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In this week’s KAP Videos, Kap Instructor Paul Densmore speaks off-the-cuff on “the three f’s” (fitness, food, & sex) and how they play into energy cultivation, KAP practice, and Kundalini:
Part 1: Fitness
Part 2: Food and Sex
Register for Paul’s next KAP1 online class here:
https://www.kundaliniawakeningprocess.com/blog/register/
Video Transcription:
Part 1:
Okay, I’m going to try this out.
Hello. Hola. This is Paul Densmore coming to you from Dr. Glenn Morris’s Kundalini Awakening Process. I just finished working out so I’m going to sit back in my easy chair and I thought that rather than be lazy I’d go ahead and record a couple of videos. It’ll probably be pretty short, hopefully.
I’m going to kind of try to freestyle them, so there might be a lot of pauses and “mmm’s” as my brain catches up with my mouth. And I’m probably looking pretty rough right now as well, but that’s okay.
So the topic for today — actually there will be three topics, and what I’m going to try to do is during each workshop and online class we tend to get a lot of question regarding three topics used to be two and now a third one has kind of gotten added in, so I’m going to post these videos and of course the KAP instructors will probably have different ideas on some of these, that we’ll be in agreement on some and on others we probably won’t necessarily see eye to eye, and that’s perfectly fine, there’s also — also realize that all of my thoughts and opinions since I’m free-styling are subject to change. Don’t put me on the spot, okay?
So the three topics: I like to call them the three F’s. And that is — the new one is fitness, and then there’s food, and then there’s sex.
And so every single workshop we tend to get questions regarding those three. So I’m kind of — kind of take them in two different ways: number one there’s the standard answer that we tend to give to all three of those, and these come from Dr. Morris, and you can find them all on his books, especially Path Notes. I think all three of them will actually be in Path Notes.
And I believe all three of them are actually on the KAP website as well, but we tend to give those and they’re actually really short, they’re just about a sentence long. And most people tend to look a little disappointed when we give those. So I generally try to expand upon them a little but.
Generally what most people want are sort of personal opinions rather than a big sort of commandments, even though they’re anti-commandments. They’re very, uh, open.
So I’m going to kind of expand on them a little bit, and so that’s where my opinions come in and remember these are just opinions. So first one we’re going to do in this video now that I’ve gotten all that out of the way is going to be fitness.
Now the general rule is that to take KAP, and participate in KAP, you do not need to be young. You do not need to be in great shape. You do not need to be able to do perfect asanas, or stand in a QiGong Horse Stance, or holding a Tree for an hour. None of that is required.
In fact, we’ve had people who have had knee injuries and literally can’t stand and do some of the practices, and that’s okay because KAP is set up in such a way that any level of fitness or degree of health is taken account — is accounted for. So we have different variations of different QiGong practices and meditation practices.
So, you can be any age, at any level of health as long as your — you get your doctors okay. Always have to put that in there. And [you’re] mentally sound. That’s always a key. So, your instructors don’t necessarily have to be mentally sound and that is the one that you’ll find in Path Notes, and Doc has always given that. Now, with that being said, we tend to say that then people just kind of go “Ohh, oh, okay, all right.”
Uh huh, they want a little bit more. So I’m actually going to kind of talk a little but about some of the exercises that I in fact I just did and are really good for QiGong and energy work. And, really short, number one: calisthenics.
Calisthenics are an excellent adjunct to any sort of internal alchemy and for several reasons. One of the most obvious is that push ups, pull ups, squats, even old-fashioned sit ups. Old fashioned sit-ups have gotten a bad rep and I’m here to say that if done properly, if they’re done slowly, with the knees well bent and one vertebra at a time both up and down with the breath, they’re actually a good tonic for the back. They’re a back rejuvenator and a spinal rejuvenator.
So experiment with that if you want. Crunches are out. No. And also don’t pull on the neck. Most people tend to pull on the neck when doing sit ups. I did for a long time when I was in high school and played football and things. I, you know, we’d pull on the neck.
Put your arms to the temples or kind of tuck them into your chest although that might kind of constrain your chest a little but in your breathing, so temples are always good, and all those movements actually free up the, umm, well, A: the muscles they work the ligaments more than most of the gym exercises although you don’t necessarily want to pull so much on the ligaments but condition them.
The joints: there tend to be a lot of energy blockages within the joints due to not using them enough. You know, we tend to be pretty sedentary and stationary these days. A lot of us tend to have joint problems myself as well. I have slight knee problems that are working out the more that I do calisthenics and exercises.
So each time I shave a little bit of that of, and kind of reclaim my youth a little bit. So they’re great conditioners for all of those and they really free up. If you go back to one of the classic sets of sort of yogic exercises are the Five Tibetan Rites, or sometimes called the Five Tibetans or sometimes the Five Rites, or there are various other names that don’t even take those into account, but those are basically just calisthenics exercises, you know, [it] takes on a more say —the back bends and everything would be taken more from — and table makers — taken more from yoga than actually you know say wrestler’s bridges which I actually do.
I think that they’re a great spinal conditioner and back conditioner. I mean, the more that you strengthen the back muscles, the longer you can actually hold yourself erect, and I don’t mean with a, you know, just walking around with the usual slouch and everything, I mean actual erectness in the muscles.
So calisthenics: good. And keep it simple, you know. Push-ups. Squats. If you can do a pull-up, if not there are great progressions that you can look up.
I’m not going to name any websites, but you can do a search for pull-up progressions and there will be a lot of good ones you can use a chair and put your feet on a chair and pull yourself up and with your feet on the chair, sort of not so much assisting but sort of stabilizing the weight so that you’re not pulling so much up at one time.
Then you would take one leg off and remember there’s a pull-up which is holding your arms this way — holding your hands this way, and a chin up which is the reverse. And they’ll work slightly different muscles although they are generally a great condition for the shoulders which tend to hold an awful lot of our tension, the chest and the shoulders and the neck especially people in the West we tend to hold a lot there also in the pelvis as well.
Squats are very good for that. They are very — if you’re into Reiki and bodywork, these are equatable.
In fact I used to do Reiki and bodywork for a long time to sort of free up, and body tension and armoring, and now I just do calisthenics because they’re roughly equatable and you can get a better bod with calisthenics than with Reiki and bodywork. Most of those guys tend to have a nice little paunch or something. Not to say that I don’t, but it’s going away.
Let me see. Oh, and then another pull up progression would be after the one leg pull up you would do it what’s called a reverse pull up or a negative pull up but anyway. And you can also start off with rows, dumbbell rows, and then body rows, sometimes called Australian pull-ups. That’s a whole ‘nother thing, you can look all those up. Now as far as weights go I’m not going to go so much into a routine, I’m just going to give you some things that go very well with energy work.
Number one: Indian clubs. Look those up if you don’t know what they are. Start off with the two-pound Indian clubs. It might not sound like much, but you’re using that rotational energy and so it’s — the majority of the work out is actually coming from the wrists, forearms, the elbows, and the shoulders as well as freeing up the chest.
It’s a wonderful device for freeing up the chests. It’s a wonderful device for freeing up the chest as well, doing chest openers in various other exercises. Indian club exercises. So you can look into those. Kettlebells of course.
Both Tao and myself highly recommend kettlebells. In fact the last workshop that we taught, Tao actually brought his kettlebell. I did as well. We both actually brought our kettle bells and had them there and at one point, I have no idea for what reason, Tao actually stopped the workshop and went and grabbed his kettlebells and started doing swings. I will give a plug for a guy since he’s not actually charging anything.
You can find his videos on YouTube, his name is Zen Kahuna. He’s an older gentleman in his 60’s and he does very primal naturalistic…training which is great, which I, you know, gravitate towards. So I’ll give him a little plug. And he does excellent kettlebelll work. The rotational movements and everything that he does is just simply amazing adding them into all the swings.
He also does Indian clubs and pretty much all — everything else that I workout with. Bulgarian training bag. Look that up. You can buy yours for like $200 or you can make one for — I think I made two for $20. So $10 apiece. You know, again, your choice.
Mace. Mace work. Like the old fashioned weapon m-a-c-e. Not the “Sss,” spray but the old-fashioned blunt object that you would beat against somebody’s head in a row or an argument. And again it’s one that you can make you own, which I very much enjoy. You can buy one, again, for maybe $100 to $200 or I think I made mine for $10, so yeah I’m very big on making my own tools as well.
Another controversial one that most people don’t recommend within the sort of the return to old school physical culture, or even primal exercises or play, which again I gravitate towards those two, are dumbbells.
And I include dumbbells because they were the staple of the old-time strongmen and actually lightweight dumbbells. I actually use five pounds heavier than the old — strongest of the old guys like Eugen Sandow. They recommend working out every day with five or ten pound dumbbells, and this is for men, but doing like hundreds of repetitions of a single exercise, sorry, and then stacking them all together with very little breaks inbetween.
I gravitate towards three men and their dumbbell routines and that is Eugen Sandow of course, and you can look all these up for free now. They have all their books online, and have some interesting things that are just now sort of starting to come back into what now is called body building but used to be “physical culture.” I like physical culture better because it’s kind of more holistic, but umm, things like cold showers, paleo, or even a keteogenic-paleo diet, you know.
These things are starting to come back, if you go back and you look at Charles Atlas and guys like that he basically talked about a sort of sugar busters diet, you know, if you remember that. And all of them pretty much followed this sort of Atkins diet to some degree. Some of the strongmen didn’t, you know, they ate pretty much whatever and you can kind of tell. They’ve got a little bit of a wheat belly going on around there, and we’ll talk more about that in the food section that’s coming up In the next video.
But uh you can look [at] Eugen Sandow, Farmer Burns, and Arthur Saxon. Those three. And from Sax, I mainly get the Saxon side bends and you can search for that and actually look for videos rather than having to dig through their books and things.
But excellent exercises, work very well with energy work but even just calisthenics and these are slow calisthenics not the endurance type calisthenics that you think of today that’s, you know, doing like five million push ups within a minute, you know. Do them slow. And work those muscles and actually feel every single muscle that’s going as you do a push up.
So even if you can do a hundred push-ups, if you do them really slow, like maybe two and a half seconds up, two and a half second down, and not using momentum but actually using the muscles, you’ll kind of be a little humiliated because you probably won’t be able to do as many but you’re getting stronger. So, you know, the payoff. You might not be as flashy but you’re actually conditioning the muscles better.
Again, these are opinions. Some people will disagree with me, and I’m sure very publicly disagree with me and that’s fine. It matters very little to me.
Okay, so we’re going to end that there. And you can always find me on Facebook. I’m always more than happy to talk about KAP or exercising strangely enough, or pretty much anything, and so if you have questions you can message me on Facebook, add me as a friend and message me, or just message me if you don’t feel like being my friend, that’s okay.
I like to have a small group of friends anyway, although it is growing all the time. Um, okay so that’s it for this video. Onward to video two, and food and sex. Okay. Pushing button now.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens
Part 2:
Okay, so now we’re on to video two, and uh yes I got a new tablet so that’s why the camera angles and everything are so funky. I’m actually — I’m actually looking straight at the tablet and the camera is over here, but I don’t — it’s a little weird for me to look at a tiny blinking red light.
Umm, so I’m just going to keep looking at the camera and you can pretend that I’m looking straight at you. That’s also why it keeps shaking around because I’m actually holding it. It’s high tech, low proficiency I suppose you could say.
So we’re moving on now to the last two F’s of the three F’s: Fitness, Food, and Sex. So — and I’ll give that a minute to — if you haven’t given a chuckle for that yet then, um, I’m really sorry for you. Uhh, so we’re moving on to food and sex. We already covered fitness in the first video. So, the standard response to the food question is that — the same as Doc: you can eat whatever the hell you want to.
And that works perfectly well. We’re not advocating any diet whatsoever. Again, most people tend to be disappointed with that either because they want validation for their own opinions, or they either honestly want to know our opinions.
So they either want to get into a dialogue or an argument, and sometimes both. So my own opinions — and again, these are opinions — I tend to stay away from — I tend to follow, confession upfront, I tend to follow a paleo diet these days. I have for about the past month.
Every now and again I have to give myself a little cheat meal because my weight loss will actually plateau. So, or actually even go up even though I’m only eating meat and ketogenic style vegetables like — uh I mean ketogenic, yeah, vegetables and fruit. So mostly greens, and carrots, and berries.
And I do intermittent fasting as well, so I tend to — that tends to reduce my appetite, and also Kundalini tends to reduce the amount of calories that you need. So losing — that is one of the downsides of Kundalini is if you need to lose weight, it tends to be harder although not impossible.
You can look at Tao. Tao had a superhuman metabolism going into Kundalini, and after Kundalini he still has a superhuman metabolism. It may have put a small tiny little dent in this superhuman — the guy literally eats all the time. I’m serious. Don’t tell him I said that, but he does.
And so my recommendations tend to be more so than any of the structured things, before energy work or mediation, stay away from starchy, starchy foods and grains. Stay from beans generally. Stay away from massive amounts of bread, especially white bread. And potatoes, especially french fried potatoes that you get from well you know where you get them from.
Those tend to, first of all you might want to stay away eating, period, for a period before energy work as the same with exercise as the body tends to be focused on digestion, and so you don’t want to take away from that.
You can also cause problems when you’re doing your deep abdominal breathing, and try to — and trust me, I tend to be the instructor who more than speaking from what I’ve learned, I speak from experience because everything I learned I did the opposite of and then got to learn the effects of doing it the wrong way. So you tend to get a lot of heat and what the Chinese would call fire in the lungs, and in the chest, and that can lead to all kinds of bad things that you’ll have to work on later.
So, especially stay away from white bread and potatoes before energy — that doesn’t mean them out if you’re — I’m not telling you to cut those out of your diets, I’m just saying cut them out before you do your QiGong practices. And you don’t have to. You don’t have to listen to any of this. There have been plenty of people that have reached Kundalini without, you know, these, especially through KAP, without these advisories.
If you’re on a — but the thing is most people ask that question and they want some sort of validation for a vegetarian, vegan, or raw diet. And while I love — I eat plenty of raw vegetables and fruit all days, and raw nuts as well. Still I, from personal experience and generally what we teach is that if you can — if you’ve been on a raw diet for a while and you can handle it, great continue doing it.
If you eat meat, and you have no problem eating meat, continue to eat meat. Don’t worry so much about it. This is not a — the time nor the place to get into a moralistic sort of dialogue over those kinds of things. But from an actual practical standpoint, won’t make that much of a difference. If you tend to eat a lot of meat, I might would go back to my first video and give a listen to my tips on exercise.
So, to recap both the fitness and the food, there are no rules. Just pay attention to what seems to be working for you. And that will segue quite well into our third topic which is the third F: sex.
There are no — and this differs with pretty much every other single QiGong school out there. Most [others] write it in stone, and especially for men, women not so much so, but “You must not ejaculate,” you know. “Never ever. It’s evil. Why would you even think of it, and trust me I have not ejaculated in 50 years and look at me. I am incredibly young and incredibly frustrated.”
Sorry. Not really. So, it’s more, it comes down to: listen to your body. And if you are sexually active, if you’re married or if you have a partner, after the big moment pay attention to the tiny little biological processes and energetic processes which you’ll learn to tune into those and be more aware of subtle things going on in the body and within the energetic body through KAP, and you can pay attention to what’s going on and if you feel a little bit drained which is natural, and it’s fine, it goes along with that release, you know?
Think about Reiki and body work. The whole point of Reiki and body work is to actually have an ultimate orgasm. It’s not to stop ejaculation, it’s to completely remove all the blocks — and this goes for women as well — to completely remove all the blocks so that the orgasm just blows you completely out of the stratosphere.
And I wholeheartedly approve of that. But at the same time, you will generally notice a little bit of a lack of energy after — you’re not going to get up — the old strong men as well as the Taoist tended to shy away from ejaculation before a heavy workout, and I have found that to be relatively true.
It will decrease your energy levels, and the amount of strength that you have by a bit, but you know, what do you want out of life. I mean, it all kind of depends on what you really want out of this life I suppose. But at the same time, there are methods for having sex — and Tao is a much better authority on this than myself — and where you can ejaculate and you can still have wonderful amounts of energy.
For the most part just pay attention to the breath, that deep abdominal breathing, don’t tense up, don’t tense the pelvis up, don’t, especially, don’t tense the abs up.
If you’ll notice right before you — if you’re a quick draw, one of those guys, doing that deep abdominal breathing with no catches and no tightness is amazing. You can go on and on. In fact you’ll probably outlast your partner, which might not always be the best thing in the world.
But um, kind of forgot myself. Sorry, crept back into a memory for a second there. So, the answer is, really, pay attention to your body and what you need.
Doing the KAP practices, you will continue to progress and increase regardless of sexual activity and ejaculation. So that is the final answer, really. Just pay attention to yourself and what’s going on inside of your body, and your subtle body. Okay?
I hope these have been informative. Of course, you can always — I always recommend rather than trying to get into an actual conversation with me because like I said, I’m doing this freestyle so it’s just sort of whatever bubbles up out of the cauldron of my memory you know gets transmitted.
But, you know, I always think that it’s much better for people if, you know, type me up a question and then I can sit there and think about it for a few minutes and then actually type them a thoughtful response that will hopefully be usable to them. So, I will be more than happy to answer any of your questions, as will any of the other KAP instructors.
So, please don’t hesitate to find me, and shoot me a question, okay?
So this is Paul Densmore from Dr. Glenn J Morris’s Improved Kundalini Awakening Process signing off and wishing you all the best. Thank you.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens
