The Standing Post

• People often write me saying they are old and weak and lost too much jing .. what should they do?
• taosim says to practice emptiness meditation and because one thereby cultivates shen (awareness without clinging), this will in time give rise to jing and chi. Why? Jing transforms into chi and chi into shen and vica versa.
• For older people my teacher often recommended the Chinese medicine Liu Wei Di Huang Wang, which costs about $4 in any Chinese pharmacy, to help restore the debilitating effects from such loss in conjunction with old age.
• Anything else? Some schools say to eat sesame seeds, which Chinese make into a tasty black soup. A Delicious desert we’d eat in Hong Kong all the time though I like Almond soup a little better.
• The Indians say to eat pistachios and also the marrow from lamb bones.
• Whatever you do, don’t eat the stimulating herbs with ginseng, oysters, etc. that stimulate but do not help renew the body.

The jing-chi-shen phenomena is very profound and hard to realize if you only think of all three as physical phenomena. Anyone into internal arts will wax poetic about the Three Treasures but not many will do much to experience them. Unfortunate too, is the simplistic formula “first jing, then chi and finally shen”. If you have a lot of rice, the pot still won’t cook itself, and if you don’t know what you are doing, you still won’t get a good pot of rice! I prefer the following formulation that I came up with: If you don’t lose your jing (all the forms of it), chi MIGHT manifest (providing you are authentically cultivating) then it is possible to get shen. This is a realistic way to look at it.

Related:

Ritual Purification & Popular Culture

Boosting Kidney Qi

On Breathing and Dantien Cultivation