liminal_luke

That´s fine, MildMouse. I won´t debate the issue further. If what you really want is a private discussion with Earl Grey though, may I suggest the private messenger? Or even regular email, Skype?

Now you´ve got me curious. Am I being sorted into the "in favor" camp or am I the "seemingly neutral" one? I love the idea of seeming neutrality (so mysterious!) and am hoping for that category.

I agree that math can be learned from a video, given that someone has the motivation and a mind predisposed to understand mathetmatical concepts. Math is complex but it´s also logical. If you can follow the logic, you get it. At the other end of the spectrum, there´s tai chi. Many students come to believe that tai chi can´t be learned period -- not from a video, not from a class. There´s a gazillion subtlties that can´t possibly come across through Youtube no matter how skilled the videographer. I remember my teacher making minute adjustments in the angle of my wrist or fingers and, as if by magic, the chi would start to flow. How did he do that? I still haven´t the foggiest. Of course thirty seconds later my position would of drifted ever so slightly and the energy would fade. I couldn´t put myself back into the right position even though I´d been there just a bit ago. The precision required can only be learned proprioceptively, by getting your body to do it right and feeling what that´s like. It´s more than just a visual thing. Tai chi is an extreme case but there are other skills that require similar in-person instruction: brain surgery, contemporary dance, football.

This thread started with an interesting video and has devolved into a Mo Pai debate. Chalk one up for sticking with original sources.

Sifu Jenny Lamb who teaches Yigong (the system that Max Christensen turned into Kunlun) lives in your area. Or at least she used to. She´s a powerful lady -- might be worth looking into her teaching.

Off the top of my head... Stillness-Movement Sundo Healing Tao/Universal Tao Sheng Zhen Spring Forest Robert Peng´s teaching Max Christensen´s Kunlun Method Yigong (Sifu Jenny Lamb) Juan Li (healing tao instructor with some individual things) Chi Nei Tsang as taught by Gilles Marin Not sure if this is what you mean and not all of these are necessarily "modern." Just what comes to mind.

I don´t have an opinion but it sounds like an exciting opportunity!

Talk therapy done wrong can be destructive, yes. Then again, Daoist cultivation done wrong is no picnic either. You bring up a great point about the groove of negative emotions. Therapy that does nothing but rehash negativity is not therapeutic. Still, I think most psychotherapists are very much in favor of moving on to the "alternative positive thought patterns" you suggest.

I´d like to propose three practice principles for discussion that I believe are generally applicable across a wide spectrum of cultivation disciplines. These are ideas that I´m trying to integrate into my practice. (1) Savor the rest periods. Juan Li, an instructor with the Healing Tao, introduced me to the concept of "yin practice." After any period of yang practice -- actively doing something whether in movement or meditation -- he´d sit for a time and just let things settle. He instructed his students not to "do" anything during this yin practice period, just be. In Zapchen, a somatic practice developed by Julie Henderson, there´s the practice of napping. Who would think of napping as an actual practice?! Much like Juan Li´s yin practice, napping in Zapchen is the quiet counterpart to more active doings. First you do something, then you nap. It´s during the nap that the benefits of the earlier doing integrate in the body. I think there´s a tendency in our somewhat frenetic get-a-move-on culture to devalue these periods of rest. But continually going from one doing to another we miss out on a lot of benefit. It´s important to give our bodies and minds time to process without consious interference on our part. (2) Connect with the lineage. Whatever we´re doing, it´s likely that other people have done it beforehand. It´s great to be part of an actual flesh-and-bones sangha, to have a teacher and a practice community, but that´s not what I´m getting at here. I´m talking about connecting with lineage on a subtle meditative level, sort of like prayer. We could take a moment before or after practice to imagine all those who have gone before -- and those who are practicing with us now in spirit. We can ask for help and express gratitude. There´s a huge wellspring of unseen assistance available from our lineages that largely goes untapped if we fail to tune in. (3) Embrace boredom I´m not always the best judge of my own progress; my awareness of what´s going on in my body and mind is necessarily incomplete. Oftentimes I´ll be bored and think nothing is happening in a practice. The temptation at these times is to drop the practice and move on to something more likely to create somatic fireworks. Often what´s needed instead is more faith and more trust. The benefit of my practices outstrip my conscious awareness. Just because I feel bored doesn´t mean that nothing´s happening. Quite the contrary.

...

Is muscular development incompatible with internal power? I have no idea. It`s interesting, though, to note the part of myself that rebels against this idea. What can I say? I want it all! There`s a part of me that doesn`t want to accept any limits whatsoever, and yet I think that a big part of life is accepting limitation and loss. Years ago I attended a SunDo retreat (Korean system of Taoist development). I loved how physical it was. After the main practice everyone did fingertip pushups. Advanced practitioners worked up to doing fingertip handstands. Although this is a visually impressive feat, I believe it also has some spiritual utility. What`s the relationship between physical strength and spiritual development? I don`t really know but if I had to guess I`d wager there are no weak immortals.

Lots of people don´t like to acknowledge any problems and I think one of the big advantages of many of these somatic modalities is that they don´t have to. Veterans with PTSD, for instance, can practice TRE (trauma release exercises) without sharing any war stories. Most Zapchen exercises (humming, jiggling, rocking, yawning, sighing, laughing) don´t require any talking and yet they work great. There are also expressive therapies (art, dance, play) that can work at a level below (or above?) words. I´m a very verbal person and love to talk things out. My partner does not and that used to be a source of conflict between us. He paints and at one point our living room walls were covered with his work. He told me he was going to boycott the "how are you feeling?" question and instead answer by pointing to the painting that best expressed his present mood. Culturally it´s hard to acknowledge problems because we pick up the idea that we´re not supposed to have any, that having problems is shameful. Ironically, it can be hardest to share with those we love most because we have so much on the line with them. Maybe this is why there are so many stories of people sharing their life history with strangers they sit next to on planes. It´s easy to be vulnerable with someone we´ll never see again. I mention all this because I personally often feel judgmental of people, like my less verbal partner, who I think should be willing to talk with me about their issues but don´t. For me, this judgment gets in the way of my being able to be helpful. I´ve needed to first clear any interpersonal resentment that the relationship isn´t happening in the wordy way I prefer. There´s also my longing to feel close and frustration that the other person doesn´t feel safe enough to be vulnerable. Am I OK with letting the other person be as distant as they want or need to be? This is also something I´ve needed to look at in myself before being able to offer help. Of course none of this may be at all relevent to your situation. In any case, there is often preliminary acceptance work to be done by would-be helpers, especially when the helpee is a loved one. It´s very difficult to help someone who won´t acknowledge their problem, but most people have something going on in their life that they´d like to change. This something that the other person wants to change is the door in. It´s often easy for someone on the outside to see what needs changing in someone else´s life but saying so rarely leads anywhere. My motivation to change can only come from the thing that bothers me. If that thing that bothers me can get better by doing some sort of practice with my body (shaking, yawning, jogging, dancing) then I just might do it. Especially if I don´t have to talk about it afterwards. Not sure if any of this is helpful or relevent but wanted to share my thoughts.

Maybe I´m lucky to have run into one of the few. I was walking through San Francisco and saw a middle-aged Asian woman (I thought Chinese though I might have been mistaken) shaking and slapping her arms out on her stoop. Her movements looked very much like qigong to me so I asked "Doing your morning qigong?" and earned a big smile.

On second thought, nevermind. I´ll wait and find out.

I´m taking the online course and we´ve just gotten to the movement for the heart. Last night I felt the gentle warmth of heart chi in a way I never have before. It allowed me to make a necessary apology to my partner and feel close.

I hope you´ll allow me to backtrack a little, to clarify and refine my thinking. The implication you picked up from my previous post isn´t one that I meant to convey. I think you´ve hit here on the crux of the matter here. "Native Americans before the advent of ´modern amenities´" and similar groups were not impoverished in any real sense, even if they lacked technology and infrastructure that most of us would deem essential today. Perhaps the happy Oaxacan woman I met belonged to such a community. I like to think so. Her village was at about 10,000 feet and when I got sick from the altitude the people I was renting a cabin from gave me an herbal tea to drink that calmed my system right down. It seems likely to me that the people living in the community enjoyed close social ties and a comforting sense of rootedness to a relatively unbroken traditional way of life. To say they were living in poverty because there was no wi-fi or cable TV seems, umm, inaccurate. The homing instinct to return to such a way of life is not a "hipster dream"; it´s the beginning of sanity. I do, however, want to reserve the title of "hipster dreamer" for people who strip away the traditional ways that serve as alternative capabilities to technology and then romanticize the ensuing impoverishment. There´s nothing romantic or inspiring about alcoholism or suicide or diabetes among modern Native Americans who´ve been alienated from their heritage. If we´re going to deprive people of technology we´d better not also deprive them of the traditional alternatives to technology. As odd as it sounds, I think there are people who do exactly this and then wax poetic about the resulting suffering. These are the people I´d call hipster dreamers.

I think we´re talking about two different things here. From my perspective as a hyper-connected city-dwelling dude, it´s illuminating to consider how the supposed advantages of technology may in fact be impoverishing my life. Do I get a warm feeling of social connection from, say, Facebook? How connected do I feel to the rhythms of nature buying processed foodstuffs at large megastores? What does it do to my brain to be constantly bombarded by advertising? What happens to my body when I get everywhere by car? I once traveled to the mountains above Oaxaca, Mexico where I met a woman with a powerful smile. She lived in a hut and had few of the advantages of modern life. I didn´t talk with her much; we´re not friends. So perhaps my assessment of her life is totally wrong but in the moment when we met she sure seemed happy. Was it wrong then for me to consider her life and come to the astonished realization that many of the modern trappings of my life may inhibit rather than facilitate wellbeing? I don´t think so. At the same time there´s no denying a different kind of poverty. The kind where people go hungry and don´t have access to medical care. Not every poor person lives in an idyllic mountain village like the Oaxacan woman I met. Some people live without clean water and nourishing food. It´s very difficult (perhaps impossible?) to be happy while chronically hungry and it´s important not to whitewash the very real suffering of people who lack modern amenities in a hipster dream of back-to-nature bliss.

Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone; when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work. Jia Tolentino

I remember seeing some old black-and-white photographs of sternly seated relatives who died before I was born. I would love to know more about them. What were they interested in? How did they spend their days? Mostly what I´d want to figure out is if there´s anything of them in me. Sometimes it´s hard to see the connections even between my younger self and the person I´ve become. I was so fascinated by electronics as a kid; I´d stare endlessly at all the wires and transitor thingamabobs visible through ventilation holes in the composite board backing of our living room TV. My parents thought I´d become an electrical engineer. Didn´t happen. Not even close. I look back and wonder where that kid went -- he bears so little resemblance to me. I think it´s worthwhile taking some time to reconstruct a narrative of life, good to have a larger sense of who we are through time. Ideally this narrative would stretch back before birth to include ancestral stories. If not, even just a personal narrative that gives a sense of this-is-who-I-am is better than nothing.

I wish there was an easy how-to manual for preserving the ancestral memory of who we are and rectifying things that have inevitably gone wrong, a sort of Rewilding For Dummies. Then again, it´s possible that this process does not fit neatly within the For Dummies teaching format.

I´ve spent a lot of time talking to self-appointed authorities in the healing crystal section of my local occult bookstore and I think I know the answer: some people are here to learn life lessons about having lots of money while others (most) need to learn life lessons about scarcity. (In truth, I´m as attracted to beautiful rocks as the next guy and love to hang out in New Age shops. I draw the line at coastal art galleries offering dolphin sculptures.) ((Hands Apech a tray of delicious vegetarian faux gras.))

You´ve got a point. My idea of wealthy is a pantry full of great condiments, Red Boat fish sauce and aged balsamic vinegar. There´s no point collecting lions. I think it´s challenging maintaining mental balance with too much money, just as it can be challenging maintaining mental balance with too little.

In my ideal world there´d be less super rich people and less super poor, more of a middle class. Still, I´m not sure that shaming the conspicuously wealthy is the answer. I´m not a black tie and faux gras type of person. If I threw a Bum-wide potluck here at my apartment (very unlikely), nobody would think me in danger of being obscenely high-class. Even so, I know what it´s like to be embarassed about nice things. Years ago I bought some computer equipment and hoped to sneak the boxes into my bedroom without my roommates knowing. That´s how ashamed I felt. A mischievious friend who was helping me bring in my stuff made a loud announcement in front of everybody: oh look at this box, must be expensive. I was mortified. These days I don´t think it´s wrong to have money, even lots of it. Well, that´s not really true. I´m not actually that comfortable with money, not yet, but I´d like to be. Many poor people tend to think there´s something morally suspicious about the rich and vice versa. Theoretically, I believe there are good and bad people all along the economic spectrum. Not having money doesn´t make a person a criminal -- and neither does having it. I´m glad to live in a world where some people own yachts and Cartier watches. I hope such people pay high taxes and give generously to those less materially blessed but I don´t want to see them shamed and banished.

I´m adamantly opposed to "forced property seizure by the working-class" yet happy to support programs and policies to keep people from dying in medical poverty. Does this make me exactly the kind of leftist that earns eye rolls from our beloved leader? Perhaps. Still, it´s not all the time that I´m in tune with the American zeitgeist and I´ll take my conformity where I can get it.