Mountain Palm Change

The mountain palm change, ☶, like all of the other palm changes has many meanings, layers, and levels. This is the nature of any symbol.

From a simplistic point of view it is part of a sequence that describes the process of manifestation. The spirit of heaven begins to manifest as wind, an unseen force that gently penetrates. As the manifestation matures it symbolically solidifies first as water (a fluid substance that we can see and touch) then as a rigid mountain that appears to be still, stable, and almost unchanging. But geologists know that this apparently unchanging object is in fact a living, morphing energy like everything else. Mountains typically change at an incredibly slow rate, but consider a volcanic eruption. The potential for explosive energy is always there.

Bruce has taught that Mountain is associated with the body of individuality and stillness and stability. He has said that the body part is the spine. He also taught Frank Allan that it is spiraling into and out of a point. He has said that each level of stillness amplifies the ability to feel inside the body. This is what I’ve heard directly or indirectly.

Here is what I’ve found after 20 years of fumbling around in the dark…

I found Mountain through meditation. I was trying to use inner dissolving to dissolve something and couldn’t penetrate into it. In an intuitive flash, I realized that I was trying to go in but couldn’t and what was holding me back wasn’t in front of me, inside the inner space – it was something outside holding me back. I realized that I needed to relax my mind outward to go in further. I expanded or relaxed outward toward what was stuck. My mind penetrated into it and into the emptiness going out, into the outer barrier or stuck-ness my mind was holding. I let it go and went into emptiness.

This opened a whole new paradigm: The idea that a yin line could symbolically indicate going out to find emptiness.

This is a very strange and contrary thought. Everyone thinks yin is in. They think closing is in toward the center point.

What few people fail to appreciate fully is that “in” is relative. If your mind is centered in the lower tan tien, then certainly yin and in is toward the lower tan tien. But, what happens if your mind is centered in two locations like the center of each palm. “In” is toward each palm, but toward one palm is away from the other and vice versa. Holy sh*t, Batman: now we are talking about the double-palm change. The yin line symbolically represents (at the most fundamental level) two yang paradigms at play, co-creating each other.

This is why I prefer the term store and release because you can store in lots of different ways and release in lots of different ways. It frees the mind from a bias toward a single pattern: yin is in. It makes a lot more sense of the Heaven palm and what Bruce taught me a year ago in the spring of 2012. He told me that Heaven went out, it went in, it went in and out at the same time, and finally – it dispersed into all points simultaneously. So, this personal revelation was just a deeper understanding of Heaven palm and how the mind can go into emptiness in more ways than just yin is in.

Further, you see the value of trying to understand the eight palm changes – it helps you to hone your understanding of the exact symbol, idea, paradigm, or archetype that each palm change represents. Once you have that, you start applying the understanding to the body and chi to make it a living, felt experience, your own personal Bagua laboratory.

This digression still doesn’t explain what Mountain has to do with anything or how it relates to the body of individuality. To get there, you have to understand yet another abstract thought – your mind creates the patterns, the barriers, the stuck-ness. It basically disrupts the natural flow of stillness to movement and movement to stillness.

All the stuff that we dissolve is just some energy that we have frozen into some pattern. Dissolving frees it by completing the energy; by relaxing and allowing the held pattern to flow once again. The sum total of everyway that you hold in your mind, emotions, chi, psychic energy, or karmic patterns is exactly the subject of your individuality – it is your body of individuality. The Mountain palm change is a tool for understanding how the mind and the universe create fixed patterns and how to release them.

So Mountain can be part of the symbolic sequence of change, a violent potential energy, stillness, or a symbol of the 7th body in Taoist cosmology.

In module 4 of the BMP, Bruce describes in great detail how to open the central channel. Later in module 8, he describes the overall process to methodically open the etheric body. These are really important to understanding how you might train the Mountain palm change in the context of fully opening the physical and energetic bodies.

Take the section where he is describing opening the central channel up in stages. Each stage opens the central channel more. It is a cylindrical opening out from the central channel toward the skin.

As I trained module 8 trying to open the etheric body progressively as described, I started to notice there was a difference between simply expanding the field and expanding it like there was a surface barrier. From meditation I knew that the mind can hold virtually any pattern. We get literally stuck in a pattern; pattern of behavior, a limited set of emotional responses, whatever.

If you wanted to practice the Mountain palm change, you could use your mind to set the boundary (the radius of the cylinder) and learn to store into the surface of the boundary and then release from it back in toward the center of the central channel. You could also release further out making the cylinder bigger. This is like a two-stage atomic bomb where the first explosion creates the forces that create a second larger explosion. But the gist is that the mind decides when to stop expanding the boundary while it keeps expanding the energy inside it until energy stores into the surface.

If you were performing the double-palm change you wouldn’t create a surface. If you were performing the Wind palm change, you would absorb and release into and from the surface simultaneously as though the energy just blew through. In Mountain you store into the surface as though it was a real object and then release from it.

Why would you want to do this? One, it is a game where you learn to control your mind and energy more accurately and clearly. Two, you understand the mechanics of how you hold your energetic garbage. Three, you develop the ability to absorb into every layer of the physical body as you move out to skin increment by increment. This is important for balance, smoothness, and eliminating gaps. Five, this teaches you how to absorb everywhere simultaneously (which is the fourth mode of the Heaven palm change that Bruce taught me last year.). Ultimately, this sets the stage for learning the 8th palm change. Without this preparation it would be nearly impossible to fully realize the potential of the 8th palm, Lake, where you learn to store from anywhere to anywhere in any pattern and then release from it to anywhere in any pattern or energy level.