idquest

People tend to forget that virtually all modern 'eating healthy' advice are just theories not substantiated by practice results. In diet science, it might take decades to prove or disprove a theory because this is how long it takes for a body to react to a new eating pattern. But modern economics doesn't work on decades schedule, best it can do - a year or two. So judge yourself on a validity of a particular diet. The best advice I've come around has been eat in moderation, alternate food, introduce more veges, cut down on sugars.

If your muscles are frozen in legs, hips, and waist, the prerequisite will be to first unfreeze the muscles before even attempting circle walking. Because you can seriously damage your body otherwise. IME, the problem with the best teachers is that they usually start their own training early in life, as children or teenagers. This results in their not understanding whatsoever what problems 'normal' western students will have because of inflexibility. THis could be the reason why your teacher started your training with the circle walking. What are unfrozen muscles? If during a turn you feel like your tissue in legs, hips, back, and waist sort of 'rolls over' the bones, you should be fine. Otherwise - think hard.

Bill Maher explains the real reason on what motivates mass shooters (starts at 2:30). Bill is quite on it, IMO:

Can you share on how this cooling effect manifested? Do you think it was due to caffeine or other components?

To my knowledge the people flowing from the Middle East to Germany pay substantial amounts of money to get there. That puts them into 'migrants' category' for me. Still the impression is that from some point in time the process of migration started to be directed by somebody rather than being chaotic.

It seems there is a lot of internal stretches going on. They are difficult to notice while watching the videos. I found this explanation of internal stretches interesting: I wonder if those who practice zhineng qigong do think that this kind of internal stretches are used.

Nerves that are affected are different - this is why it feels different.

First, relaxation doesn't mean being collapsed. When you say you become flabby, this could be due to your body structure getting collapsed. Second - and this is my interpretation that could be incorrect - when Chinese say "relaxed" they in fact mean "Song". Being Song is quite different from being relaxed. You could do some research on this.

Here is my question: There are movement practice and sitting in silence. By movement practice I mean either forms like taiji or qigong/neigong short forms. What time proportion for these practices do you recommend for beginners and intermediate students? Is it possible to achieve anything by sitting in silence only if the goal is spiritual development?

For some reason I can't insert a quote of the gendao's post but here is the answer to it. Well your picture gives you the answer. To stretch tendon, you should lengthen a part of the body with the minimum muscles engagement. This is one of the reason why neigong/taiji are slow movements. When you succeed in engaging tendons, you'll feel hydraulic/spring-like extension and contraction around the joints. To OP: tendinitis, if over all the body and not isolated in one-two joints, is likely to be a diet issue. It could be due to leaky gut or candida as well.

Agreed. You should stop practice while still wanting to continue it. If you do practice until you hate it, you'll just drop the whole thing altogether sooner or later.

Of course everything is creation of the mind, this is obvious. Slight problem though comes from the fact that the mind can create responses to external stimuli and to internal ones. Responding to external stimuli or interpreting them in a right and adequate way may have life or death consequences. Whereas when mind responds to internal stimuli, it could mean anything or nothing at all. The difference is significant. Does dream yoga help with that?

So what do you think the main purpose would be in practicing the dream yoga, preparation for the bardo or something else?

The stretch should be sublte but enough to engage the tendons/connective tissue along the lines of the meridians. That is if you extend an arm, the stretch should be felt all the way down to the feet. But you are right this is not a muscular stretch. A very good explanation of the lines of stretches and how it works is provided in the Damo Mitchell's book 'Four Dragons...'. The intermediate result will be your ability to open and close joints along the lines of the stretches.

Even in the monasteries the physical longevity will likely result from healthy lifestyle and little exposure to pathogens. If monks live steady life, do exercises, don't belong to any of risk groups (sex, drugs, alcohole), they are likely to live longer just because of that without any qi in consideration. The spiritual longevity is something else though. THere is quite a bit of claims on immortals appearing in dreams. Unfortunately, this is difficult to verify objectively. For any task at hand you will need resourses. Physical longevity and spiritual longevity are of different goals and at some point these two goals will start to compete for resourses. So I think the OP (or his teacher) is correct. The somewhat calming thought will be that very few actually reach a stage in cultivation at which the goals will start to compete for resourses.

And the left testicle is usually larger and hangs a bit lower than the right one.

It could be allergy, not UTI.

Damo Mitchell emphasizes inner thighs work in his school. You can look at this stretching routine of one of his students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW0_U1O3ynQ THere is also his video where he explains how inner thighs meridians work with earth energy, but I can't locate it now.

Unfreeze your muscles. Until you unfreeze, decrease the speed and range of motions. I had about the same problem. Start doing exersizes that encourage slow turning motions around hips. Also study how folding/unfolding of kwa works. At your stage, I'd stop doing waist turning at all until hip/butt muscles unfreeze enough. What helped me - sets from Bruce Frantzis, Robert Tangora, and Xing Shen Zhuang (Verdesi version).

Thank you for the videos. The first one is a bit confusing but the second is more suitable for the western type monkey mind. I'm a bit caucious about the first video because the set of about half an hour doesn't really involve legs an because of this it looks somewhat unbalanced for me. The second video says that all the movements can be broken into two main categories: absorbing or emitting qi. Quite frankly, I thought that XSZ (as an extention of ZQ) is more about engaging tendons and ligaments. Does this correspond with your experience that the underlying idea of the ZQ will be emitting and absorbing qi?

Are you familiar with Xing Shen Zhuang that Verdesi taught some time ago? I read that it is very close to Zhineng qigong. I train some version of Verdesi's XSZ and I like it. It works very well with tendons and ligaments all around the body. As for Zhineng qigong, does Dr Pang refer to any lineage of teachers?

Any qigong is a shell (choreography) by doing which you make your own discoveries about your energy body over time. You could try designing your own shell or do spontaneous qigong but as it has been said this is like inventing a bycicle. Just don't forget that inventors do make mistakes.

I read the WLP's book and it struck me as a book about gong. So many discuss magic or whatever from the book but I've seen very few comments on how much gong should be "attained" to get something worthy. If you want to attend his 10 days intensive you'd better ask yourself whether you are ready for gong.

Walking the walk

I don't see this as newage staff. Different people have different goals. Even more, goals will change as life goes. BKF just tries to bring some structure to possible sets of goals. He didn't mention philosophical and religious niches btw, and some people will be unhappy with this. So what?