healthy vegan veggie burger and 'fries'

 

also this one, a vegan chef in their vegan restaurant revealing their secret recipe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l75ixsh-wjI

 Qigong Gorilla important ear maintenance tips:

(see 2 previous blog articles on my painful video documented experience with extreme ear wax built up over decades, for reason why you need to follow these maintenance tips)

1. otoscope is 30$, a great investment. You can look in your ear or any other hard to reach/see body part and see what's going on once a month, or at least a few times a year and monitor the situation.

2. debrox ear drops work well in breaking down wax. A tip from a pro that I used: instead of 15 min in ear, go for 30min, lie down on your side with a towel under head to catch spillover, and massage your ear area and make chewing motions with your mouth to really squeeze and work the ear canal from many angles, to make a little space for the ear drop to drip down the canal in serious cases where the wax is completely blocking the canal.

3. the reason the debrox drops say to stop using after 4 days, is because ear wax is a good thing that protects you, you want to keep a layer. The body naturally pushes out ear wax. If you meditate, you can feel it pushing, feels like any other bodily pushing like burping, farting, extreting feces, etc. I've had big chunks of earwax pop out during meditation before, or even just walking around shopping.

4. The reason you want to keep on top of the situation with wax buildup, the reason that I had to see a doctor, was because it was so clogged with ancient hard wax, thaat when I applied ear drops, the old dry wax absorbed the drops, expanding in size, and causing serious ear pain pushing on the canal due to the expansion.

5. Never use qtips, they just pack in the wax deeper where you can't get it out easily. You want to use qtips because you're ears itch and you think the wax is causing it. It's not from the wax. after removing all the wax, the ears still itch. Instead of using qtips and scopps, just using a towel or tissue to wipe down only as deep as your finger goes into your ear.

6. Don't use ear wax candles, they don't work. I've tried a few times over the years, and although it produces something that looks like ear wax, it didn't improve my hearing. I distrust western medical practices as much as anyone, but in this area with ear wax, debrox ear wax drops and water flushing has been working for decades very well. And for more serious cases, ear and nose specialists have special equipment for wax removal painlessly. Unlike my first experience as a child with serious ear wax buildup, the doctor used a metal scooping device that hurt like hell, scratched up my ear and needed antibiotics, and traumatized me and scared me off from dealing with ear wax buildup. 

Summary:

1. use otoscope regularly to check situation

2. no qtips and scoops, just clean ear with towel or tissue and fingers. let ear push things out - it will if the wax is not too hard and dry.

3. if you tend to make hard dry wax, then occasionally add 1 or 2 drops of mineral oil to keep things soft and excretable by the ear. Debrox ear drops only if buildup is severe.

4. if you follow first 3 steps, then you should never get to this step. Seeing a doctor. The doctor, nurse, or medical assistant should not do anything to cause you pain. If they do, they're not doing their job properly. Ask for referral to ear and nose specialist or get a different doctor. If they know what they're doing, debrox ear drops and water flushing will fix most people.

otoscope - 30$, extremely useful - toenail fungus asubha movie - manasi karoti on that asubha nimitta!

otoscope - 30$,  great for getting pictures of video of places on your body you can't see, or need a close up on. For example, you can use the camera to check your backside for tick bites, etc. 

Works on PC windows 10, and android device.

decades old ear wax from otoscope movie

synopsis:

Both of my ears were so blocked with decades old of ear wax, I was nearly deaf, and applying the debrox ear drops caused period sharp head and ear pain to my left ear from the wax expansion.

The videos you are about to see will disgust you. Perfect for asubha practice.

After a few weeks of debrox ear drops and a few times by the doctor and myself flushing with water and spray bottle, my right ear was working properly again, but on the left ear that wax had blocked 95% of my left ear hearing.

After 8/5 visit with specialist, left ear fixed.  The video of the ball of left ear wax (broken into two pieces) is massive. For scale in the video, the finger next to the wax, is my index finger (for size reference). Up close, the wax looks like a combination of feces, and heart attack artery clogging fat. Enjoy!

After watching video, 

be sure to read this article for summary of proper ear maintenance.

https://qigor.blogspot.com/2020/08/qigong-gorilla-important-ear.html

7/12/2020 

This is after 4 days of debrox ear drops and one doctor's visit which removed quite a lot of wax already.

right ear

left ear

 

7/13/2020 One day later,

applied debrox drops twice in both ears, about 10 hours apart, 

between 15min and 30min lying down for each ear. 

Right ear can hear and feel some of the chemical reaction, much less than yesterday.

Left ear, it broke through and can feel the drops dripping down deeper into canal, itching a little and sound of rice crispies with the wax dissolving, for about 20min or longer.

After flushing ears with water, new videos:

left ear: you can see compared to 24hrs ago, some of it dissolved away, you can see a little deeper into ear canal, whereas yesterday the camera was bumping right up against the thick layer of wax.

right ear: some more passage way cleared, you can see part of the ear drum now! major progress.

7/16 after another regular doctor with water flush, left side still blocked

7/16/2020 left ear scoop can't reach

7/16/2020 right ear mostly clear

7/16/2020 left ear completely blocked

8/5 two weeks later, specialist with special tools fixes problem in two minutes

he looked at right ear, didn't see it needed any more work.

8/5/2020 left ear wax vaccuum souvenirs from ear and nose specialist

8/5/2020 left ear clear

8/5/2020 right ear clear (from several days of debrox ear drops and self water flushing)

conclusion

I asked the ear and nose specialist what kind of maintenance I could do to prevent this problem in the future. He suggested one or two drops of mineral oil , maybe once a month. He said olive oil leaves yellow coloring that looks like wax, so better for clear oil. 

 

shake and bake: why it's so amazing? resonant frequency

Not even a very strong wind took out the tacoma bridge.

Another video giving basic primer on resonance, including example of pushing a person on a swing, opera singer shattering glass not because of loud or power, but because of adjusting pitch to hit resonant frequency.

Similarly with shake and bake,

with a very tiny amount of input energy, by carefully experimenting with the frequency of your leg locomotion and subtly adjusting how your arms whip around freely, you'll find little timing patterns that seem to loosen, shatter, disrupt physical and energetic tightness and blockages in your body, with gentle shock waves.

Actually if you're really good at taiji, qigong, and completely relaxing, you have to be careful in how much you relax your arms from a cold start, you can easily pull a muscle or tendon to hurt yourself.  

a personal story of tap and slap

I lived in a Buddhist monastery in asia for 3 years. In a bigger branch monastery of the same lineage, hundreds of monks and nuns have tried a slapping technique similar to these two videos, with dramatic results. Some of the monks, they had purple and black blotches on their body such as the upper back from toxins in the body getting shifted by hard slapping therapy.

I tried it myself by slapping behind my knees, really hard. Skin turned red, some people might bruise with that much force. This was a few minutes of continuous hard slapping, loud smacking. Not long after, maybe less than an hour, my feet and lower legs started to itch so intensely, like I've never experienced in my life. It was so itchy I wanted to scratch it with a butchers knife and cut my feet off if that didn't stop the itching. It took a few days for the itching to become manageable, and a few weeks to completely go away.

So same idea with those monks getting large splotches of purple and black skin. The itchness in the feet is the result of toxins and sludge getting dislodged and slowly flushed out (over weeks). My feet didn't change color before or after, but the itchiness was real.

Now not everyone is going to get that result, but people like me who meditate 6-10 hours a day in a cross leg sitting posture are likely to have blockages like this in their legs, and other parts of the body.

Shake and bake if you noticed, is a gentle form of the same thing I did, with 30-60 minutes daily of gentle tapping and slapping at the foot quick stepping, causing gentle shock ways to disrupt and dislodge blockages of energy and physical stuff in the lymph vessels, and the arms whipping around at a resonant frequency is also issuing gentle shock waves along many points of the shoulder, arm, elbow, etc. 

So the amazing thing about shake and bake, is that with just about 10-15% more energy than it takes to casually walk, your dislodging, melting, gradually eliminating blockages and tension all over the body. The arms whipping around you get for free, like turbo chargers on cars catching exhaust and spinning turbines for an extra turbo boost of power, as well as letting your head bob around freely (not too much to give whiplash, but enough bobbing to dislodge tension near neck and shoulders). 

 

First video demonstrates a technique slapping near knee area.

https://www.youtube.com/?v=JKUD8xqGiqY

second video same healer doing other body parts:

GST: gorilla stick therapy, advanced version of foam rolling customized for meditators

My version:

GST: gorilla stick therapy

feedback from a friend:

I have done shake and bake for a while now and I am not experiencing any pain from it at 18-20 minutes length.

Q: I wanted to know more about Gorilla Stick Therapy, I have a foam roller and no pvc pipe to go. What's the origin of this technique? and any new discovery with it? I honestly found soaking my feet in hot water to be a good thing so thank you for that <3

A: The origin of GST, beyond what I already wrote in the linked article above? Foam rolling has been around for a while. But if the foam you're using is too soft, it's not going to hit deep spots. PVC pipe will, and because of smaller diameter, you can hit some important areas you can't do with a regular sized foam rollers, such as the ankle and foot being especially important.

Remember the priority principle. The fingers, hands, toes, feet, lower limbs, generally get the least amount of qi circulation, and should get extra attention. I try to spend at least a few minutes rolling with a pvc pipe everyday, and ankles and feet are especially important, because long and frequent sitting meditation cuts off circulation there way more than fingers and hands.

Article today describing some of  the limited scientific study of foam rolling

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/does-foam-rolling-actually-do-any-good?utm_source=pocket-newtab

excerpt:

              Foam rolling was once for professional athletes only. These days it’s hard to walk into a gym without tripping over somebody rolling around on a neoprene tube. Dedicated classes in hip New York gyms are frequented by the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Shakira. Forget protein shakers, resistance bands or Fit Bits: foam rollers are this season’s must-have gym accessory.

The rise of foam rollers owes much to the Israeli engineer and physicist Moshé Feldenkrais, whose pioneering work on body movements to improve muscle function became popular in the 1950s. A black belt in judo, Feldenkrais incorporated them into his system for physical improvement when he came across them in the US a couple of decades later.

More recently, the American sports therapist Michael Clark helped introduce these accessories to the general population with his 2001 book, Integrated Training for the New Millennium. The first US patent for a foam roller was filed as recently as 2004.

For the uninitiated, the practice involves applying your own body weight to a foam cylinder, using small repetitive undulating movements to exert pressure on the muscle. The internet is full of guides on how to do this right: YouTube contains over 600,000 videos that match the term; a quick hunt on a search engine returns around 40m hits.      

Can qigong gorilla recommend any specific teacher or book on TCM, taiji, qigong, yoga?

https://www.reddit.com/r/EarlyBuddhismMeditati/comments/g49mg6/tcm_soak_feet_in_hot_water_daily_for_excellent/fo6ai2a/?context=3

Q: I'd like to thank you for your recent Qigor posts. I for one will be taking notes on all of this stuff. This sort of information based on experience can be hard to find. Considering my situation (young and health issues) I've found the one blind spot for me in Early Buddhism seems to be a lack of focus on taking care of one's health. This is one thing I commend the ancient Chinese traditions for in particular. And on that note I was wondering if you might recommend any tangential materials worth reading ie. TCM, energy channels, basic healthcare and learning about the human body. I'm also interested in learning energy work/breath techniques ie. Daoist (imagining core Qi as a warm goey ball) and similar to the instructions laid out in Keeping the Breath in Mind.

I suppose the lack of focus on healthcare makes a certain degree of sense, as times were very different when the Buddha set out his Dhamma instructions for us. And of course core Dhamma was always the priority - however these days we are surrounded by health hazards, some of which we don't recognize as such due to lack of education on the matter. So knowledge about maintaining a good posture, not sitting too long, staying away from things like sugar and processed "foods", abstaining from pornography and media, are all very valuable and relevant to modern practice. After all, the longer one's healthspan and lifespan are, the longer one can practice on the path.

A: (lucid24-frankk)
Offhand, I can't think of something I can whole heartedly recommend, not because it lacks value, but because it can easily lead to spending too much time researching what is valuable and interesting methods from a certain perspective, but can easily make us lose focus on dukkha and liberation from it. This is the main reason I feel why the Buddha didn't talk about the benefits of yoga, stretching, and some cardio, it can lead to distraction. One thing I would recommend, if one is a total beginner with taiji, qigong, or yoga, is try out a few classes where its available to you just so you have some reference point of actual physical experience. It's hard to pick up many things from just reading about it or watching video. In the long term though, I'd recommend people practice yoga, taiji, etc. on their own.

Q: Alright thanks for the advice. The modern world is full of Mara’s lures beckoning us into distraction, and I’ve found if I’m not careful my mind is all too willing to rationalize why I need to do this thing or that as opposed to getting to work with meditation.

Anyhow I’ll look into possibly finding a teacher to learn a bit of Taiji or Qigong directly, sounds like a better idea than trying to start things up entirely by myself.

A: great thing about taiji, qigong, yoga, is that you can do it simultaneously with sati, jhana, samadhi. Say someone spends an average of 2-4 hours a day doing walking meditation. You can substitute in any of those 3 modalities for walking, and reap the benefits of all of that. The reason I'm really hesitant to recommend and books or specific teachers, is because if you learn those specific lineages in their natural environment with those teachers, they teach many time consuming nuanced details about those specific arts that are not important and completely irrelevant for jhana, optimal health. That is why I publish my notes on qigong gorilla, to extract the essence of what is useful and can be done simultaneously with jhana. But the limitation of qigong gorilla, is if you don't already have some personal experience with those arts, it's unlikely you'll fully grasp how much you can relax and how much tension you carry around until a good teacher can point it out in person.