QiDr

I passed this on to other teachers as a heads up, not to be commented on by every twerp in the peanut gallery.

Wishful thinking at best. One cannot get too far out of range either acidic or alkaline and live, if you are mildy acidic or alkline, eat a little (1 tsp daily), sodium bicarb, it will bring you back into balance either way.

Not from here it doesn't

I share office space with a PhD psychologist from Germany who uses Enneagram typing in his work. His suggested reading for any of you who are interested is: Understanding the Enneagram ~Don Richard Riso Discovering the Enneagram ~ Richard Rohr Personally, I do not subscribe to personality typing, There have been attempts made at this since ancient times (five phase typing), and none of it has been usefull to me as a clinician.

I was recently contacted via email by a man wanting to enroll his daughter in my tai chi and qi gong classes over the summer. She was to come here from England and he wanted to know what styles I taught and how much twice-weekly private lessons tuition for two months would be. He said his borther lived in the area and she would be staying with him. I responded with the tuition amount and he asked if he could pre-pay the tuition and asked for an address. I advised him that he could send a casheir's check ONLY, but my preference was that the daughter pay at time of lessons. His next email stated that he had sent two money orders, that both were for over the tuition amount. He wanted me to deduct the tuition and bank the remainder of the money until he gave me the address of one of his "agents" at which time I was supposed to forward the agent the remaning funds to pay for his daughters air fare etc. After the last transmission I forwarded the entire record of emails to the U.S. Secret Service Fraud Division. I had a similar thing happen last year when I was selling a motorcycle, some guy from England wanted to send me several thousand dollors over the amount of the bike and send the remainder to some agent so he could ship the bike to England. They guy never sent anything but this sort of thing is an obvious fraud. It is surprising me that they are now targeting teachers of something as esoteric as tai Chi and Qi Gong. This most recent character found me via my web site and I have to assume that he must have done quite a bit of homework to find me at all. The thing that really toasts me is, these guys think we Americans are greedy and stupid.

Just to touch on the original dialogue, the problem I have with the no teacher approach to Taoism is that of cultivation practices. Most of you have heard me before on this subject so I will keep it short. Cultivations, especially sexual, can hurt you bad. That is one of the main reasons a masterful teacher is needed. If one is learning the art of the sword, there is an expectation that one can and will be cut. Most of the novice solo practitioners of Taoist cultivation don't know that they can develope everything from semen in the urine to a psychotic breakdown by erronious practice of Taoist arts.

Buddhism and Taoism both refer to sexual union as needing to be appropriately motivated. The highest level of attainment in Taoism is virtue, and one does not do that which is unvirtuous. Virtue is responding to all beings from an ethical and moral place. The so called taoist sexual practices that are so compelling to many adolescent seekers are considered a rather base form of cultivation and culturally innapropriate even in China.

Although there is a long history of Taoist poets and drinking, there is no source that I have read in the last thirty five years that doesn't contra-indicate drinking and Qi Gong practice. Most sources give at least a 24 hour prohibition and many up to a week before and after practice. This makes daily practice and drinking impractical at best. As to the use of alcohol in TCM, it is an herb catylist (pao zhi) and is used to modify the effects of herbs. It's own properties are hot and toxic but that is TCM terminolygy and doesn't mean what you may think. The drinking of alcohol, like everything else (including peyote I would imagine), is addressed by the Taoist precept, "A little bit of everything and not too much of anything."

The books by Master Ni Hua Ching are very readable, explicit and informative.

The Japanese meridians are the same as the Chinese. There are still a small number of Japanese MDs who use an acupuncture system that was developed (I think in the Fifties), and since been discarded. The MDs developed a 2 cm grid that was overlayed on the body and at each intersecting point of the grid, there was the acupoint. Although this method was easier to learn, it was functionally inept as eventually fell into disuse.

I call on, and thank every Heavenly being I can conjure, regardless of religious affiliation. The way I figure it, it can't hurt to cover all your bases!

Welcome Yuan Qi, I am an L.Ac. also trained in Florida at FITCM and a thirty year martial artist. Glad to have you abord.

I would not mess with it if I were you. The Atlas-Axis does not "go out" and if there were some sort of "subluxation" at that point you would not be typing right now.

There are a lot of very straight forward taboos to paractices like: It is inadvisable to engage in practice when drunk or intoxicated, within several hours of having sex, when overly full of food, when overly hungry, during the mid-day (yang practices), during mid-night (yin practices), on solstices, new and full moons, When recently angered, close to hard, external martial arts practice, when having emphasis on outcome of the practice. The list can go on and on, The point is, if you are learning practices from a book or video and none of this sounds familiar, you might want to find sources that do list these, and other proscriptions.

Wow, Super Powers and, like, you'll know kung fu dude!