notes from recent Daoism seminar.

[Trip]

The following is not an endorsement.

Just thought some of you who follow this thread would find it of interest that Stuart Alve Olson is offering an online class on Daoist Sexual Arts.



Here are some edited excerpts from the webpage:

No matter your age or physical condition, these classes provide useful information on how to apply sexual energy and methods for both restoring and revitalizing your quality of life. Health begins with acquiring sexual vitality and accumulating qi. These three classes will give you the necessary tools for accomplishing both.

1st Class: Rosy Clouds
This class will focus on the sexual methods and principles from Li Qingyun, the 250-year-old man. The premise of Rosy Clouds is to engage in sexual activity according to the natural changes of nature. This class contains a great deal of information on this subject, which Yang Sen did not include in his book, The Immortal.
Yang Sen had discussed these teachings in great detail with Master T.T. Liang—who, in turn, explained the methods to Stuart. The Rosy Cloud teachings are primarily about employing sexual activity to increase longevity.

2nd Class: The Simple Girl Counsels
The Su Nu Jing (The Simple Girl Classic) is one of the most popular Chinese bedchamber texts, based on instructions (counsels) from Su Nu to the Yellow Emperor (Huang Di). Stuart will go over all five chapters to explain the essential teachings as well as put the methods in a practical context for couples. Special attention will be given on the Secrets for Female and Male Longevity, Increasing Sexual Prowess, and the Eight Benefits (sexual intercourse methods) practice. The Plain Girl Counsels are incredible instructions on sexual energy and activity for increasing health and vitality.

3rd Class: Harmonizing the Yin and Yang
This class is based on two source texts for the White Tigress and Jade Dragon teachings. The first text, The Correct Course for Female Practice covers ten processes for reduction of the menstrual flow, harmonizing emotions, and nourishing the yang spirit. The second text, Summary on Gathering the True Essence covers Nine Fundamentals for Gathering Essence and 17 counsels on sexual activity for couples. The Harmonizing the Yin and Yang class contains a great deal of information on both health and the internal alchemy aspects of sexual practice. This class may run longer than two hours because of the information needed to be discussed.

http://www.valleyspiritarts.com/shop/da ... e-classes/

[Wanderingdragon]

Haha it has been a con scions effort not take this thread to the Taoist sexual gynastics, it is a different sect all together.

[vagabond]

ah! i don't wanna give myself a hernia!

geez this shit is weird

[D_Glenn]

ah! i don't wanna give myself a hernia!

geez this shit is weird

That's why Jinbao is adamant about FIRST(and only, in a sense) focus on strengthening the body, through standing practices (zhan zhuang) and circle walking (xing zhuang). Really take the time (everyday, for a few years) to really, properly strengthen the whole body and especially the muscles of the pelvic floor, (I've just referred to them as a basin but like the woven basket, I mentioned in the other thread, the muscles of the pelvic floor make a dome when contracted, and it's eventually a more passive strength after you practice it for a long time, but a good basket also has a preformed dome in the bottom to make it strong, otherwise the basket will eventually just blow-out the bottom.) It's also important to take the time to close down every exercise and make sure everything returns to normal, posture returns to normal and, basically, having the feeling of being uplifted (qi is upright), awareness returns to normal, no feeling sluggish, really focus on stretching the arms above your head, like when getting out of bed in the morning. If the qi is moving around on it's own accord, then it should only take 1 or 2 closing repetions to return to normal.

Just worry about the physical stuff, strengthening everything, the qi will naturally do what it does, or needs to do, the physical postures only 'daoyin' (guid and lead - like helping a beautiful, elegantly dressed women, to get out of a car), it's very subtle. Qi shouldn't be forced, muscles can be forced but you also shouldn't do that. In the Zhuang practices, we're focusing on developing the type 1 muscle fibers, which can be strengthened everyday, but at first your type 2 muscle fibers will be trying to do the work, so the for the first 2 weeks or so there should be some serious 'progressions' starting with very little time (90 seconds) and very little isometric tension just relaxing and releasing anything that's cramping, even skipping a day or two if you're really sore, to eventual 5 minutes per posture with full, isolated muscle tension/ tautness. This may take 2 weeks or it may take 2 months. As you're sort of re-wiring your type 1 muscles to only contract, and support the structure, while leaving your type 2 fibers relaxed, and ready to be utilized if there's actual movement to be done, which are used in striking drills and strengthened with weapon/ heavy weapon exercises.

The problem is that there's hundreds of books that tell and instruct people to use their mind (Yi) to guide their qi around these illustrated loops, and this is the LAST thing you want to be doing, because it's really amplifying a 'reverse flow' in the Ren Meridian. And there's really no mention, in those books, of getting, or even knowing, that the flow has returned to normal after the practice, and since people are intentionally moving qi around, it may not return to it's normal autonomic movements, no matter how many repetitions of the closing exercises the person does. Following misguided practices is one of the first causes of "Qi Gong Sickness", and is rampant in China, and possibly rampant in the Western countries, as there's even more people who don't really know 'Cause and Effect' over here.

People think that the years of extensive basic practices in CIMA and Daoist cultivation, were done to test the students dedication or loyalty but it's actually done to strengthen and build a rock solid foundation of muscle, bone, tendon, ligaments, blood flow, primo-vascular system flow, then qi flow. It takes 3 years to build a normal, properly functioning body, but it only takes 1 day ( 3years + 1 day) to learn how to move qi, but without those previous 3 years of practice then the movement of qi won't return to normal because there is no normal, it's just 'deviated' (pian) from that point onward where you've brought it under your somatic control, even if it somehow returns to an autonomic movement, it's still in an unhealthy body, or unstable vessel.

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[Wanderingdragon]

Very good information, I am curious is this just research or have you practical experience with what you have offered. If you have practical experience , it would behoove us all if you could share in laymen's terms the feelings that you have personally felt in the process of your exercise. As the strengthening you speak is still part of the physical mastery, and to do so I would like to know of the connection of the three dan tiens in the process. I queried earlier in this thread if anyone had experienced the necessity of closing off the gates and if so what might that process be, here in mentioning the shutting down process it automatically calls on the opening by default. I appreciate the disclaimer and realize any thing you offer further may still be opinion but it is relevant to this discourse. The three Dan Tiens was the basis of this thread and they absolutely key to understanding any of this.

[D_Glenn]

Very good information, I am curious is this just research or have you practical experience with what you have offered. If you have practical experience , it would behoove us all if you could share in laymen's terms the feelings that you have personally felt in the process of your exercise. As the strengthening you speak is still part of the physical mastery, and to do so I would like to know of the connection of the three dan tiens in the process. I queried earlier in this thread if anyone had experienced the necessity of closing off the gates and if so what might that process be, here in mentioning the shutting down process it automatically calls on the opening by default. I appreciate the disclaimer and realize any thing you offer further may still be opinion but it is relevant to this discourse. The three Dan Tiens was the basis of this thread and they absolutely key to understanding any of this.

Practical experience? Yes. There's two different sets of feelings. There's what you have to do for the posture requirements, I've already described the tongue, the wrapping of the girdle meridian, in another thread, the pelvic floor is harder to describe; then there's the other feelings of 'opening the 3 gates', (I've never heard of closing them, as they're naturally closed during the time when you're awake.) which I've written about it in various threads but never really pointing out that it is what I feel, but it's also what my teacher feels, and these feelings are the same as described in a roughly 600 year old book.

In my practice, and our BGZ paradigm/ model of practice, the 3 dantians aren't the same, they share the same name 'elixir field' but they're very different from one another. I've described the lower dantian in detail and this is the one you want to focus on. The middle dantian is more associated with your pulmonary vascular/ circulation system and you definitely don't want to screw around with that, and the upper one is the cavities in your brain that surround the pituitary gland (mud pill) and pineal gland (red sand pill), and you kind of what to also focus on this one because it's your mental facilities, and the source of important hormones in your body, all of which naturally decline with age, so we want to go against (ni) the natural order of things (aging) so we seek a different natural-state (ziran) and work to keep the upper dantian healthy via building and maintaining a healthy and strong lower dantian, which will ensure a greater abundance of the body's vital hormones for a longer period of time, meaning you'll look and feel younger long after your high school classmates have started to wither away. So linking your lower and upper dantian is the idea of opening the 3 gates/ passes, first you have to open the 3 superficial passes in the back, and only then can you proceed to open the internal 3 passes, but this will all come about on it's own accord, and after significant amounts of time spent practicing, putting your mind on a process that was only, a kind of metaphor, some 1500 years ago, will probably only bring you 'deviation/ side-tracked/ lost' from the path/road you're on. Think of a forest, and winding through the forest's trees is a path (The Dao), and you want to get through this forest by following this slightly trampled down path where people have been walking for hundreds of years. Now, in these current times, the path is barely discernible, and you have to brush away leaves, step over roots, and really struggle to see and find the path. But when you 'Deviate' from the path you just end up hacking your way the thick forest, going sideways instead of forwards through the forest, lost, and maybe you will circle back around and find the true path again, but you may have gone backwards and find yourself having to redo the path, only to end up getting lost again once you come back to the point where you deviated from it.

There's a decent number of paths through the forest, daoist and buddhist, but they're miles apart from one another, and you can only walk on one path to get through the forest. But getting lost, cut up by thorn bushes, finding herbs but not knowing whether they good for your particular body, at that particular time, can be like ingesting poison, etc. are all possibilities no matter what path you are on.

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[Wanderingdragon]

Ok, Now I'm still back at the three passes, I'm not trying to get the mud pill or the red sand pill, or regulate any hormones, nothing fancy yet, just want to connect the three passes , the connection, without which no thing , no one thing can flow. how do we connect them ?

[D_Glenn]

Ok, Now I'm still back at the three passes, I'm not trying to get the mud pill or the red sand pill, or regulate any hormones, nothing fancy yet, just want to connect the three passes , the connection, without which no thing , no one thing can flow. how do we connect them ?

I've already written extensive texts about this on rsf and on my blog, but it all requires some knowledge from the person reading it, and an already strong personal practice, for it to be really understood.

So there is still some catching you up to speed on the basic terminology, that we need to do, before I can even point you to those threads. For starters I didn't write "Regulate" hormones, that's misleading, we can only maybe and hopefully support their roles and functions in the human body.

The pituitary gland is literally like a small rolled up ball of mud, so they called it the mud [rolled into a tea]pill. The Pineal gland is literally like a red piece of small rice, which breaks into smaller bits/ disintegrates like a clump of sand, so they called it the red sand pill or grain. These aren't pills as in medicine that you will "get" or acquire, and your body is getting these hormones all the time, day in, day out but these are more like signalling hormones, where for example, in say, TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) it's your actual thyroid glands in your neck that are producing thyroid hormones to warm up your body every morning, so hormone health is dependent up the whole body health, not just the upper dantian.

Second is, you don't want to "connect" the three passes, think of these passes as a chain of 3 mountain peaks that are already linked together, connected in a row, and you have to hike over each one in a consecutive order. Each one is a mountain passage, and at the front of these passes, down in the lower valleys between them is a gate and a guard, who won't let you climb higher up if there's a snow storm higher up, so you just have to wait at the gate until the weather clears above, or you're resting up from just climbing and hiking over the previous mountain passage. So this time is also the practice time in an individual practice session and it's also the months of practice you have to do until the metaphorical spring time comes around and the winter weather clears out, 100 days of consecutive practice.

These passages aren't normally open, so getting them to open isn't really "without which no thing , no one thing can flow". They do naturally open at night, in a healthy person, usually within the first 2 hours of falling asleep. The trick is to open them and pass through them during the time when you're awake and practicing your gongfu.

It takes a lot of patience and hard work to basically 'hack into/ hijack' your bodies normal physiological functions, but it's eventually and essentially like getting twice as much sleep as everybody else. But it's not easy, if you saw the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, it's like in the second one when they're crossing the mountain passage to get a shortcut where the ledges are small and one slight misstep and you fall. It's also like the Daoist mountains in China where there's the wooden planks and chains to get around most of the mountain, but these 3 passes are like the places where there's only holes carved into the mountainside and where you need to put and place each foot and hand in order to navigate your way around the sheer cliff face. The correct navigation of every foot and hand hold has to be memorized and known ahead of time before you start, or else you fall when you get to a point where you can't move forward, or move backward. This was intentional so enemies couldn't follow the priests to certain places of retreat. Learning where those holes are, and how to navigate through them is the time you put into practice before you even start. There's a huge amount of extremely boring, bitter and painful practice before your body will start moving through these passages. You can look at is you need to illicit a cortisol dump before your body will start, and then you need a really healthy and well-conditioned body in order for that cortisol to not just cause inflammation. Your body needs to be able to easily hold a posture that would debilitate a person who isn't conditioned to hold that posture, and that way you can trick your body into quickly moving past that trauma phase and into the recovery and rebuilding phase where hormones like LH and HGH are released.


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[Wanderingdragon]

Whoa! What is this debilitating posture ? I know this is all elementary but I'm lost, I haven't followed you blog.

[D_Glenn]

Whoa! What is this debilitating posture ? I know this is all elementary but I'm lost, I haven't followed you blog.

Haha. Debilitating is the word I can think of, off the top of my head, to describe it, I'll have to look at a thesaurus and see if I can find a better word. It's the Lion posture that I'm thinking of and if done correctly it's really working the whole body, but even in the beginning it hurts. Just last week I had my roommate do the posture with me for 10 minutes before he went to the gym. He was like "well I guess tonights going to be a shoulder workout", I'm like "actually that's not even the muscles that you want to be tensing", but at first you have to strengthen the shoulders before you can get to the real work of building the pecs and lats. It killed him though. He's used to normal weightlifting and body weight exercises.

"Elementary"?

I think this stuff is really advanced. I get PM's from people who've been doing this stuff for on average 30 years or more and they all thank me for writing about these things and clearing some key stuff up for them. This is more like masters degree material IMO.


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[Wanderingdragon]

Walking or standing ?

[D_Glenn]

Walking or standing ?

Ideally both using the same 'Lion opens its mouth' posture. But Circle Walking has its own difficulties to overcome, besides just the posture strengthening, so at first you could just do the Standing but opening the 'Interior Three Passes' requires 'movement' (xing, as in xing zhuang), so we just do both from the beginning because the learning curve of Circle Walking is so long, subtle physical things you need to develop - like better equilibrium so you don't get dizzy when turning around in a circle, etc.

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[flints]

i have been reading this with rapt attention. My tcc practice has perhaps been the opposite. My teacher concentrates simply on opening, opening leading to relaxing, relaxing leading to internal connection and more power. Where you and he come together is in this statement:

"the physical postures only 'daoyin' (guid and lead - like helping a beautiful, elegantly dressed women, to get out of a car), it's very subtle."

Unfortunately it is very difficult to evaluate accomplishment without meeting and touching, but I am certainly grateful for the information to think about and reflect on both in thought and practice.

[D_Glenn]

Very good information, I am curious is this just research or have you practical experience with what you have written[?]

Basically I've been following/ reading about Daoism since about 1986. I first learned about the existence of Baguazhang around 1994 and finally started learning some Gao Yisheng BGZ around 1996. But it wasn't until I met Xie Peiqi and He Jinbao in early 1997 that I realized the actual mental and physical connection that Baguazhang had with Daoism. And I've been playing around with all the internal biomechanics and the mental side of Daoism ever since then.

He Jinbao has saved me huge amounts of what would have been wasted time, in both the physical work and the mental side of the pursuit.

Ever since I joined EF around 2004 I've tried to only write and post things about the martial/ biomechanical side of our BGZ because I didn't want Jinbao to be connected with the 'Qi Huggers' in any way or any how, (we're already plagued with enough hippies as it is, just being by being a BGZ style). But now that there's a bunch of easily available clips of him on youtube, I think it's safe to start writing about more of the Daoist aspect and share my own experiences on that side of things. But the actual practices are no different from the martial side of things, that I've already written about in the past, as it's the same practices that cultivate both aspects- the physical/martial and mental/health or virtue.

The important thing to note, is that this is not really a lineage of Daoism. It's a lineage of Baguazhang that just happens to contain, within it, a very good Daoist based practice, which, through some research, we can find a probable and strong link back to 郜云龙 Gao Yunlong and his student 杨士海 Yang Shihai who blended a Daoist school with Chinese Martial arts who were around from about 1650 - 1750 ad.

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[D_Glenn]

i have been reading this with rapt attention. My tcc practice has perhaps been the opposite. My teacher concentrates simply on opening, opening leading to relaxing, relaxing leading to internal connection and more power. Where you and he come together is in this statement:

"the physical postures only 'daoyin' (guid and lead - like helping a beautiful, elegantly dressed women, to get out of a car), it's very subtle."

Unfortunately it is very difficult to evaluate accomplishment without meeting and touching, but I am certainly grateful for the information to think about and reflect on both in thought and practice.

Going on six generations now, we've learned in our BGZ, that if you practice extreme hardness in your zhan zhuang (standing; stillness practice), that then you can be truly soft and relaxed when you are practicing your forms (movement practice), and can then make full usage of both extreme softness and extreme hardness (hard and soft mutually supporting one another) when in an actual fight.

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