I think I succeeded, if you can succeed in meditating , in the bath ear plugs in light off the only thing I could hear properly was my heart beat and I kind of focused my attention on it, it was weird I didn't feel energy but I did feel heavy and that It didn't feel like there was water around me Is that a step in the right direction?
This is possibly a zen attitude but...There is benefits to meditation, but you can't succeed or fail in meditation. There is only sitting and that's it. You won't feel any energy. The idea that meditation will help you feel energy, develop chi or make your hands feel incredibly hot and you can transfer that heat around is quite frankly...nonsense. Edit: I am being very polite there, MAP has strict rules about naughty words. That's not an attack at you. Don't believe me? Go and ask some Buddhists. If possible, ask a priest or one that has meditated for a long time. Most meditation (that I know of) focuses on the breathing not the heart. What I suggest you do is learn a little about zazen (zen style meditation) and give it a go.
hello there, I to am a huge meditation fan, although I must admit it has nothing to do with zen or any other eastern religion for me. I sometimes spend anywhere from five to fifteen minutes sitting quietly or even holding a deep straddle stance while practicing mental imagery of combat scenarios or just reviewing my own goals and the steps I need to take today to accomplish them, some don't think this is meditation but is for me.
I can highly recommend "Meditation for Warriors: Practical Meditation for Cops, Soldiers and Martial Artists" by Loren W. Christensen. It covers it all, straight ahead with no BS, in about 150 pages. You can get started almost after 5 minutes of reading.
That sounds like a load of marketing "nonsense" to me....If you really want no thrills meditation, then just meditate. As in just do it. And it will take you no minutes of reading or anything else.
I would never recommend meditating in a bathtub, especially if you have no prior experience and when the water is hot. You could easily fall asleep/pass out, and drown.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9b4FbGlVSE"]Introduction to Zen Meditation: The Still Point - YouTube[/ame]
To me meditation is a bit like what I do if my computer slows down. I just let all tasks finish their job, start no new programs and just wait for some time until the cpu has cooled down. The next application I start will be faster. Just like that, meditatation works for me. If I have a lot of things on my mind, I sit down, don't start new thinking, let old thinking finish and do that until my mind is clear. The clear and good feeling afterwards comes from being able to concentrate on one thing (just like the CPU handling operations from only one program instead of twenty). During meditation one can have a feeling of sudden happiness or experience previously unexperienced clear moments. But only because one always thinks too many things at the same time and is not used to this state of mind. No supernatural stuff in here... I guess, one can "move" heat or sensations around. But not in the way of energy. I also think the energy stuff is nonsense. That was probably the explanation of the ancient Chinese because they didn't know better. But I'm not even sure they did think of it this way. When I was in China, people's approach to Qi was much less esoteric than here. For me, it is the feeling you feel or produce if you concentrate your awareness on something and do certain exercises. You train your awareness to feel sensations that occur during exercises. But they are no expression of esoteric energy but rather normal bodily feelings. It is either autosuggestion or feeling a feeling that your brain would normally filter because it is seen as irrelevant. You might feel heat or tingling sensations and you might even be able to play with them because you will feel them (or imagine them) wherever your awareness goes. So the movement is the movement of your awareness rather than the movement of "Qi". As your awareness moves from one hand to the other, you will feel the heat on the way because you only focus on one spot at a time and thus feel the heat there. Qi goes with Yi (以意行气), as the Chinese say. With my explanation it sounds less like "Qi energy is commanded by your will" but rather like the very easy observation "you will feel stuff where you concentrate on".
If you think of qi as will/perception (two sides of an inseparable coin when using human sensory systems, I feel), then you are moving qi around when you do those kind of sensory meditations. It's also fascinating to me that you can also do the same to others without verbal cues.
You mean as in "I concentrate on your left arm and don't tell you and you can feel it"? We tried that once or twice in our Dojo. It felt weird to even try something like that. Our master believes in this kind of stuff which is really disturbing to me and makes me doubt that this is the right school to go to. But since he leaves everyone his opinion and doesn't act like a missionary, I still go there for the lessons I think worth to learn. It doesn't hurt to try this stuff out but I have serious doubts that it can work on others. The success rate of guessing where the other one is concentrating on was rather low when we tried (although, I have to admit, that my partner was right a few times and I got doubts about my scepticism but that was only for short until he guessed wrong again. I guess it's more or less random). At least, I am still very sceptic that it could work.
No, that wasn't quite what I meant. That does sound like guesswork. I was talking about how your intent can effect if/what others feel. I don't believe in psychic energy that flows between living things. I think it's most likely to be ideomotor phenomena. But that doesn't make it any less amazing to me, especially looking at how people perceive those phenomena.
Yes, that's what it looks like to me. Would be nice to see something like that work but I guess I'll never see it work. You mean as in "my intent is to atomize your inner organs when I hit you" or "to punch into the wall behind you" instead of just hitting you without any intent? But that is also only affecting your own punch and the "improved-by-intent" punch hits the opponent so that he will feel it. From what you've said "It's also fascinating to me that you can also do the same to others without verbal cues." it seemed as if you had something in mind that could affect another person. Can you elaborate on this? As I understand the ideomotor phenomenon (which was new to me), it is about you learning stuff even if you don't do it actively. But you still have to imagine it. Like going through a form in your mind thus improving it without having to practice it in reality. If I do something with my intent to a partner, the partner would have to know about it to get some ideomotor phenomenon, wouldn't he? If I use no verbal cues, I would have to put my hands over the part of the body where I would like him to feel something. Otherwise, the person doesn't even know that he is being affected and can also not experience any ideomotor phenomenon, can he?
Yes, you need touch, or at least having part of you close enough to be felt by the other person. But a mixture of ideomotor effects and empathic effects can have real effects. An example I've done a fair few times would be curing hiccups in others. I place my hand on, or close enough to be felt, to someone's diaphragm, just under the sternum. Then using energy transfer purely as a visualisation and relaxing myself and my breathing I can cure hiccups in under a minute with a very high success rate. The same kind of thing can be used in massage. At no point does the recipient have to visualise anything, or be aware of what I'm visualising, for it to work. Most of my examples are not suitable for a family-friendly forum, but I've tried out a lot of experiments without telling the other person and they have become very aware of the effects, even though they had no idea what I was doing. So, I've found that a lot of these visualisations can have real effects, even though the things you're visualising don't really happen. The body-empathy effects can be done without touch. We pick up thousands of visual cues and clues from people all the time, and it's fairly easy to affect things like breathing and muscle tension in others. Does that make sense?
