I am becoming more familiar with my energy body – and like most interesting results it happened when I did something wrong. During a screwed up retention practice I wound up with a lot of chi floating around my base chakra. I managed to move it in to my dan tien after a few hours but it was very dense and hard to move. Later, I tried to dissolve it in to less dense energy, which first required me to get it lumped together in more or less one spot. When I tried this I noticed that the chi always tried to separate in to two globs on either side of my abdomen. I was slightly confused by this until I remembered that essence is stored in the kidneys. I relaxed further, stopped trying to direct the flow, and watched. Not too long after the chi did in fact move to my kidneys. That was the first time I ever observed essence directly so now that I had found it I decided to attempt working with it. Operating on a basic understanding of Taoist alchemy that essence gets moved to the lower dan tien where it is changed in to pre-heaven chi – which as far as I am aware is a form of chi that is closer to the Dao and therefore should be attainable by dissolving. Which I decided to try.

I had mixed results. Using the belt meridian I moved some essence into my dan tien and began to dissolve it in to lighter energy (using the ice to water to air method) so that it could move up through the taiji pole in to the middle dan tien. I only recently managed to move energy in to that area with the proper density achieved. It was my experience that chi will not willingly move up the taiji pole into a higher elixir field unless it has already achieved the proper density. It is moved through the meridians easily enough but not the taiji pole. When I attempted to dissolve essence I found it was far more volatile than other forms of chi. It only took a small amount of time to dissolve the essence into a form that was approximate to what I needed to move chi in to the middle elixir field. When I did it began to rise right past my middle field, in to the upper elixir field and bumped into the top of my skull. It seemed to me that it was bright orange tinged with red as it went up, but seeing the colors of energy is new to me, there was also a slight pressure associated with it when it entered my head. I vented some of it through the Baihui point on top of the head, reliving some of the pressure and caused an odd sensation to flow down my body over my skin.

I know that at some point I need to get energy up there any way but from my previous work I noticed that if I did not dissolve the energy enough before hand, the dan tien would not hold it. Also a sort of pressure was felt when I moved improperly dissolved chi to the middle field. From experience, the chi will drop down after a few days and a bit of mental/emotional hullabaloo fixed mostly by mindfulness and circulation though GV and CV.

It is odd to me that essence shot up so fast. I am not sure what this means or if it is useful, though I assume I’m doing something wrong. The work I did moving chi from the lower to the middle elixir field resulted in chi stopping at the middle field and not going higher.

Anyone have a view on this?