Latest essay, Brain Massage Meditation: re-claiming visual chi.
Not linked up with my site yet. Wanted to fly it by you guys, give it a whirl if you like.

-- later edit --
It's a short essay, straight to the method. But think "brain massage", and consider that our (certainly my) Taoist background has largely neglected the brain in favor of the five elements, LTT, and energetics. (Contrast that with the western medical view of the brain.) I suggest that you try the method, even if you don't have eye issues, and you might be happily surprised by your brain. There's lots lots more that can be said (and www-researched) about all this. I'm in post-essay-frazzled-mode, so I leave it to you guys.

Nice T!

I enjoy the way the site is evolving. This is taking the practice-oriented approach to your work many steps further towards more every-day situations that in my opinion contain the seed of true practice.

In relation to the vizualisations you describe, I really like the use of pictures. I will give it a try.

One question though: Why have you not mentioned the overall importance of collecting the Shen that is lost through vizual stimulation and dispersal of awareness through the senses, especially the eyes.
I always start my meditation and qigong routine with "collecting the Shen". What is the connection in your view btw the Yi and Shen?

Nice... I hadn't considered anything along those lines before. Good to be aware of.

Yes, it's a HUGE ISSUE, especially for me! I have enormous residual tension in and around the eyes.

Generally my approach is not to use attention so high up, lest it compound the problem, but to stay at the feet and trust it all to settle. But just to be aware of the outside the body aspect is really useful.

BTW, this essay raises the question of the bases of the senses. This is something I've only heard about from one teacher. (but what a teacher!)

Apparently there is a place/aspect of energy whiuch enables each sense. Lacking this, no sensory function, even if the organs of sense are perfectly formed.

These places/functions have a very fine, light feeling which I've only been able to reach when guided in person.
For location, they are just in from the physical organs of sense, i.e. behind the eyeballs, inside of the ears, base of the tongue.

Check 'em out if you can!!

Two thoughts. There is a gentle sun gazing meditation. Gentle because its done with the face towards the sun, but eyes closed. You feel the sun rays entering through the eyes, filling them, then coming through to the brain filling it with light. Then flowing down the spinal cord. (I think its from Chei Nei Tsang collection). Chia has some similar meditations. Feeling the suns light transcribing into its component colors throughout the body.

Rawn Clark's Center of Stillness Meditation (bardoncompanion.com) uses visualizations to shut down the senses. Taking each sense and separating it from the body. It includes the thinking mind and emotions as two extra senses. Its nice because it gives you a tool to use when you're not meditating. i.e. too much thinking, let me move my thoughts into a shiny metal sphere and let it circle around me.


Michael

This looks like a reworking of Ilchi Lee's "Brain Respiration Qi Gong". This has been very big in Korea for several years and Dr. Lee has been promoting it in the West as Dahn Yoga (as well as some other names).
Dr. Lee approached me when I was at PIHMA wanting to know if we could include his teaching in the curriculum. I passed on it at the time and he later went up to Sedona to open the Dahn Retreat Center.
I practiced it for a while, IMO, it is microcosmic orbit and some others packaged together and presented with a West-med slant.

Wow. Love the visuals of the brain on that page.

I've been taught that the eyes are directly connnected with the brain, a total connection into the nervous system. In his book Sacred Mirrors by Alex Grey there is an awesome painting of the nervous system, and there staring out at you from a nest of brain and nerves are the eyeballs.

BK actually does/teaches an eye tension release massage, which helps drain tension from the nervous system, so giving relief to the entire body.

This is similar, even though entirely based on meditation or energy-work if you will.

Cool article and meditation. I also have a lot of tension around my eyes and in my face and neck in general. Not sure if this is related or not but I just started working through the eyeQ program. Claims to teach you to double your reading speed, which is neat, but I am also interested in the other claims around more efficient use of your vision. I often feel like I am using my eyes in a terribly inefficient way. For example I notice sometimes, especially when I am stressed, I am awkwardly shifting from one hard focus to the next hard focus in my environment when it's completely unnecessary because everything I need to see is within my visual field and could be accessed easily with a much softer, open gaze.

Sean

This subject prompted me to remember something I learned from one of the HT instructors in Europe while on a retreat in Mexico. We were talking about vision. It was just the expression of a basic principle. Normally we “reach out” with our eyes to gather information and to interact with the world. If we can change our focus or style we can learn to let the information passively come to us. So what is ordinarily a very yang activity – sight, connected with the Liver, which represents new yang, spring, rising up, ambitious energy, can become a more yin activity. Learning to be receptive in your vision. Just this concept by itself changed things for me as soon as I began to apply it. At first it is kind of like you have to “pull” your intention back into your eyes, as a way to balance out the old style of reaching out to gather information.
Soon you begin to have the sensation of a neutral energy at the eyes, neither reaching out nor pulling in. This type of gazing is also helpful to open up and enable better peripheral vision.

Trunk
Your concept of a meditation to help improve the functioning of this system is very detailed and the inclusion of anatomical structures can be helpful to put your mind intention focus on the structures involved. It strikes me that this approach to meditation on the body structures is very yang. You reach inside your body structures with your intention in order to bring consciousness more into the systems involved. Much of Mantak Chia’s meditation systems use the same principle of going inside and exploring the anatomical structures in this detailed way. Lately I have been exploring the idea of a more yin approach which is a principle of doing practice and trusting that things will develop as they need to. The concept of choosing a part of the whole to work on systematically as here presented does not resonate with me currently.

I hope I am clear that I appreciate your contribution. Understanding the nature of a practice and the principles involved is important to me at this stage. As usual there is definitely a place for both yin and yang.

One of the practices I do regularly is a closing meditation routine.
The first step is to hold your breath and rub your hands together and then gradually let out the breath. Next suck the energy from the palm of your hand (male left hand, female right hand) and then swallow down to your lower tantien. Next holding your hands (palms) over your eyes. Rotate the eyeballs nine times clockwise and 9 times counterclockwise bringing the chi from your hands into your eyes.
The routine goes on from there, maybe I will write it all out to share with all bums soon.
This exercise has been really helpful to a lot of people with eye problems. As you can see, it is very simple. You could increase the rotations to 36 times to have a stronger effect.
Perhaps this technique could be combined with your brain meditation.

My contribution to the subject at hand.

Craig

Thanks for the feeback, everybody. As always, everyone is in a different place, and it takes a dozen people to get a good view of anything. lol

After a week or more I'll probably come back and review & revise, based on general feedback + my own biases. Personally, I'm groovin' on the brain massage part of it + the western-informed brain anatomy that I've (surprisingly) not studied much, all this time. Western anatomy says that those various structures of the brain command the whole body, and it seems (and feels) to me that unharmonized pressures in the brain would throw things off, (especially occasionally by the inevitable pressures of jing gong), and that just being aware of those pressures and of the basic terrain of the brain - and allowing circulation (through whatever method/s, non-method/s) feels like a very good thing. The retrieval of visual chi gave me the boost so that the "brain massage" occured effectively, so - just me - I'm experiencing the eye stuff more as a means to get to the brain work. For those of you with your heads already on straight, this will be a non-issue.

I apologize for the newbie ignorance, but does this have anything to do with this?

http://www.neilslade.com/art/Brain/chap1.html

Yes. Here's the rather skimpy brain-links page that I have (not including the new essay that is still in testing-phase). Includes reference to Neil's system. imo, Neil's presentation is rather fixated on one gland and misses over-all brain balance (plus there are other glands in the brain that are related to the endocrine system, pleasure, etc.).

AlchemicalTaoism.com is a mix of my own essays, plus archived sort of "greatest hits" from this community compiled over the last 6 yrs +. Though it's way too extensive for a single read, it's a good intro to a lot of what's been going on around here.