shake and bake: heat up the body, aerobic, cardio

Range of application

'Shake and Bake' is the name of an exercise. If there is any single exercise that is a cure all, or the main part of a cure all, this would be it. It fixes common ailments, and really exotic meditation problems from force getting too strong hitting against blockages and tightness in qi merdian network.

Didn't know about 'shake and bake' when I had carpal tunnel

I was a programmer, and my chronic pain issues (the actual pain part) were mostly wrist pain, carpal tunnel, cold numb hands. Western medicine's solution was wear a wrist brace and give that condition a name, "renaud's syndrome". Worthless. That's when I got into yoga and qigong seriously. Neck and  shoulder tension of course is a leading cause of the problems. The whole body is connected.

The exercise that I found the most helpful was the turtle neck/spine, doing that as much as every hour. I was in my early 30's when I started taking all this seriously, seeing the downward trend in health and deciding to reverse it. It took 10 years to make the renaud's syndrome, cold hands and weak nerves in the extremities get mostly fixed, but all along the way it was obvious the exercises were slowly fixing the body.

With what I know now, I probably could cut that recovery time to less than half, and that would  involve a lot  more cardio/aerobic exercises. Because of diet being vegetarian, more veganish, for more than half of my life, that contributed to having a body type getting cold easily.

The main exercise that would have accomplished this, cutting my recovery time by more than half, is what I call the "shake and bake". It's an easy aerobic cardio vascular exercise, takes only about 10 to 20% more energy than walking at a moderate to brisk pace.

Shake and Bake

(first examine how it interacts in synergy with other optimal health principles)

4👑☸ →  ☯🦍   🎱   🧘🐢 (⤴)

---

Gorilla Mantra

always W.A.S.T.E. F.R.E.E.

acronym explanation in brief

W.A.S = Warm And Soft. Like a healthy supple baby full of qi, life, vigor. Not cold, hard, brittle, close to death like an old sick man. "W.A.S." comes first in the "always WASTE FREE" because before any exercise can be effective, you need to first heat up make things warm, soft, pliable.
T.E. = Tension eliminated. The process of achieving Passaddhi/Pacification, or Taiji's relaxation 'sung'. When you scan the whole physical body, while moving through any slow diagnostic movement, whatever feels hard, cold, brittle, pain, tight, uncomfortable, dense, massive, that's tension. And it can be eliminated by warming it up, melting the ice, going through "F.R.E.E" range of motion.
F.R.E.E. = Full range (of) expression, elastic. If you move through range of motion, you hear "snap, crackle, and pop" from your joints cracking, you have cumulative tension and sub-optimal circulation, you haven't achieved W.A.S state yet.

❤️ Gorilla Heart Sutra (8 lines)

1. always W.A.S.T.E. F.R.E.E.
2. f.a.r.m.i.n.n.n.g.: finish diminish, assess to progress, ramp not amp, measure for pleasure, inject bottleneck, no pain to gain, no harm alarm, no need for greed, grit to the limit
3. aware but don't care: don't care if they stare, don't care what you wear, don't care about hair,
4. shake and bake, tap and slap, jiggle and wiggle, fiddle and twiddle, splice and dice

Shake and Bake

Normal jogging, jump roping, are good exercises if you do the form properly, totally relaxed, elastic, bouncy, and springy. Most people don't have good form, otherwise you wouldn't see so many low back, knee, joint chronic pain from doing this exercises as people get older.

I experimented a number of years with slow jogging, and got some good ideas from that.
I also experimented some with jumping rope.

Being a taiji/qigong enthusiast, and jhana meditator, my natural instincts kicked in and discovered a way to do aerobic/cardio exercise in the absolute most efficient way.
That means using the least amount of input energy and getting the most output benefit, the most bang for the buck.

It looks like doing jump rope without a rope

 So the pace and rhythm is somewhat like this, or picture a jogger waiting at an intersection jogging in place to stay warm and loose.
Doing jump rope without a rope means you can relax way more, because there's no tension from the stress of needing to jump high enough to clear the rope, and coordinating  hand, wrist, whole body movement to clear the rope on each jump.

If you're doing it right, the input energy should feel like just a little more, 10-20% more energy than walking at a moderate pace. That relaxed. You feel like you could do this for hours effortlessly, just like you could walk for hours. Yet, your breathing is deep, using far more range than shallow sedentary breathing, your heart rate is somewhat elevated, your body is getting warm and soft and a light mist of sweat is building. That's the baking. Melting the ice (cumulative pain, tight spots, energy blockages).

2nd level of refinement

Getting 5 exercises for the price of one. Instead of moving your arms in slow jogging form or coordinating jump rope form, completely let your arms and shoulders go, so they're just hanging freely getting yanked around by your lower body locomotion. If you're doing it right, you should be getting many kinds of micro stretches similar to old people doing those arm swinging exercises in a China town public park.

3rd level of refinement

Let your neck, shoulders, upper back go. The neck you have to have momentary restabilizing moments to keep your head level enough to maintain your balance, but let the tension go in the neck the rest of the time. So it kind of looks like a funky chicken dance with the head bobbing. You're not aiming to look a certain way (that would just create tension), it's just how your lower body locomotion of the legs is going to affect your upper body in a completely relaxed state. 

4th level of refinement

Maintain passadhi/pacification relaxation of jhana the whole time you're doing the exercise. The only tension you should feel is one of your feet pushing off the ground. The rest of the body is doing taiji, doing at least first jhana. 

I could make a video of myself doing this exercise, but no matter what anyone's skill level is, it's going to look silly. You can't tell from looking at external appearance what someone's skill level and level of relaxation is. The only test would be you doing it for many hours effortlessly without getting tired.

This is similar to 80, 90 year old taoist masters (with highly developed 4th jhana and beyond level of samadhi) being able to hike for hours in the mountains in China, at a brisk pace, up mountains, looking spry like a goat and putting 20 and 30 year olds to shame and leaving them in the dust. It's a real thing. The higher the jhana, the lighter you feel, the more energy and degree of effortlessness is possible.

RDA: recommended daily amount

How much 'shake and bake' should I do everyday?

(This is a private email I sent to some friends)

recommended daily amount:

1 session, perhaps first thing in the morning.

20min in one session at moderate pace with slow deep breathing, light sweat, feeling really warm, soft, pliable, relaxed, not tired.

another 30-60min total, in 5-10min sessions, as needed throughout the day.

anytime parts of your body start feeling cold, or tight, uncomfortable, tired, and before doing other exercises like stretching and resistive weight training.

'shake and bake' is my way of getting RDA of optimal aerobic. You might customize or find something better, more fun (swimming?), or more suitable for you.

But if you do the proper amount of daily cardio, you'll prevent so many problems, and gradually fix existing ones. This can be done at any age.

By doing this exercise religiously, I was able to fix some weird exotic qi problems that famous monks and chinese doctors couldn't help me with. If I live to be 80, 90, I'll be like one of those taoist immortals blazing along on hiking trails up the mountain effortlessly. Don't ask me in old age why I didn's share these wondrous simple secrets with you! I've already told many of you about this, but you look at me with disbelief and skepticism. So now it is in writing. Don't regret things later, take care of your health now.

qigong gorilla's overview of optimal health

Basic model of the components of your body and good health

The purpose of this article is not to give an accurate and up to date understanding of science, but to illustrate how the fundamental workings of good health is actually pretty simple and intuitive.

The numbers cited are rough estimates, science is always changing.

There are 37 trillion cells.
There about 100 trillion good bacteria living symbiotiacally, most living within your gut, and they manufacture essential things your cells can't produce on their own. You'd die without these outsider friendly bacteria helping out.
Each cell is like a miniature version of you.

1. it needs to eat food, air, oxygen, 
2. it needs to crap, eliminate waste
3. it needs garbage pick up,
4. it needs food delivery,
5. it needs heating and air conditioning.
6. it needs repair service at times from the immune system, infracture, roads and highways for delivery and pickup of cargo.

Blood circulation by the heart reaches less than 30% of the cells.
How do the other 70% of cells get their services met?

Lymph fluid, which does not get circulated by the heart pumping.
Lymph requires muscular contraction and movement from sufficient physical exercise.
And also the workings of the jhana battery, which gets charged by noble silence, celibacy, sufficient food, sleep and rest.
A fully charged jhana battery acts like a powerful network of water towers and pressure tanks, and a high power electrical system that can service all 37 trillion cells.

If you drain your jhana battery by indulging in sensuality, too much thinking, not enough meditation and rest, then your community of cells and good bacteria, many of them are going to get starved, not get enough oxygen, get ill from their garbage not getting picked up and being too cold because their heater is broken from not enough electrial power, and not enough power and working infrastructure for the immune system to send out it's doctors and maintenance workers.

If you lead a sedentary life, 70% of your 37 trillion cells are going to get shortchanged on necessary services.
Each cell is like a mini you.
You need to eat, crap, get garbage picked up, etc. (same list of services stated earlier).
You wouldn't eat one week's worth of food and crap that out in one sitting once per week would you?
You can't, you're not designed to do that.
Every cell is like a mini you, it's not designed to do that either.
You need to eat and get necessary services not only once a day, but throughout the day.
So does each mini you.
So how do they get the goods they need?
Sufficient daily exercise.
Again, remember that blood only circulates to a small percentage of your body, the other 70% of the 37 trillion mini you's need physical exercise pumping that lymph fluid and circulating qi in invisible networks of qi channels to keep the whole system humming and working properly.

What is optimal exercise?

Normally you breathe shallow, using less than 20% of your lung capacity.
If you over exercise, too intensely and/or too long, you incur injuries, you deplete your jhana battery which you need for more important spiritual pursuits.
If you under exercise, the 70% of the 37 trillion mini you's get starved and intoxicated with un-removed garbage, and cumulative damage from that compounds, making it harder to repair and rejuvenate your collective body.

optimal exercise is going to involve a full range of expression 

(of motion, breathing, relaxation,  muscle contraction, stretching, etc.)

Daily quota for optimal health is going to look something like this:
1. minimum of 30-60 minutes of elevated aerobic cardiovascular: such as slow jogging, rope-less jump roping, enough to get full deep breathing, elevated heart rate, full body light mist of sweat, not exhausted sweat pouring, heart pounding.
1b. minimum of another 60 min. of easy walking, taiji, qigong,  walking in the garden, hiking, standing and walking meditation.

2. stretching: Always do #1, at least 5 min. or however long needed to get the body warm and soft. This is to prevent injury, but also to make the strecthing effective and make long lasting impact. At least 30-60min a day total, better to have many small sessions throughout the day. Better to do dynamic forms of stretching that naturally keep the body warm, soft, elastic. People with cold body types doing yoga, and holding poses too long, body will get cold making the stretching far less effective and impactful, and risking injury.

3. getting full range of muscular movement: again, start with #1, get warm and soft. You don't need a gym membership. At least 30min a day of some combination of pushups, pull ups, light dumbell work (one dumbell between 5 to 10% of your body weight is good).

4. self accupressure, self massage, tapping and slapping, probing to sense what's going on in your body. Parts where blood, qi don't circulate well, that part will feel tender, painful, weird. Parts that are in excellent health, massaging won't feel good, it will feel neutral like you could take it or leave it and you wouldn't care. If you massage or work on a spot of the body and it feels really good, it's your body trying to tell you to keep going. Foam rollers are good.

How do you know you're doing each of the 4 categories correctly?

For optimal health, if you're doing it right, you should feel endorphins, pleasure chemicals of the brain that feels the same as a mild or moderate form of first jhana. That comes from the 70% of those 37 trillion cells giving you positive feedback thanking you for meeting their service needs.

What's the secret to success?

1. You need at least a low quality first jhana level of samadhi. This is not hard. 99% of people can do this.
This gives you the sensitivity you need to do step 3 of 16aps breath meditation correctly, able to use the breath energy and tactile sensation of all 37 trillion cells of your body to probe what's going on, where it's healthy and where it has stagnant energy or blockages.

2. modulation: doing an efficient and necessary quantity of intensity of daily exercise that you need that day. Without #1, you won't know what's too little, too much, too intense, too lax, or just right.

3. if you're doing the whole daily routine right, it feels good, you look forward to it like a hungry person about to eat (that's the 70% of the 37 trillion cells talking to you, most people don't listen), you don't get tired physically or mentally while doing it. Over time you get stronger and your endurance increases, it becomes a habit as natural as breathing, eating, sleeping.  And once it's ingrained as a good habit you'll have it for life. If after many months, it feels like a dreadful chore,  then you're doing something wrong.

intermittent fasting the easy way, 16 hr fast, 8 hr window to eat

A 300lb guy lost 100lb easily doing the 16/8 intermittent fast for a year.
The 16/8 is easy to do, and is catching on in popularity in the regular world.
People with full time jobs, they report healthier weight and better energy throughout the day.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/26/health/intermittent-fasting-jared-sklar-wellness-live-longer/index.html


For comparison to the 16/8, monks, nuns, yogis keeping 8 precepts are doing 20/4 or 19/5 intermittent fasting easily.

If you eat healthy food, you can eat as much as you want, never feel nutritionally deprived,  doing 19/5 intermittent fasting, it's pretty much impossible to have unhealthy weight (assuming no unusual health problems).

There's a large number of yogis and monastics who have been doing this long term that are a testament to this, and it looks like health conscious worldlings are joining the party.

gorilla hummus protocol

Gorilla Hummus protocol

Rather than eat the same chick pea hummus all the time, I like to diversify my nutritional portfolio, swap out the chick peas with other beans and legumes for different proteins and amino acids, and swa out the tahini with various nut butters as well.

You can use the bean hummus to make burritos, wraps, as a dip, or as a sauce for your brown rice, etc.

standard hummus

First, a basic hummus recipe to establish pattern/protocol.
1. Chickpeas (garbonzo beans): soak dry beans overnight, then pressure cook for 20min. Or use a can of precooked beans.
2. Tahini: In health food or grocery stores, you can find in nut butters section. Tahni is ground up sessame seed paste.
3. Garlic: 2 cloves, or more.
4. Lemon juice. about one lemon per cup of cooked beans
5. Ground cumin
6. Olive oil
7. salt: at last 1 tsp per cup of cooked beans.
8. add water if necessary to get creamy consistency
put all 8 items in food processor and about 1 minute should do it. A blender can work too, but harder to clean and extract.

gorilla bean hummus protocol

My optimizations to make it into a generalized bean paste hummus.
1. beans I've used to good effect, instead of garbonzo: black, pinto, kidney, adzuki, mung, lentil, navy. 1 cup dry bean soaked overnight in water becomes approximately 2 cups of bean volume.
1b. pressure cooker: throw out the soak water (or feed your garden with nutritious bean water), this supposedy reduces gas power of the beans. When pressure cooking, add just slightly more water than the height of the beans. You'll end up with just the right amount of water for use in the hummus if not too much escapes as steam, otherwise step 8 to add a little more water in. Pressure cook about 20 min. If you don’t have pressure cooker, cook as long as needed to get beans soft. Or buy canned precooked beans.
1c. right after pressure cooking 2 cooked cups of beans, I add 5 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar (have used other vinegars too), and this is to add acid to help digest the beans and results in less gas.
2. tahini, or any nut butter: peanut butter works great, so does almond, cashew
3. garlic: I put them in raw. hummus usually tastes good and fresh for about 5 days, and garlic is one of the noticable things to taste weird when it's not fresh anymore. I've tried maybe hummus without garlic on occasions when I needed to avoid bad breath.
4. lemon juice - or lime, or some combination of orange, lime, lemon, if the lemon is way too sour. I even experimented with some cranberry, organge, mango juice before just to see what happens.
5. ground cumin - usually I don't use and it still tastes fine
6. olive oil - usually I don't use, and prefer just to add more nut butter if you want to increase the creamy factor.
7. salt
8. water

Most eco friendly and energy efficient way to hard boil eggs

A pressure cooker is a device everyone should own.

The way most people make hard boiled eggs, is a tragic waste of resources.
First, they boil a lot of water, as high as the height of an egg.
That takes a lot of energy, time, propane, or electricity.
If you could picture all the coal and fossil fuel emissions, air pollution, to do that, you'd try to use the least amount of energy as possible to do the job.

With a pressure cooker, all the heat is retained and put to work cooking the egg, not evaporating into the air like boiling a large pot of water.  I made a video above so you can see just how little water is needed. You only need a tiny amount of water with the pressure cooker. Enough to produce steam to engulf the eggs with the same heat from water vapor as you would get from water in boiling liquid form.

So it doesn't take long to bring a tiny amount of water, maybe 2-3 minutes to a boil.

Then you put in the eggs, put the lid on it, set a timer for 5 minutes.
When the pressure starts to build to to a noisy level, reduce to low heat, enough to keep the boil going.

After the 5 minutes timer sounds, turn off the stove. Set the timer for another 5 minutes, let the eggs continue to cook at near boiling temperatures with the retained heat.

When done, if you plan to eat the eggs right away, you can add some cold water to make it easy to peel the shell. Otherwise, just take the lid off and let it cool naturally. But this will cook the egg more, so if you want to keep the yolk at whatever level you decide, then add cold water.

So total time, this takes about 12 minutes. And uses the lowest possible amount of water and gas/propane.

optimal eye care, exercise for your eyes so you never need glasses



4👑☸ Cattāri Ariya-saccaṃ 四聖諦

☯🦍 eye-care

preserving quality of vision

This applies to just about everyone in the modern world. If you knew this when you were a kid and put it into practice, then you'd never need glasses. 

(4👑☸) → ☯🦍   → ⚔️🛡️   → eye-care   (⤴)

Move it or lose it

I wish I had this brilliant insight like Jack when I was young. But now that I know the principle, I can at least maintain the vision quality that I do have.

Excerpt from Jack La Lanne's

"live young forever: 12 steps to optimum health, fitness & longevity."

(Jack lived to around 100 years, never needed glasses, was famous for doing 1000 pushups in 20min, and other feats of health and fitness.)

Your eyes need exercise just like any other muscle, especially in this day of pollution, television, driving and computers. I am a great believer in exercising my eyes. Like a camera or a pair of binoculars when you adjust the focusing mechanism. I like to exercise my eyes by changing my focus on various objects. Maybe it's my restless nature. I can't sit still for long and I constantly want to look around me, observe and learn. Could be my French heritage, or is it the fact that I feel so energetic and good about myself I just want to explore? Anyways, I use this characteristic of mine to exercise my eyes.

How do I do it? I grab a book with fine print (a telephone book will do, although with everyone owning a computer, I don't know how long the telephone company will continue to print books). Start by focusing on the small print, and then slowly bring the book up close to your face endeavoring to focus as it comes up to your nose. Oops! Now the Jones' and Smiths are really getting jumbled. Then quick as a flash I look out the window beyond Santa Monica, and try to focus on a sailboat way out near the horizon. Repeat this experiment several times a week. Look at objects up close and way out. And from distance again to up close.

This practice has enabled me to see clearly without glasses since I was in my teens, at which time the only focusing I did was at the candy counter at the corner store. I believe focusing the eyes to be a very useful eye-strenghthening exercise. However, the practice is only recommended for healthy eyes. If you have eye problems then your first course for action is to consult your eye doctor. He's the real professional, fully trained to treat abnormal eye conditions.

My version of Jack's insight

I make a point of standing while reading. Holding my book or e-ink kindle at a generally ergonomic posture and distance. But as I'm reading, I'm constantly changing the position of the book, telescoping, and even shifting up and down, left and right slightly, to force the eyes to constantly relax and change your shape to refocus and see clearly at various distances. This works in a sitting posture as well, but it just feels better to get the whole body moving, easier to keep spine, hips, shoulders, neck loose.

taiji rest of body

The rest of my body is doing easy simple taiji, no fixed pattern. Constantly shifting my weight from one leg to the other. Using the free arm and drawing taiji circles to circulate blood and qi throughout the whole body.

movement arouses vigor/energy

You'd think this is more tiring than sitting in a static position, but actually you feel much better, just like the water in the waves of the ocean in motion is clean and pure, and the static still water of a pond is full of algae and filth. 

☸ Lucid 24.org 🐘

DCHYL: Don't care how you look

The best and most effective qigong and physical exercises often look silly. If you care how you look, then you're going to miss out;.