given the real techniques but asked to join just because they worked hard, or paid a lot or stayed for many years... There are very few that get the real inner door techniques - and these techniques are almost always quite simple little additions to an outer door technique that actually make it ‘work’. Nowadays in China, the government sports bodies are put in charge of standardising, simplifying and culturally realigning these arts to follow an accepted communist approach. Sadly this is slowly changing the internal arts landscape into a sort of cultural circus of feats and acrobatics for show and the promotion of ‘traditional Chinese culture’... The real arts are very much in decline, if not yet completely dead in China

The idea is to move your attention outside of you... so onto some task outside of your body... watching something - talking to people - walking outside etc. Something you could try is using a ball - like a tennis ball or golf ball and roll it under foot, massaging it. If you can find a good acupuncturist, then that may help - but 99% of acupuncturists have no idea how to treat Qi deviation. (A weirdly high proportion of them don’t even believe in Qi!) Beating the heavenly drum might be helpful - but if anything, harmless (as long as you don’t start to do any breathing techniques or directing attention inwards in a focused way.) So do try that. Your attention will soon normalise, so don’t worry to much. And the good news is that once you’ve managed to get things back to normal you can get back to practice (not before 6 months at a minimum).

There is a good reason to stop all energy practice for at least 6 months. I’ll try to explain why. Just remember that this advice isn’t just from me but from someone who used to be sought out to fix exactly the type of problem you’re having - as well as much worse problems. With your practice you’ve set into motion a certain pathway for energy to move. As soon as you engage with energetics in any way, your Qi will follow that path. That includes being still with your mind... that also includes trying to ground. Think of it this way - over years you’ve been running a stream that leads to your head... as the stream has been flowing this way for a while, it has cut into the land a riverbed. Now when you add ‘water’ (energetics of any kind) - it will invariably follow the course of the riverbed... even if you try to will it to move in another direction. As you know it’s impossible to move water any way other than the way it wants to move.