Low Key Unguided Qi Gong

[SimonM]

That is because belief is something within a person. Of course if they believe that mumbo-jumbo they will think it is happening to them.

But when they take that personal, psychologically internal, experience and generalize it... especially when you give people advice such as "don't participate in a psychologically healthy practice because your mind might get trapped in the astral plane"... that's where we see the bad side of religion pop up.

Remember that religion is why apparently sane people:

Roll around on the floor of a draughty hall making stupid noises;
Blow themselves up;
Blow other people up;
Set themselves on fire;
Set other people on fire;
Go to war over a difference in interpretation of a 1000 year old book;
Try to stop the spread of new, verifiable knowlege;
Deny their loved ones life-saving medicine;
And so on.

So my advice: keep religion out of your meditation - except possibly to try to understand that religion is just an illusion created by your psyche and the expectations of your friends and family.

[TenTigers]

I was thinking more SSRI for depression or OCD. I don't know that SSRIs are used for bipolar. I thought they used neuroleptics or lithium.

serotonin levels are directly related to BPAD, but you are right, depression and OCD as well.
from what I've read,,neuroleptics and lithium are often used for more extreme and unstable patients.
Again, I am certainly no expert, just have some experience dealing with family members, students, friends, (alot of ex-gf's..)etc.



gf: "Why is it that every girl you've had a relationship with, was driven to physical violence against you? Do you see a pattern yet?"
me: "Yeah. I dig psycho chicks.They're hot!"

[SimonM]

Everyone should date one psycho girl... just to learn the signs.

So that, in the future, if you encounter one - you RUN!

[TenTigers]

Everyone should date one psycho girl... just to learn the signs.

So that, in the future, if you encounter one - you RUN!

yep. "Play Misty for me" is required viewing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFLwJpW6cDw

as well as "Fatal Attraction."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYpeK...eature=related

[taai gihk yahn]

I've been practicing pretty basic Qi Gong for about 3 months now. It's been extremely beneficial for my well being, health and state of mind. I'm sticking to pretty basic exercises:
Microcosmic orbit.
Bone Breathing
attending and intending, etc.
I've heard frequently that unguided Qi Gong eventually leads to trouble; psychological or even physical trouble. Is this legit? Or can I continue with my daily routine?

it really depends what you are doing and how you are doing it; in fact, what one means by "qigong" can vary significantly from school to school; for example, Micro orbit is done very differently by different people; same with yi jin jing; so it's really not possible to say "qigong" will do "a" or "b", because it's too vague of a classification (one could substitute yoga here as well);
the thing to really consider are the specific attributes one trains; for example, if you are doing something physically rigorous like parts of YJJ, you can certainly injure yourself, much as you could by doing yoga or any martial art or any sport too aggressively / incorrectly, etc.; this is pretty obvious;
when getting into more "internal" stuff, such as meditation (or more specifically, visualization), combined with specific breathing practices, then certainly it is possible to have undesired effects: whenever one is consciously regulating breath, one is working in the field of the autonomic nervous system, which is the system that regulates a host of relatively non-conscious functions: breathing, blood pressure, visceral tone, sweating, fight / flight response, etc.; if left to its own devices, this system does a pretty good job of taking care of itself; for example, pressure sensors in blood vessels (barroreceptors) regulate the tension / pressure gradient in order to influence BP / cardiac function; engaging in certain types of breathing, especially if forced, can impact these centers in at times unpredictable ways, resulting in either precipitous increases or decreases in BP (please note I said CAN, not WILL - meaning that not everyone will have this sort of effect necessarily; individual variation is a key factor for this sort of thing); and the next result can be something like fainting (quick drop in BP), or you can get a biotch of a headache (increase in BP); visualizations can have similar effects

as a general rule, classical Taoist inner alchemical work stresses that when one is working with the "qi" (not to say that this is an actual thing, but that's neither here or there for purposes of this discussion), one does not want to either help it or hinder it; meaning that, if left to its own devices, the organism will take care of itself; meaning that a lot of this work is predicated on creating the proper environment for the ANS / enteric systems to "do their thing" untrammeled by the frets and worries of the conscious mind - in other words, letting the body get back to its brain-stem level programing for a while in order to "rebalance" what it needs to fix;

Practicing qigong incorrectly can and probably will physically injure you. Same goes for gong fu.

I'd say more the "can" than the "will" - again, it just depends;

Not because magic qi will melt your brain or something, but because if you don't understand proper alignment you could grind the joints down, pull tendons, permanently hurt the back etc. Especially in a calm highly concentrated state.

agreed, although I don't know about grinding joints, unless you are doing very vigorous work over a period of years to even decades; but that could be said of pretty much anything...

To get the most out of qigong, it is wise to find a mentor.

100% agree

You can learn lots of qigong from books though, and get a lot out of it. I read a book when I was 14, about tai chi and started doing it. I didn't get into a school where there was any real knowledge on zen untill I was 18. I had gone a very long ways. My teacher, and all of my upper classmates thought I had a significant background in soft martial arts.

the problem with books, as my teacher says, is that they don't talk back to you; my personal belief is that initially one needs to find a teacher, because the teacher will have you train what is specifically needed for you to come back into balance - the book will not be able to uniquely tailor your practice according to your personal imbalance, and so may not be appropriate; books are good later on when you understand the principles deeply enough to be able to look at other approaches and apply those principles to them

doing qigong wrong will sersiouly mess you up.
if something goes wrong you dont know what things to do to reverse it. sometimes you are just doing things plain wrong. lifting weights wrong messes up your muscles and bones, doing qigong wrong messes up your friggin nervous system. im surprised no one mentioned the saying "playing with fire and inviting demons".

well, again, I think you'd have to be trying pretty hard to do something "irreversable"; more likely, you will irritate some aspect of the ANS a give yourself a nice headache, or get the sweats, or have some strange lower intestinal tract responses...

its better if you just sit still and meditate with no thoughts until you find a teacher.

this is trickier than it seems; and the "trap" is that the desire / intention / resolve to sit with "no thoughts", is still a thought, and so one has lost before beginning; instead, one simply sits, and observes what is going on: the breath is a good place to start - simply observe the breath; when thoughts arise, one simply notices them as clouds passing by overhead - no trying to deny them, but not being attached to them either; and always coming back to a clear following of the breath when one recollects to do so...

i used to try buddhist golden seal from some old book before i found a teacher, i couldnt flex my fourth finger for days, it keeps trembling. uve been warned

the urban legend is that Jung went a bit off the deep end from trying to practice Daoist internal alchemy from a poorly translated text...

Qi configurations need time,to open the point's space and reaching it's potential.
like cooking an egg.

ok, a bit esoteric, but not completely off the mark; simply put, the organism needs time to self-correct, and will often go through various processes before it's done; from personal experience, these conform to what is classically described in terms of moving sensations, "involuntary" movements, visual / auditory manifestations and even emotional stuff (bear in mind, there are many "western" healing approaches that discuss similar issues, going to show that human nature is human nature regardless of cultural context); physiologically, I have some ideas about what is "really" going on, but as these are to a certain degree conjecture and lack full cohesiveness, I'm not going to get into them (postural organizational stuff I can talk no prob; some other bits are a little harder to tease out);

more to come...

[SimonM]

Zazen (sitting no-thought meditation) is definately one of the most practical varieties. And, like the game of go, it's one of the simplest on the surface... one of the most difficult to master.

As far as the advice given on the topic by taai gihk yahn about focus on the breath and passive observation of arising thoughts goes I have to add my support. This is precisely how I council others to handle this form of meditation... after they get past the full-body-relaxation stage.

The story about Jung is funny but I have to say seems, based on what I know of the man's life, to be completely devoid of fact. Jung was a bit on the wierd side even when he was a little kid. His work mapping the consciousness was largely one that came about as a process of his personal exploration of his own psyche.

Here's where we may be parting companies though.

The mind can be a wierd place. Exploration of the mind can lead to altered states of consciousness and changes in perception that people can misinterpret as something supernatural. This is not, in fact, the case.

The collective unconscious, for instance, is NOT telepathy. Every person carries that shared collection of common archetypes in their unconscious due to two shared factors: 1) inherited brain structure, 2) the fundamental common bases of the human experience.

Essentially the collective unconscious represents the pre-sets of the brain and those experiences that are so common to humanity that we don't even think about them.

Spending a lot of time exploring the boundaries of your mind can strengthen the ties with the collective unconscious by creating a greater familliarity with the personal unconscious and thus the pathway through which archetypes arise in the conscious mind from the collective unconscious. This well of insight can sometimes allow a person to assess the data incoming from the senses in a manner that seems highly intuitive to the point of supernature. In fact all they are doing is using a bit of insight into the self to create greater empathy for others and using that empathy as a decision making tool to assess what they see, smell, taste, hear and feel.

Bawang's warnings aside I've been practicing various forms of meditation including some moving controlled breathing meditations (qigong) with and without a teacher and the worst thing that has ever come from them was a feeling of slight fatigue (it is worth noting that fatigue came after multiple repetitions of the iron thread which combines qigong techniques with isodynamic muscle exercise).

[TenTigers]

hmmm interesting stuff, Simon.
I also, when I teach meditation, first teach "centrepetal relaxation"(not sure why it is called that?) relaxing the boody from the toes to the head, and then remaining in that relaxed state. Thoughts are allowed to come, but when they do, they are aknowledged and released, returning to the relaxed state, etc,etc.

what is your interpetation of spiritual and/or demonic possession?

[SimonM]

hmmm interesting stuff, Simon.
I also, when I teach meditation, first teach "centrepetal relaxation"(not sure why it is called that?) relaxing the boody from the toes to the head, and then remaining in that relaxed state. Thoughts are allowed to come, but when they do, they are aknowledged and released, returning to the relaxed state, etc,etc.

Yeah, that's what I start with before they are ready for zazen. Been teaching the wife that.

what is your interpetation of spiritual and/or demonic possession?

Mental illness (psychosis), attention seeking, suggestable people trying to work through neuroses, ignorance and good old fraud.

[TenTigers]

what is enlightenment?

[SimonM]

Seeing through the illusions that confound most people.
Full individuation combined with an empathic understanding of the other that transcends self/other boundaries and which leads to compassionate action.

[bawang]

i put it this way:
when i was in high school i ask my friend hey how do u do a deadlift? he says dont ask me just do it. so i hurt my back and had problems for 1 year. but he did it all wrong too but didnt get injured right away.
some side effect i got from doing qigong wrong were shaking hands, red dots appearing on hands, head ache, suddenly getting nervous, cant breathe, suddenly rage for no reason, etc when i did wrong then i had to ask my teacher what excercise to correct them and what i did wrong
if u do qigong wrong u might not feel the effects right away. if u do dantien breathing i guess thats all right thats pretty easy even a chimpazee or orangatan can learn it, but i bet buddhas balls if you try something without instruction from some fat guy on dvd or a crumpled up 20 year old book something like dapeng qigong or ermei fireball qigong which i heard are really complex, somethings gonna go wrong. theyre not just "qi go from dantien to hands"
also some qi gong masters theyre not right in the head because they do too much qigong, its common joke and also truth. u guys never seen internal sifu act crazy like gary busey?

[IronFist]

i put it this way:
when i was in high school i ask my friend hey how do u do a deadlift? he says dont ask me just do it. so i hurt my back and had problems for 1 year. but he did it all wrong too but didnt get injured right away.

That's awful. The deadlift is a pretty technical lift. Not as much as the squat or the Olympic lifts, but bad enough that you can easily injure yourself if you do it wrong!.

some side effect i got were shaking hands, red dots appearing on hands, head ache, suddenly getting nervous, cant breathe, suddenly rage for no reason, etc when i did wrong then i had to ask my teacher what excercise to correct them and what i did wrong

That's all from deadlifting wrong?

dapeng qigong or ermei fireball qigong

What are those?

u guys never seen internal sifu act crazy like gary busey?

SO I SNIFFED COKE OFF MY DOG BUT I GOT ALL THIS DOG HAIR IN MY NOSE. lol Gary Busey is nuts.

[SimonM]

Here's the thing Bawang...

Don't believe in qi.

[sanjuro_ronin]

Here's the thing Bawang...

Don't believe in qi.

You mean that you don't believe in certain interpretaions of Qi, right?

Some people interpret Qi as breathing and other s coordinated structure along with proper breathing for example.
I am sure you "believe" in that, yes?

[SimonM]

I believe that gentle co-ordinated structure exercises combined with controlled breathing standing meditation are good for your health, yes.