liminal_luke

Belated New Year´s Goal: Memorize a poem a week. Maybe I´m naive but I think that somone who can recite many poems from memory is unlikely to be unknowingly implanted with a computer chip.

What´s with the butthole negativity? I often practice sunning through closed eyes (https://www.chineitsangnow.com/sunning.html) and find it very relaxing. Haven´t tried the anal version as I don´t have a private outdoor place to try, but if I could I would.

Here´s the way the course is structured: Saturdays are teaching days when new material taught. Then, Sunday through Friday, you practice that material following along with practice videos given for each day (all the practice videos for the week are the same). The first week covers breathing that will be used throughout the practice. In subsequent weeks, a new Yi Jin Jing movement that corresponds to a meridian/organ is taught -- lung, large intestine, etc. Some information is given about the psychological effects of having that organ in good working order or not. For instance, a messed up large intestine leads to "stagnation" and a well tuned one leads to "letting go." There are two or three live webinars where there´s an opportunity to ask Robert practice questions. New material is made available as the days and weeks pass and you can always go back and review past days. The class videos can´t be downloaded (maybe the audio can be) but everything is available for a year after the course starts on the website. You can practice whenever you like. At the end of the course there are three different videos of the complete practice that are available to be downloaded and saved "forever" on your computer or whatever. The difference between the three videos is the length of practice. Hope this is clear and helpful. Feel free to ask more questions if you like. (Or you could always go "straight to the horses´s mouth" and email Robert.)

What is spiritual? Often what people mean is something that pertains more to higher heavenly energies and less to grounded, earthy ones. Using the chakra map of human energetics, spiritual qigong would be practices that work with the higher chakras, the third eye area for instance. Personally, I´d stay away from this unless you happen to be very advanced. Practiced prematurely, I think such practices can make one flighty and ungrounded. I like to go low, way low, the lower the better -- work with the feet, the legs, the lower dan tien. If you attend to the low, the high will take care of itself. You stay safe while taking secret advantage of the low (wo)man´s paradox -- the lower you go, the higher your potential.

Thanks for asking. I´ve been taking a break and am just about to cycle back into it. Highly recommend the class. Robert says that if he had to pick one word for Yi Jin Jing it would be "mighty." Supposedly, long-term practitioners are able to perform feats of great strength. (One class participant who´d taken the course before reported this result.) I didn´t get any stronger but did start to develop a fierce warriorlike attitude that was new to me and felt good. I suspect that individual results vary greatly according to what a person needs.

The profound centeredness and silence of genuine spiritual experience is often absent from spiritual debate. (Not that I don´t occasionally love myself some jittery, over-stimulating distraction in the form of a fiercely repetitive Mo Pai fight.)

This is in line with what I´ve read and been taught. I recently took an online Yi Jin Jing course from Robert Peng who refers to abdominal breathing (roughly LTD breathing) as natural breathing, and says that it´s good to do 24/7. Some people breathe this way as a matter of course, especially when they are relaxed, hence the moniker "natural breathing." Relaxation leads to abdominal breathing and abdominal breathing leads to relaxation. It´s hard for me to imagine this is a bad thing. There´s more of a potential for things to go wrong with conscious manipulation. Reverse breathing may be perfectly harmless but maybe not for everybody all of the time. Manipulating energy with breathing into the LDT may or may not be helpful depending on the manipulation and the manipulator. If other people have been taught differently, I´d be interested to hear alternative views.

When I first read the title of this thread, I started thinking about hanging balls. Then I watched the videos and was transported to a sublime and awesome spiritual realm. Now I´m thinking about hanging balls again. Such is life.

I wonder about the idea of imagining an ideal life and the related task of goal-setting. It´s January and as usual I´m big into my New Year´s resolutions. I don´t always (ok, ever) keep my New Year´s resolutions but I always enjoy making them. Here´s my question: Would my ideal self be someone who imagined an ideal life and took constant steps towards manifesting that life? Or is my ideal self more of a go-with-the-flow kind of guy? Is there something about the striving-process that is itself inimical to the "ideal life" I´m striving for?

I don´t find babies cute but I suspect that as I meander my way towards sagehood they will grow on me.

Just an FYI....Robert Peng is starting another Yi Jin Jing course beginning February 8. https://robert-peng-qigong.teachable.com/p/yi-jin-jing

Yikes, hope everything´s OK with the people in your world. I´ve long wished it was possible to have a heartfelt and educational discussion about world events on this forum. The potential consequences of what´s going on with Iran and the US....whew, so big, it certainly seems like we ought to be able to discuss it. Unfortunately, I don´t think we can though. Years of Trump Talk have taught me that. Maybe there´s something about the disembodied nature of online communication that precludes harmonious talk about politics. Or are people having productive online political conversations elsewhere? I dunno. What I do know is that taking care of the real flesh-and-blood people in our lives trumps (no pun intended) whatever´s going on here. At least for me. There´s no winning the war against internet bozos. They´re impervious to reason, always ready to come back with a clever retort or rationalization. But we can make a difference with those we love. Hope everyone you love is safe and secure.

Me neither. What´s going on between the US and Iran seems like such a big thing, part of me wants to go there. But then I think about the mini-war that could create right here and it doesn´t seem worth it.

I agree: nuts and seeds are healthful foods. Like many other healthful foods, however, there´s reason not to overdo. Here´s a good rundown on the benefits and potential drawbacks of various nuts... https://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-definitive-guide-to-nuts/

Yikes!

' a silver lining to every cloud

Fortunately, he´s not alone.

Well said. I believe we are all on a journey towards "realization of our inherent complete nature." It can be a solo journey but most people´s evolution is furthered by partnership. Marriage is in service of exactly this realization and this is why marriage is so notoriously difficult.

One obvious benefit of male orgasm -- though certainly not the only benefit and arguably not the best -- is conception. As much as I hate to admit it, the process of people-making through heterosexual sex is high alchemy and quite majestic. My understanding is that Taoists follow nature and nature is abundantly and uninhibitedly sexual. Orgasm gets a bad name these days, especially among men, because more than a few of us stay up all night staring at a screen full of disembodied body parts, chat online with the alledged, and often rageful, owners of said body parts, use such technological pseudo-intimacy to avoid real intimacy with both ourselves and others. In my view, such activity is neither natural nor, truth be told, pleasurable. It´s not so different from food. Bad things will happen if we eat only Twinkies but starvation is not the best, or only, alternative.

It´s absolutely possible to have too much money. There are even psychologists who specialize in the problems of the excessively moneyed. How much is too much depends very much on the person -- as does how much is too little. Some people are gifted (saddled?) with destinies that require riches. There are philanthropists who receive great personal satisfaction, and do much good, putting money to work preserving the Amazon, funding cancer research, fighting hunger. Other well-to-do folks spend on themselves in a way that gives them pleasure and I, for one, don´t begrudge them their wealth -- those Picassos aren´t gonna buy themselves. Many people have more money than is good for them. Money can isolate people from the world and make people lonely. It can enable sloth and all manner of vice and addiction. Money is interpersonally tricky. I often think I could do with more money, but the truth is that I probably have just the right amount.

Question for any of our resident jing experts who care to reply, @dwai @freeform @Taomeow. Suppose a Bum has modest aims (health and happiness) and wants to relate to their jing in an optimum way -- what advice would you give?

This bit belongs in your Best-of-the-Bums anthology.

Add daily to my word collection of favorite words. Recognize that feelings are just feelings. They won´t kill me and no feeling necessitates the eating of a chocolate chip cookie. Stop glomming onto my partner energetically. (I´ll know I´ve succeeded when I can feel happy when he´s sad.)

a fantasy story A woman intuits that something went terribly wrong with humanity thousands of years ago and she wants to set things right. So she makes herself powerful and expansive and gathers together alchemical energies from the far corners of the universe and far back in time. The energetics involved are impossibly huge but somehow she manages to condense them on her person in such a way that nobody notices the transformation. Perhaps the energies go into an amulet in her purse or into a piece of jewelry she wears. Perhaps they are integrated into her body but in a hidden way. She is disguised. Walking around living a perfectly normal life while carrying around the seeds of worldly transformation. Nobody knows. That part is important, the hiddenness. Perhaps she has conjured up a retrodactyl to help in an aspect of this process. Perhaps she has herself become, in some sense, a retrodactyl. She continues to live out her ordinary life waiting for the right moment to put the energetic elements she has gathered to some beneficial use.