TheGullibleSkeptic

There is an old Daoist practice called Shou Yi, or ‘Guarding the One’ that I find very beautiful. It comes from the understanding that our awareness is constantly being drawn out of us / cast out into the world. We spend most of ourselves on people, our own worries, on memories and conversations, or things we want or things we dread. Sometimes we can sit down in a perfectly still room, alone, and still have our attention scattered out to these places, across a hundred different things like we are tuned into endless radio dials. There is a unity underlying all of this. One way to approach working your way out of this interference and loss of energy/Qi, is to imagine gathering your awareness back from everywhere you have ever left it. Examples : From the people you’ve been constantly thinking about. From the things you haven’t finished or will even never finish (or couldn’t finish). From yesterday and tomorrow and all the places the mind has wandered off to, that steal your life force from you while it’s needed for your own body. Let it come back into you on the breath (likes fishing poll reeling it back in) and settle behind your eyes, down through your chest - threading everything with a vitality and glow down into the lower abdomen. Have these things returning look like little golden threads or filament or little strings of light shimmer. Imagine these threads of your attention gradually returning little by little until you can feel yourself fully inhabiting your own body again, right where you are sitting. Some threads may be ten yards out and some may be 100 and some may be beyond the horizon or somewhere where you do not even know. Just reel them back in. Think of this as closing up your own house in the evening. You walk back inside. The windows are closed, the doors are drawn back in and the warmth that has been escaping begins to fill your own rooms again. Then you can build there and nourish from within - a meal, a fire, a bath (etc). Then it tends to you and not others. There is nourishment and cultivation in allowing the mind to become quiet enough that the spirit can settle back in and this is the season for it. The practice is especially helpful when you give it plenty of time. You may begin to notice how much of yourself was really occupied elsewhere at all times, without you realizing it. This is a faster and more informal way to practice this concept/practice. If you want the longer cultivation actual exercise, I can post that soon with the passages from the actual texts they come from, but try this version. It works and it’s easy for beginners. I will also post a few diagrams drawn by Joe Dispenza, illustrating similar concepts which show how these things siphon life force / qi / prana away from the body, especially over time. It scatters away. Linger in this practice and disconnect from external sensing / sound and thought / analysis and just exist in the body without mind and as all unnecessary activity stops the body is free again in so many ways, whether for healing or for getting what you want. Just have these filaments go back to where they are supposed to and then back to the lower dantian (just below and behind your belly button)