Trunk

thx! works.

I was just thinking of starting a mj thread, gonna jump in & segue a little w/ this: Sen. Cory Booker "It’s so hard to find a job. You can’t get business licenses. You can’t get Pell Grants. You can’t get public housing or even food stamps. So many things are cut off to you. Now, imagine if those arrests are overwhelmingly concentrated in certain communities, where you have the churning in of the poor people in those communities, or minority folks or disproportionately large numbers of the black men in that community have been arrested for doing things that if you went to a college campus and really did the police work, you’d find that large numbers of those folks are doing those drugs." Sen. Cory Booker’s bill would void federal convictions for marijuana possession and would grant new sentencing hearings to those convicted on other marijuana charges.

I wonder what your experiences with hitting practices have been .. ? Mine have been spotty and some input might help. Way back in the HT days, I tried a couple of dowels taped together: ouch! And the wires taped together: ouch! And the wires-taped-together but all-bent-spread-out: ouch! Recently, I ordered "healing broom", which is also a wire hitter. Nicer construction than mine that are duct-taped-held together, and finer wires - so I thought they'd be easier on me. And a woman demonstrating it on the website, ("couldn't be bad", I said). I recently received it: ouch! Wire hitters and I just haven't gotten along. Hitting with the hands can be helpful. The basic "Chi Self Massage". So far, I've find it's most effective on my upper chest. It kind of thumps deep into my chest, which is the kind of effect that feels satisfying. But hitting by hand doesn't quite do it on other parts of my body ... maybe I need to experiment more with that. I went to the L.A. Chinatown yesterday with a couple of friends, walked around, ate food, looked at stuff. A shop was selling bamboo swords (aka "shinai", "kenpo stick") and I found that the lower middle section felt really good for self-hitting. There's weight to it and flexibility, by virtue of the material (bamboo) and the fact that it's of four pieces. I bought one ($10), like it, consider it a "good find" for my self-hitting deficiency. I found that I could smack myself pretty hard on my upper back with it, and it felt really good. (p.s. I wear sweats when I self-hit with the shinai. Provides the right amount of padding for me, plus protects from splinters.) Any other tips?, experience? hits? misses? Trunk

new Pew Research Poll results: Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact on U.S. Curious about the views of those on this forum re: whether colleges & universities have a positive / negative effect on the country? Graph of other results of the poll:

Surprised this hasn't started as a separate (extensive) topic yet...

Much better, thanks! (Both on my pc and my iPhone: works! )

I'm not into the notifications icon and mail icon both being collapsed into the right-hand menu. Notifications are fun but not important, mail is *really* important. I'd rather not have their numbers hidden together. Get my drift?

More emoticons 'd be fun.

I much prefer having <enter> just go to the next line. Thanks to all the staff!

Found this useful site: Mahayana Buddhist Sutras in English If you have links to other useful Buddhist online resources, this might be a good catch-all thread.

I've been watching some youtube videos of Tim Snyder, well educated, well spoken and decided to order his book On Tyranny. Might as well get some education from this mess. from his wikipedia page

Arresting a Reporter for Asking Questions Is an Unacceptable Assault on the First Amendment these go together Activist Faces Jail Time for Laughing During Sessions Hearing

Chicago just posted all the climate data deleted by Trump’s EPA

EPA fires members of science advisory board ~ edit ~ Edited this post to look pretty and include quote. I'd only quickly posted a link before.

http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/05/04/massive-bombshell-out-of-netherlands-trump-guilty-of-money-laundering-crimes/

Segue back to Jung, who, for a long time, was making mandalas daily ... I've been re-watching HBO's West World, and diggin' it. The emergence of consciousness. Extraordinarily well written. And "the maze"? Can anyone say "mandala"? That's the one w/ all the mandalas!

My version of the "5 Minute University" is a fun way for friends to give mini-lectures to each other, "casual teaching": - each 'class' is ~ 5 minutes - and costs a nickel (or free) - *if* any notes are involved, fits on 1 page Maybe it's just silly... but, also, in normal friendly dialog, conversation is usually too free-flowing for any one person to really get to say a good chunk of stuff, to even give a mini-lecture. This is a way to shift the conversational format to monologue / lecture / instruction for a short period. To get agreement from the 'student' to mostly listen, to give permission to the 'teacher' to lecture / instruct. Most adults have something they've done deep research in, and this allows opportunity for friends to casually teach each other ... in whatever they know about. Anyone can do this, any topic they know about. In this case, qigong. (My 'university', lol, also offers guitar lessons.) If someone doesn't want the conversation, then they won't go along with the little game, won't pay you the nickel. It's a very low pressure fun way to opt in / out of these conversations, which are too often perceived as intrusive or offensive. It's also a fun way to be available for more 'classes' if a 'student' is interested. I'm working on a short "sphere series" of classes. #1 create and feel the sphere (that's enough for most people right away, just the surprise and newness of, "wow, I can feel it") #2 resonate the sphere of the hands with the core (all along the vertical, spending more time at blockages, refining expanding ~ condensing the centers along the way) #... (and more in the series, qi spheres are applied throughout many practices in the DGS bagua qigong system) As I mentioned before, there is enough to get the initial start w/ the sphere at 1m26s in the above video.

I know Sean led a qigong class at a local YMCA (or similar) some years back. It included joint rotations that could be done by elderly or those w/ mild injuries; I don't know what else was included. It seemed a healthy way to connect with others.

I will say that I've recently found some inspiration in Father Guido Sarducci ... and, more dubiously, the Dude.

... ok, so, cont'd from last post ... To connect with people who aren't seriously into it, you need a way to have them feel it immediately. Short answer: show them how to create n' feel a sphere (here at 1m26s, more extensively in the video for sale). It can be communicated and felt within a minute or two (literally). I've been pretty socially retarded in this process and 've only shown maybe 3 or 4 people. I have a friend who is not nearly as into it, and a lot less inhibited, and after I showed it to him he showed it to about 20 people. He said pretty much everyone felt it right away, and it felt good. So: feels good, is fun. I have more extensive thoughts about this. Maybe it's just my inhibition about sharing that manifesting as me making it more complex than it has to be... but I have a number of things I've been working on along this line and want to work it out more and play it out more before I share further. The above is a start, though. It's enough for someone to jump in, if they want to. cheers, Trunk p.s. My as-yet-to-be-realized venture of John Dao Productions is about addressing the theory gap: ability to communicate and share in a very generic way in common language, but that also has depth alignment with principle.

Really good question. For me (and I'm not saying this as advice, just how it's playing out in my life), I focused on practice and theory for decades, and basically had two sets of friends: 1. dharma friends, 2. secular friends. I basically didn't talk about dharma stuff at all with secular friends. (Though they knew I was into it.) It's pretty lonely. However, I didn't feel that I could communicate about internal life until I felt really well oriented in theory and practice. That took decades. Ok, so, then, that done, the prominent topic has become, "how do I communicate with others?". (... more later ...)

p.s. A note about learning finger-knitting style mudras for the first time: When I started learning them, they felt *completely* foreign. So much so that getting my fingers into the mudras was a little confusing and I forgot how to get back into the mudra pretty much immediately (like, as soon as my hands came apart, lol). So, my advice is that - if your learning process is anything like mine was - start by just learning *one* mudra. Hang out with it, enjoy it, become familiar, feel it. Then, if you dig it, come back for more. If you try and learn bunches in the first go, likely you'll just overwhelm yourself. Keep it in fun, managable doses. Finger-knitting mudras + Kwan Yin Magnetic Qigong (qi sphere work) has totally *dramatically* changed my experience of my hands for qigong, my own internal healing (including the core not just the limbs/hands), bagua and often in every-day situations. The inquisitive feeling of "something with my hands" that I felt when I was first introduced to meditation (mid 80's), decades later, these practices brought to fruition.