Posts

Building techniques in layers

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Over time as you learn new techniques, you can start to add them to your repertoire of skills to perform as needed. As you sense each situation you go through in life, be it in public daily life, or alone in practice, you can reach for whichever technique, or set of techniques is needed to deal with each blockage or difficulty you come across. One person talks of it as there being 3 stages of chi kung, where the first is learning the basic building blocks, then learning how to apply them, then integrating them into your own personal conditions and life situation (its talked of in part of this video on healing chi kung .) There is also a very approximate timeline of development in chi kung someone made, that talks of three types of practice: feeling, controlling and knowing energy (from a page on  chi kung mastery ). I think you can probably compare it to learning to use a new computer program. Like for Word you can learn how to change fonts, set styles, add bullet points etc, If yo...

Internal alchemy for beginners

One of the classic goals of alchemy was to turn lead into gold. In golden elixir practice you're doing the same thing but with your own energy, feelings, thoughts and body. So you want to cultivate as much positive energy, feelings etc in yourself, and remove as much negatives as you can. Also you want to be able to turn the negatives into positives. One way to think of doing this is to think in terms of magnets, and how if you hold one magnet in the correct position, you can use it to push away another magnet without touching it. Similarly you can build up a positive feeling in yourself and use it to push away a negative one. We do this is small ways without thinking much about it, like when something irritates us a little but we quickly shrug it off. We can, however, be more conscious about this process and turn it into something of an art form. The basics of which are: - sensing the 'lead', or becoming aware of something that is bad or could be improved - bringing in a p...

Golden elixir - what is it and where does it come from?...

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There are many beliefs and religions that talk of a spiritual energy, like Christianity's Holy Spirit, Kundalini in Hinduism, or Chi in Taoism. Science also talks about energy, and there are some spiritual practitioners who talk of the overlap or connections between the two. There is also talk in the modern spiritual/alternative medicine arena of ' energy ', and in the way of golden elixir the  ' the three treasures ' (jing, chi and shen) refer, at least in part, to this energy. Where does it come from? Some religions or beliefs would say from God. Science refers to matter/energy exploding outwards at the time of the big bang, but doesn't have an explanation of where that mater/energy came from in the first place i.e. what came before the big bang. Personally I am interested in the experiential side of things ,which for me has come mainly through meditation and then chi kung. Sitting in meditation I sometimes felt Kundalini style sensations in my spine or el...

A short summary of a journey along the way of golden elixir

I first came towards golden elixir when I got a book and video series as a present. It was about Qigong in general, internal alchemy being a branch of chi kung that I came to later on. The book was 'Stand Still - Be Fit, the way of energy'. I got it partly because I'd been trying out some meditation exercises for the first time, and also as I was into regular fitness at the time - my parents thought it would make for a funny present. Jump forward 25 years and I'm still interested in this area, although my practice has changed a lot since then. Originally I was a lot more focused on the physical side of things whereas now I'm more focused towards the spiritual end of the spectrum. In between times I've been interested in Tibetan Buddhism, Eckankar, Reiki healing, popular psychology and complementary therapies, and elements from these have all rolled in together with Qigong practice for me now. I've only had one Qigong teacher who I took classes with for...