Dantian

Where does one channel end and another begin? those spaces between are important and creating and respecting that space between allows that something to be created.

Allowing space and relaxation in the Dan Tien allows the Dan Tien to begin filling.

Allowing space in the heart allows the heart to become full and warm.

We live in an era now where there's a lot of heart coldness.

So just below the belly button there.

In Tai Chi, this spot just below your belly button is called the Dan Tien.

And I give it a few different sort of names.

I call it the centre of your wheel.

And now I want to find some place to then, as Judith is saying, I want to root myself and ground myself.

And in the Taoists, like in my Tai Chi practice with my students, I'm like, we must sink Our energy is called a sinking practice because once I can sink my breath and my energy into my gut, into the furnace of the Dan Tien, then I can root myself into something and then I can build everything from that.

But I find that the magical community and the religious community and all these people, they want to go up here.

right away they want to go into the higher super nulls into heaven they want to go into the higher thoughts but i'm like you you've built your higher thinking on a house of cards and until you build a foundation for yourself to actually grow from which means you have to actually ask the hard questions about who am i and what am i doing and am i as we started this whole thing off on um stilo is talking about the stories am i only and um one of my favorite movies i heart huckabee I heard Huckabees and it's like how am I not myself? How am I not myself? And you got to continue asking that question is like what are the stories that I continually tell myself? Are they true? Have I lied to myself this whole time? Am I stuck in some kind of cognitive dissonance where all of a sudden the reality of my words and the reality of my actions don't line up? And then have I also gotten stuck in this thing called naive realism where I think that where I think that my perceptions are actually the experiences had instead of just understanding them as they are.

And what causes that to happen? Well, in one language, it's called Kundalini rising.

In another language, it's called stimulation of the Dan Tian,

right,

in Chinese.

You're placing it across your body and you're usually amplifying one of three fields.

You're basically your lower dantian, center dantian and upper dantian to just give it kind of a simply put colloquial understanding.

which in Dantians are just kind of like the Chinese definition of chakra centers, to very simply put it in kind of an understanding way where you're trying to connect with your heart or sacral chakra, basically, or then like your upper chakras, basically, to kind of put it.

Could you give us some examples of how you might personally apply Qigong practices in your life? Give us some examples of some of the basic works that you're doing to help the audience understand what this is.

Yeah, I guess the simplest put, if you've ever seen people in the park doing Tai Chi, that's basically what you're doing is you're connecting with the energy and you're And this is a really good way, I think, of describing it.

And so you can see, okay, whether Usui or whether he learned this practice from someone else, you know, read this in this book and then adapted it for Japanese bodies, right? That like, oh, we're going to like sit in Seiza, right? Perfect alignment, right? This kind of disciplinary practice of disciplining the body.

Oh, instead of focusing on the solar plexus, right? We're going to focus on the lower belly, the Hara, the Tanden, right? And these kinds of ways that the kind of combining these teachings coming out of like American mesmeric new thought stuff with previously existing Japanese ideas about body energetics, about body discipline and kind of creating this new that gets taught as part of Hatsune Ho.

Well, I think that was one of the things in Tomita's book that really caught my attention was the Seiza for five days, thinking, I couldn't even do that for an hour at this point in my life.

Well,