2 Circle Walking and Taoist Meditation - Intermediate Meditation 1

BAGUA MASTERY PROGRAM

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MODULE 2 Circle Walking and Taoist Meditation: Intermediate Meditation 1 BRUCE FRANTZIS

Copyright© 201 0 Bruce Frantzis All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval syste transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recordi1 otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Energy Arts, Inc., P.O. Box 99, Fairfax, CA 94978-0099 The following trademarks are used under license by Energy Arts, Inc., from Bruce Frantzis: Fri Energy Arts® system, Mastery Without Mystery®, Longevity Breathing® program, Opening the E1 Gates ofYour Body™ Qigong, Marriage of Heaven and Earth™ Qigong, Bend the Bow™ Spinal Qi~ Spiraling Energy Body™ Qigong, Gods Playing in the Clouds™ Qigong, Living Taoism™ Collectio1 Rev Workout™ HeartChi,™ Bagua Mastery Program,™ Bagua Dynamic Stepping System,™ Bagua nal Warm-up Method,™ and Bagua Body Unification Method.™

Editing: Heather Hale, Bill Ryan and Richard Tau binger Interior Design: Heather Hale Cover Design: Thomas Herington Photo and Illustration Editing: Mountain Livingston and Thomas Herington Photographs by: Eric Peters, Bill Walters, Caroline Frantzis, Richard Marks and Catherine Helms Illustrations: Michael McKee and Kurt Schulten Image Alteration: Lisa Petty, GiriVibe, Inc., Patrick Hewlett and Jodie Smith Models: Bill Ryan, Keith Harrington, Don Miller and Paul Cavel Printed in the United States of America PLEASE NOTE: The practice of Taoist energy arts and meditative arts may carry risks. The inform in this text is not in any way intended as a substitute for medical, mental or emotional counseling a licensed physician or healthcare provider. The reader should consult a professional before unde ing any martial arts, movement, meditative arts, health or exercise program to reduce the chan injury or any other harm that may result from pursuing or trying any technique discussed in this Any physical or other distress experienced during or after any exercise should not be ignorec should be brought to the attention of a healthcare professional. The creators and publishers o text disclaim any liabilities for loss in connection with following any of the practices described i1 text, and implementation is at the discretion, decision and risk of the reader.

Table of Contents Section 1: Meditation 1, Part 1 ................ 5 Key Concepts .............................................................. 5 Progression .................................................................. 5

Meditation 1: Put Your Mind into Your Body ........ 6 Part 1: Wake Up Your Breath and Body ................... 6 Preparation ............................................................................... 7 Instructions ............................................................................... 7

Section 2: Meditation 1, Part 2 ............... 9 Put Your Mind inside Your Body: Center-to-Periphery Breathing ................................ 9 Preparation .................................................................. 9 Instructions ............................................................................... 9

Section 3: Meditation 1, Part 3 ............. 15 Breath and Awareness Penetrate Your Five Extremities ........................................................ 15 Preparation ................................................................. 15 Instructions ................................................................. 15

Section 1 Meditati on 1, Part 1 Key Concepts In Module 1, the basic physical techniques and meditation principles related to practicing bagua as meditation were introduced. This section details an actual meditation session.

Progression Ideally, all training sessions should be approached from four progressive levels: 1. Walking in a straight line with and without the arms engaged. Take a maximum of ten steps in one direction before tuning around and beginning again. If taking a lesser number of steps, do your best to take an even number of steps (two-four-six-eight) before turning around. 2. Walking the Circle without the hands being engaged.

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Bagua Mastery Program

3. Walking the Circle performing bagua energy postures, including the Upper Body SPC palm position to be introduced in Module 4 and Module 5, respectively. 4. Walking the Circle while practicing the Single Palm Change (SPC). Maybe your Circle Walking workout will last fifteen, thirty or forty-five minutes, or even an hour or two or more. Regardless, take one instruction from each set that follows and practice it for your entire workout without attempting the next one. Once you are internally satisfied that you've got the gist-. no matter how many workouts it takes-practice the next instruction plus the one you have just learned together. Warm up with the first instruction and continue simultaneously adding the second, if you can. However, if adding the second instruction is too much, then just focus on the first one. Again, stay there for as long as it takes until you reach an intuitive degree of internal satisfaction and can simultaneously practice, coordinate and integrate instructions 1-2 (above). Then, proceed to add instruction 3, where instructions 1-2 follow each other as the warm-up and the bulk of your practice is spent on instruction 3. If you're being honest, it will most likely will take you at least a couple of years.

Meditation 1: Put Your Mind into Your Body Part 1: Wake Up Your Breath and Body The function of this warm-up is to begin the process of putting your mind inside your body. Phase 1 seeks to get your breath and mind to consciously feel and inhabit your belly, lower tantien and all your internal organs. The meditation's next stage uses and expands upon this awareness.

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Module 2: Circle Walking and Taoist Meditation-Meditation 1

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Preparation '

If Walking the Circle during Phase 1, go around the circle three times and then reverse direction. For a minute or two, begin to warm up by physically Walking the Circle and relaxing your body and mind to the best of your ability. Begin by encouraging the energies of your body and mind to know it's time to wake up rather than remain sleepy. This will help you become more aware.

Instructions 1. Put the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth in the way of all Taoist chi practices. 2. Initially, when you start walking, just get your energy to move and shift from being sluggish to lively. Become aware of your breath. Then, ideally using the physical processes of Longevity Breathing, inhale and exhale from your belly in a nice, easy and comfortable manner. Initially, regardless of your previous level of training, practice regular breathing. After a while and if you are more experienced, use reverse breathing. In either case, practice until your belly becomes very alive with a sense of your breath moving chi inside it. 3. Moving slowly and easily in the same direction, find out what your personal feeling says about if you are creating too much or too little internal pressure from your breathing. Your breath's in-and-out movements and your walking speed shouldn't cause your nervous system to involuntarily rev up or freeze. Walk and breathe comfortably without starting a cycle of internal strain. Breathe in and out as you step until your mind and breath calm down, and your nervous system continues to relax and stabilize. 4. Change direction and see if you can maintain the sense of your mind waking up and being inside your belly and body. See if that's okay. If not, continue to walk in the same direction and stabilize again. If so, change again to see if the relaxation level of your body, mind, breath, nervous

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Bagua Mastery Program

system remains stable, relaxed and comfortable. If so, great. If not, internally look inside and find out why not. Correct the situation and make it so. Just continue to let go until the breath in your belly feels normal, comfortable and stable.

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Section 2 Meditati on 1, Part 2 Put Your Mind inside Your Body: Center-to-Periphery Breathing Preparation While Walking the Circle, initially go around the circle three times and then reverse direction (or follow the more specific instructions from the previous section).

Instructions 1. Extend your breath and allow it to open from your belly. Feel it internally move out in increments up and down your body in tandem, until it simultaneously spreads and arrives all the way up to your shoulders and down to the bottom of your hips and kwa.

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2. At each increment of your breath moving simultaneously a little higher and lower, you have several options of how you can coordinate your breath with your physical movements. Each increment is progressively more difficult, so it's recommended that you only proceed to the next one after the previous one has stabilized, meaning you can do it fairly easily without strain. Breathe naturally without specifically coordinating your breath to the specific ways you step, or extend or retract your arms or hands. The function is to get your internal sense of breath moving inside your body, so it can fluidly move from center (lower tantien) to periphery (bottom of the pelvis and shoulders) and back again from periphery to center in smooth, effortless cycles. • It doesn't matter whether you inhale or exhale from center to periphery or vice-versa? You may inhale or exhale on either half of the center-periphery-center movement. Two points based on your body's natural reactions should guide you: a) Which one (inhale or exhale) can your body most easily adjust to without involuntarily holding your breath even for short periods of time-either moving center to periphery or periphery to center. b) Which breathing pattern can you actually do with the least amount of strain and continuity, as your inhales and exhales continuously alternate moving between center and periphery? Ideally, the practice of bagua requires a firm grounding in Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body Qigong.

3. Next, focus on being able to feel everything inside your pelvis as your mind, breath and chi move from your center (lower tantien) to the periphery (pelvis and shoulders). This includes your internal organs, intestines, sacrum and tailbone, pelvic bones, perineum, genitals and anus. This now begins a new breathing rhythm, where you are not only affecting your breath, but everything your breath influences.

4. As you attempt to become conscious and fully alive with each breath, penetrate and bring alive everything in between the center and periphery.

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Module 2: Circle Walking and Taoist Meditation-Meditation 7

In your quest, ask yourself questions, until you get better and more complete answers, e.g.,: Has my mind, by use of the breath, enabled me to start feeling the inside my body? Does putting my mind inside my body enable me to feel the physical tissues (ligaments, muscles, bones, blood, organs, etc.)? If not, try to make your mind ever-more quiet and still until you can. 5. As your mind goes inside your body and reaches to your shoulders, shoulder blades and bottom of your hips, begin to recognize and feel what's inside your inner emotional, mental and psychic world that is blocking your ability to change. Feel the wrenching of what doesn't want to change and inhibits your mind's ability to feel the inside of your body. Then, see if you can let the inner resistance go, until your mind can continuously inhabit and feel that part of your body. 6. If you don't succeed at first, take some more steps as you energize and open up that area of your body to a greater level of your awareness. Continue until you break through and can let go of some of your resistance to changing the chi that affects the frozen or closed places in your awareness. 7. Continue to do this until you have some confidence that between your tantien, hips and shoulders you can more or less feel what's in there. Some practitioners can do this relatively quickly while others need much more time. After a lot of practice, if you reach an intuitive point wher_e you feel this is not going to happen, simply move forward to the next instruction. Eventually, it will naturally happen as long as you let go of timetables. Gradually, bit by bit, continue to practice as before until you find you can fill your whole body with breath and awareness and be consciously aware of the process. 8. Now simultaneously, as you are becoming ever-more aware of your body, focus on also becoming aware of your awareness-that which allows and empowers you to experience this moment. Move at a speed that allows you to feel as though you're not pushing your system. Your body and awareness must naturally open up without strain and maintain the

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seamless continuum between both. Change direction as often as you need to-maybe only going around the circle once instead ofthree times before changing direction. Continue until internally you feel you're opening up. 9. Next, using the same center-periphery-center breathing in tiny progressive increments, extend the periphery to your elbows and knees. Use your breath to penetrate and open up the feeling inside your thighs: • Start with your muscles and blood vessels and eventually, if possible, down into your bone and bone marrow. • Then, from your shoulders to your neck, first into the muscles, blood, vertebrae and eventually, maybe many years later, into your cerebrospinal fluid and the spina~ cord.

10. Change whenever you get to a place where even if only after you take a few steps your breath and awareness can no longer penetrate, so that your mind is not inside your body. • Continue in this way until your mind, using each breath, can naturally saturate your body fairly effortlessly. The sheer process of breathing itself makes you aware of your body regardless of how many other things you are aware of at the same time. • Change when you feel you need to regardless of whether it's after three or one-hundred steps, just maintain the continuity of your body, breath and awareness.

11. Walk without changing direction when you perceive the need to energize any "dead" areas. 12. Once you have completed the previous instructions, take as many minutes as you need to simultaneously integrate all the instructions of part one and two inside yourself. All the instructions must become one seamless, natural event, rather than a series of separate events.

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Module 2: Circle Walking and Taoist Meditation-Meditation 1

When Bruce finished teaching Part 2 of this meditation practice, he then transmitted the essence of how to do the previous instructions using both audible ancient Taoist chants (liturgies) and silently. He reiterated the central point of the practice after the chants and before the silent transmissions. After the one minute of chanting, he said: "Changing when you need to, open up the chi bound inside you. Open up that which blocks the change, that which blocks the ability of your mind, your awareness to be present inside your body." Then, he deepened the transmission and said, "Each breath makes you aware of what's happening inside. The breathing process itself first links your mind and breath to make you aware of the inside your body. So later, just by breathing alone, you can become aware the inside of your body without having to especially focus with your mind." He then silently transmitted the same information for thirty seconds.

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Section 3 Meditation 1, Part 3 Breath and Awareness Penetrate Your Five Extremities Preparation From Part 3 forward, change the direction you walk after a single revolution of the circle, unless otherwise specified. Continue to follow all of the instructions detailed in Part 2.

Instructions 1. Continue the process of Meditation, Part 2 and incrementally extend your center-to-periphery breathing sideways to your wrists, down to your ankles and up to your occiput, the top vertebrae of your neck. Walk for awhile. 15

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2. Next, move forward. Breathe from center to periphery to your head and third eye, center of your palm and the bubbling well point on the ball of your foot. Usually, this requires some stabilization time to seamlessly integrate the center-to-periphery breathing this far.

Exercise patience and do not rush ahead to step 3. Bruce silently transmitted for almost two full minutes during this teaching. 3. Finally, incrementally extend your center-to-periphery breathing to your fingers and fingertips, feet and end of your toes and bai hui point in the center of the crown of your head. In this final opening of your breath, remember not to push yourself in a way that strains your nervous system. That will inhibit your capacity to smoothly sustain center-to-periphery breathing while remaining highly aware-especially being aware of awareness itself. Once again, ask yourself questions and try to find informative personal answers. As your center-to-periphery breathing progresses, notice what's happening. Ask yourself: Am I aware of my awareness? What else am I aware of? What is the subtle something that exists inside of me that allows me to be aware of things? For example, if you visualize yourself being a nine-foot-tall rabbit or a super hero walking in a circle, what is it inside of you allowing you to be aware of that vision? What enables you to be aware of your body? Yes, you want the breathing rhythm to make it automatic, but what is it that allows you to be aware of your body, breath or to visualize yourself doing this movement? From here forward, to invoke that awareness (whatever it may be to you), the text will instruct you to "use your mind" to do something. Start asking: How is it that I can begin to relax this awareness, so it's not tense? Bruce, to help his students better understand and wire in how they can personally embody center-to-periphery breathing, then chanted and silently transmitted for more than five minutes.

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