Month 16 Discussion

[Anonymous]

Taoist Meditation Circle Month 16

Part A: Breathing and Pulsing the Heart
Breathing into the heart—let the rhythm in your heart become smooth
Use the 70% rule
Compress and release your heart

Feel the pressure inside your heart without thinking a lot about how your lungs, belly, and diaphragm are moving. Adjust your body or just your mind
Recognize your physical heart—pressurize and release that pressure inside your heart by the movement of the back of your lungs, belly, and diaphragm moving together

Practice:
The heart creates more emotional activity than mental activity
Disturbing emotions can cripple intellectual activity
Stabilizing subliminal emotions so they can be kept at a level you can deal with
Recognize and change these because they take you toward the tipping point of distraction
–Conversations in the head
–discomfort
— uncomfortable visualizations
–Intermittent bodily pains that come and go

As your heart becomes even more calm begin to notice any subtle emotions arising inside you. See if you can catch the lightest subtle whiff of emotion starting to move like a very light smell moving across a room.
–Do not shift into denial
–Have your intent increase
–Amplify your ability to boost your subtle emotional signals.

Recognize that emotions both subtle and gross are occurring at the same time
They need to be dissolved if you are doing Taoist Dissolving Meditation

Find the pinpoint center in your heart and seek the subtle emotions
This Pinpoint center is quite clear when you find it
This center is something unambiguous
Energy moves in and out from the pinpoint center

Inhale and feel it go deeper into the heart
Exhale expand from that space deep inside as it gets bigger it carries with it a sense of moving through and saturating your body and then going outside your skin and into your etheric body

This is Taoist practice of Opening and Closing
You get the sense of breath originating in the center of your heart
Softer and more gentle breathing will relax mind body and spirit.
Amplify these subliminal emotions so they become clear rather than vague or fuzzy

You can use your meditation time better and get where you are going faster
if you can recognize these emotions
Consciously deal with your subliminal emotions

Review everything you have learned in previous sessions.
Breath with your heart and recognize the energy your subliminal emotions create
Use your subliminal emotions to your best advantage to enable your mind to become more focused.

Taoist Meditation Circle Month 16
Part B
Conclusion to the First Taoist Meditation Circle
In 25 minutes Bruce reviews the material from the last 16 months.
*****It is the most organized and best in the series.

Review staying present:
3 rounds of 10 breaths before taking a short break
Start noticing if you are becoming distracted
Bring yourself back as rapidly as possible
Look at all the areas that are not moving smoothly, spleen, liver, side of diaphragm, back of diaphragm etc.

Dissolving Meditation is beyond the scope of this series
Read these books:
Bruce’s books on dissolving:
The Tao of Letting Go
The Great Stillness

4 conditions that are blockages:
1. any sense of tension,
2. strength (ego)
3. something that doesn’t feel quite right
4. any type of contraction (physical, emotional or mental)

Begin to notice when you lose your focus and where in your body this happens
(your throat, heart, dantien…)
First look at what might physically be a signal of distraction
Go through your checklists from previous months

[Anonymous]

…..an excellent summary as ever. Many thanks Joan. Having worked on this for a few days now, I’m wondering how others are working with the opening and closing of the heart centre and the breath. Closing the centre on the in breath and opening on the out breath seems to be what is encouraged, but it’s not absolutely clear. Closing on the in breath and opening on the out breath seems a periphery to centre on the in breath and centre to periphery on the outbreak. That said I sometimes find myself reversing this pattern when turning my attention to work towards improving sensitivity to subliminal emotions (which I’m finding the most challenging aspect this month). How are others getting on?

[Anonymous]

yes Colin , i was a bit unsure of that in the same way … anyone else ? C

[Anonymous]

As far as opening and closing the heart center, it works best for me to open on the in-breath. As the energy enters the heart, it expands and grows larger to encompass more and more. On the out-breath, the center goes back to its normal size and closes. This feels very natural to me, though as I’ve mentioned in other posts, the movement in opening and closing is actually quite small. (For me, anyway.)

[Author]

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