In detail

avihimsa don't harm yourself

Don't hurt yourself. Samma Sankappo, avihimsa: Pain lets you know not to go further. if you try to push through, the next 2 or 3 days the pain of muscle tear prevents you from progressing. infact, rather than improving faster you retrogress while the injuries heal; before the improvement can resume. Greed for attainments is counterproductive.

Body heat, warmth needs to be sufficient before starting exercise.

start from slow careful mindful movement in limited safe range of motion before gradually, mindfully accelerating tempo to full speed. Example: if it's cold, and you stretch before you jog, you can hurt yourself stretching. Instead, walk around or something to warm up, then stretch, then jog.

Adjust for environmental conditions - dress warmly enough. Be aware of wind and wind chill. People expend lots of valuable energy to warm themselves up because they under-dress to show off their body. Then from sweating and wind chill, they waste valuable energy to generate body heat. Worse, immune system is compromised because the body is busy trying to keep warm. Some chinese medicine doctors say not keeping the body sufficiently warm is one reason cancer can thrive and prosper. Energy is valuable, don't waste it on vanity or from laziness.

find sweet spot: piti-sukha

Sweet spot - find piiti sukha. if too lax, no piti, no improvement. too rough, pain . in between is a sweet spot. This comes from proper practice of 16 steps anapana. Deep, active relaxation and sensitivity to breathing of entire body.

no tanha - careful patience fastest way

no tanha - careful patience is fastest way to improve. greed for attainments is counterproductive

16 APS - comprehensive breathing

breathing - relaxed (mental and physical), happy, natural. see 16 steps of anapana.

secret of success - love what you do

secret of success - train your perception to love what you do even if you don't initially. formula for long term sustainable practice.

the sun is amazing. so is fresh air, big trees, mountains. pine trees have lots of negative ions that are nourishing and make you physically feel good. himalaya mountains have powerful energy which is why yogis like to meditate there. sequoia trees have life spans over 2000 years just on sunshine, soil, moisture. meditate and exercise outside in nature when you can.

priority principle

priority principle - extra attention and more sets and reps for your problem areas. they are bottlenecks! bottlenecks in critical places reduces efficiency in everything you do, so fixing bottlenecks allows you to work most efficiently. similar idea to compound interest. it's exponential, not linear growth. for example, my arms and hands were weak, so I started learning and practicing handstands, doing more push ups.

right mindfulness

you're clear about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and aware every moment.

use mindfulness to probe and note problem areas in the body. these are areas you will apply priority principle to later for extra attention. also the memory aspect of right mindfulness comes into play as you evaluate how well your custom exercise routine is working, where it's still deficient, where it's working well, whether you're spending too much time doing what's working well but getting diminishing returns on your time when you can get more return for your investment on weaker areas.

the modern idea of the efficiency of multitasking is way overrated. to some extent, with simple tasks, it's productive but mostly it's just people doing poor quality work for many tasks simultaneously. for the work of attaining full liberation, the work needs to be of highest quality.

own it. take it to the limit

where it the point of diminishing returns? why only stop at 9 reps? overcame morning sloth and torpor problem by doing 36 reps and more. i did the turtle every hour, many reps. fixed carpal tunnel.

megaturtle principle - a million angles and slight variations might unlock hidden tight knots

5 for the price of 1

- especially if you have a small amount of time to exercise, moves that can work 5 problem areas at once gets you the most amount of exercise in the same amount of time.

Balancing 4 elements

In taiji alchemy it's pretty tough to understand the language and terminology they use. It just sounds like mystical mumbo jumbo, and complicated networks of energy channels, sublimation of energy.

Taoist alchemy uses hundreds of pages to describe how to attain optimal physical health by purifying and sublimating the different networks of energy, whereas Ajahn Lee just concisely expresses it something like "the four elements of your body will become harmonized, and you'll feel very comfortable." (big understatement)

Here's my attempt to fill in the blanks between Ajahn Lee, EBT, and real taiji.

Your body has earth property in there, which I'll call "ice".

It has water property, which I'll call "water", or "juice".

It has heat property which can range from cold to hot, I'll call "fire".

It has wind property, which I'll call "the force."

It has space property, which I'll allude to with "water dissolving into vapor, and emptiness".

So if someone who's earnest about getting good samadhi, jhana, here's the process. Say they sit four hours a day. Even two hours a day you should feel some gradual improvement day to day.

So when you're sitting, you just have to do two things.

1. Gently try to make your body more relaxed than it is.

2. Gently try to make your mind calmer, more relaxed, and peaceful than it is.

You'll know its working because you'll feel a force that pervades everywhere in your whole body. everyone's health condition is different, so maybe at first you'll only feel the force pushing in one spot, a piece of ice somewhere, maybe the size of a small stone. It may feel like that chunk of ice is permanent and will never melt. But if you sit every day, it will gradually melt, you'll feel the ice shrink, and melt into water.

So the chunks of ice in your body will gradually be targeted by the force, and slowly melt. The process may be physically painful. When I first started meditating, there was this chunk of ice in between my lower and middle back that would only appear when I sat down to meditate, and not have any pain outside of meditation. It took about 3 years for that small chunk of ice to fully melt and become pain free.

Probably the reason most people don't get jhana is they don't believe that the meditation will ever be pain free, and give up.

Pain is just the interaction of fire melting the ice in your body into water.

So the more you meditate, the more you become horrified (for most people) when you come to the realization that most of your body is ice. Because its mostly ice, that is what "normal" feels to you. But if you persist in your meditation every day, and you relax properly, that ice surely will melt. And when enough ice melts, and enough of the main energy channels in your body are free of blocked ice, you'll feel the water (that is the melted ice) now has a clear path,

and then BAM!!!

You get a taste of the juice. The juice (piti sukha) is the water flowing freely and continuously around energy channel loops. The juice triggers pleasure chemicals in your brain.

When enough of the ice in your body is melted into water, and the main channels are unblocked, you'll be able to get first and second jhana. It will feel like liquid pleasure coarsing through your veins. Second jhana water movement can be so intense its like you're sitting under niagra falls. Not everyone will experience it that intensely, depending on their age, health, etc.

Then the fire continues to melt ice and vaporize the water into emptiness. So from a stiff block of ice of a body, it will feel like a smooth, comfortable bag of water, and then become lighter and lighter. when the water melts into vapor and dissolves into emptiness and visual light.

Day by day, it improves. I don't think anyone who meditates according to the EBT (consistent with how Ajahn Lee teaches it) would be surprised if they levitate one day.

So here's an important point that the Hindus and taoists who teach real taiji will explain the "why and how" in detail, but the EBT does not. This is probably because monastics following vinaya, and following the Buddha's schedule (AN 3.16) are already doing the right fundamentals, but this leaves Buddhist laypeople out of the loop on a critical detail.

Celibacy is essential. True brahmacariya, meaning you try to not even have one microsecond of lustful thinking, or any negative emotion at all.

I need to wrap up this post, I'll just say IMO, without celibacy even if you meditate four hours a day you put your ceiling at a mediocre first jhana and low quality second jhana, and you may never see much visual light.

And even much worse news, if you have jhana ability, then being non-celibate has greater risk of developing psychological problems and nervous system disorders than someone who is non celibate and can't do jhana, especially the older you get.

In Chinese, the jing-shen is the common phrase used to express health. Jing means the exact same thing as viriya in the hindu sense. It's energy, vigor, and reproductive potency, semen. In chinese, the same character in "health" (jing) also means "sperm". "shen" corresponds with the abundant visual light in the 4 iddhipada.

The further away one goes from celibacy, you'll not have steady and stable (if any) visual light (shen), and your lack of jing is directly proportional to your health.

Unfortunately modern science and psychology has very inverted understanding of celibacy and sexual health from a spiritual aspirant.

An earnest and even modestly skilled meditator can test this out themself. Follow the buddha's schedule on basic walking and sitting meditation, and sleeping schedule (AN 3.16)

If you're maintaining celibacy well, you'll directly feel how strong viriya is. The four hours a sleep, plus one or two naps a day, will feel like plenty. Even less than four a of day sleep if you're meditating a lot. Visual light will be become abundant, your mind will become sharper, memory will improve, your mind will be quick and agile, as your body softens and improves, it will be free of disease, light, comforably, reflexes get sharper.

If you interrupt celibacy, you will drastically feel the impact it has following the schedule above.

sitting meditation posture, knee health

Here's one of the most important things I've learned through experience, trial and error, regarding knee health, sitting postures, and I've tried lots of healing modalities, eastern, western.

Right mindfulness, sati and sampajano regarding the four postures, all the time. Samma sati is not just for liberation, if you train yourself to be really sensitive to what a healthy knee (and body) feels like, and what an unhealthy knee feels like, and using yoniso manasikara to investigate the causes of healthy knee feelings (smooth, empty), versus unhealthy knees (stiff, pain, joints cracking), and all the subtle grades in between,

Then when you try out different modalities, yoga, taiji, pushups, whatever, you'll start to build up a database in your mind of what the benefit of each action is, how much you need to do of each to maintain current knee health, how much is needed to improve it, etc.

There are many ways and combinations of modalities that will work, but the key is you have to do them regularly (many, many times a day).

You can be the most bendy flexible yogi in the world, but if you stay in one static posture all the time, energy in your body is going to stagnate after a while, you have to alternate movements and postures from time to time, no fixed rule, best to just train right mindfulness to be alert to whats going on so you can intuitively make adjustments.

So number one is mindfulness. This includes the memory faculty, you have to remember the different gradations of healthy to unhealthy knee feelings, what you did to improve and maintian it, and what aggravates it.

Number two is you gotta keep moving and changing postures regularly, knowing where your limitations are. If you're trying to do long sits, increase sitting times carefully and gradually if there's pain and discomfort.

If you have a sedentary job, set an alarm that forces you once on hour for (1 to 5 minutes, trial and error to determine) do some stretching and movement.

Number 3 is keep improvising, trying different things, and eventually you figure out quick efficient ways to keep all your body parts in good order.

because poor health is conditioned ever so gradually and slowly over the years, most people don't see it coming. That's why the memory aspect of right mindfulness is so important, so you remember what the good health state feels like and what you did to keep it from slipping away. Conversely with the bad. Know what you did that makes the healthy feel uncomfortable and deteriorate (samma sati + samma vayamo )

Sampajano, clear comprehensiion, moment to moment is also so important. If you clearly feel whats going on in your body, you will know how to assess and capitalize on that knowledge. You'll figure out how to do very quick, efficient actiions to maintain good health and keep it from declining. Compared to someone who is unmindfully just doing different modalities without really feeling and paying attention, you can waste a lot of time, energy, risk injury.

cjmacie knee therapy

Not to give up hope, folks...

(from a suttacentral discussion thread)

In my early 30's (1970's), my knees & hips were in bad shape -- crepitus (noisy), pain with using stairs, etc. Looking pretty dismal, and not good for the future. Probably from lots of "jogging" back in the 1960's when it was 1st fashionable, but on pavement / asphalt and with not very cushioned "tennis" shoes, as they were then.

Once a notable experience -- knees were quite problematic, working in a 2nd floor office with 20-odd steps up and down several times/day. One weekend went skiing (had been off/on), getting better at it, spent whole weekend virtually with bent knees in & out with the turning and moguls, etc. After that all knee pain and creaking GONE. Probably a combination of getting circulation really going through the tissues, and strengthening the muscles -- so the weight is carried by the muscles, not so much on the joint faces.

So, over the decades, some occasional soreness, esp right hip, but not critical nor worsening. 1980's-1990's fair amount of TaiJiQuan (TaiChiChuan) and QiGong (DaoYin), which increased tissue stamina, flexibility, and especially balance greatly.

Then about 10 years ago (ca. age 65) started "meditation", first sitting, then (probably competitively) trying other ways of sitting. Japanese style sitting on folded-under calves didn't work at all. Cushion sitting at first difficult, painful. Keeping at it, got easier with persistent (but not fanatical) practice, i.e. couple of times/week. Then started 8-10 day "Vipassana" or "Jhana" retreats, noticing the flexibility, ability to sit cross-legged, even to 1/2 lotus, continuously improving. Like going skiing for a week -- first couple of days creaky, painful; then day 3 or so onwards wonderful progress.

Now it's fairly stable -- can sit sorta 1/3-1/2 lotus, easily 1 hour; at times 1.5-2 hours. S/t come out of it and relax the knees and ankle for a minute or two and switch sides (left-over right from right-over left).

From 40-50 years ago thinking the trajectory was toward being crippled rather young, it was amazing how practice (and some care) was able to change that situation.

Then there's the admonishing of the Burmese / Mahasi monks (read about and witnessed a couple of times in weekend retreats at Tathagata Meditation Center (San Jose, Calif)) -- pain in the legs? you wussy Westerners. Just toughen through it - note it, use it in mahadhatu practice,... Seriously, at least two teachers taught as much. And the stories of Westerners visiting Burma/Myanmar and observing the locals toughening through it, even with painful, bleeding limbs. Maybe extreme, but there's something to the matter of overcoming conditioning to comfort at any cost.

Don't know about elsewhere, but at "Vipassana/Insight Meditation" movement retreats around here (Northern California, where retreat centers abound), the familiar scene -- people come early, pick their favorite spots in the mediation hall, and pitch their camp -- erect a shrine to comfort, with a couple of cushions, extra bolsters of various sorts, blankets, shawls, etc. Then going to the Tathagata Center (mostly Vietnamese devotees/yogis) -- there they take a mat, one ca. 2-inch cushion, and make do with it. Some even no mat/cushion, in 1/2 or full lotus on the hardwood floor.

Bottom line: You folks still in your 30's, 40's, 50's, not to despair. The human body is formed by what it does, and can s/t unbelievably adapt in response to function (practice).

Relaxing in taiji = passadhi-sambojjhanga

Relaxing in taiji is the same as passadhi-sambojjhanga

In Taiji, the “relax” they talk about, the key to unleashing the sublime power of internal energy (the same energy experientially felt in the 4 jhanas), is exactly the same as the bodily and mental pacification that comprise passadhi-sambojjhanga (pacification awakening factor, #5 of 7sb).

Not relaxing is what keeps people from experiencing genuine taiji power, not relaxing, or not pacifying sufficiently the body and mind in one’s samadhi, is what prevents the 4 jhanas from happening.

ZMQ (Cheng Man Ching) was a famous disciple of Yang Cheng-Fu (who needs no introduction).

The Word “Relax" in Tai Chi Chuan by Professor Cheng Man Ching (鄭曼青).

"I have been practicing Tai-Chi Chuan for over fifty years. Only recently have I started to fully understand the word “relax”. I remember my Tai-Chi Chuan teacher Yang Cheng-Fu who did not like to talk much. He used to sit all day without saying a word if no one asked him questions. However, in our T’ai-chi class he would tell us to “relax” repeatedly. Sometimes it seemed like he would say the word hundreds of times during the practice so that the word could fill up my ears. Strangely enough he also said that if he did not tell me of this word that I would not be able to learn T’ai-chi in three life-times (meaning never). I doubted his words then. Now that I think back, I truly believe that if he did not keep reminding me of the word “relax”, I doubt if I could have learned T’ai-chi Chuan in six life-times.

What is the meaning of “relax” in T’ai-chi? Here is an example to help you understand the word. When we go visit a Buddhist temple we usually see a statue of Me-Lo Buddha. The one who has a big rounded stomach with a big smile on his face. He carries a large bag on his shoulder. On top of this statue we see a motto: “Sit with a bag. Walk with a bag. It would be such a relief to drop the bag.” What does all this mean? To me, a person himself or herself is a bag. Everything he or she owns is baggage, including one’s children, family, position and wealth. It is difficult to drop any of one’s baggage, especially the “self” bag.

T’ai-chi Chuan is difficult to learn. To relax in practicing T’ai-chi Chuan is the most difficult phase to go through. To relax a person’s mind is the most significant obstacle to overcome in practicing T’ai-Chi. It takes a great effort to train and exercise one’s mind to relax.

jhana constipation

There’s a saying that on average it takes 10 years of taiji practice before one actually becomes a beginner (accumulates enough internal energy to the point where one can tangibly feel and work with said energy).

It’s a subtle art. But it’s actually ridiculously easy. Exactly in the same way, first jhana, and getting micro spurts of second jhana is actually incredibly easy. You just have to train yourself how to fully relax properly (physically and mentally). Just as with taiji, jhana is the same, in that it won’t match the sutta descriptions of jhana bliss at first, for most people, even when you’re doing the method correctly.

For most people, you’ll be stuck in a jhana constipation phase for a long time. What this phase feels like is body pain and discomfort. So even though you’re doing the relaxing (passadhi-bojjhanga) correctly, people will just associate correct meditation with physical pain and not want to continue. This is really the main difficulty with jhana attainment, is people don’t have the patience to wait for all the energy blockages to melt (it can take years). It’s like a hen sitting on an egg, it takes time.

Internal energy is the ability to produce heat, force, luminosity on demand. The energy blockages (felt as pain and constipation) melts from heat and force. A good second jhana literally feels like glaciers (cold, stiff regions) in your face, chest, have melted into torrential rivers of piti sukha juice flooding everywhere.

Ice melts into pitisukha juice, piti sukha juice is further refined into just sukha vapor (3rd jhana), and the sukha vapor is sublimated into luminosity and emptiness (4th jhana).

Jhana is actually ridiculously easy to do, it’s just that it won’t feel like a proper jhana at first, and people don’t have the belief and mental fortitude to persist in the practice. Usually when people start to believe is when they get a partial jhana experience, maybe on a 10 day retreat, one of the main energy channels partially melts, you still have body pain but you get some partial bliss, then you start to believe in the process.

If you nourish viriya, the internal vital energy experientially felt as heat and force, then this becomes your viriya-sambojjhanga. If you follow the worldly way (non celibacy), maybe when you’re young and healthy you can still get various stages of jhana occasionally, but you wonder why your results are inconsistent and unstable. And when you get older, you wonder why jhana doesn’t appear at all even though you’re still doing the technique correctly.

Celibacy, keeping 8 precepts well, noble silence is what nourishes your internal energy, making the heat, force strong enough to melt all energetic blockages. For the lay people who get a little taste of jhana, and believe in the process, but fail to progress, probably what kills them is lack of celibacy. When the heat, force, start to build up, the body and mind become virile, health becomes vigorous, and the way lay people respond to this is by trying to get laid or masturbating. When you do that, you lose heat and force. And you never make net progress because you always take one step forward and then one or two big steps backward. And then life ends, what a waste.

Summary:

Jhana is ridculously easy to do, it just won’t feel like jhana unless you have the patience to work through the (usually painful) process of the energy blockages melting. The way people respond to pain is to start thinking (which kills the passadhi-bojjhanga) or stop samadhi practice altogether thinking it doesn’t work.

Lay people also kill their jhana potential by trying to get laid and/or masturbating. This kills your heat and force, the tools that melt the energetic blockages.

relax, 2. celibacy, 3. noble silence

knotty36

Greetings Frankk,

Very interesting post! Of course, I don’t know you, but it comes across like views based on personal experience more so than theoretical speculation. In any case, I’d be interested in hearing your response to a question I have for you.

Regarding…

What, then, would you say about the sexual cultivation of energy? Obviously, very firmly entrenched in the same culture which gave birth to Taiji, what relation would you say it has to the cultivation of jhana? Honestly, I have my own thoughts; but, again, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hear your views without any interference from my own.

frankk

38m

Besides just following AN 3.16, with alternating 4 postures as needed (instead of sitting all the time), you can really speed up the process of opening blocked energy channels with good exercises.

This is a big topic, so I’m not going to drop too much information and overwhelm you, but I have done meditation, yoga, taiji, qigong, for decades, and I have a lot of experience of what works and doesn’t work. If I’m recommending an excercise, among the millions of options out there, there’s a very good reason for it.

sun salutation:

A Very Slow, Very Easy Yoga Sun Salutation

I would advise those of you practicing brahmacariya, celibacy, in the pure EBT sense (no sex, no masturbation, not even one microsecond of lustful thought), don’t casually browse around on youtube randomly looking at exercise videos on the related videos sidebar. Your best bet is find a youtube video downloader, download the specifically curated videos I’ve recommended. Turn off wireless on your computer/phone most of the time, only turn on wireless when you go at safesites like suttacentral, do only what’s necessary, then turn wireless off, and turn your computer/phone off. Delete your facebook account, keep your phone in airplane mode as much as you can, get the slowest internet connection speed you can get away with. The faster your internet connection, the more you’ll be tempted to consume rich media. The slower and more sluggish your internet, the sooner you want to turn off your computer out of frustration.

This yoga video is really sublime. The guy is doing something that I thought I invented. Yoga tends to only hit orthogonal angles. You can open up your world by adding little twists turns to every yoga pose, and every subsection of several yoga sequence and pose, improvising and hitting angles of body tissue that the standard basic never addresses.

Before and after every sitting meditation, I exercise at least 5 minutes (some combo of yoga, taiji, qigong). In the sun salutation, the one part that I especially spend a lot of extra time on is the upward facing dog portion. In the video, the yogi turns left to right slowly, from the crocodile part before upward facing dog (backbend). I do that too, but I’m more flexible so my range of movement is way more turned than his is. I’m saying this not to brag, but to point out that you can really open the your hatha yoga practice by adding improvised twists and turns and undulations, circles and spirals into the framework. If you do 5 minutes before and after every sit, eventually you’re going to be really flexible.

opening eight extraordinary meridians

Eight Extraordinary Meridian Meditation Method/開通八脈法

This is an excellent way of doing step 3 of 16 APS (anapana). My suggestion to improve this taoist exercise would be don’t force your breath to coordinate exactly with the sequence in the video. Never forget the prime directive of taiji, and passadhi-bojjhanga (pacification awakening factor) - relax (body and mind), every moment all the way, all the time. The main purpose of the sequence is to stop vitakka and vicara (thinking and evaluation), to develop sensitivity to the movement of 4 dhatu experientially, combined with 16 APS, all in a completely relaxed way. Once you’re well versed in that exercise, you can try coordinating inhales and exhales as they suggest, but it’s not important to do that. What melts blocked energy channels is relaxation and noble silence. The exact sequencing of inhale exhale is more of an aesthetic.

neck exercises, especially the turtle (around 6min mark)

Hunyuan Taiji Silkreeling - Neck

When I was young, I had a desk job and got carpal tunnel syndrome. My hands were cold all the time, my wrists hurt, I went to the doctor. This was western medicine’s best strategy: They gave my a wrist brace to wear, and they had a name for the cold hands “renauad syndrome.” What a joke. They named the problem and gave me a extra pad for the mouse pad and a cast to keep my wrist immobile. If my problem was worse they’d probably prescribe painkillers. This was when I started to look seriously into yoga and qigong with earnest. When you’re in pain, you’re motivated.

The neck turns and neck circles are kind of obvious things to do, but the turtle qigong is really sublime, this is the exercise that I swore by, of all the qigong and yoga I ever learned. I didn’t just do it 9 reps in one set, once a day. I did it every hour. I did it every half an hour. And I fixed “renauds syndrome” without drugs, without wearing a stupid cast, by doing the opposite of what western “medicine” prescribed. Instead of immobilize my wrist, I made sure I moved it as much as possible, as well as my neck, my shoulders, my spine, every vertebrae in the spine. When I first try to do the neck exercise, I felt like a mannequin, my spine felt like it was just a single iron bar that could bend slightly. After a few months, my spine felt like two warm iron segments, after a year, 3 segments. After 10 years, I can feel every single vertebrae independently. It took over 10 years to get my hands really warm and comfortable. A big part of the problem was my mostly vegan diet. A meat eater, would probably fix the problem in less than a year doing the qigong I did to fix carpal tunnel and renauds sydrome.

bagua whirlwind palm

Wu family Baguazhang whirlwing palms organ/spine resetting video promo

I came across this video, I never did this exercise before, but I know its good. Not just good, spectacular. It’s similar to some other exercises I do, but this one is like a superset, it combines stretching, circling, and spiraling motions.

even if you meditate correctly...

(from my blog article commenting on…)

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-powerful-mental-tool-and-for-some-it-goes-terribly-wrong

I've had personal experience with panic attacks, bad episodes in the past. It's a huge topic, and I'm not going to try to address everything, but here are some things that are extremely helpful, from personal experience.

(link to PIE article)

Back to the article

So now you can understand from the linked article, why some people who meditated correctly, and initially got great results, but later had anxiety, depression, panic attacks, physical health problems, migraine headaches, etc. Odds are most of them are sexually active in some way, whether through sex with a partner or masturbation. There is probably no faster and dangerous way to destroy PIE as sexual activity.

But what about people who are celibate and still have those problems?

Continued another time.

Now we look at an interesting case of a yogi who can do jhana, keeps brahmacariya well over a long period, more than a year, but develops some of the problems described in that article, such as anxiety, disturbing and distressing states in meditation, panic attacks, physical health problems, etc.

the yogi keeping brahmacariya

I'm going to start off with more of a rough sketch / outline, and fill in with more details and editing over time. I just want to get the information and the solution out quickly, and refine the descriptions later as needed.

So even though I eat super healthy, do at least 8 hours a day of some combination of sitting meditation, walking meditation, taiji, yoga, hiking, I developed what I could feel was an energy blockage somewhere near my lower and middle spine area. Even consulting some taiji masters, meditation masters, I got useful advice and tips on how to deal with the mental part of the equation, but nothing that really helped diagnose what was going on in my particular case, what was the root cause and how to fix it. I had to figure that out on my own, trial and error.

physical and mental problems resulting from that spinal blockage

* trouble sleeping,

* panic attacks,

* body feels hot like a fever, but also could get shivering cold, could feel hot and shivering cold at the same time!

* mental outlook, normally extremely resistant to negative or states of depression, but I can see day by day that if I didn't figure out the problem soon anxiety, depression, maybe thoughts of suicide would be possible.

the solution (these things healed the spinal blockage)

(this whole routine takes about 60-90 min to do)

I was able to fix the problem, by making these adjustments to my exercise routine.

Make sure I follow mayo clinic guidelines for daily exercise, incorporated into my routine, such as:

* at least one session of 30 min continuous cardio, where I have elevated heart rate, deep breathing using full range of breath (in sedentary mode, me maybe only use 30% of our range of breathing).

* for weight resistance training, I do at least this much every day, 18 pull ups, 18 pushups, 18 knee lifts hanging on the pull up bar with some spinal twisting

* lotus kicks, at least 81 repetitions, left leg, right leg, standing, lying down. This works not just your abs, but the whole core, the whole body, and also helps loosen hip area tissue that are tight and a bottle neck for yogis who do lots of sitting meditation

* after the cardio portion, with body loose and warmed up, this is the best time to get in at least 15-30min of yoga, because the stretching will really take and make forward net progress of more flexibility over time. Whereas if you try to do yoga and the body is cold, of course it still has much positive effect, but it would increase your elastic range over time.

diet adjustment

* added more salt to my diet, because I chronically under eat salt in meals I cook, to avoid getting too much salt, for health reasons since most people eat too much salt, but also as an austerity to make sure I don't become attached to tasty food. But what I realized that over a long period of time, I probably had some salt deficiency accumulated. So I added more salt so that my food cooked "tastes good", but it's still much lower salt than you would find in a restaurant. The lesson here is when food "tastes good", it's your body giving you feedback that you need that nutrient. The mistake I made is overcorrecting for a problem I don't even have. Americans tend to way overconsume salt, and they eat out at restaurants frequently. I eat at restaurants maybe a few times a year, I could count on one hand. I always cook my own meals, so there was never any danger of me having too much salt.

* take a multivitamin everyday, especially one that has all the B vitamins with good assimilation bioavailability. I've been using Oxylent daily, it's a highly rated multivitamin that comes in powder form you mix with water, which absorbs much more efficiently than a pill.

Previously, before I had these health problems, I would take a multivitamin pill maybe once at most twice a week.

the important insights

since I already ate very healthy, and already got 8 hours daily of meditation, taiji, yoga, everyday, people were shocked I developed those health problems at all. I was shocked. These problems lasted for about 2 months before I hit the combination of things in the solution above, then I could see the problem start to go away gradually, and after 3 months I felt completely healed.

The weak link in the chain takes down the whole chain

your body is a network of interconnected loops of energy. Not just the physical stuff like blood, lymph, etc, but non physical energy circulating that's invisible to the naked eye. If you can meditate correctly, noble silence of second jhana, or even first jhana, you'll feel these currents and loops of energy, kinaesthetically, as heat, electricity, force, visible light. At various stages when your battery is not fully charged, you'll feel bliss or comfort, that can range anywhere from something like getting a high quality massage when your body is sore, to feeling like your whole body, every cell in your body is experiencing an orgasm. This can last hours, if you keep 8 precepts and brahmacariya well.But blissful side effects only happen when your batter is not fully charged, just like food only tastes good when you're really hungry. Pleasure chemicals in your brain are doled out to induce you to follow biological imperatives. Once your battery is charged, it ceases to dish out the pleasure chemical inducements, or can even issue signals of pain, for example if you overeat.

So the weak link in the chain, especially if it happens in a critical part of the body, like the spine, and wreak all kinds of havoc. I would say for my case, 80% of the solution is due to the additional daily exercise I incorporated into my daily routine that I didn't previously do (daily), and 20% due to chemical multivitamins.

why am I telling you this?

i'd be the last person anyone would expect to have those kinds of weird problems, with the way i eat, exercise, meditate. But it still happened because my vegetarian diet, for a long period mostly vegan, led to nutritional deficiencies (over decades), with my normal body temperature being on the cold side. Hands, feet, ears, get cold easily.

If you do a lot of sitting meditation, and you get cold easily, then the kind of spinal blockage I describe can happen to you too.

By following the solution above, my normal body temperature is starting to gradually rise, and my yoga/stretching is starting to increase my elasticity and range of motion over time. I'd always been puzzled why I plateaud and wasn't improving in the flexibility dept. despite my doing taiji and yoga correctly, ever day. The reason turned out to be simple. Not enough body heat, not a high enough normal sedentary body temperature. And the solution is actually very simple. Follow mayo clinic guidelines on cardio and resistive weight training.

what caused me to make my error?

I thought cardio was just an inefficient wasteful use of valuable energy that would tire me out and cause me to be able to meditate less and need more sleep. That all the taiji and yoga I was doing was more than enough daily exercise.

What I discovered through daily practice (with the fix) is that if done properly, 30min of cardio done with a taiji mentality of complete relaxation, this is not tiring at all, but gives me more energy than when I don't do it.

See the slow jogging, and chi jogging video for some ideas.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1s7fmyVR2v6O3jQl3OsTJfcbJVLn2448n

if you watch how the kenyans jog, that's how good, efficient, relaxed form should look.

I do a type of slow jogging, that I call, qigor gorilla jogging, that's basically a slow version of the olympic kenyan runners. Doesn't even go much faster than walking, and can even be slower than a walking speed, but the full body pushing off the ground fires all the leg muscles, the buttocks, enages the core, elevates the heart rate, works up a light mist of sweat. So relaxed and easy I can do it for hours if I needed to, after 30min every day for a few months, it feels as easy as walking.

better than caffeine

getting enough cardio is much better than caffeine.

(more on this another time)

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