Lesson 1 – chi breading
Most people in the West "chest breathe." That isto say, they breathe by engaging only the barest minimum of their diaphragm and instead rely on the muscles of the rib cage to draw air into their lungs. This can be verified by the rising of the shoulders and expansion of the rib cage during inhalation. The only time such breathers fully utilize the diaphragm is when their bodies are physically distressed, say by running hard and fast past normal endurance. Only then does the diaphragm fully engage, bypassing the person's regular programmed "chest breathing" in order to get enough air into the body. This temporary use of the diaphragm often results in the side-ache or belly-ache that people who are not used to physical exertion experience when they take up jogging or a similar activity for the first time.
Step One
1. Lay down flat on your back on a padded but firm surface, like a mat.
2. Place your hands over your solar plexus, the area of your abdomen just below your ribs.
3. Gently but forcefully expel all the air from your lungs. In order to do this you will find yourself sucking in your stomach slightly.
4. Relax and allow your lungs to begin filling with air. You will feel your diaphragm pull down as your stomach returns to it's normal position.
5. Continue to inhale and allow the breath to push your belly out and your hands upward toward the ceiling.
6. Exhale and allow your stomach to return to normal.
You have just engaged your diaphragm in an exaggerated fashion. Under normal breathing conditions it is not necessary to expel all of the air out of your lungs or actively push the stomach out.
Step Two
Now continue to so breathe, mentally exploring the sensation of the bodypart involved in the pushing up of your hands.
Step Three
Now, instead of using your breathing to push your hands up, feel the drawing down of the diaphragm pull air into your lungs and cause your hands to rise. Then, relax and let the air leave your lungs naturally.
You have just breathed as nature intended, using your diaphragm.
Warning
Watch out when you start to do this. You can get quite light-headed because, instead of only drawing air into the top third (the small portion) of your lungs, you are drawing air into all of your lungs, and therefore getting alot more oxygen than you are used to.
Step Four
Now sit up and still breathe using your diaphragm. You might need to put your hands back on your stomack at first.
Step Five
In the normal course of your daily life, anytime you think about it, check your breathing. You must re learn to naturally breathe with the diaphragm... unconsciously. I am telling you that is will take most of you who are diligent at least two years.
Step Six
As an exercise, once a day, lay down and place a book on your stomack and make it go up and down. Use heavier and heavier books to exercise and strengthen that diaphragm.
Step Seven
Have someone check your breathing when you are asleep or napping. When you are breathing naturally while asleep and while you are awake, you are well on your way to having succeeded in de-programming yourself from chest-breathing.
mically and slowly. Breathe in through your nose and out of your mouth with your lips just open enough to permit the breath to escape softly.
2. Maintaining your breathing, relax your shoulders
3. Maintaining your breathing and relaxed shoulders, relax your jaw.
4. Maintaining your breathing, relaxed shoulders and jaw, consciously ask your body to relax each individual part, starting with your toes and working upward. Don't forget your hands and fingers. Don't forget yourface and skull and eyes.
5. Maintaining all of the above, place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth.
Practice this until you are able to do it without effort and without reading it.
Step Four -- Relax the Mind
1. Relax the Body (Step Three above)
2. "Let your mind go." By this we mean, don't concentrate on anything. Just let your brain think whatever it wants to, but try not to actively think (including judging what you are doing right now or worrying about whether you are doing it "right.") At first your brain is most likely going to do a clearing house inventory, then it is going to go through a mental checklist of stuff that is worrying you or that you "should" be doing. Let it. In time, and you must be patient with yourself here, you will run out of things to fuss about, and you will decide to let your thoughts be quiet.
Step Five -- Neutral or Passively Attentive Position
1. Once your thoughts are quiet and maintaining your breathing and relaxed body, let your head gently slump forward onto your chest.
2. Explore the feelings of this position and again, if the brain starts generating thoughts, let it and out-wait it without fighting it.
Step Six -- Active Position
When you are comfortable in the Neutral Position, raise your head level orslightly tipped back, passively supporting it while maintaining a relaxed body. Again, if the brain starts generating thought, ride it through until quiet.
Once we have mastered these techniques and can drop at will into"state," we are ready to learn where and how to utilize a few tools that will help us to perceive deeply, without which attempts will be only hal fas successful.
Lesson 2 – relaxing
Relaxing completely and utterly is imperative when beginning to learn to experience with and use the deep senses. Later, complete and utter relaxation is not necessary, although a relaxed state is still engendered.
Step One
Find a place of safety - a sanctuary where you feel absolutely safe to be and where noone and nothing can intrude upon you - not the phone, not the door-to-door salesman, not your kids, your spouse, your parent, your relatives and friends. This is a hard thing in the present day world. So, turn off the phone (and the radio and television). Place a sign on the door that, in bold letters, says "Do Not Disturb For Any Reason Other Than Life-Threatening Emergency On Penalty of Wrath and Maybe Even Death." Tell everybody in your household to leave you completely alone and to try to be very quiet.
Wherever you choose to sit down and be still, whether in the yard or garden, at the State Park, or in the sanctuary of your bedroom (most recommended), it should be somewhere with which you are very familiar. If you are used to silence, and if there are few noises that are going to disturb you (like the bump when the baby falls out of the high chair and starts to scream or the neighbor starting up a lawn mower right under your nose), then stay in silence. If there is the potential for disruptive noises, put on some"white noise" like a fan or air conditioner. If you are uncomfortable in silence - for instance: you go nuts when the TV or radio isn't droning inthe background - put on a tape or CD, but choose instrumental music of a soothing, non-dynamic nature (and I don't mean Easy-Listening or Muzak), or perhaps the sound of running water . . . like a gurgling stream if you are used to listening to such sounds. One thing you don't want is the human voice, or anything you are not used to that is going to catch your attention (I use chinese classical instrumental music).
Step Two
Sit quietly in a comfortable but erect position (not that erect position you pervert lol). A favorite chair is fine. Cross-legged on the bed, with or without a backrest, is fine. Don't lay, and don't slouch.
Step Three -- Relax the Body
NOTE: this exercise can be done with the eyes open or closed, as you choose and as is most comfortable for you.
1. Breath with your diaphram, breathing deeply, rhythmically and slowly. Breathe in through your nose and out of your mouth with your lips just open enough to permit the breath to escape softly.
2. Maintaining your breathing, relax your shoulders
3. Maintaining your breathing and relaxed shoulders, relax your jaw.
4. Maintaining your breathing, relaxed shoulders and jaw, consciously ask your body to relax each individual part, starting with your toes and working upward. Don't forget your hands and fingers. Don't forget yourface and skull and eyes.
5. Maintaining all of the above, place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your front teeth.
Practice this until you are able to do it without effort and without reading it.
Step Four -- Relax the Mind
1. Relax the Body (Step Three above)
2. "Let your mind go." By this we mean, don't concentrate on anything. Just let your brain think whatever it wants to, but try not to actively think (including judging what you are doing right now or worrying about whether you are doing it "right.") At first your brain is most likely going to do a clearing house inventory, then it is going to go through a mental checklist of stuff that is worrying you or that you "should" be doing. Let it. In time, and you must be patient with yourself here, you will run out of things to fuss about, and you will decide to let your thoughts be quiet.
Step Five -- Neutral or Passively Attentive Position
1. Once your thoughts are quiet and maintaining your breathing and relaxed body, let your head gently slump forward onto your chest.
2. Explore the feelings of this position and again, if the brain starts generating thoughts, let it and out-wait it without fighting it.
Step Six -- Active Position
When you are comfortable in the Neutral Position, raise your head level orslightly tipped back, passively supporting it while maintaining a relaxed body. Again, if the brain starts generating thought, ride it through until quiet.
Once we have mastered these techniques and can drop at will into"state," we are ready to learn where and how to utilize a few tools that will help us to perceive deeply, without which attempts will be only hal fas successful.
Lesson 3 - feeling chi
Stand in a doorway with your hands down at your sides. Extending your arms until they touch the door frame without bending your elbows (or locking them straight either), steadily push on the door frame for about five minutes. Then maintaining the position of your arms (releasing the pressure just enough to step out of the door frame) step out into the open and feel what happens to your arms. (They want to raise up.)
Having felt that internal sensation, we now move to "forming a ball of chi" between our hands. Sit down and enter an active meditative state-balanced, relaxed, and centered, with the mind at ease and quiet. Bring your hands, palms facing each other, up in front of you at about the same level or position your would use to examine an object that had been handed to you (say, about heart level). Let the space between your palms be a comfortable amount-say about eight inches (20+ centimeters). Now, start moving your hands as if rolling around an imaginary ball you visualize yourself holding in your hands. Breathe slowly, from and to center, while doing this, and concentrate your exhaled breath as if generally focused or directed toward and into this imaginary ball.
Using an awareness located at your temples, without disrupting any of your inner quietude or bodily and mental states, feel what exists between your palms. You will feel a bouncy or cushiony ball, perhaps just faintly, but it is there. An analogy between the feeling of this and something more familiar would be the feeling that two magnets give you when you try to bring both their positive or negative poles toward one another, especially if you move them in a circle around one another. The difference is that the magnets repel and try to slip away from each other, where as this only feels like a cushy ball. What you are feeling is chi, or your own life force, concentrated by your mind between your hands, or, perhaps better said, your awareness concentrated so you can perceive the chi riding there between your hands as it naturally exists in, of and around your body in interaction with self, environment and life. This is the "chi ball" that tai chi teachers try to teach you to"hold" as they begin to help you on your way to "dancing in tao." And, yes, chi can be likened to electromagnetic radiation.
Next, maintaining your awareness, slowly stroke the air above one of your hands, around and about a single finger, or back and forth across the back or palm of your hand. Sometimes some surface of your arm proves a better subject. Or, of course, the head. Perhaps immediately or in time, with attentiveness, you should be able to discern an energy and movement. Both the stroking hand and the body part being stroked should return sensation. Just switch your awareness between the two to feel the individual sensations. And, please,attend what those sensations feel like. Nuances are everything. They define your own personal and individual manner of sensing and it is slightly to incredibly different for everyone. In learning to detect what are now just nuances, you will become more sensitive to the sensory stimulae delivered by the deep senses. Because, in truth, what you are feeling are the gross (obvious) sensations, the subtle yet being invisible and intangible to you as yet. The more nuances of which you become aware, the more the subtle will become apparent until, with practice and application, the most subtle will become tangibe. Remember, in the details reside the keys. The more details you apprehend, the more keys you will gain to understanding exactly when and what your deep senses are perceiving.
Having accomplished feeling chi on your own body, now it is time to try to feel it about the bodies of others. Do NOT attempt to do this with someone who is not completely comfortable with you and what you are doing. And certainly don't do it to someone on the sly. That's a good way to get punched in the nose. And remember, most people tend to "clap in their auras" and, therefore, their chi fields, around strangers, in strange environments, and when feeling uncomfortable. Another thing to remember, if you try to "show off" this new found sensory ability as a parlor trick or to impress your friends, acquaintances, or enemies, you will probably wind up embarrassing yourself as your own state of consciousness will not be holding to the necessary balance, harmony, center, and relaxed, meditative state by nature of the fact that you are "performing" for prestige, whether to try and prove the reality to some other person, or simply to gain recognition. (We have to chuckle here, because we know that many of you will probably try it anyway, but, until and unless there is legitimate reason to so demonstrate, such as in teaching others, such demonstrations usually if not always fail).
Further exercises and experiments in feeling chi of course revolve around other subjects such as animals, plants, rocks (yes rocks) and so on. Once you begin, the possibilities for exploration become self-evidencing and endless. And, yes, this is the same sense that the blind use to sense objects.
Lesson 4 - soft sight
To enter soft sight, you need to "defocus" your eyes from honing ona specific object. You can look in an object's direction, and that object can be at the center of your vision field, but you don't focus on it. Instead, you just look in its direction.
Try this first. Hold up one index finger. Hold it about one foot in front of your eyes. Focus on that finger. You should see one finger...sharply. Now, relax your eyesight's focus until you are seeing through that finger. If you pay attention, you should be able to see two distinct fingers sharply, but also so everything else is seen just as sharply. Whatever you "pay attention to" without moving your eyes or changing your focus at all is clear and in focus, with nothing out of focus. Pay attention to where your eyesight and your mind are "physically" in order to do this. Pay attention to the feeling of and the quality of the state. Identify the mechanism that allows you to see two fingers in focus, as well as everything through and around those fingers in focus.
This is the beginning level of soft sight. In time, with practice, you will be able to maintain this state and move your eyes... once you have mastered entering this state at will without effort in an instant and learned to maintain it regardless of actions or situation. Once you are comfortable entering soft sight at will, take the state deeper, by utilizing all the tools you have thus far been given (and hopefully have begun to master) in these lessons .
When you can drop to soft sight with a thought, you are ready to begin exploring aura and the rest of what the world calls the supramundane that exists for most as that to be scoffed at as imaginary, but that is actually a non-experienced fact by virtue of self-and culturally imposed blindness and desensitizing in this, our real world.
(Faust)
Another Form
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