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Hello all,
As I’ve mentioned previously, my main motivation for studying HT was to find a way to manage depression. I initially got some good results working with healing sounds, DHQ, and other “basic” practices. But the real revelation came when I started working with fusion 1. Initially I experienced a degree of emotional stability that was really remarkable (to me). However, over time I feel like I’m losing traction with the practice. I believe Michael refers to this phenomenon in his article on the subject, and the way in which people make initial gains with the practice but seem to level out over time. I’ve had some sense that this is actually an indication that the practice is deepening, and that one is working into progressively deeper layers of emotional processing, and that, perhaps, these deeper layers require more time and effort to achieve resolution, therefore leaving one with the impression that the practice has become less effective. That’s just an idea I’ve entertained and I don’t really know what the answer is. In any event, I’ve taken it as an indication that it is time to keep moving forward and I am starting on fusion 2/3. However, on the initial audio Michael talks about something that might be interpreted as a contraindication to the advanced fusion practices. He talks about how opening the deeper channels leaves them vulnerable to harmful influences in the form of (I believe) negative emotions. He doesn’t really explore that further and it left me wondering how seriously to take that, or if one might need to defer fusion 2/3 practice because of having unresolved emotional issues.
As always, any thoughts appreciated.
elephantHi elephant,
A person is always going to have unresolved emotional issues, it is part of being human. I wouldn’t necessarily let that stop you from moving forward. Yes, if you open the 8 extras, they can get polluted by negative emotions. However, if you don’t open them, then by definition, what are they? 🙂 Closed! Are they not? Plugged with junk! Are they not? 🙂 Right?? 😉
So you may as well start clearing them out.
Michael’s comment is just explaining why the Fusion 1 comes first, because if you have a lot of unresolved emotional issues, then these will act to undo the work you do in Fusion 2/3, by repolluting the channels after you clear them out.
However, part of being a human being means that you will always have unresolved emotional issues. Part of being a human being means that new emotional issues will arise. Does this mean that therefore you never move on? No. It just means that after you get a good chunk cleared out, you do move on, but you will *continue* to need to do the lower level practices as you progress. In other words, just because you move on to Fusion 2/3, doesn’t mean that you are done needing Fusion 1.
The same is true with the grounding practices that precede Fusion 1.
If a person is not grounded, they will be caught in their emotional body, completely hooked by emotions, pulled into all kinds of different directions with no free choice (emotions running the show), pulled into all kinds of crazy storylines in the mind that feed the emotions, and caught in a cycle where one needs to do continuous processing of emotions–like ongoing therapy–with no real progress, freedom, or feeling like you are getting free. A person can’t spend all of their time processing their emotions, it is just not a productive use of time. It’s better to get free from them before doing anything else with them.So for TRUE emotional freedom, one needs to get grounded first. By doing this, you detach from the emotional body, so you are not hooked by your emotions, and you can observe them neutrally without needing to either express them or repress them. Now you are no longer in reactive mode, but you instead are in a place where you have a free choice. Now, at your discretion and leisure, you can harvest this energy via Fusion 1 for later use, or you can simply choose to hold off in addressing it until you have some free time when you can do so. However, idea isn’t a one-time affair. One still needs to REGULARLY do grounding practices to stay grounded, otherwise due to the nature of life, a person will lose this ability. Then back to being hooked by emotions you will be, and you will again start spinning all kinds of crazy storylines in your mind that aggravate your emotions. So it needs to be an on-going practice. In any case, given grounding as a prereq, then you can do Fusion 1 at your discretion, but also regularly, to harvest free energy and process this negative energy in your field. However, in the same way, when you move on to Fusion 2/3, you will need to also do Fusion 1 periodically so that negative emotional energy in your field that continuously arises (due to the nature of being human) doesn’t repollute the channels you just cleared out.
The real point in all of this, is this: unless you stop living your life, you will need to keep doing the earlier practices as you progress on to higher practices, because stuff is always going to keep coming up. It’s the nature of life and the dynamism of change . . . it’s the underlying nature of the Dao, truth be told.
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AS A SIDEBAR:
The biggest mistake I see people making as they progress through the system is missing this bit about needing to keep doing the earlier practices, and especially the bit about staying grounded vis-a-vis ongoing grounding practice. This is the real problem in my view, rather than a concern about resolving everything at a given level. People start getting into the adv. kan&li classes, and–since in the intervening time, they quit focusing on grounding–they are not the least bit grounded, and because kan&li tends to be ungrounding as well as bringing up deeply buried issues, it can cause many people to feel their lives unraveling. I’ve seen so many folks turn into nutcases–either flying into fits of rage, suicidal depression, identity crises, etc. because they were rushing through this advanced stuff without being grounded.
People joke on here about how I make such a big deal about being grounded.
But to me, it is no joke. I take it very seriously.
I’ve seen too many people have serious problems, to where they really need “therapeutic/psychiatric help”, because of things unraveling as they progressed. If a person is deeply grounded, they can handle whatever comes up, no matter how severe, because they can maintain a neutral detached perspective. If a person is not grounded, it can be a real disaster.So, as an instructor, I consider it a strong ethical responsibility on my part to make sure folks progress through the system in such a way that they can handle what arises.
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In any case–getting back to your initial question–my recommendation would be to:
1. Go ahead and do the Fusion 2/3.
2. Keep doing the earlier practices, e.g. Fusion 1, and esp. grounding practices.As you are learning Fusion 2/3, you probably don’t need to do Fusion 1 daily. Maybe twice a week. But grounding practices, I recommend daily . . . regardless of how high you progress. You don’t necessarily need to be gung-ho and do as many as I do daily (I have different goals currently), but I’d strongly encourage a daily grounding practice of at least 30 minutes (for anybody). Then add whatever alchemy meditations you want onto this.
Qi,
StevenI do not want, due to the ongoing arguments elsewhere on this forum, to offend you by posting this reply. I have been reading over some of these and am going to go ahead and say something.
This is all being made WAY TOO COMPLICATED.
For example, many people are depressed because they feel cut off or alone.
The point here is that the “chi” fields connect souls, inclusive of the dream plane.
That may sound like foo foo if you are not familiar with it, but it is seriously that important.
You have two options: 1) cut off 2) connected on internal soul antenna station which runs on empathic resonance..
The reality of a biological soul which works through REAL resonance, and a genuine spirit connected across that space is, largely, the point.
That biological level of soul connects through the middle cauldron as well as the faculty of humor.
Obviously many would argue that’s all chemical or neural imprint. It’s not and it takes work to get there. Steaming will get all the other exercises up and running. Nothing is going to explode or be worth dragging around in circles of over complication and excessive analysis.
I’ll be nice: You don’t need 4 $300 lessons to gradually get somewhere.
Does anyone move the chi with the hands in cross mandala?
I do it in this way and seems works for me …I haven’t tried that, but it seems like a reasonable extension of the basic practice. I suspect that anyone who works with these practices over time will at some point find themselves introducing some smaller or larger variations into the practices. Viktor has shared some of his experiences with this. And I confess that I have experimented on occasion. Of course some will invoke “the tradition” against this kind of thing, but I believe both the recent and remote history of qigong shows that there has never been any kind of fixed, inflexible baseline of tradition. And the individual “practices” themselves are more like a set of tools that we can learn to use in a flexible way. Michael actually teaches fusion this way. It becomes quite natural and intuitive to begin to find new combinations. This will not seem surprising when one considers that ultimately we are just communicating with our own energy.
Hi elephant, thank you for sharing. It seems to me that you are on the right track and personally I am encouraged to work more on my own development.
I don’t really know Fusion, but since it is split in three parts, it gives an impression that it will be complete with the rest of its parts. So maybe in the meantime you might want also to include the other ‘complete’ practices like DHQ and Primordial Qi Gong (which I would recommend anyway for your original goal). If you haven’t done Primordial yet, I would recommend it to you as it is very multidimensional in its results, having an effect in all the layers: emotional, mental, physical, spiritual… And I learned it in two hours from the DVD. Afterwards you can refine it, but the most of it you have on the DVD.
I respect Stevens perspective on grounding very much as well.
In the end I think the idea is to progress in a sustainable way and as comfortable as possible, not necessarily fast. So don’t worry if you don’t do it all in one day and be open to all the possibilities that might bring you wellbeing. Sometimes that could be even basic techniques or something outside of your practice might trigger that change.Thanks Victor. I have been doing PQ for some time now. I would say it is my most consistent practice, and I do it almost every day. I do it even when I feel I can do nothing else, because I just put myself into the flow of those graceful movements and it just carries me through the form. However, I’ve never felt that I’m getting the depth of experience with the practice that others speak about. Yes, I find it helpful, but nothing like what you, Michael, and others have praised so highly about it. I’m open to the possibility that some of this effect simply remains unconscious for me, and that some of its depths will be revealed with time and practice. In the meantime, I persist with my experiment.
Have you taken any of the live courses? Michael adds little things at each live course I’ve attended to the Primordial practice that power it up significantly. PQ is speaking to you or you wouldn’t be practising the way you describe. Sometimes PQ is the only form I have time for but I almost never skip it because all the formulas are wrapped up in it.
Some of this is just time.
I remember when I first learned Primordial, I remember thinking “what’s the big deal with this form? I don’t find it as phenomenal as everyone else seems to be making it out to be. I don’t see what the big deal is.” In fact, I almost didn’t even like it.
But then, as time went on, even though I didn’t see what the big deal with the form was, I found myself doing it daily. I started finding it was the form I was doing the most. I still didn’t see what the big deal was, but strangely enough I was doing it a lot.
Then I started to realize . . . “if I’m doing this all the time, maybe it is because it is doing something good for me and my shen are asking for it.” I started to pay attention more closely. I noticed that it always made me feel better and seemed to brighten my mood. Even though I wasn’t conscious of what it was, it seemed to be giving me what I needed. Over time, I also noticed that it seemed to be a strong player in expanding my consciousness and accelerating my spiritual evolution. Consequently, I’ve found it to be one of the most important tools for progress.
My point in this long story is that, while now I think it is phenomenal and give it glowing reviews like everyone else, when I first learned it back in 2007, my attitude was almost the opposite. 🙂
So give it time . . .
S
I haven’t taken the live course. I look forward to finding an opportunity to do that. I’m sure it would be beneficial. But you make an interesting point, as does Steven, about what impels one to return to a given practice over and over again. I’ll have to observe more carefully.
elephantRecently I have become more interested in this grounding and practicing it more thoroughly because it has always been a weak spot of mine. Here are some of my ideas that may help:
1. Different techniques work better for different people. Sitting at imagining roots coming out of my feet doesn’t seem to work for me, mainly because it is a visualization, and I’ve never found it helpful to use the mind to ground the mind, I always find it easier to let the body ground the mind.
2. Purging energy can make it easier to ground. Releasing energy from my feet into the ground while standing, not using my head but my dantien to direct all the energy into my body into the ground for 15 mins or so helps lots if i have excessive energy. I get warm / hot when i do this.
3. Vipassana or watching the physical sensations of your breath in and out of your nose, or feeling your clothes over your body in daily activities I find very good for grounding. It is physical and brings me into the physical. Plus it’s easy to do throughout the day
4. Ive started practicing inner smile differently, instead of smiling to my organs either with energy from 3rd eye or dantien, Im teaching my organs to smile out and release energy by themselves. Now i think about it this is probably how i should have been doing it all along. It is releasing or using the energy.
5. Healing sounds, i feel, improves the conductivity of the facia around the organs providing a better conductor so more energy can be released at a higher rate. More releasing of energy means more calmness and easier to become grounded.
Unless I have the spare time of a monk, it becomes very difficult to ground myself if i’ve done too much. Hopefully as this new style of inner smile improves and i can expend more energy through the practice i can bring in more and have a more effective means to vent it out faster = get higher and coming down in time for bed 🙂
You give some good suggestions for folks . . .
>>>I’ve never found it helpful to use the
>>>mind to ground the mind, I always find
>>>it easier to let the body ground the mind.Exactly. This is precisely the reason why practices that focus on getting into your body are so potent, e.g. the “Physical Body & Grounding Curriculum”. When I teach standing meditation for example (ala Yiquan or IS1), I *do not* have people doing alchemy when doing it, for exactly the reason you mention. The activity of the mind acts in cross-purposes to the grounding. For grounding, in my experience, it is much better to do standing meditation in “Zen way”, when attention is focused on the breath in the lower dantian and when the mind wanders via thoughts, you return your attention to your breath. This way you are not fueling mental activity, and you are simply allowing the energy of the earth under your feet to be the fundamental player in the game. In so doing, the earth does the work for you.
>>>Purging energy can make it easier to ground.
>>>Healing sounds, i feel, improves the conductivity
>>>of the facia around the organs providing a better
>>>conductor so more energy can be released at a
>>>higher rate. More releasing of energy means
>>>more calmness and easier to become grounded.This is primary reason why, as a linear course structure, QF1-2 often come before the material of QF3-4 and the “Physical Body and Grounding Curriculum”. When your body begins detoxing and moving energy, grounding is easier. So the QF1-2 makes grounding more effective. Of course, if a new person had more time, learning them both simultaneously would be optimal. Getting into your body is the most important thing a person can do, in my view, but I digress . . .
>>>watching the physical sensations of your breath
>>>in and out of your nose, or feeling your clothes
>>>over your body in daily activities I find
>>>very good for grounding It is physical and
>>>brings me into the physical. Plus it’s easy
>>>to do throughout the dayYes, anything a person can do to get into their body and out of their head is going to be supportive for grounding. You and I are on the same page. These are all good suggestions for folks.
It’s clear that via some sincere practice on your part that you are starting to get a good sense of what this is all about. Keep it up!
Qi,
Steven
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