idquest

His neigong book is not easy in a sense that it is not easy to figure out the main points and focus of practice. I had exactly the same opinion of it as you when I first read it in 2012. For some reason I kept returning to the book and now I find it of great deepness. The Sung Breathing alone is worth a lot. As for his teaching, I understand he positions himself in the mainstream with neigong of open/close, lengthening, and pulsing, emphasis on the spine and shoulder blades, not so much of spiraling even though I'm sure he know a lot about spiraling as he studied Feng's Hunyuan Taiji. In neidan he is again in the mainstream with the version of Lu Dong Bing's Golden Flower.

NotVoid, have you tried Ma Xuzhou's system? Do you like it? To Lataif: I don't know how old you are, but anybody older than 40 will tell you there is difference whether you start wearing glasses at 40 or at 55. Also, the speed and depth of deterioration matters as well. Mantak Chia is over 70 AFAIK, I wouldn't judge on his system based on his wearing glasses at such age.

If by neidan you mean Lu Dong Bing's method of Golden FLower replicated in numerous sects over millenia - then no, BKF doesn't teach that.

You can read 'Neigong' by Damo Mitchell, chapter on Sung breathing. He discusses exactly what you are asking.

IDK how old you are, but if you are over 40, I'd say safety should be a priority. I know several online courses, but the only one that really focuses on safety is B Frantzis's one. Quite pricy though.

Alignments and relaxation are critical in ZZ. Both are addressed in depth in Frantzis's book "Enenrgy Gates". He also suggests a method that blue eyed snake described: start small, stand until you feel discomfort, than sit down. Frantzis's approach to ZZ is different from LKC's one. LKC advocates "not doing" while standing whereas Frantzis teaches dissolving. Listen to your body what is best for you and use either method. For me dissolving is better because it occupies the monkey mind. In LKC's book, don't overlook his set of ba dua jing. THis is a good set and if you do it mindfully, it will unfold wonderfully with time.

From history classes in school I remember that Spartans, Ancient Greek people, would drop their sick/deformed children from a cliff to death. Spartans were very healthy people and their genetic pool was good and clean. We should remember that any medical intervention will eventually result in deterioration of genetic pool. So what to do? Drop sicks from a cliff or intervene? People live longer but they are not necessarily healthier. Is ti good or bad? These are not easy questions, and I don't know answers myself.

If Putin is pushed hard, like for instance by weapon supply from US to Ukraine, there is a real risk he will test a nuclear bomb. Just to show what else he has. THis will bring the escalation to a totally new level.

The whole point of doing ZZ in many traditions is to get out of one's head and get into one's body. When you listen to some external data flow, you remain being in your head negating the whole purpose of the practice. This is IMO and IME as well.

Just finished the book. Enjoyed it a lot.

I remember when CD's emerged to replace vinyl discs and how everybody got excited about them. And I remember very well how deeply I was disappointed when I first heard CD-quality sound. It was entirely lacking the richness of the analog vinyl disks with all the harmonics and subharmonics and sub-sub... It is obvious for me that our goal has to be to fuse\integrate everything we have in our bodies because otherwise we'll get CD mechanical replica like a basic avatar picture. I don't intentionally study ancient text as I regard this as dangerous enterprise for obvious reason. Just use your common sense. Get full integrity.

Frantzis's neigong is good IME. To what extent it is authentic - you can compare what he teaches with what other masters do. If you can see internal workings of the body, you'll notice that Frantzis generally teaches about the same as accomplished masters can demonstrate in photos or video. THe other advantage of Frantzis's material is that he explains things using modern anatomy vocabulary. If you look at his neigong components and think they are somewhat simple and low key, please keep in mind that for an average person it'll take about 10 years to incorporate most of neigong components.

I actually visited Daode website and I noticed that they enroll students to qigong classes. So I'm not really sure why this fight against qigong.

Growing number of good teachers now teach online and this will increase. At some point of development a student will need some personal interactions, but online studying can advance you to a pretty good level.

Twisting at lumbar spine could create real problems. I remember that cute girl at a local school who said she'd have to drop out after two months of training. When I asked why, she said that because of bagua training she started to experience pain in the lumbar area of the spine. The point was that when we started, we were instructed to assume a dragon posture with a twist, and then instructors would require 'twist more, twist more'. Now I understand that the turning/twisting appearance should come from turning of pelvis without any substantial turning of spine at lumbar. But a number of students just didn't have enough flexibility in their hips and they compensated the shortage of angling by engaging spine at lumbar. My current understanding is that turning/twisting at midriff area could be required for enhanced martial performance and should be trained very carefully under supervision. But for health training I don't see any reason why one would risk their health and turn\twist at midriff at all.

Thanks Trunk for this clarification. I can see how safety explanations could be difficult for masters. If they practice from childhood or very early age, or are very flexibly naturally, they may not even understand what kind of difficulties other people might have. I look at myself as an example. When I do bagua stepping, it is very clear for me at this point of my training that if somebody’s legs muscles don’t slide along the bones, they will very likely screw up their knees. But I understand this now. And my leg muscles started to slide just 6-8 months ago. So what happened with me 3 years ago when I attempted doing bagua for the first time? I did it for a year enthusiastically and everything was fine until after a year of training my knee started to complain. But again, if somebody’s muscles slide from the childhood, they may not even understand what I’m talking about because for them sliding muscles existed all their life and they never even had frozen muscles.

Trunk, I have several questions with regards to your last two posts. Vibrating palm. There clearly are martial applications. Does Sifu Matzuo discuss health benefits of the vibrations in the DVD? Iron Shirt breathing. Matzuo mentions the breathing in such context that one could assume he means reversed breathing. Is it correct? I already bought Matzuo's Heart of Bagua DVD. It is good and content is rich, but IMO it is geared more to the intermediate practitioners. What I mean is that twists of bagua, both in the spine and in the legs, have substantial potential to inflict damage to the spine, knees, and ankles joints. In this DVD (Heart of Bagua) I couldn't find any tips on safety. Do you know of any Matzuo's bagua DVD where he addresses safety of practicing bagua?

If serrapeptase dissolves hard tissue, my question would be what it does with soft tissue? And with bones? I remember some time ago there was buzz about nattokinaze, how it is beneficial for heart health and how it dissolves plaques. So people became enthusiastic and started to swallow it in numbers. And after a while reports emerged on how people developed first nose bleeding from damaged membranes, then other irregularities including something really bad happening with lungs. From what I've read only Japanese have 10-20 years experience with serrapeptaze, not so much anybody else. So I'm wondering what long term effects could be.

I found this interesting: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/04/us-science-eels-idUSKCN0JI27W20141204 Did they study mopai? Or mopai studied from them?

LET’S SET THE EXISTENCE-OF-GOD ISSUE ASIDE FOR A later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon We are the result of the evolution and we are badasses because we have to fight for scarce resources with competitors - this is what N. Stephenson (my favourate sci-fi author) says. You can regard this as an original sin out of which you should evolve spiritually, as OP is saying (or so I understood the OP).

Many tend to forget about the main business large polities implement - protection. With the assumption being that the smaller nation wouldn't need its own military at all if it breaks away from a confederation. But protection doesn't go anywhere, in most cases it just shifts to something else; in Europe this will be NATO. And let's not forget that NATO expenses are largely financed by the USA and to a much lesser extent by UK and Germany. This is why all Eastern European countries wanted to join NATO right away after USSR collapse: they couldn't come up with their own resources to build its own military but still wanted protection. I'd agree that protection as a government business is pretty much the same as any street protection when 'protectors' create situations to demonstrate how people/subjects need them. But from time to time something crazy will come up and then you have to act and you better have some muscle to show.

So we have JB's statement about "naturally occurring phenomena" on the one hand (with which I pretty much agree base on my own experience). On the other hand we have an idea that neidan is about going against the current, reversing the flow. Which is an interesting, powerful, and logical point. So if we put aside all personalities issues, how do you reconcile these two if you think both are valid assumptions?

This has been my observation as well: the practice unfolds by itself. But we still need some framework to work with, we have to set up the practice. And for this we need a teacher or at least some pointers.

I'm not sure the relaxation of abdominal muscles by itself should be a goal, Rather what they call 'loosening the waist'. Interestingly enough, I just recently started to feel this loosening while doing simple turns left-right with weight shifting from one leg to another. Tied to the abdominals is loosening of lower back and butts which brings the loosening to a deeper level. If I'm correct, then this is mentioned in the Taiji Classics as referred to as waist problems. Bagua would be a powerful method to study loosening but at the same time a very risky one. One should have certain understanding of the body mechanics before even thinking of bagua.

Watch your knees. Very few instructors explain how to circle walk so that your knees remain healthy. The problem is that the misalignment in the knees don't manifest right away but rather accumulate over years and closer to 45-50 a person might get in real trouble. What helped me - 3 swings as taught by BKF. For some people they are obvious; but for me it took more than a year to fully appreciate them. I started them after 50, so for younger folks all that could take much faster.