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Hi,
I have a problem that I can go through for some time so I’m seeking an advice here:)
I’m doing my microcosmic orbit for some time, but recently when I want to meditate and focus on my dan tien / navel area then My soles of the feets are very hot and draw my attension strongly so I can’t focus on navel and it spoil my practise.
It started a few weeks ago when I came with idea doing Horse Raiding stance (Ma Bu) before my meditation because I do this stance anyway in other time of the day, and it builds my chi ball and after a short while I have my dan tien warm so, It seems perfect to do it before my meditation in the morning when it takes me a while to get my dan tien awaken. At first it was fine, I started my meditation with hot dan tien..
maybe not gently warm but hot. But next day my soles were very hot at during the time of meditation, so I discarded morning stance straining before meditation. But still after some time I have my soles hot when doing meditation practise. I do not have shoes on my feets etc. I dress in quite proper way and have some cotton towel below my feets or sometimes only wooden floor. I tried a bit massage soles but I didn’t help , maybe I wasn’t massaging to much? But still I can’t get rid of the burning feets. So please advice my how to release that hot. IKindest Regards
Jacek
Sounds like a blood circulation issue.
If you do a lot of standing practice before doing meditation, you
may have a lot of blood and/or qi stagnate in certain places–in your
case, your feet.Several suggestions:
1. If it doesn’t bother you when you do standing practice, try
doing the microcosmic orbit while doing your standing practice.2. As you’ve discovered, don’t do meditation after standing
practice if it the after-effects distract you.3. After doing standing practice, or if you feel blood and qi
pooled in your feet, do a long–say even 10 minutes–of standard
shaking the body practice to get all the blood and qi moving again.
Your whole body will come alive then, not just your feet. If you
are too aroused after the shaking to do meditation, you can always
do some soft slow-moving qigong to get you into a relaxed state
such as ocean breathing, etc.S
My guess: your liver
My suggestion: you could do the shaking like Steven suggests, combine it with the liver sound and releasing heat out of your body by movement instead of standing posture.
If you want to practice the horse stand make sure you had enough movement practice before it, in order to release the tensions in your liver and meridians…And you can massage your feet more firmly and longer but also massage your diaphragm and liver area, and do stretching to the sides and hit with your full hand or something fairly hard but not too hard on the sides of your torso, up and down, this will release tensions in your gallbladder meridian too and give more space internally.
And work on liver issues, tensions, releasing heat… use your voice to release heat by sounds, singing or yelling or talking about your issues, whatever works for you.
Everything stagnant will increase the heat, all the moving will help you…Hope it helps
Wendy
Hi Jacek,
I agree with Steven’s first two suggestions but disagree with his third. If you do a vigorous shaking practice after standing meditation i’ve found that it can really undo the progress you made during the meditation, and also progress made form past standing meditations, because it can really make things feel ‘torn down’ and loose in a not-perferable way. vigorous shaking after standing meditation can make your tendons, muscles, etc. feel much more disconnected and weak.i found this out by rubbing my hands together very quickly to produce heat to massage my face as is commonly done after seated meditation. my back, shoulders and arms then felt very disconnected, so i think it would be much worse to do an intense whole body shaking after the meditation.
i like what Wendy said, too, except for her focus on doing things after the meditation.
so instead, this is what i suggest. shake vigorously *before* standing meditation, and this will get things moving. also be sure to kick out your legs after the main shaking so that’s all open. you can also do the six healing sounds and wendy’s suggestion of working with the liver. after standing meditation, shake your body lightly for not very long. when i do shaking after standing meditation my feet stay on the ground and i kind of spring up from the ground, it’s leisurely. then bring your hands to rest on your lower back (palms facing away from body) and have your whole body relaxed, try not to let your head hang down. slowly shift your weight back and forth on your feet, the movement is small. after doing that for a while, do it side to side, then circles one way and circles the other way.
if you have time, sit down, relax, and have some tea =). tea has many herbal benefits (and i fell it helps with the liver and tendons), and can help to move chi.
if what i said doesn’t work, try doing more stuff afterwards like others suggested, but i think it may be safer to move first. you could also do some taijiquan afterwards, which is a very common practice and would get things moving.
It seems I was not clear in my posting, all the moving, massaging and use of voice be it sounds or other things are done before the meditation itself.
The only thing after the meditation you could think of is using the triple warmer sound though to release any tensions, heat and toxins and even lie down for a while to connect with earth in a full body way to help expell any excessive heat.
i would also like to make a clarification on my post. if you’re doing a really low and wide horse stance, you’d probably want to bring your feet closer together so you can be more comfortable and balanced to do the little shaking and weight shifting.
>>>I agree with Steven’s first two suggestions but
>>>disagree with his third. If you do a vigorous shaking
>>>practice after standing meditation i’ve found that it
>>>can really undo the progress you made during the meditation,
>>>and also progress made form past standing meditations,
>>>because it can really make things feel ‘torn down’ and
>>>loose in a not-perferable way. vigorous shaking after
>>>standing meditation can make your tendons, muscles, etc.
>>>feel much more disconnected and weak.Depends on what you are trying to accomplish,
and what you mean by “progress”. Personally, I feel like
I’ve entrained too much rigidity in my body after a
period of standing meditation, and rigidity is not
what I want to cultivate. A good vigorous shaking after
standing meditation helps loosen everything back up again,
which is how I personally want to be. As for the meditation
aspect, nothing you do in life should “undo” your progress.
The point of doing meditation is to train an expansion
of your awareness and stillness that is meant to continue
in life. Energy channels you open should be able to handle
the vigorous movement of qi.But ultimately it is a matter of opinion. Some people
for instance want a lot of rigidity removal and increased
flexibility–and so maybe do a lot of Tao Yin; other people
don’t feel that way and feel they lose too much structure, and
train somewhat in the opposite direction with a lot of
standing-in-stillness postures. Personally, what feels best
to me when doing standing postures is to FOLLOW by shaking to remove
rigidity. Ultimately, you have to decide what feels best for
you and do it. There is no right or wrong here; there is only
what’s right for you.S
“Personally, I feel like I’ve entrained too much rigidity in my body after a
period of standing meditation, and rigidity is not
what I want to cultivate.”This is also why I recommended do inner smile after guided meditation. Some of my most powerful moments in meditation come after I have washed my face with my hands tapped my head and rubbed my ears at the end of a meditation, then gone and just inner smile melted into the chi flows I created. It is a process of talking and listening.
Hello Dog
I have felt the same, but feel that when doing standing qigong regularly and realy go into relaxing and not stand to long, but just close to the time when it feels as a strugle; then there is not any rigidity or wery litle anyway. And I always lay down a while afterwards doing microcosmic and a litle inner smile and collect at the navel and then just relaxing. For me this seems to help against rigidity. But as you perhaps know I am wery new at regular exercise with iron shirt, mostly beacase that part of the practise have been wery difficult for me.
Talking about my iron shirt, I want to add that I feel quite tired afterwards and my body feels shaky several hours afterwards, still it feel like it does something good. My believe is that my weekened kidneys is equivalent to weekened structure and beacase of that the iron shirt is quite demanding for me. All girls except perhaps one in my yoga group can stand longer than me now without any strugle. For me it is quite hard to follow them sometimes.
What I also believe is that the iron shirt has healing power for me, if I not owerdo it. I have to learn to do this exercises without trying to achive a goal. For the moment I put goals on myself. What I want is to be able to stand for 100 breathings, which I have done now in some of the easier postures. Actually I start with about 18 breaths and increase to 36 then 50 and depending on how it goes some more steps up to 100, but somethimes this goal make me struggle to much I think. But on the other side it is for me quite fun to try to do this. Thats why I keep on even though I’m shore it insn’t the best aproach.
🙂
S D
A few suggestions, one what is the feeling behind your focus, also pay attention where are you centered. As you progress you will experience cold heat tightness extreme openness, thoughts, feelings, all is temporary, all is normal, allow it to change. Pay attention see what thoughts, feelings, and sensations pull you from your center your core. Feel deeply “witnessing” from your central or neutral core space total acceptance. Keep working your inner smile. Fear I would say is the main driver I am feeling that is taking you out of your center, this is the core disharmony not the heat. I hope this makes since. Fear not, your energy body knows what to do to heal its self if you allow it to change.
I feel this applies.
Thirty spokes meet at the wheel’s hub
It is the center hole that makes it usefulShape clay into a vessel.
It is the space within that makes it useful.Cut doors and windows into a room
It is the holes that make it usefulTherefore, benefit comes from what is there,
Usefulness from what is not there.
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching>>>Depends on what you are trying to accomplish,
>>>and what you mean by “progress”.I agree. For me, one of the main things i try to accomplish by standing meditation is to improve body structure and alignment, and tissue connectivity.
>>>Personally, I feel like
>>>I’ve entrained too much rigidity in my body after a
>>>period of standing meditation, and rigidity is not
>>>what I want to cultivate. A good vigorous shaking after
>>>standing meditation helps loosen everything back up again,
>>>which is how I personally want to be.I have recently been practicing different postures than those Michael teaches in QF 3 and 4, but I might be starting those soon, so I don’t know what it’s like to do those and what may be felt afterwards. But i think i know what you mean about the rigidity. After standing meditation i do light shaking and weight shifting as i described in the other post, and then i sit down and relax for a while, which i think does something similar to your shaking and dog’s smiling.
>>>As for the meditation
>>>aspect, nothing you do in life should “undo” your progress.
>>>The point of doing meditation is to train an expansion
>>>of your awareness and stillness that is meant to continue
>>>in life. Energy channels you open should be able to handle
>>>the vigorous movement of qi.I suppose this comes back to what was meant by progress. When i mentioned progress i was talking about the progress i mentioned earlier in this post, and how shaking would apply to that. I wasn’t really talking about awareness or energy channels.
But yeah…like you said, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish
hey SD,
I have a habit of counting breath in standing meditation and may be able to offer some advice. Allow your counting to fall to the background, don’t concentrate on it. Don’t worry, if you have a habit of counting you’ll do it automatically in the background. Then you’ll realize you’ve been counting and you’ll be at some higher number than you expected. Allow the numbers you currently see as goal to instead be benchmarks, and let yourself just breathe through them. I noticed that when i used to stand for a certain number of breaths i would tense up before reaching that number, and then feel like things have to go according to those numbers. But just keep breathing. You’ll find yourself able to go to much higher numbers more relaxed this way, and you don’t have to end on certain numbers either.
RyanHello
I was guiding in standing three with my yoga group. I did go up to 70 breath, earlier I had 50. It was quite nice to guide, with relaxing and posture adjustments. Every tent breath I guided them in the things that was important for me. Like relaxing shoulders and relaxing stomach and such. Quite nice experience. I stopet at 70 but we had the goal to go to 100, they where already there, and I was also quite happy to stop. But still I found the universe withing my own body, this time more than ever before during standing practises I think.
I feel I have some experience in what you ment by letting the counting fall into the background now. It seems to be fare more important to relax and feel within than to count. Which I of course have realised a long time, but perhaps not been able to find in the irons shirt practises jet.
Perhaps I start more and more to enjoy the iron shirt practises also. Theres alot in the book we are following anyway, which is realy good for me, beacase I want to come into this pracrise as well as the others in the univrsal tao system.
SD
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