Good .02 as always David
To extrapolate on spending money to make money, I've heard it put in a qi-frame of moving qigong earns the money, meditation puts it in the bank. or something like that
Xav, unfortunate that you dont have a quiet environment to meditate - I'd recommending going for it anyway. You still manage to get to sleep at night, right? One doesnt need a pristine environment, though those are always best...yet tough to find. Ear plugs might help, but with some practice you wont even notice the background noise. There's no wrong way to eat a reese's though
one can always enjoy it no matter the method used to smash it up, get it past the taste buds, and down to zee stomach! Try starting out with ~10 minutes of embryonic breathing after brushing up, before you hit the sack. 10 minutes is easy to get in, and once you've done it for a few weeks (=building the habit) then your body will more readily make up excuses to
do it rather than avoid it! It should really make your hard qigong better if nothing else. I've gotten to the point a couple times where I began supplanting percentages of my sleep with deep meditation - I started doing that when I noticed that the deep meditation (eb, longevity ~minute breaths) I was doing was actually recharging me more than normal sleep. I'd imagine there's a point where it might be able to fully replace it, but you'd have to do a ton of it and get to a level far higher than I'm at to do so
Unfortunately I'm not immune to life's distractions though, those have knocked my practice out of whack more than once, which is why I've gone back to the practice and re-build the results...
I have a good turbulence ending breath method I'll post up if you guys are interested, good way to get to 'dantien breath'...and only dantien breath, not nose/sinus/throat/bronchi/lung breath
That +embryonic breath+longevity breath=growing a huge qi ball, breath feels like it stops (not to mention time) and metabolism downshifts & hits the gas! At least for me when I practice that combo for a decent period of time and I can ramp up sessions deeper and deeper. If I hadnt done it during more than a few separate periods of time, I'd say it might be a coincidence...but I'm just entering another swing of it and I'm sure I will get another metabolic boost - funny thing with me is that its been an all of a sudden one session clicks and wow!?
Its in seated meditation where you'll develop better internal sensitivity, I'm sure with some practice you should be able to see the benefits. Maybe I'm just overly biased towards seated meditation - conversely, I dont have time to do any martial arts! hehehe
(would love to have time to learn bagua and taiji...perhaps in the future...) I am a strong proponent of a good metabolic yin&yang - working out/martial arts/moving qigong gives your body a boost, high reference frame, quiet meditation gives it a low frame of reference, and the body seems to naturally snap into the middle, where you would like it to be.