Three things this corpus says, which sit badly together once you put them in one place.
One. Every energy practice has three beats and they only work in order: stir the energy up, smooth it out until it's even everywhere, then let go and witness. The third beat is where the result is said to arrive. Always Meditate After the Nyāsa
Two. The first beat is loud and the later ones are quiet. Stirring produces heat, buzzing, soreness, movement — sensations you can't miss. Smoothing produces "harmonious fullness," and letting go produces a body that "feels more comfortable or pleasant." That's the whole reported difference. Bliss Is Endocrine
Three. Nearly forty sensations get catalogued, and the instruction attached is to ignore all of them and keep going until an attainment reached over years. Forty Sensations, and the Order to Ignore Them
Put those together and the practice has a feedback problem built into its own architecture.
Phase one pays immediately and unmistakably. Phase three pays in the absence of something — no snags, no roughness, a body that isn't complaining. Absence is exactly what a nervous system stops registering. So the practice reinforces the beat that is explicitly not where the result comes from, and starves the beat that is.
Then the third claim closes the last exit. If you'd been using the sensations to track your progress, you're told to stop — and nothing replaces them. The two markers offered elsewhere, warm feet and lightness, are both quiet, and both are on the ignore list under different circumstances.
Which produces a specific, predictable practitioner: somebody two years in, running longer and harder stirring sessions, getting hotter, sleeping worse, and reading all of it as progress — the exact person the overheating passage describes, arriving at an acupuncturist.
A practice whose phases differ in signal strength will drift toward its loudest phase regardless of what its instructions say, and the drift is invisible from inside because the loud phase is genuinely working.
That's not a claim about this tradition. It's a claim about any staged practice with an arousal phase and a settling phase — training, therapy, rehearsal, recovery. The settling phase is always the one that gets cut, and the reason is never laziness.
Falsifiable version: in any two-phase protocol where phase one produces strong interoceptive feedback and phase two produces its absence, self-directed practitioners will over-run phase one and under-run phase two, and will report the imbalance as diligence.