Sorcerer wrote:Concrete medical benefits of Qi Gong p- perhaps with journal publication links.
Helped with IBS, but the benefits went away after I stopped training every day.
One of my teachers has healed some pretty amazing things, but almost all the time it has come with this caveat of "X is why this happened to you, you cannot continue living your life doing X just like nothing was ever wrong, if you dont change this then you wont finish the healing process." And I'm talking like the extent of say having almost fully healed kidney dialysis and the patient feels better so says heck with it, returns to his old very poor diet including greasy foods and no limits on sugar, the affliction returned and the patient says "I dont get it!" *facepalm* And many more similar stories. If one doesnt want to cure the affliction at the root, and instead feeds the root while chopping off branches, then the root will simply continue to grow.
Similar with practice. It is difficult to maintain very high levels of practice in society because we tend to easily forget all the aspects of society that detract from our cultivation. Which is why so many have gone into seclusion to practice.
When you train, you establish a habit energy. In establishing a new habit energy, most often a much greater effort and establishing of the new habit energy is required in order to fully overcome the old habit energies. The afflictions are associated with, flow from, the old bad habit energies. Entropy is a superlatively powerful...force, if you will...
Therefore cultivation is partly a method of fighting the energy vector of entropy, with ordered patterns of energy. How 'much' (think quality as well as quantity) cultivation do you think is necessary to get post this physiospiritual coefficient of friction?
Habit energies are vectored quantities, i.e. they have direction to them. In totally disregarding them, we leave ourselves at the mercy of the waves on the ocean, like floating on a raft. Beginning to train is like adding a rudder and sail. Gaining the upper hand in arranging vectored potentials in a purposefully ordered manner is like putting a propeller engine on the watercraft.
It is no different with thoughtforms. The method to end a recurring thoughtform is to recognize the arising of the energy potential when it arises, arrest it right there, and redirect it to a more useful energetic pattern. Every time it happens. No different than catching oneself thinking while in meditation - the proper corrective action is to simply return to the breath and initiate the mindful breathing protocol. The many logical loops in brain processing route neural feedback from the cranial nerves and enough of that energy potential resonates into higher centers of the brain and manifests random thought in the absence of direction for this relatively unmanifested energy.
When cultivation...hah...when one's
vectored habit-energy reaches a certain threshold, then the situation results that the sensory input is well enough conditioned - and the method of turning the light around at the niwan efficient enough - that there simply winds up being insufficient potential for random thought to manifest itself. That of course does not prevent purposeful thinking, it is more the outcome of the "calm, clear mindscape" that we hear as being a downstream result of practices. I've reached that stage of practice a few times where these events have manifested thusly, the behavior is consistent each time.
With regard to physical effects, another characteristic signpost of relatively deep practice-immersion is an increase in metabolic rate. As lower dantien breathing becomes more and more efficient, it can serve to replace a measure of electrochemical energy we get from digesting food with the electromagnetic energypotential at the lower dt. So when "a quick recharge" is needed, it becomes more efficient (e.g. I drove 7 hours straight once then had a drum performance, was absolutely spent after the drive, to get back in time...after 20 minutes of focused cultivation including lower dt breathing and turning the light around at the niwan, my friend said I looked like an entirely different person, completely refreshed, and the performance went well.) But this general metabolic boost happens strongly and carries forth throughout the entire day...so if the effects seem to drop off sooner than you'd like...well, keep cultivating, brother
Sometimes its easy to stand next to two tall buildings and from directly underneath, they appear to be similar in height. I was next to the WTCs once, and they were so tall, it was difficult to tell how much taller they were than the surrounding buildings. But look from the statue of liberty, and wow, they're darn near twice as tall. So it is with cultivation and how far it is of an "upward" gradient. Are you taking the stairs or the elevator?
Even in mildly complex systems, any outcome is the wrong thing to target, with the process being where the focus should be.