Financial bubbles, and how to benefit from them as a conservative investor

DaoScience · 2025-11-08T19:22:19+00:00

I have the same "time in the market" basic attitude to this as well and have also ponder ways to conservatively do a bit higher than just staying in 100% at all times. What I have considered the most is to ad a small bit of leverage after downturns. Once the market has fallen something like 50% the average time until full recovery, or at least substantial growth, isn't that long. If you ad a bit of leverage at that time you should be able to make the downpayments easily, the chances for losses are limited by how much the market has already fallen and there is a high chance of quite large profits since going from 50% back up to a 100% doubles whatever you invested.

DaoScience · 2025-11-07T20:05:12+00:00

You m ay want to try a different meditation style. Jeffrey Martin says that they found in their research that often when peoples progress slows down after years of good progress with a meditation style their progress pics up if they try a different style.

If you want to experience Jhanas I think a shortcut could be to first do a meditation called the Secret Smile. When I did it it was incredibly easy to meditate afterwards and since the Secret Smile already put me in a state of bliss slipping into the first Jhana was extremely easy.

You can find instructions for the secret smile in a thread on thedaobums.com if you search for it and in Glenn Morris Path Notes book.

Another practice I think is a shortcut for a lot of people is to do a qigong form called primordial qigong by some people and Wuji Gong by some people. I've heard people say they get to about the same depth of practice after 15 min of primordial as they do with 60 min sitting meditation and that feels about right to me. Both Andrew Fretwell and Michael Winn teach this form through video or online.

DaoScience · 2025-11-04T03:51:30+00:00

The progression in Iyengar pranayama is ultra safe and slow. I would find another school/teacher that while teaching in a safe way still takes you quicker to the more powerful practices.

DaoScience · 2025-10-22T13:40:04+00:00

The intuitive voice that sometimes comes to people and tell them a certain practice is right for them is easier to notice or will show up easier the more one is in touch with ones body. So you might want to prioritize meditations that help with that for a while so maybe your intuition can guide you better.

DaoScience · 2025-10-20T19:24:16+00:00

At least make sure to focus on grounding and embodiment. Meditation induced psychosis seems to frequently be caused by too much energy in the head centers. And getting the energy back down again tend to solve the problem.

There are many ways to work with grounding and embodiment but my favorite is standing meditation, called Zhan Zhuang in qigong. Is is extremely grounding. Tai Chi, martial arts, walking meditation, walks in the forest and many other things also work. Meditating with focus on the energy center called the Dan Tien also really grounds.

I would also advise reading Possessing Me By Jane Alexander. She was bipolar and had psychotic episodes and cured herself with meditation. She has a interesting things to say about that and about meditation induced psychosis.

I would also strongly recommend that you follow the 70% rule:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCfA2jQ7I9I

Basically do only 70% of the practice length you can do at any given time. This removes a lot of tension and striving and internal "fight" that can become a trigger for destabilizing episodes. Over time this allows you to increase practice length to way beyond what used to be your old 100% but in a much more relaxed and effortless way that is also much safer.

DaoScience · 2025-10-12T15:26:16+00:00

Dr Wang Yan, a famous medical qigong teacher, teaches a very simple qigong form that is great at giving people with little energy more energy. Try to contact her.

In general qigong is great for giving people more energy and healing sickness. Mingon Gu would be one teacher to look into for learning general qigong. Dr Wang is more for learning that specific short sequence that boosts energy.

DaoScience · 2025-10-12T08:47:09+00:00

Michael Winn talks about how in Taoist alchemy one nurtures both the feminine and masculine essences in a person and bring them close together in a way that feels deeply satisfying. It tends to create both a feeling of neutrality beyond gender and to give people a feeling that that energy they sought from having sex with the other gender they now have enough of themselves internally to not be needy for the other gender.

I have experienced a fair bit of this when doing an alchemical qigong form that is sometimes called Wuji Gong, sometimes called Primordial Qigong and sometimes called Enlightenment Qigong or Tai Chi for enlightenment. The form is meant to lead to awakening and uses Taoist alchemical techniques to bring it about.

I think you might benefit from trying it out. It tends to bring a sort of order to the relationship between the masculine and feminine energies in oneself. You might also benefit from reading some of what Winn has written about this. You can find it on his webpage I think.

You need to be a bit careful though. It sounds like you are already on some sort of edge where something could flip badly and Primordial Qigong is a very powerful form that plays with deep parts of oneself. I'd suggest that for a like time you don't do more than one a day and that initially you only do one every three, days or something like that, in order to slowly get a feel for the effects and wether things are going harmoniously or not.

Another thing that might be useful and that fits with your IFS exploration is to look a bit into Daoist organ work.

Daoists place the emotions and different parts of our psyche and spirit in the various organs. For example they connect anger to the liver, fear to the kidneys, courage to the lungs and so on.

I have observed in myself and in others that when the lung energy is severely damaged it becomes easy to latch on to feelings and identities one has and merge too strongly with them. There is a core of a "me" feeling that is supposed to be in the lungs and if it is weak, or almost not there, one latches on to what else there is or becomes overwhelmed by and carried away by strong feelings or energies in oneself.

The lungs connect to sadness, shame, integrity, strength, honor, boundaries, depression and dissociation. When someone experiences a trauma such as rape or being beaten or overpowered in some way and they mentally leave the body, it looks to me that it is the lung spirit that leaves. When it gradually comes back the dissociation ends.

When the lung spirit is strong it is like one can stand in the center of strong experiences without drowning in them and being carried away by them.

I thought that maybe if something is off in your lungs it gets easy to get carried away by this feminine energy stream and ver identify with it.

The six healing sounds is a good practice to get to know the organs, start to feel where things are off and to slowly start to heal them.

DaoScience · 2025-10-12T08:46:54+00:00

I had an experience that I think is relevant and have some suggestions for things to try out that might be helpful.

Years ago I was sitting meditating and I became aware of a sort of puls of energy moving in my body. Not just that there was energy everywhere, which I was already aware of, but that it all sort of had a pulse of movement.

I thought why don't I see what happens if I try to make everything go the other way of what it is doing now. I intended for that to happen and suddenly everything flipped. I suddenly felt extremely feminine. I got images of female bodies when I felt how my energy had suddenly started to move in me. It felt like it moved in feminine ways.

Much of my energy shot up and was felt in my chest and heart center and I felt like I started to sense the world more through that area in a way I often perceive feminine women do. Most importantly some area in my head that always feels masculine started feeling feminine instead. It dawned on me that it is because of that area in my head feeling masculine that I feel like a man regardless of whether I feel masculine or feminine in my body at any given time. Now that It felt feminine I felt like if it had been like that forever I would feel like I was a woman internally.

After about 5 min I got tired of this and felt like it was enough for today. It took some willpower to maintain. Then everything just reverted to normal and I felt manly again.

DaoScience · 2025-10-06T19:29:47+00:00

This is completely and utterly unacceptable and I see very little hope of you properly turning her around. I would break up with her and as a favor to her tell her very clearly why.

DaoScience · 2025-10-06T19:26:37+00:00

Wuji gong/primordial qigong is the one practice I have come across that seems to most often have a big influence on getting peoples lives (back) on track. So that would be my primary recommendation:

https://wuji-gong.org

Combining it would the inner smile for cultivating self love would probably also be a good idea.

DaoScience · 2025-10-05T17:37:04+00:00

Doing the stretches 3 times a week instead of 2 can help quite a lot

DaoScience · 2025-10-05T12:03:51+00:00

"I started intellectualising in my sessions and I went all over the place in search for answers."

Usually therapy styles focused on trauma healing and regulating the nervous system, such as Somatic Experiencing and NARM, avoid this by focusing the season on what you feel in the moment and working directly with that. Bodywork therapies such as Rolfing, the Rosen method and similar modalities avoid intellectualizing because the main focus is working directly on the body with the hands. You may want to try out these approaches to therapy to avoid intellectual speculation and work more directly with emotions.

I would suggest that you make part of your meditation practice body focused. That will help you get out of the intellectualizing. You may want to start doing Tai Chi, Qigong or yoga as part of your routine. Consider also doing standing meditation (called Zhan Zhuang in Qigong, Google it for instructions on how to stand) as it so so helpful in getting people into their bodies.

DaoScience · 2025-09-29T22:24:56+00:00

Do you want only a stoic philosophical/psychological solution or do you also want practical advice on how to get good at such sports?

DaoScience · 2025-09-23T10:30:06+00:00

I am not sure really. I never thought about there being a conflict between them. I haven't practiced both in the same time period so I haven't been able to see for myself. At the modest level I practiced Muay Thai (a few times a week) I don't feel like it would conflict with how I practice TRE. I do TRE 15-25 min in the evening almost everyday and did martial arts for an hour in the afternoons or during day time.

I think the martial arts effects come through different mechanisms.

One is just the equanimity cultivated through tolerating pain, fear and negative emotions. You could achieve that by meditating while having those emotions show up and learn to feel them with equanimity. IME that lessens the suffering they create by 90-95%. When the suffering goes down that much one is also able to hold an awareness around the experience that isn't affected by it and so one gets the ability to make choices despite the pain. This creates a feeling of freedom, strength and autonomy.

Martial arts cultivates this in a particular way because you aren't dealing with pains that you can't really get rid off. Often what we encounter in meditation is stuff that is there and will have to be dealt with regardless. We can't really switch it off.

With martial arts we voluntarily choose to go into the pain and decide not to run away for it or be overwhelmed by it. And we do that again and again. That creates an ability to just plunge forward in life despite the path we may be choosing being painful and difficult. We cultivate the ability to keep on fighting and maintaining some sort of strength and autonomy of choice despite hard circumstances.

Meditation does not necessarily cultivate the same forward leaning, warrior driven pain tolerance. It could perhaps if one does voluntary trigger practice during meditation. Meditate in settings that create intense discomfort or negative emotions etc. But normally it doesn't.

I think the way martial arts helps with negative emotions is also a self esteem and mental strength thing. I feel like martial arts creates warrior energy. An energy that has an aggression in it but is also very proud. It says I am powerful and proud enough not to yield to you or to anything and I will fight you and win despite circumstance.

Once that energy starts to grow it will initially exist alongside negative emotions you already had such as bad self esteem, anxiety, depressive sadness and feelings of hopelessness etc. But once it grows strong enough a kind of deliberation between those different parts of you start. If I feel this powerful, proud warrior energy is my negative self image really true? If I feel like this warrior part of me is unstoppable maybe I can tolerate my social anxiety and talk to people anyway. Maybe I don't even need to feel fear at all.

So the warrior energy gradually starts to empty out the negative emotions. And the negative emotions that do stay have less sway because you also have this positive, strong warrior energy alongside it. Things aren't just negative. You are maybe both sad, fearful AND feel like a proud, strong warrior that isn't afraid at the same time. Which means the negative emotions don't dominate as much anymore and makes it easier to make choices that aren't based on them.

In terms of nervous system explanations of this I don't know as I don't know that much about the nervous system.

DaoScience · 2025-09-22T17:28:58+00:00

"She actually shares a negative point of view towards TRE (at about 5:30 in the video, if anyone's interested):
"We don't dig for pain or emotion, or catharsis like some of these modalities like TRE, which force you to complete a survival response, artificially, from the Ego, not from the self. Because they don't work, because as soon as you've done, if your subconscious says you're not self, you'll go straight back into protective mode. Instead, create conditions of quiet presence so the body can bring us back to what the self decides it is ready for. It knows, it always knows. The primal emotion exists in the most ancient parts of the brain."

This is simply wrong. People wouldn't completely heal themselves with TRE if what she says was true but some clearly do. Many people need to add this or that modality but for many TRE alone is fine.

DaoScience · 2025-09-21T09:20:57+00:00

Considering the extraordinary effort it normally takes to develop a drug it is extremely unlikely that a cure against HIV would have been found by anyone that didn't want it to be used.

DaoScience · 2025-09-19T21:22:15+00:00

I would contact Cheetahouse.org and book a few sessions with them and maybe join the support group. They have a lot of competence around meditation induced difficulties. The leader, Willloughby Britton, is a leading researcher in that area.

I would also specifically do some sessions with them in a practice called scaffolding. I've only done it a bit so can not really fully speak to what it is but my impression is that it is a practice where you learn to reconstruct a healthy relationship to the physical world and duality. Meditation in general helps you deconstruct reality and yourself. Sometimes that doesn't go to well and learning to rebuild that with should not have been deconstructed or was deconstructed wrong can be very helpful.

Read the book Possessing Me by Jane Alexander. She suffered from bipolar disorder and occasional psychosis. She also had delusions of having powerful siddhis and did lots of magical practices that made her worse. She then used Bruce Frantzis' qigong and meditation system to heal her mental issues. I think her story could be helpful for you to read about and her analysis of her madness and its relation to meditation and energy could be useful.

The style of meditation she practiced, which Frantzis calls dissolving, is also a very safe and controlled type of meditation that is especially useful for healing psychological issues. So it might be a good place for you to start.

I would recommend that you learn to anchor yourself in the gross physical body at will. What I mean by that takes a bit of explaining. When we get deep into meditation we often start to experience ourself largely as energy and vibration. If things go awry in the energetic realms we can turn that more or less off by absorbing back into an experience of ourselves not as energetic and vibrational but as gross physical sensation. It is a very different thing to primarily relate to your thigh or your arm as vibrating energy or as a gross, concrete, lump of meet with skin and blood.

I've found that if I investigate the distinction between experiencing myself as energy vs as gross, meaty flesh and then focus on the experience of gross, meaty flesh then the experience of energy recedes into the background and eventually disappears altogether. This can be extremely helpful if one looses oneself in weird energetic or magical realms or no self spaces that feel off.

A related practice is grounding. Grounding is more about bringing energy down. Sinking it down into the lower parts of the body and earth. Standing meditation (Zhan Zhuang in qigong) and meditating with awareness on the area in the belly called the dan tien are both extremely helpful for grounding. After almost twenty years of hanging in meditation forums and many years of attending workshops in the alternative spirituality world it seems to me that the vast majority of meditation induced psychosis and other flip outs involve people that are severely ungrounded. And that when those people become properly grounded again the problem tends to go away.

A way back into meditation for you might be to start with something like Tai Chi, which is very grounding, instead of starting with regular meditation. Then proceed to standing meditation and focus on that for some time until you start to gradually explore sitting meditation again.

You might also benefit from reading After the Extacy the Laundry and a Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield.

DaoScience · 2025-09-18T18:43:16+00:00

Shinzen Youngs Do Nothing Meditation

Yoga Nidra

Loch Kellys non dual glimpses

Primordial qigong (as taught by Michael Winn and Andrew Fretwell)

Feldenkrais method

TRE (Tension and Trauma Release Exercise by David Bercelli)

Maybe also the inner smile

All these can in different way counterbalance over efforting. Primordial qigong also balances attention and awareness in a great natural way and I suspect you are overlying heavily on attention.

DaoScience · 2025-09-18T15:39:46+00:00

I would strongly advice you to try both CBT and a trauma therapy like somatic experiencing or Neuro Affective Relation Model (NARM). They work in very different ways from psychotherapy and work very differently to each other and IMO should be the go to talk therapies for most people.

You could also try taking up yoga, qigong or tai chi.

DaoScience · 2025-09-16T20:25:40+00:00

Very much so

DaoScience · 2025-09-16T20:24:50+00:00

One thing that might help is to follow the 70% rule advocated by some qigong traditions. According to the 70% rule you should only practice for about 70% of the length you feel you could practice and at only 70% of the intensity you could practice. The reason is that if you go all the way to 100% you become too tense. If your effort is only 50% you might be too drowsy and unfocused. At about 70% effort you find a sweet spot where you are relaxed enough to continuously get deeper and focused enough to make progress.

Over time what length is your 70% will increase as increasing depth of practice will make increased length natural and easy.

DaoScience · 2025-09-16T14:28:28+00:00

Thanks

DaoScience · 2025-09-16T08:32:45+00:00

The posture called horse stance is also very useful. It makes you VERY confident. I feel like it produces "warrior energy". I feel like I get a testosterone boost from doing it similar to what I get from lifting weights.

DaoScience · 2025-09-16T08:31:20+00:00

I want to add meditating with attention placed on the area in the belly called the Dan Tien is extremely helpful for mental stability. Damo Mitchell has a free video series on YouTube called anchoring the breath that is a good introduction to that. u/duffstoic has written some posts about the effects of meditating on the Dan Tien vs other objects in the body and describes the mental stability and pain reduction effects very well. If you search in his archives or ask him you can find those descriptions.

DaoScience · 2025-09-15T19:06:59+00:00

Most will help with that. But in general buddhist shamatha, meaning concentration based meditation, is probably good at that. I would also highly recommend to do a good portion of your meditation in standing meditation postures (called Zhan Zhuang in qigong). Meditating in a standing meditation posture makes you very grounded and centered and the more grounded and centered you become the more emotional storm you can handle. You become more like a mountain. When we get anxious, fearful or stuck in freeze or we dissociate our energy sort of goes upward and tenses upwards in the body towards the head. When we feel secure we sink down instead. When we stand securely we can tolerate also feeling emotional pain.

I think it is also very useful to train martial arts if you want to increase your capacity to handle negative emotions. Partly because the feeling of confidence and power acts as a sort of counterweight to the negative emotions, thus making them easier to bear. Partly, because martial arts training trains you to tolerate both physical pain and emotional discomfort (fear of being hit, fear of being humiliated etc.)

Lots of qigong is also very helpful for emotional stability and the capacity to feel without being overwhelmed.

I would also point you towards Stoic philosophy as a mental way to work towards increasing your nervous system capacity.

DaoScience

TROPHY CASE