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Lung is the Tibetan word for “Qi” or “Chi” in Chinese. It flows in your energy channels and swirls in your chakra. When you bring too much of it up into the head, you have the potential for many things from a headache to a brain aneurysm. Should you have the potential for migraines, you can actualize that potential. In severe cases, bringing the energy to the head too much can even cause strokes. But usually it’s not this serve and mostly what we call “rising lung.” This is like having too much coffee, and you can’t sleep, you can’t settle or focus on anything. To combat this we don’t live from up in the head, but down in our gut. There are specific practices we can do to help get the lung energy down from the head and back into the body. But many of these are best suited with working with a teacher skilled in these teachings in person. So you get personalized instructions based on your body, practice, and condition with a lot of feedback.
It's just like if doing hatha yoga, it's common to strain or pull something in part of the body. Especially if you decide to get "creative" with your movements and not follow the proper form. Even following the proper movements can cause some to put too much stress on the body. Likewise, for mediators, the same is true for the mind as well as the body. We can strain ourselves in our practice, especially if we push to hard, or try to get "creative" and do it our own way "mixing practices and teachings."
Someone trying to "think" about the practice too much – with too much comparing it to this, and contrasting it with this other practice – they are very likely to get rising lung. Ever get a headache from too much studying in school? That pressure in the head from trying to "figure it all out"
It's also advisable to see a doctor too. Check your blood pressure, and get blood work done. As what we are talking about includes both medicine and practice. So we don't just wanna rely on one or the other. Geksel works with medicine, not in opposition or replacement of medicine.
One of the best ways to prevent rising lung is to practice in a relaxed way. But for many karmic patterns, this is easy to say, and hard to do. Many people have the karma to practice in a fixated way. So learning how to practice with diligence and energy while utterly and completely relaxed can be very helpful. You practice in a relaxed way without trying to get results.
To release lung disease when it arises, reduce the push. When you are beginning your practices you are supposed to push. When you are studying in Sutrayana you are expected to study very hard—even to the point of memorizing vast quantities of information, losing sleep, and staying up late at night studying. There is also a push when you move from Sutrayana to Tantrayana and begin studying the Tantras. This is when those prone to lung (wind/energy imbalance) will have problems.
If you survived the intense push of college – all that studying, energy, test taking, then you may be trained in handling lung.
However, once you get into Tantrayana, yes, you will get lung. Let's just hope you don't get it so severely that it kills you. It can cause a stroke or a heart attack if you are prone to those conditions. This is generally why people are young and healthy when they start doing tantric practice.
When you practice Tantra, you push: you must accumulate a set number of mantras or complete a practice with intensity until a specific milestone occurs. If you are overly prone to lung, you will not do very well at Tantra; it will make you ill or crazy. If you are properly trained in tantra, you will have been taught to push. Then you reach the higher Tantras, where the end of pushing becomes self-evident in practice, and you have to accept and relax into the reality of nonduality. You cannot push your way into that state. That transition is very difficult for people who are natural "pushers"; in fact, some never choose to make the transition.
So the best way to settle lung is to relax. Lung rises from a strong upward flow of qi/chi and constricted channels. If the channels are not constricted then the qi/chi can rise and just go right out the crown of the head. Which isn't a problem. But it this constricted channels that cause the problems such as physical symptoms of headaches, migraines, stroke and mental symptoms such as nuttiness, agitation, inability to sleep or concentrate.
Diet for Lung Disease
Drink Hoppy beer, eat fried potatoes with cheese. Use a lot of butter. For non-vegetarian, foods with a lot of gelatin like ox tail soup is good for lowering lung. Vitamin B is what is so effective. Asparagus is good too.
Garlic and onions may narrow the channels and increase lung. So avoid garlic and onions. That doesn’t mean completely avoid garlic and onion, but when you have rising lung, keep the garlic and onion down for that time period. Vitamin B is what is so effective.
Lung Prevention & Management
1. Don't push yourself, your body or your mind — more is not better and might is not right. Whatever you do, do it for others!
2. Do physical prostrations before meditation sessions or do chi gong in the breaks. Twice a day is good, if you can.
3. Begin your session with a quiet time, calming your mind, tuning in to your energy. Breathe into your lower chakras and let the anxiety come out. Melt the tension with the experience of refuge. Soothe your inner child; listen kindly to its complaints.
4. End your session with five minutes of spacious meditation, just relaxing into emptiness or relax at the dissolution time. Even though you want to get up, just sit and breathe into the mental tension until your mind is relaxed. Aim to end the session before you are tired. Also, you can visualize your hollow body filled with five-colored lights radiating out all the lung and blessing all the sentient beings and the environment.
5. Spend a little time every day, if possible, relaxing your gaze by looking up at the sky or staring
out at a long distance view as you gently recognize emptiness. This really lets the lung out.
6. Eat enough protein and cut back on (not cut out!) all sweets. Eat a well-balanced diet, suited to your body type and health needs, i.e., study nutrition. Exercise six days a week.
7. Learn to relax in all your actions. Meditation is play, not work. Relax: Lie down or sit in a comfortable chair or do chi gong for a few minutes after your session ends. (This is advice from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.)
8. Don't force your practice. Be satisfied with what comes.
9. Contentment is the key to a good retreat; cultivate contentment and a happy mind. The key to contentment is breathing with bodhichitta all the time. Let go from grasping experiences by a deep understanding of karma, and let go of all notions of blame and shame. "Follow your sunshine."
10. "Set your re-set button" once a week, if not once a day by beginning anew with yourself. That is, recreate until you feel grounded, open, joyful, clear, and motivated.
Channel Stretch Yawn
One way of looking at how karma is stored is to look at the energy body. Karma can be held in the chakras, in the shape of your energy body. This energy body is not static. Imagine yourself as a column of chakras: one in the forehead, one in the throat, one in the heart, solar plexus, navel, groin or secret place, and others in the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
The word “chakra” means “wheel.” Think of a Slinky toy shaped into a circle—something three-dimensional, not just the flat diagrams you often see. These chakras, have little channels extending from them out through the skin, reaching just beyond an arm’s length, and then wrapping around you. They form a sort of egg-shaped swirly cocoon.
This wrapping is caused by self-focused attention by what you habitually pay attention to: your stuff, your friends, your work, your house, your relationships. This habit of attention wraps the experience of reality around you, forming a subjective filter. The way we perceive reality is projected onto the inner surface of this cocoon through the channels. But due to infinite lives, post-traumatic stress, deaths, births, and the countless experiences we and others have endured, these channels have become bent, kinked, frizzy. These kinks and distortions are karmic formations and obscurations, like smudges on a pair of glasses. They keep us from seeing clearly.
The Practice
Breathe in through your nostrils. Breathe in a deep breath and breathe fully out through all the chakras. The chakras are in the central channel, so the breath moves up around the ears and flows into the central channel. And each chakra rolls and rolls and reaches out—all the chakras, even the little ones in your palms, your elbows, your shoulders. All the channels in your body begin to unfurl and reach out—past the edge of the atmosphere, past the edge of the galaxy, all the way to infinity in as many directions as you can imagine. All nine local dimensions, if you can do it.
And you stretch your body as well. Stretch your arms up and out, stretching your finger tips, your arms, your shoulders, opening up the chest and back. Lift your head upward, open your mouth, stretching the jaw and throat as you yawn. Stretch and elongate the body as you do this.
Then breathe out gently through the mouth. Relax on the out-breath. Just relax. Don’t try to bring them back. Don’t try to hold them out there. Just let go of the visualization. They’ll come back to your own personal pattern. But doing this gets the "lint" out, clearing out the kinks and smudges in our karmic patterns and is therefore very, very useful. This will shake off any recent unpleasant encounters you may accumulate through your day. You give them a good opening and shake. Do this throughout your day, taking short breaks and at the end of the day. But do it frequently. It won’t bother people and it doesn’t take hardly any time at all.
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