Hi Gallen,
Thank you very much for taking the time to post such a detailed reply to my post. I totally agree with all your main points. I have found from my own mediation experience that I go a lot deeper into "emptiness/beingness" when I have practised qi qong beforehand and I do believe for a balanced healthy life we need to balance the passive /yin meditations with the active yang exercises. The reason I bring this subject up is that about 15 years ago I used to practise with another qi gong master and he taught us numerous techiques for cultivating chi and transforming negative emotions - at first I was really enjoying the practise but about 5 years later I went through a really bad period of panic attacks ,which I don't think were related to the practise ,but I was trying every taoist techinique I knew to try to transform the negative to the positive - with little success. After months of real mental and emmotional pain I realised what I was doing was not working and by some good fortune I happened to listen to a tape by an Indian priest and he said something in the tape which reminded of the Tao Te Ching "Yielding is the way of the Tao" and "Stillness and tranquility set things in order in the UNIVERSE". (He actually used the Christian phrase "Resist not evil.").Anyway when I made this connection everything started to change - when I started to experience my next panic attack ,instead of resisting it or trying to transform it by some techique, I just stayed with and sort of let myself go into it and was amazed by how quickly I came through it ..then I started noticing that the attacks were getting less and less and finally after a couple of months they just went !. The biggest lesson for me was the power of just letting go and accepting what was happening. I am really drawn to SFQ as it seems to be be a more balanced practise then my previous one - especially when I read in the training manual the importance of entering the emptiness. What I do now is just after the quided self concentration exercise - the bit when Master Lin says "feel yourself lost in the harmony of the universe" I let go of trying to visualise or do very much and just try to just rest in stillness. I just would have preferred some sort of instruction on the tape to this effect as in most of the actual quided exercises the empahasis seems to be doing and not enough time to just being. I quess I just what reassurance that in SFQ practice there is a recognition of the importance of getting to a point of trusting in the balancing power of the universe and getting the mind out of the way !
