Learn · Vocabulary
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The first of the three principles: suspending the naming and judging of sensations so the raw signal is not immediately overwritten by commentary. Not numbness — the opposite: perception before interpretation. From the Korean self-cultivation tradition.
The second principle: withdrawing from contact and stimulation for the length of the practice. Nothing new comes in — no input to react to, so the system's own state becomes readable.
The third principle: letting the breath become long, quiet and even until it no longer announces itself. The one principle that is also a measurable physiological intervention — see slow breathing and resonance.
Dr. Kwon's clinical framework: a graded ladder between matter and non-matter — organ and structure, language and expression, hormones, neurotransmitters, brainwaves, emotion and thought — with each level influencing its neighbours in both directions. Offered as a way of organising clinical observation, not as a proven mechanism.
The core practice of the method: attention moved slowly through the body, region by region, under the three principles. Related to but distinct from the MBSR body scan — this lineage adds the structured journal afterwards.
The point-for-point map of the body along the somatosensory cortex, drawn at a strange scale — hands, lips and tongue enormous; back and organs compressed. First charted by Penfield in the 1930s. The felt body is this map, which is why attention training can change what you can feel.
The midline brain network most active when you are doing nothing in particular — planning, replaying, narrating the self-story. Its activity and connectivity are measurably different in experienced meditators, which is the neuroscience behind why practice quiets the narrator.
The brain's continuous sensing of the body's internal state — heartbeat, breath, gut, temperature — from which felt emotion is substantially constructed. The modern vocabulary for what every body-first tradition claimed: the state of the body is not separate from the state of the mind.
The heart's natural speeding on the inhale and slowing on the exhale. Textbook physiology, and the reason exhale-weighted breathing calms: a long exhale leans on the slowing phase.
Breathing near six breaths per minute, where the breath falls into step with the baroreflex — the pressure-sensing loop between heart and brainstem. Heart-rate variability rises sharply at this pace; it is the best-measured effect in all of breathwork.
The moment-to-moment variation in time between heartbeats. Higher variability generally reflects a flexible, parasympathetically-toned nervous system. Established as a measurement; many specific 'coherence' claims built on it are still emerging.
The deliberate pause in classical pranayama, lungs full or empty. Physiologically, largely a training of the CO₂ chemoreflex. Powerful, and the one practice family in these courses with real contraindications — taught last, with its rules attached.
A core Buddhist meditation method, laid out in the Ānāpānasati Sutta as sixteen stages across four groups — body, feelings, mind, and mental objects. The method is attention resting on the breath as it already is, not control of its pace or depth, which is the tradition the counting practices in this course belong to.
One of the six classical cleansing practices (ṣaṭkarma) of Hatha Yoga: short, forceful exhales driven from the abdomen, with the inhale left passive between them. Sometimes called a breathing exercise, sometimes a kriya in its own right — either way, a stimulating practice with real contraindications, not a gentler cousin of slow breathing.
Also among Hatha Yoga's six cleansing practices: isolating and rolling the abdominal recti muscles, performed during external breath retention (empty-lung kumbhaka). One of the more advanced techniques in the classical canon — it presupposes real capacity in both retention and specific muscular control, and carries contraindications accordingly.
A Tibetan yogic practice family combining breath, subtle-channel work (rtsa, 'channels') and movement (rlung, 'winds'; 'khrul 'khor, 'magic wheel') — documented within Bön and Tibetan Buddhist traditions and taught outside them by teachers including Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Chögyal Namkhai Norbu. Combines several of this course's other elements — breath, retention, movement — into one practice, which is why it is taught last.
The five-phase correspondence system (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) that Chinese medicine maps onto organs, seasons, and — in the Sun-style Xingyi lineage this course's five-elements breathing lesson draws on — onto breath patterns themselves: an uneven exhale, inhale, rhythm or texture read as a sign pointing to one phase's imbalance, the same way a pulse or a tongue is read elsewhere in the tradition.
Four traditions' words that each mean both breath and spirit/energy — Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew. The linguistic fingerprint of a cross-cultural observation: whatever the traditions were tracking, they met it first in the breath.
Ultraweak light emitted by living tissue — on the order of ten photons per square centimetre per second from human skin, measured with photomultipliers and published in the instrumentation literature. That it exists is measured; what it means for health and coherence is open research.
A proposed anatomical network of fine channels, first described by Bonghan Kim in the 1960s and revisited with modern microscopy. Contested: some laboratories report the structures, replication is inconsistent, and mainstream anatomy has not accepted it. Presented here as exactly that.
The layered-body maps that recur across contemplative traditions — Vedantic sheaths, Western esoteric etheric/emotional/mental bodies, the Korean strata. Taught as a vocabulary for registers of interior experience; the minimum honest reading, and the one this course uses.
Any traditional table linking interior experience to body regions or elements — five-element cycles, chakra-to-gland ladders. Frameworks, not findings: coordinate systems for reporting experience, refined over centuries of practice and used here the way a musician uses notation.
Live and playable at /playground, which is the shortest route to understanding this entry. Sand on a vibrating plate settling into geometric patterns along the nodal lines of a standing wave — first systematised by Ernst Chladni in 1787. Two centuries old, endlessly repeatable, and the site's central image: invisible vibration producing visible order.
The site-wide scale carried by every claim: Established (peer-reviewed and replicated), Emerging (measured and published, not settled), Observation (what practice traditions and clinical experience describe, before science has looked). Collapsing the three into 'claims' misdescribes the work.
A signalling layer present in almost every tissue — brain, gut, immune cells, bone, skin — whose job is regulation: keeping other systems inside their range. Named after cannabis only because the plant was studied first; the receptors and the body's own messengers for them were found afterwards.
The body's maintenance of its internal conditions within a viable range, continuously and without instruction. The single most useful frame for the endocannabinoid system, which does not carry messages so much as adjust the volume of messages already being sent.
The two principal cannabinoid receptors. CB1 is among the most abundant G-protein-coupled receptors in the brain — dense in movement, memory, appetite and pain-modulating regions, and notably sparse in the brainstem areas driving respiration. CB2 sits mainly on immune cells and in the periphery.
One of the two principal endocannabinoids, isolated from brain tissue in 1992. A lipid, cut from the cell membrane on demand rather than stored, and degraded within moments by the enzyme FAAH.
The more abundant of the two principal endocannabinoids, identified in 1995. Like anandamide it is synthesised on demand and rapidly destroyed — by MAGL — so the system's tone is set by rates of production and breakdown, never by a reservoir.
The structural oddity of endocannabinoid transmission: the receiving cell makes the messenger and sends it backwards across the synapse, telling the sending cell to release less. A feedback brake built into the synapse — a governor rather than an accelerator.
The enzymes that end the signal — FAAH degrading anandamide, MAGL degrading 2-AG. Because endocannabinoid tone is a matter of rates rather than stores, these are as much part of the system as the receptors, and much drug development has aimed at them rather than at the receptors themselves.
The principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis, isolated in 1964. A partial agonist at CB1: it activates the receptor less completely than the body's own messengers would, and — not being cleared by FAAH or MAGL — occupies it for hours rather than seconds. Its dose–response is not a straight line.
A non-intoxicating cannabis constituent with very low affinity for CB1 — so not 'the calm one at the same receptor'. Its documented actions are largely elsewhere: negative allosteric modulation at CB1, and interactions with TRPV1, 5-HT1A and adenosine signalling. Licensed, as a purified molecule, for two severe childhood epilepsies.
Originally a 1998 finding that inactive lipids enhanced 2-AG activity; later broadened into the hypothesis that whole-plant preparations act differently from isolated compounds because of minor cannabinoids and terpenes. Plausible, partly supported preclinically, and the most commercially useful claim in the field — which is why its tier is worth stating out loud.
The work at the meeting point of contemplative practice and clinical medicine: holding the felt experience and the physiological description at once, each labelled with its own level of evidence, rather than resolving the tension by discarding one. Complementary to medical care and never a substitute for it.
A plant alkaloid — an insecticide, in the plant's own economy — that acts on the body as an agonist at nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Addictive, psychoactive, and not the constituent of a cigarette that causes cancer or emphysema: that is the smoke. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The receptor family acetylcholine uses, and the one nicotine occupies. The α4β2 subtype in the midbrain is the one that matters for dependence: activating it raises dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, the common final pathway of nearly every addictive drug. Chronic exposure upregulates these receptors, which is what tolerance and withdrawal physically are.
A tobacco species carrying several times the nicotine of the N. tabacum in a commercial cigarette, used ritually across Amazonia rather than recreationally — administered in specific forms, on specific occasions, by practitioners trained to work with it. Documented at length by Wilbert (1987). Evidence of a bounded relationship, not evidence of safety.
Separating the harm from the habit and removing the harmful part, rather than requiring the habit to end before anything improves. In tobacco it means the smoke, not the nicotine, is the thing to eliminate first — the position the Royal College of Physicians set out in 2016, and the reason nicotine replacement sits on an open pharmacy shelf.
An inspection rather than a treatment: the practitioner attends to how the energy centres are sitting, how protective the aura appears, whether anything looks to be driving a symptom, and how a person's complaints relate to one another. What it produces is an account of what was observed — including what could not be told — not a diagnosis. Offered short, and deliberately so, because its purpose is to let someone decide whether to go further.
The field described in most energy traditions as extending beyond the skin, and the outermost thing a practitioner reports working on. "Shield" names its function in that framework — how much it is currently keeping out. No instrument measures it; what exists is a long practitioner literature that is internally consistent about what a depleted one is like. Treated here as reporting language, not as an object.
Points along the body's midline where the classical Indian systems locate concentrations of activity, each conventionally tied to a region, a function and an endocrine correlate. The mapping to glands is a correspondence, not an anatomical identity — see correspondence map. Used here as a coordinate system for saying where something is felt, which is what it is good for.
In practitioner language, persistent attachments to a person, place or situation that are described as continuously drawing on someone. Cutting them is one of the first things done at the outer level of a session. The reason it comes first is structural within the framework: refilling something that is still draining accomplishes nothing.
Deliberately returning attention to weight, contact and the body's lower half at the end of interior work. The framework describes it as reconnecting to the earth; the observable part is simply that people who skip it more often report feeling scattered or unwell afterward, which is reason enough to do it whatever one believes about the mechanism.
The name most contemplative traditions give to the part of a person that is not reactive and not in a hurry — what is left when the running commentary stops. Realigning with it is how the deeper level of a session is described. Whether this is a metaphysical entity or a reliable state a nervous system can enter is left open here, because practice does not require settling it.
In the tantric traditions, the opening of an energy said to lie coiled at the base of the spine — reported as anything from a gradual warming to an abrupt and disorienting event, sometimes with genuine physical and psychological upheaval. Relevant here for a practical reason rather than a doctrinal one: people who have been through it describe themselves as markedly more sensitive to energy work afterward, which is why sessions for them are worked differently and more slowly.
The practitioner's term for how a particular person's interior system is currently configured — how sensitive, how permeable, how quickly it responds. The claim attached to it is specific and testable in principle: that people with a long practice or a Kundalini awakening behind them respond to the same intervention differently, so the same session applied to them is a different session. It is offered here as a working observation from practice, which is what it is.
The Korean tradition of self-cultivation through breath, posture and stillness — the lineage the three principles of jigam, geumchok and joshik come from, and the one Dr. Kwon undertook postgraduate study in. Korea's counterpart to what Chinese practice calls qigong and Indian practice calls yoga, and a discipline to practise rather than a doctrine to accept.