Personal Heavenly Mtn Report (long)

Hello all!

My apologies to those that haven’t been able to contact me.

Since coming home three weeks ago, I’ve been occupied with a
number of things: visiting friends, running errands, catching
up on stuff I was behind on, feeling the need to withdraw, etc.

As to the report:

I went to Heavenly Mountain for the first three
weeks of the program. Well, I originally only planned for two,
but you know how things go . . .

I signed up for Mantak Chia’s course on DNA Repair, Immune Qigong,
and Taoist Yoga the first week and Michael’s Qigong
Fundamentals 1-4 the second week.

So I got in my car, and down I drove.
It’s about a 13 hour drive from where I live, but I didn’t
really mind. Driving can be very peaceful and meditative.

I arrived at the Heavenly Mtn. gate, and the guard comes out
immediately and has me fill out a form indicating my reasons
for being there and how long I’m staying. He returns inside, and
I expect him to open the gate. I sit there, and nothing happens.
I do have a code to get in, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to
use it. I park my car at the gate, and walk back to the guard’s
house and ask if I should use my code. Without answering, he sticks
his arm out the window holding a remote control, and pointing it
at the gate he presses a button–to which it opens. I walk back to
my car, get in, and as I start up the car, the gate closes. I
walk back down and explain that it closed. He repeats the procedure,
and I RUN back to my car, and pull through in time.

Later, I find out that the code will just open it, so from now on
if I need to leave, I’m dodging that guy!

I rented a single room, and I got a double-occupancy room with just me.
What is more, is that the room that I got happens to face the mountains.
Breathtaking!

The bathroom is adjacent to the second bedroom, so I decide to sleep there.
The second bedroom has a “funny” feel to it, kind of a not-so-welcoming
feeling–just weird energy, indescribable. The first bedroom feels OK, but
I’m stubborn. Of course my stubbornness leads to a week / a week and a
half of sleepless nights . . .

Every night at 2:07am, I would wake up with a violent start and I would
lurch forward in my bed with a terrifying feeling of falling into
a deep abyss.

Did I enjoy it? No. Did it bother me? NO. It wasn’t really that
big of a deal. I figured that if it were REALLY traumatic I would
just sleep in the other room, but I was stubborn. To be honest, it
was sort of entertaining. Like clockwork, every morning at 2:07am
I would wake with this phenomenon.

Here’s where it gets weird. A week into the classes, I’m eating a meal,
and just chatting about normal stuff, when someone mentions that they
haven’t slept a single night since they arrived; that every morning
they wake up at the same time . . . the clock reads 2:07am! My jaw
hits the floor! I share my experience, and before long a lot of
people are sharing similar experiences.

Finally, I make a mission to eradicate/clear the energy in my room
and make things normal. I do a little ceremony in my room, and do
a Yang Inner Smile to the room and the energy lifts. The room
feels better. I sleep all through the night with no problem.

In fact, I notice that the energy in general has improved over the
first week. The energy in the meditation sanctuary felt uncomfortable
for the first few days, and then it flattened by the end of the
week. By the time the second week had begun with Michael, the
sanctuary started to feel really good. The same could be said with the
individual bedrooms, albeit it just took a little longer. In my
case, I had felt the weird energy weaken, and then my concerted
effort forced it out.

The morning after my first “problem-free” night,
John the bookstore guy, who had been collecting a large number of such
stories decided to bring it up during Michael’s class–a particularly
dumb thing to do in my opinion because it just fed people’s paranoia,
and to be honest the problem was taking care of itself as the energy
was becoming more grounded, but oh well. Michael showed us some
grounding exercises and adequately addressed the issue.

SIDE COMMENT:
For those that are planning on going in the future, DON’T
worry about such things. This was just a side-effect of the
transcendental meditators that lived there previously. They
spent their time bringing up energy above and away from the earth,
and so the energy at Heavenly Mtn. had no grounding and no connection
to earth. Aside from feeling weird, lack of earth causes
PARANOIA and WORRY. Lack of earth energy feeding the
kidneys causes FEAR. All bizarre phenonenon were, in my opinion,
caused by those three emotions becoming highly charged due
to lack of connection to earth energy
and the weird field of energy hovering above the earth.

However, the main practice rooms had corrected by the end of the
first week (due to all of the practitioners), and by the middle
of the second week, the bedrooms were correcting also. I stayed
three weeks total, and slept fine the last 1.5-2 weeks, and would
have stayed longer if I could have!

OK, ENOUGH with the energy issue already; we’ve corrected it!
On to the practices . . .

The first week was Mantak Chia’s course “DNA Repair, Immune Qigong,
and Taoist Yoga”.

Mantak Chia is an extremely warm and friendly guy. I was happy to
have met him. He just exudes a lot of positive energy, and you
can really tell that he genuinely cares about teaching students
the most that he possibly can teach, and genuinely has an
interest in seeing his students do well. He was a little hard
to understand at times due to having a thick accent, but it
was more than made up for by his enthusiasm and knack for
repetition of key elements and ideas.

Wow did he cover a lot of different ground in that course. In a lot
of ways it was a great overview of the whole Healing Tao system.
He went through the Six Healing Sounds and Inner Smile, he gave an
introduction to Tao Yin (floor stretching yoga), covered some
aspects of Fusion, and at one point had us connecting our sexual
energy with the Pole Star (which I assume from my limited understanding
is part of the Kan and Li formulas). He had us do laughing qigong,
bone beating, organ pounding and pushing with a lot of belching.
The latter being one of his favorite techniques for detoxifying–he
really liked belching! He also gave some individual Chinese astrology
readings (for extra charge) and gave you the opportunity to ask
some personal questions that you might have.

He was a very kind man, and the genuine article!

The second week, I took Qigong Fundamentals 1-4 with Michael. Michael
had led the morning warmups during the first week with Mantak Chia,
so those of us who were staying on another week were familiar with him.
He is highly educated, and you can tell that he understands how
western people think. For one, they have a lot of questions, so
Michael solution is to just bombard you with as much verbal information
as he can, either while doing the practices, or during resting periods
where he gives kind of an oral lecture. Of course most people respond
by soaking up as much as they can, like a toddler that finds a 50-gallon
drum of candy.

I had come to the retreats having purchased the Fundamentals in advance,
and had practiced the Qigong Fundamentals 1-2 prior to coming, so that
part was not new at all. Mainly I just used the first couple of days
for minor refinements. It wasn’t until we began the Qigong Fundamentals
3-4 that the real new stuff began for me. The breathing techniques from
Qigong Fundamentals 3 seemed surreal to me, and in fact, I had quite
the reaction on to them on the day that we learned that part.

We were all lying on our backs, and we were instructed to practice breathing
in a certain way OUT our mingmen. As I started doing it, I began to get
nauseous. After a short while, this passed, and was replaced by an intense
FEAR. I started to feel like I was having some kind of panic attack.
It was not enjoyable to say the least. Then he had us reverse it, and breathe
INTO our mingmen. All fear instantly dissipated and was replaced with
a peaceful bliss-type feeling. Not wanting to waste other peoples’ time
with my nonsense, and not sure what to make of it, I waited until
break, and told Michael what had happened. To my surprise, about my
fear response he said, “That’s great! Bring it up to everyone
after break.” Of course, it was a good thing–as it was my body needing
to clear some stuck sick chi in the kidney region.

Then we finished with Qigong Fundamentals 4, which involved bone beating
and rooting postures . . . kind of a lead-in into the Iron Shirt course.
Well, I didn’t want to leave at all at the end of the second week, so
the Iron Shirt course started to look real tempting. The problem
was that the course was going to run from Fri-Wed (July 4), and my summer
job was going to start Tue July 3 with an informational meeting that
I was giving as a supervisor. Well, a quick moment’s thought made
me realize that I could email the people I was supervising, and put
the meeting off until the Thurs July 5 (since Wed was the fourth).
Doing this would allow me to stay another week.

Did I want to stay another week? Most definitely.
Moreover, due to my graduate school situation, I knew that most likely
next summer would potentially be out for me to come to a retreat,
since I have a foreign language requirement that I need to fulfill.
Yes, I can quite possibly make it to a weekend workshop somewhere,
but probably not a retreat.

Considering this, off the email was sent!
I then immediately signed up for a week of Iron Shirt with Marie Favorito.
The first morning practice was a killer. Marie is extremely flexible.
I was not. 30 minutes into practice, and my muscles are dying. I
made a big mistake I’m thinking. After morning practice, I felt completely
exhausted. I felt like I was done for the day. I was thinking–I’m
going to eat breakfast, and then I’ve got 3 more hours of practice!
Oh no! Boot camp! I ate breakfast, and went to practice. The first
hour and a half were torture. Then, strangely enough, the fatigue
and soreness vanished. I started to feel better . . . physically
anyway . . .

Then the next morning, the emotional drama began. Upon waking, I
felt really REALLY depressed and lonely. I felt like, “I want to
go home! (sniff sniff).” Then I thought, how silly that would
be. I’d leave, waste a lot of money, still feel sad at home, and
being even more depressed that I left. I decided to stay, but
it was hard. I’ve never felt so sad and lonely ever. Strangely
enough, by mid-morning, my blues were completely and totally gone.
I felt great! It must have been some kind of rapid detox.

From that point on, until the end of the course, I never felt better.
I felt great physically, and nothing seemed as difficult as that
first morning practice, and emotionally I was on cloud nine.
I was loving it.

Marie is great! She gave all of us a lot of personal and individual
attention. We would be put into an Iron Shirt posture, and she
would come around and individually correct everyone’s posture to
the tiniest degree. She had a lighthearted attitude and coy sense
of humor that made a way of making the most strenuous postures
not seem so bad. She was very good at giving explanations while
in postures, and then without breaking a beat, mention someone’s
name and say “tuck in your pelvis”. A very sharp eye indeed!

In her course, we learned all of Iron Shirt 1 and 2 pretty
comprehensively while she periodically reviewed qigong fundamentals;
at the end of the course, she gave an introduction to Fusion 1.

At the end of the course, Marie and many of the fellow classmates
in the Iron Shirt course that I had become friends with were
trying to sucker me into another week or even a weekend of Week 4,
but alas, it was time for me to go. 🙁 I really didn’t want to
go, but I had to. It was time. I had a job I had to get
back to, and couldn’t put it off any longer.

With reluctance, I got in my car, and headed out.

In total, it was a fantastic experience, and wouldn’t trade it
in for anything. I miss being there!

Smiles,
Steven