The life of a Ki User

I may as well go into my studies of Ki a bit more. *cracks my knuckles*
Probably a long post from here on in, so be warned, Wall of Text to come for all those that read this.

First off, I study what's now known as, and later insulted and belittled, as RadKi, or Radical Ki. This first came about by a guy named MysteryShadow. He had the idea that you could combine basic Ki channeling exercises, such as four stage breathing, with Psionic techniques, to utilize your inner Ki more effectively. Pretty much, the guy made a basic website, then a forum, and mostly left it alone, giving rather basic methods to learn how to use your own Ki to do stuff. The forums enhanced this, though, and built upon his techniques, which is what I eventually learned to use for best and easiest results.

So, the first method he taught was grounding. Grounding is taking ambient Ki from the planet, and drawing it into your body, to let you feel what it feels like, as well as to let your Meridians work. Simple, easy, and noted that you'd have a tingling feeling in your hands, much like the "pins and needles feeling" when your foot's asleep, but without the prickling sensation of the pins and needles, and more like the general numbness. Other results noted were that you'd have increased blood flow to the body part you were channeling Ki to, and so the easiest way to tell if it was working, until you began to feel Ki, was to look for white spots slowly appearing upon your hands while meditating on the grounding exercise, and doing four stage breathing. For those that don't know what this is, it's Breathe in slowly, then hold your breath for 3-5 seconds, breathe out slowly, then don't breathe for 3-5 seconds.

It was, looking back upon it, extremely simple stuff. But it WORKED. 10 minutes a day doing the grounding exercise, while breathing like that, would let you feel your Ki.

He also warned of such things as Burnout, which is, basically, the problem of overusing Ki each day to the point where you couldn't feel it anymore.

For about a good year, I studied his guide, found a forum member that would mentor me, and generally did quite well. Then things started to go downhill. First, came the attempts to replicate Dragonball Z techniques more closely. This was... not unexpected. A lot of the people there were devoted to coming up with new techniques, and they thought a "Power Up" one like the Kaio Ken would be interesting to research. So, more forums opened up and devoted themselves to the idea of trying to replicate techniques, which finalized with a forum called "The Art of Kaio Ken". I still have a copy of an ancient e-mail from the year 2000 or so, explaining their "brilliant" technique for replicating it. (Hint. No, it really wasn't. At all.) But 4 or 5 different techniques were created by them, most of which had hefty health risks. From one guy suffering from having a shot earlier the day he was practicing, only to stare at blood spraying from where the shot was supposed to be fully healed, several feet away, to general problems with even getting it to work, possibly from not enough training the physical body... it was pretty rough as a technique to duplicate for them. But... before they could work out the problems with the technique... or much more development in the community could happen, the DBZers rolled in, as they were called.

Approximately 50 people decided to flood the forum, some asking where to get the rules for this "RPG that they had run into", others declaring themselves to be Saiyans, or Saiya-jin, for those that knew a bit more about the Japanese versions. But those that posted started ranting on the forums about "Easily pulling off the techniques" and wanting more.

Mystery Shadow's website and forum then went down, adding to the troubles that beset the community. Drastically so. And with Mystery Shadow's website gone... the original teachings that were used, all slowly started to degrade.

Initially, a technique explanation for grounding went like this.

"Close your eyes, and do the four stage breathing, as explained before. As you do this, visualize yourself, all of your body, and then slowly visualize roots, lowering from your body to the ground. Continue your breathing, and slowly visualize energy trickling up the roots, to your body, and all through it. It can look like anything you wish it to be, from water, to light, to lightning, to flames. Try different things until you get the results below. From here on in, slowly visualize it going to your hands, and continue accumulating it until you can feel it, as a sensation of your hands being 'asleep', but without the pins and needles. Now, from here on in, open your eyes, and look at your hands. Do they have white splotches on them? If not, close your eyes, and continue to practice until they do. When you're done, let all the power you drew from the earth, return to it, then go off to do other things. Don't do the exercise too much, or else you'll have a hard time feeling Ki if you experience Burnout. However, try to do this daily, once a day."

After this all happened, the people that wrote up on it, turned to a much simpler explination.

"Visualize roots going from your body, into the ground. Now, imagine energy flowing up from the ground, into your body, then push it to your hands. Continue until you can feel it."

And from this, it went on to, on most Radical Ki sites, be even simpler.

"Visualize energy going from the earth into your body, until you can feel it."

Do you see how it happened, now?

An example of one of the last pages still on the web, devoted to Radical Ki, is here: http://www.geocities.ws/ki_master_james/

Feel free to browse it around, as an example of how they tried to keep it to the original techniques, but failed. But that could be set as an "intermediate" site for explanations. Still though, it's not as descriptive as the original articles were.

From here on out, the "community" split into two sections. A. The section that believed in Radical Ki, and all it stood for, including the DBZers, and all, and B. The section that returned to the traditional methods.

The only place left that works on the Traditional Methods, is the Veritas Society. If you want to check them out, look it up. I've posted a couple times there, but I don't really care for it. You might, though.

As for me? I studied under my teacher as long as I could, took his advice, and became more like a hermit researcher. Rather than rely on the message boards, I stuck to myself, especially after a series of incidents involving a moron trying to make a deal with... SOMETHING on the astral plane. He wanted to get out of doing the rest of high school, the entity was "All too happy to help" then left him in the lurch halfway in. Most likely for his own amusement.

From there on out, I occasionally posted, but mainly kept to myself online rather than get involved with the huge arguments, mentoring and teaching people in what I learned, what I discovered, and what I figured out worked better, while still doing my best to explain things properly then rely overly on Visualization alone as the method to manipulating Ki, like most people that followed MysteryShadow's stuff did to this day.

Later, I heard about Naruto-tards showing up, the same way the DBZers did, only having a much shorter shelf life then the DBZers ever did. Instead of lasting about 5 years with their crap, the Naruto-tards lasted 3 weeks or so. "Chakra" and real life doesn't mix, and they were retarded to think otherwise. Plus, by that time, cameras advanced to the point where you could actually have webcams and show techniques working, so their BS was countered by "Take a picture of the damage, then!"

Ok, I'm done for today. Thought this might help you all out a bit to understand my background with Ki better. But ever since then, I've stuck my own path, and I've wound up mentoring a lot of people in Ki manipulation. Three of those people, if I had never mentored them, wouldn't be here today, either from the drugs one was thinking of taking because he couldn't get a date, or the other two by being suicidal. One flat out told me, point blank, "The Week I met you, I was planning on killing myself. You were the only reason why I didn't kill myself, and I'm glad to this day that I didn't decide to die anyways."

I think that's the greatest accomplishment of them all, right there.