Just went into full-lotus for the first time today, after biking across Minneapolis. There's always a bit of stretching and pain and I make some "huurh!" sounds. haha.

Yesterday read Govinda's biography of being a Tibetan monk. Pretty cool stuff.

C'mon people -- just sit in full-lotus and the rest is immaterial.

Last night I went to the midnight show of PAPRIKA -- Japanese Anime. Pretty cool stuff.

Sat in full-lotus of course -- my yang electromagnetic energy shot into the chick two rows in front of me causing a mutual climax.

The movie was all about the R.E.M. dream state and how a machine enabled group dreaming and others to control our dreams and how then reality and dreams merged and how the love of Paprika saved everyone.

When we sit in full-lotus it creates R.E.M. dream state during the day -- while men are in R.E.M. they have erections and full-lotus enables any subconscious sexual tension to be resolved right then and there.

Japanese culture is full of sex obsessed teenage-type males who have lost this secret. haha.

Hello

Congratulation for u:re full lotus.

F D

Put up or shut up: hehe, Im still working on it. I do full lotus but cant stay in it for long. Sometimes longer than others though. It goes up and down. But I still need to warm up first.

I totally understand and appreciate your reminders on full lotus. There is nothing like it...

I want to repeat that I can sit in full-lotus for as long as I want -- hours on end -- as long as there are young females able to suck up my yang electromagnetic energy while I take in their yin electrochemical energy.

Last summer I went 3 days never hungry because of the full-lotus -- just living off "collecting the N/um of young maidens" as the Bushmen call it -- a practice going back to 80,000 BCE.

There is a smart way to get to full lotus and not so. Most of the people go through pain and force full lotus and possibly cause damage to the knees. From what I've learned so far, the full lotus should come with the stretch from the hip, not the knee. Here is a couple of yoga postures that help to improve frexibility needed for lotus posture:

This one is from Plato








The first part of the the exercise:

To be honest the full-lotus needs to be approached from an ENERGY issue -- not a flexibility issue.

So I would recommend the simple active exercises -- simple tai chi -- and then lots of SMALL UNIVERSE and then half lotus and THEN the full-lotus.

Blissful heat, electromagnetic fields and then light.

http://springforestqigong.com

Drew, am I right in thinking then that the full lotus can indeed be faked? By this I mean that someone can have the flexibility but not the energetic development...

If this is the case, this point to the model that one can train the body externally and/or internally. I assume that therefore you advocate the interal always?

Clarificiation would be gratefully appreciated

Yours humbly,
James

i can get into full lotus without a problem and always have been able to, just not for long and for whatever reason my time doesn't really improve no matter how often i sit in it

Well if by flexibility you mean bending the top of your skull?! Then the two -- internal and external -- go together.

When the energy is strong then the body is supple like a baby, with the skull opening back up, creating a soft spot. The hands and feet -- the acupressure points -- BREATHE electromagnetic energy.

So I stopped practicing just as I was achieving EMPTINESS (nirvikalpi samadhi) which is actually just the BEGINNING of true meditation.

Emptiness means achieving awareness of deep sleep so that the body is filled full of electromagnetic energy as bliss -- which means sitting in full-lotus for over 2 hours straight without experiencing any pain at all -- on your own, with no reliance on energy exchanges.

As that experience builds then the body fills with light and you can see inside other peoples' bodies.

For me to stay in full-lotus I rely on internal climaxes and to achieve these I rely on female electrochemical energy sucking in and being attracted to my built up male electromagnetic energy. This is what I call the O at a D or orgasm at a distance -- mutual climaxes as energy exchanges.

So I'm not building up my energy but if I did then my body would increase in flexibility so that in the morning I would not have to start out in half lotus for 10 minutes or so.

Once I go into full-lotus I keep going into full-lotus all day long with maybe just 20 minute breaks -- or else the energy channels start closing up again.

So because I no longer live close to work I spend too much time in transportation.

That's just one factor -- another is diet and another is -- the main one -- emotions or the electrochemical energy exchanges with people around me. So I now live with an old male pervert who sucks off my electromagnetic energy and so if I sit in full-lotus I can then make sure he's sucking it out of my third eye -- instead of pulling my electromagnetic energy down to the awareness stored in his lower chakras (his tailbone and sex center). Otherwise he converts my electrochemical energy back into fluid and I lose my alchemical agent, causing me to have to rebuild my energy.

So those are just some of the obstacles and dynamics in storing up and increasing the energy versus just cycling the energy while in full-lotus.

I guess its a little of both. First, to get into it in the first place you really need to build flexibility. But then, to STAY in full lotus you need to work on the energy issue.

When I loose focus and dont meditate while in full lotus my legs start to hurt right away. But when I relax and just do my meditation I can sit longer.

I dont use innocent young maidens though. Maby I should? Its a little challenging to my ethics...dont think I ever will be able to suck the yin out of them...sounds horrible...poore little girls...

It appears that samadhi needs to be cultivated before one is able to undergo much of these alchemical transformations which you, Drew, write about.

This confirms my suspicions that being able to maintain a one-pointed concentration is essentially the first step in spiritual cultivation.

Many congratulations on achieving the macrocosmic orbit (breathing through your hands and feet). Your hard work and dedication have brought you far.

Wishing you further bliss,
James

Is it against the rules of this forum to point out that so-and-so is a complete nutcase?

Eddie Bravo on flexibilty.

Thanks for inviting me to your blog. High-weirdness is a very appropriate term for me. In first grade this girl kept on picking on me, teasing me, because she liked me. I remember that I used to breathe in such a way so that my chest was always puffed out, thinking this made me look better. She kept saying that my name, "drew," spelled backwards was "weird." So I asked the teacher and she informed me that the girl was wrong. haha. Then, without me knowing it, apparently the girl's mom arranged with my mom to make me go out on a date. Certainly I hadn't told anyone else about this girl, so it definitely wasn't arranged by anyone I knew. So my oldest sister made me go ice-skating with the girl, without anyone asking me!! Then the girl took me to her apartment where we ate little goldfish crackers with her mom looking on. I hated it all because I had no choice in the matter and felt like a piece of meat. Of course I had no way to express these feelings, much less process the reasons which caused them -- until -- the boys in my first grade class had a contest who could hold their breath the longest, while walking across the school to the bathroom for handwashing before lunch. Long after all the other first grade boys had started breathing again, for some "unknown" reason I was determined not only to win but to keep holding my breath. I knew I had won the contest but I kept holding my breath. I guess it felt good. I was woken up by this taller African-American student in my grade who was very nice. I had hit two cement walls in the corner and then the cement bathroom floor and a trail of blood streamed out of the back of my head while I returned to the room, screaming and also pondering my bright orange school t-shirt, now ruined. Our school motto on my t-shirt was: Aim Sky High -- with a rocket shooting to the sky.

High-weirdness had started early.

It wasn't until a couple years ago that I had even connected the events of my breath holding and this forced date with a girl. I had come across several different, totally unrelated references to the medical fact that it's impossible to hold your breath until you pass out. The anterior cingulate gyrus or something overcomes your will power, as noted by psychologist Stan Gooch; by a medical doctor for a global explorers club, author of "Extreme Medicine;" and also in some other neuroscience book. I'm thinking, wow, I disproved western science in first grade! Then I started pondering, why the hell did I hold my breath till I passed out anyway -- especially since three different sources say it's impossible? Finally after meditating on it, suddenly it hit me that I had actually been really pissed off because my sister had, without even asking me, taken me to go on a date with this girl who had blatantly been attracted to me but with whom I didn't want to be involved physically. It had been humilitating and my repressed anger had been projected through this otherwise innocent contest with my fellow classmates.

Anyway I was telling this recently to a friend of mine, this old man who has worked in the best used bookstore in Minneapolis for some 25 years. He told me that there's a "Rituals of the Sherpa" book which states that the first Western expedition of Mt. Everest required the sherpas to hold their breath until they passed out, in order to qualify to be guides. haha. The "Extreme Medicine" book also includes a climb of Mt. Everest where the sherpas save a climber from what the Western doctor assumed would have caused death. The sherpas chanted around the climber's body -- all night long -- shooting energy into the injured body.

For me my High Weirdness healing started with observing my mom's use of music for psychological escape. My music teacher was young and beautiful and so in first grade I also started music lessons -- piano -- and kept practicing until I performed a senior concert, my final year of high school, with my own compositions and many advanced classical pieces played by memory: Bach, Mozart, Brahms. I had studied with her husband, a music professor at the University of Minnesota, and when he showed me the natural overtones of the piano harmonics, I suddenly realized that music enabled creation of the whole energy spectrum. He, of course, dismissed my insight but he had no logical reason to argue. And so my level of High Weirdness become even higher. haha. I told my piano teacher that I thought music connected everything.

At this point I had been playing punk hardcore music mixed with all styles of rock, blues, country, jazz. I was singing in a church choir, and in school choirs, and then I started playing free jazz. I was in several bands -- reggae, folk, a classical string quartet, etc. But I realized that my interest in music was more philosophical and my teacher in music composition taught me ear training and orchestration and he also gave me two fascinating books: "Mind and Nature" by Gregory Bateson and the "Tao Te Ching."

Off I went to an experimental college with no grades, and my hallmates had a clothing optional nude policy and when ever it was someone's birthday they all dropped acid. I chose to immerse myself in avant-garde film and books, all the while taking classes from Leftist professors. One year was enough at that Ivy League experimental school -- Hampshire College -- and its surrounding colleges. I then moved to Alaska where I worked for six months out in the wilderness. I lived with a high school sweetheart, two years older than me, and we were in a cabin owned by a mercernary or professional soldier in Africa. He was also a mountain climber who fled the U.S. in the 1960s after being caught selling L.S.D. His dad had been a prominent Jewish grocer and he didn't want to threaten his respectibility. So Alaska was really High Weirdness. We were just south of Denali, or Mt. McKinley, the steepest mountain in the world -- going from the ground to 20,000 feet, with no plateaus. There were tons of people escaping society -- former Vietnam Veterans, oil workers from the south of the U.S., workers from Hawaii, Phillipines, Japan, Haiti, Russia, Mormons, big drug dealers, etc. Things got too crazy and too dangerous and so we left when the snow was six feet deep, before Christmas -- after living in a cabin with no running water, no electricity, no phone for miles -- bear tracks had covered the area around our cabin.

I told my old music professor recently that I'm feral because of that Alaska experience. I had read Ken Kesey up there -- one of the beat writers experimenting with psychedelics, and I had read Ulysses -- both great books to read in a place so isolated from civilization. Since then I got heavy into Leftist activism, living in a hippy commune cooperative, working and supporting local, organic farming, doing civil disobedience and achieving new policies for divesting from slave labor in the Third World. The intensity to get these things done was enough to cause paranoia and mass confusion and finally to lead into real conspiracy politics -- just from running into High Weirdness, for example a professor who praised Nazi SS major Werner von Braun as his greatest personal mentor. I got censored from my University job as a political writer because I had exposed this professor praising Werner von Braun but no mention of the Werner von Braun personally supervising mass slave labor, testing rockets on civilians, or even being an S.S. major. At this point the University administration had sabotaged my email because I had exposed the lawyer running the University threatening the tenure of the professors helping me to stop sweatshop labor. After I confronted Al Gore, then vice-president of the U.S., about how "everyone know's the CIA controls the drug trade," his secret service got nervous and I had a cop take down my identification on that same night -- no reason given.

Leftist analysis was just too limiting at this point. Slavoj Zizek had responded to my critique of his work, stating my music philosophy was "very fascinating" but his book in 1997 had only dismissed my analysis without dealing with the information on its own radical ecology terms. Zizek just wasn't being honest. At this point I had already explored qigong and even had experienced qigong master Effie P. Chow. I was amazed that a security guard reported that the fuses had been blown in the room adjacent to qigong master Effie P. Chow's lecture. I felt the strong magnetic fields between the palms of my hands, but my girlfriend who was with me at the qigong presentation was skeptical of qigong. So I kept doing research and even went to San Francisco in 1996, staying with a A.B.C. friend from highschool -- American-Born Chinese James T. Hong, the film-maker.

In 1999 I finally met qigong master Chunyi Lin and knew right away that he was the real thing. The first class he went around us and without touching us he shook his fingers and even though my eyes were closed my body immediately filled with bliss and I saw bright light. My girlfriend at that time was this really beautiful blonde, several years younger than me, but the deep happiness I experienced from qigong master Chunyi Lin was way better. By the end of 2000 I had already gone a week with no food and even just half a glass of water -- just living off the free energy of Taoist alchemy. I had never been hungry and my energy just got stronger, with less sleep needed. Really strong electromagnetic fields permeated my body and freaked out my friends. I healed my mom of a serious disease, I pulled this old lady's spirit out of her head, I saw dead people as floating orbs of light, I had telepathy, precognition and telekinesis. When a vortex of electromagnetic energy spun around me, causing the whole room to spin, I knew that was going too deep, too fast -- and waking reality had truly become a dream.

After that qigong master Chunyi Lin touched my forehead with his fingertip and this intense blissful light permanently magnetized my pineal gland. I even stopped practicing qigong for a couple months and the same magnetic bliss in my pineal gland remained. Now I have about ten orgasms a day -- internal climaxes which cause my vagus nerve on the right side of my neck to pulsate, thereby shooting out electromagnetic fields into females around me, creating a mutual climax. This happens when I sit in full-lotus which I do as much as possible. Last summer I went three days without any food and I was never hungry -- I just kept having what I call "O at a Ds" or orgasms at a distance with females. The females suck up my yang electromagnetic energy, with my vagus nerve pulsating and my pineal gland shooting out the energy, while the full-lotus sucks up their yin electrochemical energy. This creates a real feeling of true love in the heart chakra. It's definitely High Weirdness.

Along these lines, I spoke with a master last summer who claimed the Lower Dantian should always remain the anchor of consciousness. Opening up the 6th, third-eye, chakra more than the 2nd, sensory, chakra will inevitably lead to insanity. In the same way being too earth focused limits spirituality, being too heaven focus affects what society calls sanity.

Did you know there are two types of people on earth with abnormally strait spines? One type are spiritual cultivators. The other type are generally found in mental institutions. Carl Jung has some great stuff from his studies in mental hospitals about the patients expressing archetypal experiences that he termed the "collective unconscious". What is collective unconscious? None other than the heavenly level of:

天 Heaven
人 Human
地 Earth

Is it so bad to be over-connected to Heaven? To be deemed insane by society? This is a question of Hun (魂) and Po (魄). Hun governs our spirituality. Po governs our animal reality. Someone with Poli (魄力) or Po power is easily identified. This type of person is full of Qi. That doesn't mean they are a nice person but it does mean they are strong and healthy. A good martial artist, regardless of size, will have the upright effortless posture and intense eyes of strong Po. Po is our animal soul, emotions, and mortality. An overly Po, relative to Hun, person is overly attached to physical reality.

An overly Hun person is overly attached to spiritual reality. Think artists. Starving, sometimes mad, but also brilliantly creative. Psychoactive drugs activate the Hun in a big way.

The problem is, Hun needs Po to become manifest. Like a kite without a line Hun will flutter, fly away, and fall without a strong Po anchor. Without Hun, Po never gets off the ground. Both aspects, Hun and Po, Shen and Jing, Yang and Yin, Heaven and Earth, Xin (心) and Ming (命),Heart and Body, must be mutually cultivated.

Now back to the topic at hand:

I sit 1 hour in full lotus now. I started sitting cross-legged in the beginning. Then Half-lotus. Then 30min in full lotus and worked up slowly from there. In my opinion, once you can get in the position you can start cultivating it. And I do think there is a great deal of "Put up or shut up" to it. Productive meditation relies on concentration and relaxation. Being concentrated and relaxed when you are comfortable is easy. Now, keeping that concentration through pain will make it make it stronger. Right now, after the initial few minutes of discomfort, full-lotus becomes very comfortable for me until around 45 minutes. Then the waves of pain begin, each adding more energy than the last. If I stay concentrated I will ride through the wave and experience greater relaxation and concentration. Then the next wave comes. And the process repeats until the wave gets too big and my mind looses balance, at which point my posture breaks, my breathing looses regularity, and my mind jets back up to my head like a diver gasping for air. Or, my beautiful alarm bell rings and I stay concentrated through the end of meditation. In the first case, I need to stretch out slowly, walk it off, and calm my mind. In the second case, my legs are supple and I can get up right out of full-lotus are walk normally and my mind remains deeply connected into the body. If I am successful every day for a week, I increase my time by 5 minutes the next week.

In other words, I think the full-lotus and getting there is all about how you relate to pain. Does it control you, or do you remain relaxed, aware, and concentrated despite it. It's all about discipline.

The BioMusic Conspiracy: Secrets of the Rainbow Serpent Flute Goddess
by drew hempel, MA

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the esteemed anthropology expert on the Bushmen, the culture representing 90% of human history, gives the secrets of the Eland Bull ritual in her new book, "The Old Way." The Eland Bull ritual is considered the oldest Bushmen ritual, is practiced by the women, and also similarly found among the closely related forest peoples misnomered as the pygmies. What distinguishes the ritual is the music used -- an old pentatonic or 5 note scale.

This simple 5 note scale is considered the most universal scale, found in most human cultures, and it is built on the 1-4-5 music intervals, considered to be used in all human cultures. My music philosophy masters thesis research, linked at nonduality.com/hempel.htm, details how the 1-4-5 music intervals are also the basis for yin and yang principles in Taoist philosophy. In other words, the oldest ritual of humanity uses the same ratios that are the secret meaning for Taoist paranormal healing. Anthropology professor Chris Knight connects the Eland Bull ritual with the Rainbow Serpent ritual of the Australian aborigines. These two ancient rituals parallel the "flute cults" found in both Amazonia and Melanesia.

The basic story of these universal rituals, much like the Garden of Eden story, is that the females used to control the power for healing and the power for paranormal creation. The men have taken this healing power but secretly know it comes from the females and the men have to be very careful not to lose this ability -- the ability to create "rainbow snakes" for paranormal reality. Amazingly Dr. Andrew Parker's recent book on the Cambrian Explosion of life, some 500 million years ago, argues that "quantum diffraction gradients" were the secret behind evolution. In other words the same "rainbow snake" that you see when looking at the back of a compact disc is also how early sea bioluminscence worked in developing neurons that became brains for cognition.

The quantum diffraction gradients look evenly spaced but because of asymmetric resonance the grooves enable self-organizing of ionized energy -- into mass -- and back again into spacetime communication. This self-organizing through a higher holographic dimension is called "hidden correspondance" in quantum chaos science and also called "ghost resonance."

Science makes all this seem complicated but that's because of the biomusic conspiracy. Biomusic is a new science discipline based on the discovery that nature -- protozoa, whales, birds, mice, etc., use the same type of harmonics found in human music for communication. In other words the 1-4-5 music intervals are not just limited to humans, but are the secret behind all evolution. Dr. Daniel Levitin speculates on this possible music-evolution connection in his new book "This is your Brain on Music." Music connects with the cerebellum which recently has been discovered to connect with our emotions via the electrochemicals of our autonomic nervous system. Previously the cerebellum was thought to be mainly for motion but it turns out that motion is a means to regulate our emotions!

While nonwestern music sounds unsophisticated to the modern ear there is a timeless secret to its apparent monotony. The chanting and single-note singing is based on the concept of sound transducing into ultrasound which creates heat, called N/um by the Bushmen, which then ionizes our electrochemicals, and creates electromagnetic fields for healing. When Daniel Bournelli "disproved" the shamanic Law of Pythagoras, based on the Tetrad of the 1-4-5 music intervals, he lost this timeless and very advanced concept of total energy-mass and spacetime transduction -- this is the Biomusic conspiracy.

In nonwestern cultures sex roles are intertwined into all aspects of culture with the understanding that the complimentary opposites can resonate with formless awareness to create strong healing energy. So in the Bushmen culture, traditionally, 90% of the men were healers, while the females sang all night so the men could dance for 10 hours straight. The men would go into a trance state, after the N/um was very strong -- "boiling heat" in the belly -- and then the men would put one hand on the front chest of the female and one hand on the back of the female. This trance state would, through electromagnetic light vision, suck the sickness out of the females. The men would suck in the sickness and then send the sickness back to the spirits of the dead which feed off this extra energy.

The "rainbow snake" is the undulating "love-current" of this timeless healing energy. There are 12 harmonic nodes along the front and back of the human that resonate just like the 12 notes of the music scale, created by the overtones of the 1-4-5 harmonics -- the Tai Chi symbol or "rainbow snake flute cult" symbol. The Perfect 5th harmonic is the ratio 2:3 as yang, male energy, which resonates as the infinite spiral of fifths -- the Law of Pythagoras -- back into the formless awareness or eternal feminine consciousness. This practice, of sitting in a chair and focusing the mind along the 12 "notes" of the body, can be done by anyone, so that blissful, electromagnetic energy is created for healing. This natural resonance practice is called the "small universe" or "microcosmic orbit" and guidance c.d.s can be found at springforestqigong.com The 12 notes practice is also detailed in Professor Mircea Eliade's book on Indian yoga. The ancient tradition of this biomusic practice is the focus of the book "Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality," translated by Charles Luk.

Once the energy channels are opened then a person can sit in full-lotus, which is a tetrahedron, made up of 4 equilateral triangles, each made up of two 2-3-4 triangles, resonating as yin (3:4) and yang (2:3). The full-lotus is a very quick and powerful means to harmonize the electrochemicals of the body. Eventually light can be shot out of the eyes, via the 3rd Eye or the pineal gland, so that healing of others can be achieved. This is a natural resonance revolution from the formless awareness. More details can be found on my old blog, drewhempel.gnn.tv.

there is no need to. what good will come out of it?

I like the "High Weirdness"
Drew, I think you're the Hunter S. Thompson of Dao.

I still don't understand the ratios and harmonics though, perhaps this will take some time to really study.

I just pre-cog'd your post. I was cut and pasting this as you posted the above:

In fact the historical origin of music in China is equivalent to Pythagorean theory as noted by scholar J. A. Van Aalst, who also documents the important structural connection between the fourth/fifth and yin/yang relations:

Between heaven and earth, they say, there is perfect harmony. Now, 3 is the emblem of heaven, 2 is the symbol of earth. If two sounds are in the proportion of 3 to 2, they will harmonise as perfectly as heaven and earth. On this principle a second tube was cut measuring exactly two-thirds of the length of the first tube, and the sound rendered was the perfect fifth, which in our Western music is also expressed by the ratio of 3 to 2. The second bamboo, being treated on the same principle, produced a third tube measuring exactly two-thirds of the length, and giving a note a perfect fifth higher than that of the second tube. This new sound seeming too far distant from the first or fundamental note, the length of the producing tube was doubled (that is four-thirds of the second tube's whole length was taken instead of two-thirds), and the note became an octave lower. All the tubes were cut on the same principle, .... The lüs [notes] were divided into two classes the yang lüs and the yin lüs.... Everything in Nature belongs to one of these two grand categories, from whose combinations and reciprocal action results all that exists or takes place in the universe.101

I think it's ok to hint. Did you have someone in mind?

......................

Sorry to go off topic but what benifits would the half lotus bring in terms of spiritual or abilities if one cannot do full lotus?

WYG

No arms, no cake?

Drew Hempel, i liked reading your articles again aswell as the mini biography

Another quick question i have for you involving O at a D, when in the full lotus shooting bliss to females isnt it extremely energyconsuming ? isnt alot of the energy lost while travelling ? Also when you have a perv leeching energy cant you yust stop it ?

Also after the exchange with a female takes place, you need long time to recultivate or ?

Dunno yust curious

LOL Thanks Rain!!

There must be something that comes good from half lotus or what about seated on a chair?

WYG

Wun..I totally agree!

C´mon Werd, throw us some crumbs!!...(not so smart come to think of the hostility that first girl stirred up with that nick..)

Prreasee!!

(*Jumping up and down trying to reach his knee..*)

Full lotus has these benefits:

In proper full lotus position the legs are a stable platform for the strait spine. Half-lotus requires a pillow to acquire this posture. Cross legged a higher pillow. Kneeling also correctly orients the spine. Sitting on the front of a chair (so the equipment would be hanging down men) also puts the spine in proper position.

Yet there's also a transformation that occurs in full-lotus. The pain in the legs will move from ankle, to shin, to knee, to thigh, to butt, to coccyx. This stretching out, opening up is transformative. Then the pain will start moving up the spine. Where the pain has already been overcome is full of free flowing qi.

So in a sense, full-lotus will force you to overcome more personal issues (they are all disturbed qi flow) to obtain relaxation. Trancing out in a bed or chair is interesting, but you're not dealing with the whole body, only a superficial level of body relaxation is required.

But no rush. Where ever you are at, if you are dealing with pain and overcoming it with relaxed awareness you are progressing. It's as simple as that. Everyone's pain bodies are structured differently. Consider yourself lucky, the naturally flexible will have to search harder for their pain.

Rain, you always make me laugh!

Drew, thanks for sharing... cool story! I know someone who passed out holding his breath in a grade school contest too. During band practice.



And then there is the full lotus vs siddhasana debate. From the Hatha Yoga Pradipika:

#27 - You are also missing another primary purpose. Full lotus is the one position that opens and brings your huiyin down closest to the ground (huge Yin reservoir). This allows you the fullest connection between Heaven & Earth as a human lightning rod.Drew, could you post or link some mp3s that have the perfect yin (3:4) and yang (2:3) harmonic ratios?

Because I still don't really understand all this mathematical music theory...but it might help if I could actually HEAR the difference in comparison to modern Western music that does not have it.

Also, I would really love to see a vid of you generating an O at a D on some unsuspecting girl. Would you ever consider videoing this sometime and letting us watch her cluelessly squirm and quake from your projected yang light bliss?

thanks guys. love your sense of humour as well.

Thank you 松永道 for your superb angle on the benefits of pain, I´ve heard that if you deal with pain the way you describe you can "burn" off a lot of bad karma...is it so?

when i sit in full lotus i feel a warm tingly sensation all over, pretty good

I think a distinction can usefully be made between

1) getting enough flexibility to sit in full lotus
and
2) actually having ones legs cleared enough that sitting in full lotus is a good idea.

I know I've ranted on this before, and I really don't want to be more of a miserable bastard than necessary, nor do I want it to appear that I'm persecuting Drew Hempel, however obliquely.

BUT I would like to reiterate that there is a school of thought that full lotus, or indeed any kind of crossed leg posture is very much an obstacle to health for beginners. And that we are more beginners than we think.

For starters this posture originated in places where there weren't chairs! And yes it's stable and concentrated, if what you want to do is force stuff up to your head in order to have head-based realisations.

But for overall taoist body-based health the legs gotta be included. Healing requires that bioenergy settle down. Right down. And 60% at least, of healing release from chi kung or seated practices goes down the legs. And spending ages with legs awkwardly folded prevents this unless you have done massive massive amounts of leg clearing before hand. Like five-ten years' worth.

If your path doesn't involve clearing all the gunk out of your system, or if you really think you've already done that, then please ignore this. But otherwise, please be careful. Sit in full lotus and tune in to nothing but your legs. See if they, not the rest of you, feel alive. Then do a lotus walk. Feel the difference.

I'll shut up now. Sorry.

what's the lotus walk?

Good points Ian, i also like to add that if one is in constant pain of full or even half lotus how does one reach stillness/emptyness or even consider being relaxed?

I know that some pain can lead people into a certain bliss state but is it the same state of bliss to something like Kunlun or other Dao, buddhist systems?

Ive got pics of Daoist gods seated on chairs not in lotus positions. I have seen many Buddhist pics of lotus though!!!

Does pain mean you are getting better results??? hmmm

WYG

OK well if you read NISA -- the Bushmen female healer -- she states that she stopped healing because the pain was too great.

This is true -- the pain of a BROKEN HEART!

Actually NISA states that females can take the pain of child birth so therefore males take the pain of healing -- how the N/UM -- the boiling heat -- works its way through the body, enabling stronger healing energy.

Gurdjieff states the same thing and you'll find this in Autobiography of a Yogi, as well as Master Nan, Huai-chin's books.

The body is inversely proportional to the level of energy or spirit that a person creates -- so the deeper samadhi the deeper it works on the body.

Advaita Vedanta uses left-brain logic -- inference -- to just focus the energy straight to its source, until the heart actually stops for over 10 minutes and then restarts. After that "eternal liberation" is achieved -- meaning that all pain immediately empties out to pure consciousness, with each breath/thought.

If I got it right full Lotus can happen spontaneously if a "critical mass" in ones practice is reached... before that it might be better to go without for most of us...



Harry

I feel wind blowing through my body when in full lotus.

De
Jah
Vu

Music is a commotion
Motion is Music
eEmotion Motions Music

The Plot Thickens

Ian is giving a smart advice. This is not a competition. The wise man knows when to go slow to build a stable foundation. Stretch your hip area. Love your knees.

Drew, did you read "Healing Codes for Biological Apocalypse" by Leonard G. Horowitz? Here is a review of this book.

Yeah I read Leonard Horowitz' book -- he relies on gematria or "one-to-one correspondence" of letter and number, therefore he's no different than anything Western civilization cranks out.

As for using up energy -- sickness is caused by EXTRA energy in the body but it's just not harmonized. So to shoot energy out the pineal gland while in full-lotus you actually heal yourself because you transform lower emotions (lust, anger, fear, worry) into bliss-light or love-light, healing energy. You also take in the lower emotions of the people around you -- so if a person is an alcoholic and angry then you feel your liver get hot, sadness, you feel the lungs, fear the kidneys, worry, the pancreas.

As for lust -- well since this energy exchange works on complementary opposites then it's a matter of connecting the life-force energy of the reproductive organs with the heart energy whereas the left-brain dominance of the West cuts off that connection causing fear, anger, worry and sadness to dominate.

At first I wasn't sure if I was just losing energy or not -- but then I realized that if I do this too much then I also have to convert the lust energy I've taken in from females (or male perverts) and make sure it gets ionized into heart energy again, or else in sleep, subconsiously, it will convert back into water.

So normal loss of sex energy is not harmonized with the mind -- it's separated from the brain through left-brain dominance and therefore it's separated from the other organs and emotions and the connection between sex and love is lost.

In my experience, yes. This is part of Buddhist Vipassana meditation theory. Without going into the Indian terminology, pain is a type of emotional baggage, and emotional baggage is really a good word for it (even the English language can be surprisingly adept at portraying spiritual issues). In Daoist terms it's stagnant qi. Why has it stagnated? Emotion. Some unresolved emotional issue.

You know how a bell or tuning fork will start humming if you expose it to the correct frequency? A stagnant emotion is just like this. You wont even know its there until you are exposed to the correct situational frequency. And when this happens, that hidden piece of baggage will start humming. Anger, fear, whatever. The emotion takes over, unbalances your mind, and reacts. Jung's shadow takes over.

What is bad karma? Sin? Emotional baggage? All different words for the same thing. Every religion in the world has developed a psychic medicine to deal with them. Heaven (天丹, heavenly medicine), Human (内丹, internal medicine), and Earthly (外丹, external medicine) levels, take your pick. From the Heaven's we have God's Forgiveness. From the human level we have meditation and the visceral outpour of the emotion itself, one final push that lets it flow and lets it go. And from the earth level we have herbs, physical practices and mood altering drugs.

In meditation you find these emotions and observe them. If you let the pain beat you, it's the same as the emotion controlling you in a daily life situation. If you overcome the pain, you burn off that bit of bad karma. Vipassana emphasizes the need to be equanimous to any experience. Pain or pleasure, don't run from one and crave the other, because you are bound to have both in your life. And always, inevitably, just as they arise, they will later pass away. Patience. Observation. Equanimity.

Before I had ever sincerely meditated I attended a 10 day vipassana retreat. 10 days, no talking, 10 hours of meditation a day. It's deep surgery on your psyche. As a result my personality permanently changed. Friends and family didn't believe it. "Because people can't just change!" Well I did because I burned through a lot of emotional baggage that was controlling my daily life. And though my ego still acts out, I now know the mind is but one part of my totality. I am not the thinker, I am the consciousness that experiences thinking.

And these are just words. Sometimes I think intellectual understanding can be an obstacle to true experience. What I mention here are very simple things that I "knew" for a long time but never really KNEW. There is a world of difference between the way things are and the way we think they are, even if the two end up agreeing.

Anyway I'm getting off topic. I recall afterwards I read "The Web that Has No Weaver" which encapsulated my experience in terms of TCM philosophy:

An intact Hun produces acts of kindness or benevolence towards others and self. In fact, human kindness (仁, ren) is the specific virtue of the Hun...The [Hun's] responsibility for human kindness has an intimate relationship to a person's capacity to feel and endure pain and suffering...because of Hun, pain awakens empathy. Suffering is the fundamental awareness that fosters benevolence towards others or self. Without this capacity, a person is numb (不仁, bu ren) and incapable of experiencing the depth of another person's humanity or his or her own. (Kaptchuk, 61)

There you have it. Buddhism in terms of Taoist Medical Philosophy. I'm sure empathy can be awakened in other ways, but the way of meditative enlightenment is the way of transcending pain. Not by running away but by facing it head on.


As for clearing the legs, I think Ian's advice is probably good. I'm not sure if my experience agrees though. Meditation has helped open my legs (they use to fall asleep, now they do not) though I have always practiced a good amount of Taijiquan daily along with meditation. One teacher said in full lotus, you pinch the femoral artery to the legs and through long term practice this develops the adjacent smaller arteries so the legs are even more full of qi and blood than before. However like any body transforming process this takes time. And it HURTS!

By the way, the Vipassana Meditation retreat I went on was free, check out www.dhamma.org for more information.

Yo, that post was awesome and thankyou made alot of sense for many things for me!!!

..............

It's one of my all time favourite things.

Just walk, body loose as if you're the happiest bunny on the planet, and feel every footstep, every contact of the soles of your feet with the ground.

It drags your attention down through the body - you can sometimes feel it pulling through tight areas. And if you get loose enough you will lurch and stumble like a drunk. Only then do we find out how much tension we need to walk normally.

It's called lotus walk because after a while (maybe quite a long while) you get little explosions under each foot, that have been likened to a lotus flower opening.

Hey thanx Drew

*Respectfull bow*

Yes Yogananda in his Autobiography of a Yogi was told that the full-lotus BURNS KARMA and so this is a no brainer! haha.

Now for something completely different....

OK left the house again BEFORE I went into full-lotus (danger, danger). So made the requisite primal "uaahs" as I just went into full-lotus for the first time today.

Who's with me?

I feel that kundabuffer stretching out, the knees are coming down. I'll soon put the feet up farther on the thighs and I'll look for to more magic.

I just attended a Flower of Life workshop and was told that the lotus is an ideal position because it places precisely half the star tetrahedron (primarily the female part) underground into the earth. Which goes back again to the concept of seeking a well-connected balance between Yin Mother Earth with Yang Father Sky.

However, I believe it's better to be comfortable first - and work up to that position second. Because if you are in full-lotus but really tense from it, most of your fringe benefits will be negated as you won't be able to go very deep when you are so distracted by your pain body. And if you can't go deep, then the rest won't even matter that much.

Vortex,

The flower of life seminar sounded good did they give any explaination to the chinese stone lions holding the ball that is the same pattern of the flower of life or any chinese connection?

If you like to start a thread on the Flower of Life seminar would be awesome if not its kool! Was there anything else on meditation and Flower of Life?

regard
WYG