Chapter 6 practice application to qigong

[Anonymous]

Hi Folks, I’ve found the Chapter 6 practice very powerful. Interestingly, it seems to work really well with qigong as well as seated meditation. Has anyone else tried using the practice audios as a ‘backdrop’ during qigong practice? I’ve found that some of the strands/themes resonate really well with some aspects/ attributes of qigong and also tai chi.

[Anonymous]

Hi, Colin. I also find this a powerful chapter/practice. I haven’t tried applying this to qigong per se, but I’ve been working with the “effortless” approach on my taiji and dissolving. It’s very rich and powerful. It’s like a missing piece of the inner dissolving for me.

[Anonymous]

…..thanks Matthew, I agree. The ‘effortless’ prompt changed fundamentally the way I think about my practice (I’d like to think it will have a wider effect!). I find helpful is to occasionally play this particular audio in the background during my movement practice, I then key into the words which particularly resonate with my practice. I do similar with Songs of the Tao and the CD he did with Steve Kindler.

[Anonymous]

Hi, Matthew, speaking of inner dissolving, can one use inner dissolving in the brain? In the book on outer dissolving, Bruce put lots of emphasis on never dissolve the brain. I did not see that in the books on inner dissolving.

[Anonymous]

Hi Maria,

Bruce touched on this topic during the meditation training this summer.

You should only dissolve the brain if you have daily supervision of a high level teacher. There are many different things that can go wrong if you are dissolving deeply into the brain and if you have no one watching over you, things can go very bad. Highly not recommended.

Another related point that was made that I found very interesting. Bruce talked about how all the blocks in your system are interconnected. So dissolving any one block will dissolve all the other blocks in your system. So if you are dissolving a block in your knee, then by extension you are also dissolving the blocks in your brain. It’s just that you are doing so in an indirect fashion, so it is a more gradual, gentle process. This also means that it is a much safer way to dissolve the brain

Hope this helps,
Janak

[Anonymous]

Thanks, that helps. I have stayed away from dissolving brain given his instructions for outer dissolving. But when you try to find where an idea comes from and where it goes, if it ends up in your brain, how are you going to deal with the dissolving in this case? In chapter 5, he asked us to focus on the center, is that center not in the brain?

[Anonymous]

I haven’t had a chance to listen to chapter 5, so I’m not sure what he meant. But he did spend some time talking about mental energy and thoughts this summer.

We spent some time trying to feel the different types of energy that you might encounter when you are dissolving. In particular, we were trying to feel emotional energy and mental energy. Mental energy and thoughts are not the same thing. He describes Mental energy as the electricity that powers the thought machine. It is what generates your thoughts.

In my own meditation practice, I’ve noticed that I sometime get caught up in a familiar pattern of thoughts. “I’m really mad at person X. I can’t believe he did that! He shouldn’t have done that. etc..”. If I stayed with the thoughts and keep thinking them, I noticed I’d go in circles thinking the same thoughts but nothing much would change.

But if I stop paying attention to the thoughts and instead tried to notice, “which energies are active inside me right now? Which blocks in my body seem to be really active right now?”. I would then go and dissolve those blocks. What I then found is that the corresponding thoughts occurred less frequently and with less power. My experience seemed to match what Bruce was saying. It felt like I was dissolving the energy that was powering the thoughts.

Hope this helps,
Janak

Edit: Another way to rephrase the above. In order to get a sense of the energies attached to an idea, try this exercise. Sit and spend 5 minutes doing a scan of your body. The goal is to notice which blocks are active in your system today. Now think about your idea for 5 minutes. Now go back and do a scan of your body, notice which blocks are active. You might notice that some blocks are now active that weren’t active when you started, these are the energies that are associated with your idea. Now that they are active and you can feel them, you can dissolve them as well!

Here’s another exercise to try out. This was how I first got a glimpse that some blocks had a mental or emotional component to them. Normally when you are dissolving a block, the goal is to stay present to a block. Thoughts, images, feelings will arise and distract you. But as best you can you try to ignore them and stay present to the block you are dissolving. For this exercise try something different. When you are dissolving a block try to see if you notice a pattern in the distractions. Do you tend to think about a certain subject? A certain person? Does specific person, place or thing keep entering your thoughts? Do your thoughts have a certain emotional flavor to them? Anger, love, sadness?

It was really kind of interesting when I first started to notice that blocks had these different associations and characteristics to them.

Have fun!

[Anonymous]

“We spent some time trying to feel the different types of energy that you might encounter when you are dissolving. In particular, we were trying to feel emotional energy and mental energy. Mental energy and thoughts are not the same thing. He describes Mental energy as the electricity that powers the thought machine. It is what generates your thoughts.”

I wonder if you (or anyone else) could go into more depth about these various energies. What are some other unique attributes or characterisitcs about these various energies?

[Anonymous]

First, I’d recommend reading pages 57-67 of Bruce’s newest book “Taoist Sexual Meditation”. He breaks down each energy body and describes it in detail
http://www.energyarts.com/store/products/featured/taoist-sexual-meditation-book

Here’s my current understanding of these different energies and how they relate to meditation. I have an engineering background, which is why I like to draw parallels with western science

From the western perspective, everything is a form of energy. There are many different types of energy. In order to make it easier to discuss and study them, scientists have broken them up into different categories. So they might talk about x-rays, radio waves or microwaves.

From the Taoist perspective, everything is also a form of energy. They study energy by breaking it up into 8 categories or bodies. They are, the physical body, the chi body, the emotional body, the mental body, the psychic body, the karmic body, the body of individuality, the body of the Tao.

An example of a block in the physical body might be the bruise that’s left after someone punches you in the arm.

The chi body is the energy that runs the physical body. Some days, you wake up in the morning and feel like a million bucks! You have tons of energy and feel like it’s going to be a really productive day. On other days, you might wake up feeling like you have no energy at all, you feel so lethargic, you wonder how your going to get through the day. This is the energy of the chi body

The emotional body is the energy of the emotions. A lot of people don’t *feel* their emotions, instead they think about them. They don’t feel the energy of anger in their body, instead they *deduce* their emotions. They notice that they are thinking about punching someone in the face and think “Hmmm, if I’m thinking of punching him then I must be angry!”.

The mental body is the energy behind your thoughts. Some days your mind is clear and sharp. You can tackle really difficult problems and think them through without a problem. Other days, it’s really foggy and dull. You notice it is really hard to do any kind of in-depth complex thinking, instead you just want to do some kind of rote repetitive activity. Or after a really long day of heavy intellectual work, you be “mentally exhausted” and just want to veg in front of a TV. These are all effects related to the mental body

I don’t have much experience with the latter four bodies.

Now, onto to meditation practice. When we meditate we are doing a basic process. We are locating places where energy is stuck in our system (blockages) and we are dissolving it so it’s no longer stuck.

I used to think that a block was a simple thing, like an ice cube. But as I’ve practiced I’ve gained more of an appreciation of the wide variety of blocks and how they’re a complex hodge-podge of various energies. I now tend to think of a block as more like a ball of yarn. And the dissolving process as trying to untangle that ball of yarn.

Let’s go back to the example of someone punching you in the arm. That block you feel in your arm, might initially feel like just a physical block. But then you start to notice it has other components as well. The chi of your body is probably stuck there. You might have emotional energies of the fear of being hit or the anger of wanting to hit back. You might have some mental idea like “people always try to hurt me, so I have to become bigger and stronger.”

During the summer Bruce said “on the one hand, if you’re patient enough you can just keep dissolving whatever you feel and not worry about these different types of energy. On the other hand, if you can notice these different types of energy then you might be able to get through the block faster, it gives you some more options”

Sometimes I’ll be working on a physical block and I’ll get this feeling that “this isn’t going anywhere”. So then I might try to “tune in” and pay attention any emotional energy in the block and Viola! suddenly it starts to dissolve. In the ball of yarn example, this would be like tugging at different strings. I’ve been tugging at the yellow string but that doesn’t seem to be working. Hmmm, maybe I’ll try tugging on the blue string. Hey, that’s working! Woot!

Hope this helps,
Janak

[Author]

Posts