Entries from September 2006 ↓

Todd on The Tao Bums has rekindled my interest in shaking qigong, or in this case more accurately bouncing qigong. I really got a lot out of Michael Winn’s spontaneous “shaking the tree” practice found on one of his Chi Kung Fundamentals videos, but never did it routinely. Also, I realize in retrospect I was imposing a preference for flailing about wildly in all directions and I had a sort of strange hidden desire to suddenly tap into some kind of latent genius dynamic twisting, twirling, leaping qigong form buried in my nervous system. Pffft. :) When that wouldn’t happen in 5 minutes I got bored. heh. But the way Todd taught me is a lot more like a simple meditation. Basically you just bounce vertically up and down and pay attention. That’s it. Sometimes I am still drawn to throw in a little twisting or undulating, but the core practice is just the bounce. It’s great because you can do it for as little or as long as you want. I’m just going to tack on a few minutes of bouncing before my AYP meditations.

So I did a little more research today and found a cool variation. The Tantric Tailbone Piledrive! :) Check it out:

Via Umaa Tantra

[…F]irst place your mind in your tailbone, and try to “feel” from those nerves. Then…

For skeletal shaking, do *not* swing the tailbone forward and backward, which increases fluidity, not solidity (those pelvic tilts or “tucks”are a totally different exercise, used to open up the sacrum).

Instead, the knees joints do not move horizontally as they bend. They stay in the same place. To get the right feeling and motion, stand and place your toes and knees up against a wall in front of you, and raise and lower your butt a few inches, keeping the knees touching the wall as you bend them. Now bring yourself off the wall and move the same way during the exercise.

Think of your spine like a heavy pile driver, going deep into the earth as you accelerate your tailbone downwards a few inches, stopping suddenly while keeping the body loose and relaxed, so that it feels like your bone marrow keeps traveling downward through the bones for an instant.

Breathe deeply and naturally throughout, and recover upwards with minimal acceleration after each downward drop. The spine stays perpendicular to the ground at all times (no “forward-backward “humping” motion).

…

I’m also inspired to finally pick up Jan Fries book, Seidways: Shaking Swaying Serpent Mysteries which details the practice of shamanic convulsive trances as a powerful tool for self-transformation. (I really enjoyed his other book Visual Magick.)

I recently checked out a DVD by Stephane Hemon called “Intro To Female Ejaculation”.

On the surface some might judge Stephane to be a part of the “pick up artist” (PUA) scene or even just a downright chauvinist. But I really like Stephane. He is totally different than the pick up crowd. He has been there though and is very familiar with the language which he uses it sometimes. But he is reframing all of it. He actually reminds me of David Deida, although Stephane is a bit more rough around the edges, especially his sense of humor.

I really welcome post-conventional men like them talking about male-essenced (yang) issues. I think it’s sorely needed. Many of us guys have already gone through the growing pains of evolving upward from what we saw as the “typical macho jerks”. We’ve been thinking of the “other side” (sometimes more than our own), we’ve been getting in touch with the feminine, gone through the sensitivity training, read feminism, etc. But at some point I think these lessons have been integrated more or less and there is a next step. A time to move past the watered down sense of equality that has become so PC and embrace the truer polarity of one’s nature … be it more yin or more yang, or in some cases maybe more naturally just neutral. Guys like Stephane and David Deida can at first glance remind people of pre-conventional macho jerks, sometimes they even talk and act similar, but they are just embodying their strong yang nature.

A lack of a concept for this “next step” is a big monkey wrench in the evolution of gender roles/relations. “Macho jerks” looking for role models will most likely not look to feminized conventional men and so stay pre-conventional until they hit the bottom of the control issues and misogyny that breeds in them from being left by dozens of women for being such selfish assholes. This could be smoothed out if they had guys like Stephane in their life. He can come off just as macho and tough and talks dirty about women and has a really hot girlfriend that is apparently really submissive in a preconventional way (only apparently) but he talks about all this “unconditional love and chakras shit …. Hmmm… but maybe chicks dig this stuff?” So they go and pick up a book on chakras and suddenly they are reading all of this sensitive material and evolving to the conventional level and then postconventional more rapidly.

Then there are already conventional men without these roles models … similar thing … hit bottom at trying to be so nice and pleasing and everything equal and sooo in touch with yin that women are completely bored with them or bitchy women take advantage of them. So they get frustrated and angry and attempt to retreat back to the macho jerk role, which is impossible because they’re more evolved than that. I can’t tell you how many times I see this one, it’s really a painful conflict to witness.

So, my experiences with this DVD so far. Well, the thing I was most impressed with, besides Stephane’s girlfriiend Ghita’s beauty and breathtaking orgasms, was how dead-on Stephane shows you exactly where the deepest tension spots on a woman’s body are. I’ve been giving my girlfriend Lezlie massages ever since and it’s like magic, every spot, exactly as he shows, I can feel SO much tension there and Lezlie is screaming. Well, she was. Now things are smoothing out nicely. And the more I massage her I am actually noticing clear visual changes in her posture, and even body shape … not to mention her stress levels.

I have only just barely tried the technique he shows to make a woman ejaculation, called “yang fingers”. I am still just pushing the massage angle, but naturally I’m curious to see if I can take this process the whole way. :)

Go here to see an embedded preview of Stephane’s DVD, to save you the step of downloading it. (Not work safe by a long shot! Well, heh, depending on where you work anyway)

Bottom line: I’m very pleased with this DVD and plan to pick up more of Stephane’s material.

Via global-mindshift.org

“What is a mind shift and why do we need to make one?

How can we build a better future for all of us? That’s the fundamental question of our time. Today we are discovering it will require a global mind shift if we are to provide an answer adequate to our current situation. Take a look at the current presentation. You’ll learn why the old ways of dealing with our current situation no longer work. More importantly, you’ll discover there is a mind shift taking place today that provides the larger perspective we need to answer the age old questions.

Where am I? Who am I? What am I to do?”

Lezlie and I just watched the first part, step 1, “get a bigger perspective”. Pretty enjoyable. Cool art in the background of the video, I found Brian Swimme to be engaging and I definitely learned some things I didn’t know. I’m curious about his perspective on evolution though … he spoke many times of life “inventing” things, like photosynthesis, sex, eyes, etc. My understanding is that the mainstream field of evolutionary science considers this a naive view and that the, perhaps bleaker, reality is that new “features” are basically the result of “what doesn’t die”. In other words, the giraffe didn’t grow a long neck to reach the high leaves, giraffes with short necks all died. The “invent a longer neck” story of course sounds better though and I’m curious if/how it’s grounded in some new empirical findings. Maybe I’ll pick up his book.