Western Mo Pai   There is one school of cultivation that has drifted far from the original intent of chi kung and that is Mo Pai in the West.  Some westerner tourists ran across a guy known as John Chang.  Western Mo Pai Students is abbreviated as WMPS and pronounced Wimps.   John had cultivated chi power for many decades and had the ability to give people electric shocks.  The travelers were very impressed and made some videos of him giving people shocks, lighting small LED lights, and igniting some paper on fire.  You can buy LED lights that anyone can light up by holding, and iginiting newspaper is a popular trick using chemicals, which are rubbed together as the paper is being crumpled.  A book titled "Magus of Java" was also written about john, in which it is claimed that John is an immortal, as if amateurs would know.  They made it up to sell books.   For many people in the West the book and videos were their first exposure to the idea that chi power and special abilities really exist, and naturally, many people want to learn to do these things themselves.  However there is a big problem with all this:   John Chang got in trouble for demonstrating abilities in public (a mistake a Taoist immortal would not make) and for teaching Westerners, for which he was fired from his teaching position.  Westerners are now not allowed into the school for a good reason.   There were a couple of short term Western students who were strictly beginners, they learned 2 of the supposed 72 levels, or 2.7% of the system.  They were absolutely unqualified to teach and did not have permission to teach; yet they disobeyed and taught the very little that they had learned anyway.   Based on these meager and misled teachings some egomaniacs have created an internet forum or two in order to cash in on the popularity of Mo Pai.  The important thing to note is that each level consist of only ONE technique, which is a huge joke.     Those guys spent two years ‘learning’ only those two exercises, they received no corrections of their obvious mistakes.  Even beginners who have seen the pictures can spot the glaring mistakes and see those technique smugglers learned incorrectly.   The fact that only two techniques were taught in two years should be a big red flag for anyone interested in real nei kung.  Chi kung normally consists of small sets of low power exercises while real nei kung systems are vast holistic systems which contain thousands of techniques.   When students learn only two techniques and the teacher doesn't explain much it is normal to try to figure out what is happening and this leads to arriving at some crazy ideas, many of which one finds are incorrect as they advance further.  However these Westerners can not advance further and so they filled in the blanks with some wild imaginings, which they passed on to the Wimps.  The Wimps, in turn, are ruled over by a high pressure egotistical Western dictator type, who made up further things about the practice.   For example, the original stolen teachings mention sitting in full or half lotus but do not mention grounding.  In his wild imaginings the dictator of the Wimps took it a step further and declared that people who sit indoors need to sit with their bare butt on a bare copper wire and have the wire go outside and be connected to the ground.  He declared that it is best to sit on the bare  ground with a bare butt while meditating, which, as anyone who has read a bit will know, is not only comical, but patently ridiculous.  It ignores some basic facts about cultivating chi power, and also ignores some commonly known scientific facts which are that both people's skin and the soil on the ground are good insulators and not conductors.  It is possible to cultivate all the power one could imagine by sitting in chairs indoors as most readers with common sense are well aware of.   Edit:  The latest news has it that all three of the practitioners of Mo Pai known to the west, including John Chang, now have or have died from, prostate cancer, which they developed at relatively young ages, and this is said to be a result of doing Mo Pai.   --------------------------------   Warning about the second exercise:   So while the first technique, called level one, is fine as plain old low power meditation, there are some serious problems with the second exercise, called level two.  It is concerning level two and the requirement to create a lot of tension.  Lao Tsu wrote in the TTC that rigidity, which is the same as the tension used, is the way of death, while softness and flexibility is the way of the vibrant and living.  It has similarities to Iron Shirt, and Iron Shirt is for creating resistance to blows and is not for health or longevity.  This is what I have to say about chi kung that uses tension, and you can quote me on this:  "Most of them are going to die young", which echoes the sentiments of Lao Tzu, who appears to have been a nei kung master.    To create a lot of tension while breathing in slowly and then holding the breath and tension for as long as possible is very unnatural and is 'backwards'.  My friendly Taoist wizard/immortal/teacher and mentor put it this way:  "Never hold your breath!"   It is safe to say that doing level two is unsafe and will hurt you, not maybe, and not if you do it a lot.  It will hurt you for sure, and every time.  Every single time chips another little bit off the longevity measuring stick off your life, and it isn't worth it to be able to give people little electric shocks, there are other, better, softer ways.  There are other ways to gain healing abilities that do not involve creating tension.  In fact all legitimate schools of Taoist nei kung will lead a person to experience magic, real magic, and they are done softly.   It's different for the Western Mo Pai psychophants though, they only know about level two and so they will be continually doing this tension creating practice, which is shortening their lives and creating not only physical tension which stays with them when they aren't practicing but a lot of emotional tension which blends with their egotistical desire for power in ugly ways.  As we can all very easily see.   -----------------------------------   Warning:  Since some spies infiltrated the Wimps and shared everything with the public, the Wimp’s dictator is claiming to have discovered  the third technique for, TAADAA, a grand total of 4% of the system.  However it is a carefully guarded secret that only those who suck up to the dictator for a long time are given it. The Wimps imagine themselves to be quite exalted and advanced in the west West from knowing 3 - 4% of a defective system, and will tell you this for sure, because there is a video of John giving people little electric shocks and playing some common tricks.  BEWARE of this.  The Wimps do NOT have this information because the real Mo Pai students, the Asian Mo Pai students, hate them, will not help them in any way, and sincerely hope they go and burn in hell ASAP.