fun full lotus moves: finger toe spacers, and slapping palms to bubbling wells

 

(more detail to follow another day)

Both of these moves done starting from full lotus sit.

if you can't do full lotus, this also works from an easy partial  half lotus kind of position, so long as you have good access to your feet with your hands.

1. finger toe spacers: interlace your fingers with your toes.

For most people, this will have the effect of toe spacers 

left hand 5 finger to 5 toes of right foot.

right hand 5 fingers to 5 toes of left foot.

If anything hurts, it shows poor circulation of blood, qi, etc.

Doing this move acts as accupressure and will help dissolve blockages, pain, and discomfort over time.

1b. rotate feet and hands about ankles and wrists

with your interlaced hands and feet still attached to each other, you can make circular motions

2. slapping palms to bubbling wells, HARD.

the centers of your palms on the hands, and the equivalent spots on your feet (bubbling wells),

are major centers of energy. 

Slapping hands to feet very hard, helps to dissolve blockages.

How do you know it's working?  Over days and weeks, You may feel itchiness, on other parts of your arms and legs, or dark spots on your skin forming from lymph fluid carrying away particles that were stuck in your lymphatic system. 

When qi is flowing better in not just your hands, feet, but whole body, you will be able to tell the difference if you pay attention.

How many times should you slap yourself? 

I always go with the buffet sampler approach. I do 48 reps and then my body tells me if I need to do more. 

It's just like 4 jhāna progression. If your body feels pain, it's part of the process of your body transforming from stiff and blocked into soft and smooth energy flow. When it's getting soft, body gives you large physical sukha as inducement to tell you not to stop yet.

When transformation is complete, just like fourth jhana you get neutral sensations.

I literally slapped the shit out of myself this morning doing move #2 slapping my feet with palms

 

I slapped my feet about 48 times, and then I had to go excrete feces. After doing move #2, I had to go to use the bathroom #2. 

Remember the PV=nRT formula from chemistry and science class?

Jhanic force and the physical hand slap go where the "P" is in the formula.

I've also had to excrete feces after soaking my hands or feet a few minutes in hot water.

Science and jhanic force. It's real, it works, it's universal. 

What is the PV nRT law?

In such a case, all gases obey an equation of state known as the ideal gas law: PV = nRT, where n is the number of moles of the gas and R is the universal (or perfect) gas constant, 8.31446261815324 joules per kelvin per mole.

split squats for sitting meditators with tight hips

 

I discovered a great exercise to stretch all the muscles in upper leg and hip.

(and even the lower legs, calf muscles on both legs depending on careful foot placement)

split squats, but doing many reps to emphasize stretches rather than trying to dip low (knees almost to ground) to burn your thigh muscles for muscle growth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EswpoF3TxkU

Like Jade Wushu champ doing at beginning of video.

Body builders doing split squats to get bigger leg muscles squat lower and slower.

Jade is mostly flexing to dynamically stretch and work towards doing full splits as in Chinese wushu training.

I find the best for deep hip and upper leg stretch (for sitting meditators looking to gain pliability) is somewhere between those two extremes.

The entire video of Jade above, 10min, is really good to stretch all around the leg.

I do something similar with my crab side shuffle stretch.

Ps: gorilla warfare

There's an important lesson here on guerrilla warfare (meditators looking to add to their bag of tricks to improve pliability and flexibility).

Split squats have been around forever.

I dismissed the exercise, thinking it's just for muscle heads trying to get big muscular legs and toned butt.

And I dismissed the wushu martial artists version in Jade's video, because that crowd, like gymnasts and contortionists, practice extreme and dangerous methods to gain super flexibility.

But all these years I missed out the fact, had I not experimented with it sooner is if you tune the exercise just right, it's great for stretching many parts of the leg and thigh quickly, in one exercise (whereas normally you need 4 or 5 exercises to stretch all parts of the leg).

So the lesson as always, it's NWBH.

It's not what you do, but how you do it that determines if something is useful, safe, or dangerous.

DWTD🐕: taiji and internal arts body movement

 Ideally should move with the whole body.

What happens in practice, beginners learn by looking at what the hands and arms are doing, 

and imitate that first,  

and then dragging the rest of the body along with the hands.

Tail wagging the Dog.

It takes years, even decades for energy channels to open up, 

for one's whole body sensitivity to reach the point where one can directly can clearly see 

what body parts is leading what, and whether the whole body moves together in perfect unison.

For beginner and intermediates, if you're going to err better for the hands and arms to lag the torso and legs (tail moved by dog, lags the dog).

VLC free video player, the optimal way to learn qigong, exercise, movement videos stepping frame by frame

For example,  say you wanted to learn how to do a 24 posture taiji form like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV6PjN55Lb4

Find a browser extension that downloads youtube video, download that video.

Then download the VLC player, and use the step frame by frame to pause and take the time you need to learn each posture.

Of course this can't replace in person teaching and correction where you can see movement, posture, and orientation in 3 dimensions instead of 2. 

But if you already know the 108 yang taiji form, and you wanted to learn the 24 form from this video, the VLC tool makes it incredibly easy to do so, by studying a 5 minute performance of the form, and not needing to find a 1 or 2 hour tutorial with various camera angles.

VLC (open source video player)

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Completely Free - no spyware, no ads and no user tracking. (they take donations)
Runs on all platforms - Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, iOS, Android ...

Extremely useful windows PC keyboard shortcuts

Press [space bar] to pause and press [space] again to resume video
Press [e] to step frame by frame forward in video (no need to pause video first).
hold down [e] to continuously step through frames, plays at about normal playing speed
There’s no step backward one frame, because of video compression makes this not easy to program.

jump forward and backwards by 3 seconds

[shift + arrow left or right] = move backward or forward by 3 seconds
[alt + arrow left or right] = move backward or forward by 9 seconds
[control + arrow left or right] = move backward or forward by 60 seconds

the squash-up: great exercise for sitting meditators, to preserve knee health

 

I sit cross legged on the floor. 

A lot. 4-8 hours a day.

This is what I do immediately after every sit:

48 squashups (or more, but minimum 48).

Why 48? Just an arbitrarily large number, 

but 4 should remind you of 4 noble truths,

and 8 should remind you of noble eightfold path.

What is a squashup?

Why do squats, and pushups separately, when you can do them both at the same time?

From squatting posture, have your hands also on the ground.

There's about 12-20 in. distance between your 2 hands, between 2 feet, between hand and feet, forming approximately a square shape if you were to connect the 4 planted pods on the ground. 

That's just an approximation, play with distances to see what feels comfortable.

What is the goal of this exercise?

To flex as many joints as possible, with jhānic relaxation, to maximize blood flow, lymph flow, qi flow, recover the stagnation from the sitting posture you just did.

Knees, elbows, wrists, ankles, hips, shoulders, should all be getting flexed and pumped. 

If you're doing it right it should feel good, the more reps you do the softer and warmer, more pliable the parts get.

I have most of my body weight shifted on the the upper body planted on the hands more than the legs and feet, because your knees and legs will probably be somewhat asleep, sore, etc. 

Don't go for full extension/limits on the up or down portion of the movement

In other words don't hurt yourself trying to squat push all the way down and all the way up to whatever you imagine "correct posture" looks like. The goal is to prevent injury, not gain injury, and to just move and pump blood into body that parts that are asleep and stagnant

If you're doing the exercise right, you should improving the health of your legs from the increased circulation of everything: blood, lymph, oxygen, qi, etc.

It's like if a beaver damned up a lot of the energy channels in your legs, doing enough repetitions of this exercise should tear down those dams and get the fluid pumping everywhere again. Sorry beavers.

I've been doing this over a year, got great results

My knees feel better now, I'm an old man in my 50's, then they did when I was in my twenties.

It's not just this exercise of course, I do several important exercises from the qigong gorilla arsenal every day, but for sitting meditators who sit a lot, hours every day, you need to be doing this one or something equivalent, or your knees are going to kill you when you get old. 

So right after every sit, I spend about 1 minute doing this:

48 reps at least of squashups

18 reps of cat and the scat (at least)

🙀🐈💩the cat and the scat: great exercise for sitting meditators, squatting safely

https://qigor.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-cat-and-scat-great-exercise-for.html

for cat and scat, as with squashups, you want to be careful to put more of your body weight onto your hands, so your legs and knees don't have to deal with extra strain of heavy load.

Basically, it's like the legs are just squatting just the legs mass, not your whole body mass if you were doing standard standing squats.

 

'bouncing' + rock the baby: more ideas on why 🏃👨‍🍳🥧 'shake and bake' is so effective

 

Shake & Bake🏃👨‍🍳🥧  

Why does rocking calm a baby?

The rocking sensation is thought to have a synchronizing effect on the brain, triggering our natural sleep rhythms (2). Slow rocking can help your baby ease into sleep mode and increase slow oscillations and sleep spindles (3) in their brain waves.Nov 3, 2020

Why is it important to rock a baby?

Rocking a child helps establish a healthy heart rate as well as good blood circulation. The rocking motion helps the child feel secure and therefore has a calming effect. Rocking can also help warm a child who is cold.

Some babies instinctively do accupressure and 'shake and bake' to achieve kāya-passaddhi (for jhāna) and sleep!

What does rocking in babies mean?

Head banging and body rocking are common ways that children soothe themselves to sleep. It is disturbing to parents, but usually not a problem unless the movements hinder sleep or result in injury.Aug 18, 2020

Why is rocking comforting?

Rocking had a soothing effect. In one study published in the journal Current Biology, it is posited that “the sensory stimulation associated with a swinging motion exerts a synchronizing action in the brain that reinforces endogenous sleep rhythms,” which may explain why rocking induces that relaxed feeling.Oct 22, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/magazine/i-learned-this-stress-management-trick-when-i-was-3.html

 excerpt:

By David Aloi

• Oct. 22, 2020

I’ve taken the deep breaths, the warm baths, the Xanax. I’ve tried candles and crystals and sitting cross-legged. But nothing can calm me quite like rocking. Here’s what that looks like: An adult man, mid-30s, finishes work and climbs into bed. It’s early evening still, the shades are drawn, he has yet to cook dinner. The day has been hectic — deadlines, dog to the vet, a leak beneath the sink — but that’s all behind him now, a soft quiet settling in. His head rolls on the pillow, with intention and control, from side to side, each ear touching down like the taps of a metronome. Tap. Tap. Tap. His hips follow suit, and soon his whole body is in one smooth kinesis. He feels his pulse slow and his breaths even out. He’s free, dreaming of other worlds, worlds with many moons, with humming tides. Twenty minutes pass, and something brings him back to Earth — a car alarm, or his partner asking from another room what he’s making for dinner. He climbs out of bed, lighter, less burdened. Spaghetti, he thinks.

To the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, this scene might ring a bell, summoning a term that sounds like something you may see at a remarkably boring jazz show: “sleep-related rhythmic movements,” or SRRMs. Characterized by repetitive and rhythmic motor behaviors, these movements occur mostly during quiet wakefulness or the early stages of sleep. For me, they include head and body rocking and rolling, but other movements are possible as well. And if they go so far as to disturb one’s sleep or daytime function in a profound way, or even cause an injury, a disorder diagnosis is made. SRRMs are typical in infants and children, and become less prevalent with increasing age, usually disappearing spontaneously before adolescence. Rarely are they seen in adults — but somehow here I am, approaching 40, still rocking to the beat.

My earliest memory is as a 3-year-old, when I graduated from crib to training bed. My parents tucked those guardrail bumpers beneath both sides of my mattress — a drowsy toddler in a stalled spaceship. I would rock up on my hands and knees, and then somehow fall awkwardly onto my back and into a sound sleep. My parents never thought of it as worrisome or something that needed fixing. “You were such a cute Martian in there,” my mother said to me once.

As I grew up, I finessed my technique and began to rock solely in a supine position, head rolling side to side. I gained more and more control over it — from compulsion to volition — and I recognized benefits beyond the sleep-inducing. Rocking had a soothing effect. In one study published in the journal Current Biology, it is posited that “the sensory stimulation associated with a swinging motion exerts a synchronizing action in the brain that reinforces endogenous sleep rhythms,” which may explain why rocking induces that relaxed feeling. For me, it’s a shortcut to Chill Town. It makes me less anxious, more present. And beyond all that, it just feels good.

...

frankk experience with 'rock the baby' effect:

when I was a child, no qigong experience, I always noticed when sleeping on a moving school bus, or in a moving car, that the frequency of the vibrations of automotive vehicles traveling and bouncing on  roads (even smoothly paved ones), was very comforting and made falling asleep easier.

In hindsight, the science of why rocking the baby works well applies there, and to 'shake and bake' as well, and how that can help with passaddhi-bojjhanga (pacification awakening factor) that enables the physical part of jhāna to happen.

The video below explains how bouncing, shake and bake, rocking the baby helps tune the energy channels and dissolve blockages in the body.

bouncing is a mild form of 'shake and bake'

10 min video: 

Just Use This & Your All Energy Blockages Will Be Cleared in 3 Seconds | Chunyi Lin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g7sZQ9x1jo

Ido Portal has something similar to 'bouncing'

The Vertical Shake

6m video in chinese, showing accupressure point to relieve allergy, hay fever

 

6m video in chinese, showing accupressure point to relieve allergy, hay fever 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4pNrmH3aEw

The spot under the mid cheekbones, when you press there it should feel more senstive and painful than surrounding facial area if you're suffering from allergy.

Do 36 small circles at those cheekbone points.

The next part where you trace path from cheek bone point to nose/eye area, 

trace that track with your finger 36 times.

The last part of the video pushing on point below knee has something to do with strengthening your immune system from colds.