8trigrammer

I agree with everything chev said. I have all of Bruce's books. This one gave a great overview of the whole chi gung/taoist thing and ties it all together in a way that I haven't seen Bruce do yet (and I've been to 2 of his seminars as well..) I wish everyone would read this book. It has an endearing tone to it, and encourages humanity to move towards life than towards death. What can be wrong with that?

I see your point about the knife thing but: They clearly were not going at full speed in the Sonnon clip, whereas they were in the other so I don't think it's a fair comparison. As I understand it, training at slower speeds is a way to program more sophisticated movements/reactions/techniques into your body. In the second knife clip, the guy with the jacket pretty much froze up or "shunted" - no techniques, no nothing - just got pummeled. So again, it's hard to compare being that we don't know what the skill levels of the 2 fighters are. The only way to really judge would be to put Sonnon up against the knife attacker in the second clip at full speed. I'm not pro Sonnon, in fact I could care less. If anything I'm more in to B.K. Frantzis' stuff. But to me, these clips don't convince me that Sonnon "sucks" or whatever. I did a search on Scott Sonnon on here and came up with 3 pages worth of threads. I don't have hours to sift through the threads and find the Sonnon related topics, I was hoping you could just summarize the jist of why Sonnon get's bashed (other than what you already posted, which I did appreciate by the way - I'm just trying to sort everything out..).

Would you mind sharing that? Or maybe just point me in the right direction.. It would be much appreciated.

LOL - "i'm not saying that you're an enabler..." nice use of psychobabble

This looks pretty neat: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nux8nu2Jaks

Is this the spontaneous movement that BK Fratzis talks about in regards to Ba Gua?

For SFJane: First off, what did you mean by Kleinfelter? Onward, As someone who's been to a couple of BKF's retreats and has read his books, your commentary was fascinating to me. I applaud your openness in talking about your own experiences as well. Some food for thought: When grandmaster Lui was teaching Bruce, he was in his late 80's. Although he himself didn't engage in any explorative sex (or whatever you wanna call it), let alone much plain vanilla sex, except for a couple of times, is it possible that in his travels/studies with all his different teachers and temples and what have you, that he may have encountered people who were more like yourself in terms of sexual exploration? If he did, maybe he observed their sexual practices as detrimental to the water method in the long term. Also, being that he had been a practicing taoist for decades, is it possible that he gained insights on this subject which you may have not yet discovered? In other words - 30 years from now you may look back on the sex you've had and find that it hindered your spiritual progress (for lack of a better term..). Then again - you may look back and find that it put you way ahead of people who were not as sexually eclectic - far be it from me to know that, it's just food for thought. I guess my main point there is that I wonder what the long term affects of male to male intercourse over, let's say, a 30-40 year time period is in relation to Taoist practices/internal alchemy/energetics etc.. I realize that you and some others have mentioned that there are ways for males to have homosexual sex in a such a way that is not harmful, or even beneficial, energetically speaking from a Taoist perspective. If this is true, then where did you learn about these practices and why wouldn't a man like grandmaster Lui have known about them? Surely the Taoists must have experimented over the centuries and kept a record of these kinds of things.. Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts/ideas.

Is anyone on here in to Ba Gua Zhang AND CST? I would love to hear some 'compare and contrast' between the 2. I wonder if doing Ba Gua with an iron ball in each hand will be the next fitness craze.. I'm gonna go copyright Ballbells right now... or should it be Baballs..?

How are the Peidmont clubbells working out? Why the vow of celibacy?

I've recently gotten in to KB's - if I understand it correctly the tensing only happens for a moment - Not including the slow grinds. So like on the swings, snatches, cleans and jerks there's an explosive tensing for a brief moment, but then relaxing as much as possible the rest of the time. Granted, the stabilizing muscles are activated the whole time, but besides that..

Why all the Scott Sonnon bashing? I've been reading some of his stuff, it doesn't sound all that bad. Am I missing something?

I'm a dabbler in Ba Gua Zhang and martial arts as well as meditation and Taoism. I've attended a couple Bruce Frantzis retreats which I really liked and learned a lot from. I currently take a Ba Gua class with Sifu Jason Tsou. I love discussing spirituality, philosophy and stuff like that.