Bruce Kumar Frantzis

Relevance of Taoism in Modern Life Hi folks. This column/blog is a first for me. In fact I’ve only sent about ten emails in my entire life, and have avoided email because I knew it would take me away from writing and teaching. I’ve decided from time to time I’ll write this column/blog for a few reasons. First, I want to support the Energy Arts Instructors that are actively teaching and spreading the material. Secondly, this will be a place students can learn about what is happening around the world. Finally, I want to share some new thoughts on energy work and the relevance of Taoism specifically to modern life. My Vision for Energy Arts is to bring the practical knowledge of Taoism to the West. In some respects I haven’t been very successful in reaching the masses over the 30 plus years. I’m not politically correct, skinny, and/or the new-age role model - in fact I’m quite the opposite. On the other hand, maybe the timing wasn’t right for the work to generate mass appeal or for me personally. Regardless, we are going to continue teaching the real-deal rather than the side show, supporting those who choose the former. Stay tuned as we create new products and launch new initiatives on this website. A bit of background info: When I returned from the Orient, I developed a thirty-year plan to teach the three treasures of Taoism, called jing-chi-shen in Chinese and body-energy-spirit in English. The summer’s retreats for 2007, TAOIST YOGA and the Gods Playing in the Clouds Instructor course, focused on developing the second treasure, chi-energy. Taoist Yoga is based on one of the foundation practices in China to open up the body’s energy channels and to learn to feel energy. It's something I spent years practicing and is a great way to accelerate your current chi gung practice. For many of the old timers out there, I'm now going into entirely new areas of chi work and expanding on information I began releasing at the 2004 Heaven and Earth Instructor training. In future courses, I will continue to release new information providing students and instructors the opportunity to further upgrade their practices. I wish everyone a prosperous Chinese New Year and thank you for reading my blog. Please also register for our newsletter because that will have news and articles and the latest updates. See you soon. Love and balance, Bruce

The Heart-Mind Series [Part 1] Intent The Heart-Mind is an important concept in both Taoism and in Buddhism. To understand the Heart-Mind, we must first understand the nature of intent in relation to Taoism. There are two levels of intent in everything you do in Taoism and Chinese chi work. The first one is ordinary intent. The second level of intent is the place from which intent arises originally. That is, the place where intent is born. Any level of intent has both a yin and yang component. If you want to walk across the street, that's a yang action because you have to go and do something. If you want something to come toward you, that's a yin form of intent. But then there's this question of where the intent comes from to begin with. Where do all your thoughts come from? Where do all your emotions come from? Where is the birthing room of yin and yang? Classic Chinese philosophy says that in the beginning there was the undifferentiated void called wu chi (wu ji). Wu chi held within itself all possibilities but was beyond needing to take form. However, in order for creation to come into existence, there needed to be a creative force. This force was called tai chi (taiji). Tai chi gives birth to yin and yang. Tai chi is neutral, neither, both, or. It has no qualities of its own, but it allows any yin and yang to take form. It is a level of emptiness that produces manifestation. The interplay of yin and yang is called liang i by the ancient Chinese. So, where does any thought, any emotion, any phenomena come from? If you have a psychic perception, where does it come from? If a thought comes into your mind, or an emotion comes into your body, where does it originate? The thought itself, the emotion itself, the psychic perception itself, or even the way karma occurs itself you could say always has a yin or a yang quality. It could be more yin and less yang or more yang and less yin, but one or both are always involved. You can break anything down from the most finite things that exist in quantum physics to the biggest things in the universe. The subconscious--a place that has thought--is still yin and yang. The place in the subconscious from where it is born, that's the Heart-Mind. It is not the subconscious itself rather the place that gives birth to the subconscious. On a human level, intent is normal intent but then the Heart-Mind is a phrase that is used both in Buddhism and Taoism. Taoism sometimes doesn't use the word Heart-Mind and sometimes uses the word spirit (shen). Buddhists always use Heart-Mind, Taoist sometimes use HeartMind and sometimes use spirit, but the fact is that they're interchangeable. I tend to use the term Heart-Mind because Buddhism is better known in the West, and I prefer to use common terms.

[Part 2] Subconscious We've been talking about the place from which intent and thoughts come from, the HeartMind. How do you get there? What is the method?

Let's take the process of Inner Dissolving, Lao Tse's 2,500-year-old tradition of ice to water, water to inner space. When you go from ice to water that's a yin-yang relationship; tension to relaxation is a yin-yang relationship. Now, if you want to go to the place where both of these energies originate, you effectively will move through two levels. If you're talking about the level of human perception to arrive at relaxation (or water) you will move through the subconscious whether you realize it or not. But that in and of itself has more to do with the transparency of recognizing the deeper implications of what's involved with a specific yin and yang. It's much more about becoming aware of the subtle nuances associated with that yin and yang, which aren't normally terribly obvious. Now, if you go one step further into what really allows the subconscious to generate yin and yang then you hit the Heart-Mind. You hit what can be called spirit. So you're playing around with words to a certain degree when you say the Heart-Mind is the subconscious. Well, it isn't really, but given the fact that the West uses the conscious and subconscious dichotomy you could say the subconscious is the Heart-Mind. It's more accurately that which allows the thought that ends up in the subconscious to arise to begin with. It has no qualities, or you could say it has every quality. It's not yin and yang, or you could say that it has every possible yin and yang that could ever exist. This place is then where you start going ice to water, water to inner space (Inner Dissolving). The process of going to inner space is the process of going to emptiness. Emptiness only arises once the Heart-Mind is activated to a strong enough degree. How strong is the emptiness? To what degree is the emptiness? When you start looking at emptiness to a finite enough degree, then you find that there are stages of emptiness and qualities of emptiness. The point is each of those stages-when they finally arrive-comes from the Heart-Mind. If the Heart-Mind isn't activated sufficiently you can't go to the various degrees of emptiness. In the Western frame of thought there are only two things: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. In Eastern thought there is a very distinct continuum that goes from gross yin-yang to subtle yin-yang to no yin-yang. The subtle is where the subconscious comes in. There's obvious intent and then there's the Heart-Mind, which is the place where intent ultimately comes from. Awakening and engaging the Heart-Mind ultimately is a keystone of all higher level chi gung/qigong and TAO meditation.

[Part 3] Creating Continuity in Your Life When you start learning chi gung/qigong, you have the intent for your chi to move. However, this is not the same thing as becoming directly aware of the chi itself, where it's a felt, living quality. It's not that you have the idea, the imagination, or the ability to think about chi but that you actually feel it. It's the difference between the idea of eating and actually eating-having the juices in your mouth and tasting the food. The idea will produce some facsimile of the real thing and you might go so far as to salivate, but when the real deal is present the taste and sustenance of the food is either there or it's not. There's little thought involved.

Similarly, in order to actually feel chi directly you have to go through the Heart-Mind. You have to have a direct experience of moving chi in the body. To do this the body requires that the Heart-Mind be opened, if only to the tinniest degree. Gods Playing in the Clouds is a bridge between chi gung/qigong and mediation since it starts from awakening the Heart-Mind and working with directly feeling and consciously moving chi. So, I'm going to start emphasizing this aspect in all of my courses. Gods is different from other chi gung/qigong sets. The beginning level of Dragon and Tiger, for example, can be done without actually feeling chi; you could visualize or have the idea of the chi moving. But, at some point, when to get to the next level, you are no longer dealing with the idea of it, you're dealing with the reality-you're tasting the chi, the juices and the food is going into your stomach. All chi gung and meditation starts at the level of intent and arrives at the HeartMind. Take the idea of inner dissolving. You want a release, you have the intent for a release, but then it goes past a certain point where you start awakening the Heart-Mind. It sits there with the willingness for something to happen, but then it shifts into something that becomes very real. This is where Lao Tse's water tradition and the fire traditions part company. Many of the fire methods are very strongly based only upon ordinary intent. To enter the real world of chi gung/qigong you have to access the Heart-Mind. At the level of intent, only a small percentage of your being is involved. To the degree to which you attach the Heart-Mind-surface-level or deep involvement-is the degree to which your being is involved. If you want to awaken the latent parts of the brain, it can only be done after the Heart-Mind is functioning really well. Whether you're using only intent or you're accessing the Heart-Mind, normally you'll be doing the same things, the same transactions or techniques. The only difference being that once you awaken the Heart-Mind, there are specific methods and practices down stream that you can attempt that without the active use of the Heart-Mind simply aren't possible to accomplish otherwise. You can get great benefits from intent. But that said you're going to find that people with intent alone are not normally resolving their deepest psychological and emotional issues, their sense of being connected to life. You're not going to find that genuine satisfaction arises solely out of intent. "Om Coco Cola" or whatever. If human beings truly want to tap into something bigger than them, they cannot do it without tapping into the Heart-Mind. I knew that at some point in my second phase of my 10-year-teaching program that the HeartMind was going to really start coming up. I just didn't know when. My first 10-year program was much more about teaching people how to use intent. If you can't crawl you can't walk. I got the flash last winter as to how to teach it. You could say my internal view went from fuzzy to clear. The Heart-Mind will henceforth be emphasized in my teachings as a result. For Gods Playing in the Clouds it's very important. You can make energy move through your body to gain certain benefits, but if you add the Heart-Mind into it there's more that comes out of it:

A) You perform functions dramatically better; metaphorically 100 vs. 1,000 horsepower. B) The Heart-Mind is really what allows humans to integrate their experiences, and become smooth with them during practice and our daily lives. Ordinary intent doesn't do that. Ordinary intent can give you high performance in external tasks, but no more. What you will never get-no matter how much intent you use-is feeling whole inside. Ordinary intent will not make you smooth inside yourself. By its nature intent breeds the next intent because no intent can be complete. It always leaves you with what's missing. Integration occurs where everything comes together and where it truly is "all good." Something has to create continuity in your life, and basically that is what happens through the Heart-Mind. The simplest definition-albeit partial-of the Heart-Mind is: Where your emotions and your rational mind come together. From an Eastern perspective it's not only to do with the mind. It's to do with the spiritual consciousness and emotions that reside in the heart and your rational capacity to figure out what's going around you. For example, you can be completely cool inside if your heart is open, but conversely you might not be able to walk down the street without getting lost if your intellectual mind functions poorly. You don't have to have a Heart-Mind that's completely open to be more integrated inside. It's the same as the difference between being stark-raving mad, to being kind of okay, to being mostly okay, to being absolutely okay. Life exists along a continuum. Classically Gods Playing in the Clouds is the bridge between chi gung/qigong and meditation. A central element is the Heart-Mind. Presuming you have all the earlier nei gung, they truly come together in Gods with the Heart-Mind and take it to the next level. See you next time! Bruce

The Man in the Suitcase and TAOIST YOGA When I was in Tokyo I studied yoga with Perr Wynter, a Norwegian man who studied with a yogi from India who, for some reason, lived up the fjord from him in Norway--a very rare situation. When Perr was in his twenties he went to India and studied at the Shivananda Ashram in Rishikesh where he lived in a very, very tiny room. He was an exceptional Hatha yogi. He could do any Hatha yoga posture that existed, and when he came to Southeast Asia and he was in Malaysia, his money and passport got stolen. So, what happened was he worked in a circus to earn his stolen money back where his act was folding himself into a suitcase, which will give you some idea about how flexible he was (also see images of Perr above and below)! Now what made Perr so interesting is that if you're going to talk about Hatha yoga and Hatha yoga postures, then there's wasn't much he couldn't do.

From what I gathered, he could do as much as Iyengar, author of Light on Yoga, could. But everybody in Tokyo wondered why when he did aikido and when he did tai chi, his energy did not really flow. He was known for being relatively uncoordinated; he was known for just having a kind of semi-spastic quality about him. The question started arising: How is this human-rubber band such that he cannot make energy flow through his body? He was very healthy and strong--there were no two ways about it--he was all those types of things you would associate with health. As a matter of fact, he was the yoga teacher of a very prominent karate teacher in Japan, Yamaguchi Gogen, the head of Japanese goju karate who wrote about Perr and showed his pictures in the back of his book. It took me a long time to figure this out, especially after having done Taoist Yoga and chi gung/qigong for many years. With the training Perr had received, the average person with their average expectations and thoughts would've imagined that Perr could learn tai chi and aikido, and that he would've learned exceptionally, rapidly and well. But, the fact of the matter was that after years of practicing he was considered to be a rather poor student. What it came down to was this: Perr had stretched his fibers to the degree that, well, they were as far as they could go. He did not have the ability to genuinely relax his body. In order to move really well doing tai chi and aikido, you've got to have the ability to really relax your body; flexibility alone won't cut it. Well, Perr actually wasn't very relaxed. He wasn't relaxed in the sound of his voice; he wasn't relaxed in the way he moved. What he had was fibers that were stretched all the way. So I became aware of the fact that you could still be relatively tense and be super-stretched. I should mention, many of the gymnasts who can physically do some of the more difficult Hatha postures are extremely tense and they're not particularly relaxed. There's something about energy flowing freely in the body, which is a different thing entirely. When your body simply becomes really stretched, it enables you to move the inside of your body like a machine. It allowed Perr to control his nerves to a great degree, which he got from Pranayama there's no two ways about it; but, he didn't have the flow of energy to a great degree. And if you knew Perr--at least back in the late 60s--he was not what you would call a very relaxed person in any way. Although the stretching gave him great mechanical control over his body he did not have the fluidity and the ease, the relaxation that we normally think a person who truly had energy working in his body would have. The man in the suitcase is an example of the difference between classic Hatha yoga and chi gung/qigong. Many of the chi gung/qigong people don't have anywhere near the flexibility that Hatha yogis have. Most can't put both legs behind their heads, can't lie on their stomachs and put one hand in the middle of their bellies with their other hand behind them with their legs in a full lotus and their body completely parallel to the ground, suspended off the ground. They can't do things like that, but they can be as healthy, have as much energy and be very relaxed. China has a history of circus and acrobats where 12-year olds can do every physical posture Iyengar can do, and yet it's just a fact that they got them young and when their fibers could stretch. The Chinese do not consider them in any shape, matter or form to be Chi masters-they're just considered to be extremely good physical specimens.

Taoist Yoga is a great way to increase your flexibility and your range of motion when doing chi gung/qigong. Many people who do chi gung/qigong start out stiff and rigid. Taoist Yoga is the ideal complement to chi gung/qigong because it stretches you out in a conscious way. It focuses your awareness on allowing chi to flow, saturating your body with chi, or what is called "making your body wet" in the east. Just as with chi gung/qigong, you're locating energetic holes and kinks and then releasing them. There is a difference between something happening inside you--a flow of energy occurring inside you--and what the outside of your body can do. They don't always go together. Taoist Yoga is working to get that internal flow inside your body while you're doing Hatha yoga postures. You may not want to practice Taoist Yoga with the goal of putting yourself in a suitcase in order to pay your rent, but you can dramatically shorten the time it takes to learn chi gung/qigong by integrating the principles of Taoist Yoga into your practice. That's it! Bruce

Maintaining Awareness Your ability to feel and control energy depends on maintaining continuous internal awareness inside your body. Without some minimal level of continuous inner awareness, you cannot focus long enough on your movements or energy flows to gain most of the wonderful benefits of chi gung/qigong, tai chi and other Taoist energy arts. The first challenge is to learn how to simultaneously pay attention to your energy, breathing, emotions and how your body is feeling. The second step is to use that awareness to benefit your health and reduce your stress. Western Education is Outer Oriented From kindergarten through the university system, Western education focuses primarily on training your intellectual and mental capacities for external tasks and activities. Many intellectually brilliant people—from physicists to lawyers to social thinkers—can maintain focus on the problems at hand and come up with solutions. These same people, asked to focus inside themselves and simultaneously engage with their emotions, energy, breathing and deeper parts of their mind and spirit are unable to do so. Taoist Education is About Internal Orientation The primary orientation of Taoist education is to teach people to have an internal orientation. In these practices, you must learn to track the effect of your physical movements on your breathing and emotional moods and gain the sense of your mind being clear on the patterns by which you consciously move energy within yourself. Taoists call it making the body conscious. In an increasingly difficult and complex world, many external and internal circumstances can break your ability to maintain inner awareness. Chi gung/qigong and other Taoist energy movement practices train you to look inside your body, mind and spirit. Eastern philosophy has the point of view that until you learn how to feel deeply inside your body and

become consciously aware of the deeper recesses of your mind, you will not be able to improve the quality of your life. Internal Awareness Prepares you for Meditation Increased and focused awareness will prepare you for the more challenging work of meditation. In the Taoist meditation tradition, spirituality involves more than having health, calmness and a stable, peaceful mind. Meditation helps you take spiritual responsibility for yourself so you can become a relaxed, spontaneous and fully mature and open human being. It helps you reach a place of inner stillness, a place deep inside you that is absolutely permanent and stable, whether you are quietly sitting or doing several things at once.

Bust the Stress: Bust the Allergies Connecting the dots between stress and allergies and asthma is easy. The most common symptoms of stress are achingly similar to those associated with allergy and asthma: tight chest, shortness of breath, insomnia, fatigue, muscular pain and headaches. Unfortunately, the more run down you get, the more susceptible you become to seasonal illnesses, such as colds, bronchitis, sinusitis and pneumonia. Moreover, clinical evidence backs up what sufferers know first-hand: tension and anxiety make symptoms worse. It is more difficult to connect improvements in these maladies with the slow, benign-looking, gentle movements of chi gung/qigong and tai chi. Chi Gung/Qigong and Tai Chi Reduce Stress The ability to let go and relax—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually—is the heart of Taoist energy and breathing practices. These techniques directly train the central nervous system (the intermediary between the body and the mind) to relax and release tensions that have built up inside the body and its internal organs. This allows the production of stress hormones to slow down. Working with the body, tai chi and chi gung/qigong train you to focus your awareness inside your body so that when you try to release specific points of tension with your mind, your body will listen, attempt to obey the suggestion and finally relax. It is a very sophisticated and systematic process of mind training. Tai Chi and Chi Gung/Qigong Train You to Relax First, the movements are a container through which you learn to recognize where tension and stress are lodged inside your body and mind. Second, the slow motion movements help your nervous system to relax. They give your mind the time first to recognize, and then to exert conscious effort to change a host of specific interactions with your body, chi-energy and emotions. Moving too quickly—physically or mentally—causes many to miss these interactions. Third, the movements encourage chi to flow progressively more smoothly and powerfully, promoting relaxation with full awareness. Finally, they teach you how to conserve your chi and not to dissipate it. Harvard Study Aborted Although there have been many clinical studies that clearly demonstrate that chi energy practices mitigate many chronic illnesses and improve circulation, no formal studies have

been completed that directly link the benefits of these practices to the mitigation of allergies and asthma. The only study I know of was one conducted by Harvard University in 2003. Taoist breathing was taught to 48 asthma patients, most of whom were middle-aged. The purpose was to determine whether it would alleviate asthma symptoms. The study was aborted after 3 months. According to Bill Ryan, founder of Brookline Tai Chi and one of the teachers, few were willing to practice by themselves on a consistent enough basis to gain results. And some, told that they would have to learn to breathe from the belly and relax their stomach muscles, were afraid of having big bellies. That is a sad commentary on some of the conditionings imposed in our culture that were strong enough to overcome the desire and motivation to potentially reduce the suffering that results from asthma attacks by so simple an exercise as breathing. Chi Gung/Qigong and Tai Chi: Gentle and Safe Chi gung/qigong and tai chi is gentle enough that it can safely be done if you have allergies and asthma. You can practice indoors when pollen levels are high. The slow movements will not cause exercise-induced asthma attacks. In addition, the adrenalin rushes and release of hormones that sometimes accompanies vigorous exercise or team sports are seldom triggered by the practice of tai chi or chi gung/qigong. Over time, chi gung/qigong helps the body and mind adopt habits of moderation. As the body and mind let go, the nervous system relaxes. The circulation improves. The immune system is strengthened. As I like to tell my students, no one goes to the hospital for a relaxation attack. Miracle Cures Are Not Always Instantaneous People who have experienced the benefits of chi gung/qigong often call them miracle cures. However, practitioners also know that improvements happen incrementally and synergistically. The symptoms of allergy and asthma slowly settle into the background, and more miraculously, there is a decrease in use of inhalers, antihistamines, decongestants and anti-inflammatory pain medicines. The beneficial effects of tai chi and chi gung/qigong are as gradual, natural and inexorable as water etching out a canyon, or the warm sun melting an iceberg. The lack of pain and strain means that everyone can do these exercises, whatever their age or body type. Taking Control of Your Health At a deeper level, these practices provide you with the ability to feel deeply inside your body. You can gain the ability to recognize what triggers symptoms and to work with your limitations rather than fight against them. The feeling of being in control of your body helps to build the foundation for wellness. Becoming proactive against allergies and asthma helps your anxiety levels drop. And so does the physical tension that can accompany it, such as the tightness of muscles that cause headaches and neck and shoulder pain. Being in control of your body and your emotions and feeling the beneficial results inside you helps encourage you to continue. You can make healing yourself your business and not someone else’s.

Nei Gung: Fueling Internal Power With Chi Handed down for thousands of years, the ancient Chinese nei gung tradition of chi cultivation provides a systematic method for transforming body power into one integrated, unified, and dynamic whole. Offering immense benefits for internal and external martial arts practicioners, nei gung promises a body that can move better, faster, with more strength and stamina. The 16-part Internal Power System, described by Master B. K. Frantzis in his compendium of martial arts practices and techniques, The Power of Internal Martial Arts, introduces students to the sophisticated nei gung system discovered and used by Taoists for several thousand years. Ultimately the source of chi power in the internal martial arts of ba gua chang, tai chi chuan, and hsing-i chuan; of chi therapy and bodywork; and of Taoist meditation, nei gung evolved from the Taoists' meditative exploration of the underlying spiritual realities of the universe. Used by the Taoists to maintain superior health, for healing illness and to experience profound inner stillness, nei gung became the root from which not only the Taoist but other chi gung/qigong systems - Buddhist, Martial Arts, Medical and Confucian - developed their knowledge and techniques. The 16-Part Nei Gung Internal Power System Below are listed the basic components of the Taoist nei gung: 1. Breathing methods, in increasing complexity. 2. Feeling, moving, transforming and transmuting internal energies along the energy channels of the body. 3. Precise body alignments. 4. Dissolving physical, emotional and spiritual blockages. 5. Moving energy through the body's meridian channels and energy gates. 6. Bending and stretching the body, inside out and outside in. 7. Opening and closing all parts of the body's tissues, joints and subtle energy anatomy. 8. Manipulating the energy of the external aura. 9. Making circles and spirals of energy inside the body, controlling the body's spiraling energy currents, and moving chi in the body at will. 10. Absorbing and projecting energy to and from the body. 11. Controlling energies of the spine. 12. Controlling the body's left and right energy channels. 13. Controlling the body's central energy channel. 14. Learn capabilities and uses of the body's lower tantien. 15. Learn capabilities and uses of the body's upper and middle tantien. 16. Connecting every part of the physical body into one unified energy. Developing High Performance Using Nei Gung Nei gung offers benefits for students and practitioners of internal as well as external martial arts. The Chinese use the term nei jia to describe all the internal martial arts or Taoist chi practices as one family. Wai jia chuan expresses the concept of the external martial arts, such as gung fu, karate and judo. With the internal martial arts, movement begins from deep inside the body and works outward, with the object of fusing the inside and outside. External martial arts work the muscles and reflexes - the outer frame of the body. When nei gung is incorporated, the student can also develop awareness of the deepest subsystems in the body

and unify the inner and outer components into a powerful and cohesively functioning performance. To use nei gung for developing high performance in martial arts or competitive sports, the student engages in a two-part program: 1) focus on health and the healing of overt and hidden injuries, and 2) an accelerated level of commitment for high performance. It is essential that the training sequence is observed; any training method that can create real physical power and speed requires a healthy body. The health- building phase of nei gung clears physical problems that diminish the capacity for optimal performance. When practiced for health and fitness, nei gung helps to develop superior balance and speed, while upgrading the internal organs, glands, and joints for increased vitality and mental alertness. Integrating the breathing and meditation components of nei gung, the student develops a mind and central nervous system that is relaxed, calm and flexible. Students who practice aikido or external martial arts, such as karate or tae kwon do, will benefit from nei gung's highly systematic internal energy chi training, especially in the area of health. As the body becomes healthier, it naturally performs better. Once the body's health is upgraded, the student has a clear awareness and control of chi in the body and energetic systems and has absorbed into his or her body an understanding of the internal work necessary to master the chosen martial art. Subsequently, the student progresses in the movement and fighting applications of the martial arts style, incorporating the newlyacquired nei gung skills into all physical movements. Once the student's body has absorbed a basic ability to fuse the internal energy work with the physical movements, the student focuses on maximizing his or her internal power with progressively more advanced training stages, both in solo martial art form work and in combat training with opponents. Obtaining Internal Power Frantzis comments, "Knowledge of the existence of a precious thing is a far cry from acquiring it." In presenting information on nei gung in a coherent manner, he hopes it will continue to benefit humans as it has for millennia. It is his objective that these valuable tools will help raise the awareness level of internal arts and, when used appropriately by motivated, creative and intelligent people, will increase the awareness and quality of life for present and future generations. Energetic practices to develop the full range of nei gung form the basis of a carefully designed, six-part chi gung/qigong program taught by Frantzis throughout the United States and Europe. These courses provide a complete nei gung regimen, combining the energy work of Oriental medicine, Taoist meditation and physical movement. For students who desire intensive training in a retreat setting, Frantzis offers the six courses on a rotating basis each summer in California. The courses include: Dragon and Tiger Chi Gung/Qigong, Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body, The Marriage of Heaven and Earth, Spinal Chi Gung/Qigong: Bend the Bow and Shoot the Arrow, Spiraling Energy Body, and Gods Playing in the Clouds Ibbie White is a freelance writer in Mill Valley, CA, and is a student of chi gung/qigong, tai chi, and ba gua chang.

Inner martial arts promote longevity, healing On a Sunday afternoon in late March, martial artist B.K. Frantzis is teaching an advanced workshop on The Five Elements in Taoism. The workshop has been going on all weekend in the large, open Feldenkrais studio on 6th and Bancroft streets in West Berkeley. Sunlight pours into the large room through skylights and glass blocks as Frantzis delineates for his students the sometimes subtle differences between the elements. The five elements of Chinese medicine and Taoist culture are air, water,earth, metal and fire. In the Sunday afternoon session, Frantzis, who advertises his method as "Mastery without mystery," segues easily from fire to earth. The main characteristic of earth, he says, is that it is stable. This is why earthquakes are so profoundly disturbing to humans. In a tremblor, the element of earth, which we deeply understand to be still and unmoving, trembles and shakes. The shock is so great that it bypasses our cerebral functions and rocks us at the core level of our being. This is an experience I have had myself during Loma Prieta, and so I sit up and pay attention. When one encounters real truth, I have found, it tends to resonate with our own personal experience or with internal convictions we have developed after contemplating that experience. To use a metaphor from another space and time, these intimations of shared reality ring with the sound of silver on the bar. I shouldn't be surprised. Frantzis has come highly recommended to me, by people whose opinions I respect, over a long period of time. He's been teaching in Berkeley for the past decade, though his studio and home are based in Marin. For one so young - he will turn 53 in April - Frantzis has amassed a remarkable series of accomplishments. He is an acknowledged master of Tai Chi, Ba Gua, Shing Yi, Chi Gung/Qigong, Taoist meditation, and Chinese healing practices. He has written four books and taught workshops and classes all over the world. He estimates that over the three decades he has been teaching, 10,000 students have passed through his classes. Then there is the extended family of students of students. In this particular weekend workshop there are about fifty participants, ranging in age from 25 to 70. During the breaks, they stretch and practice - circle walking in the Ba Gua style, executing high kicks, moving slowly and deliberately in the balletic motions of Tai Chi. One of Frantzis's students characterizes the whole as "practice related to the cultivation of internal energy." Frantzis specializes in the internal martial arts. These utilize the life energy known as chi, pronounced chee, like the Navajo detective in Tony Hillerman's books. Acupuncturists use points along the body's meridians to move chi around, improving health by releasing blocks to energy flow and balancing the body for preventive health care. Frantzis stresses three areas in his teaching: longevity, healing and meditation. "Tai chi is the Chinese national health exercise," he says, pointing out that it is practiced by 200 million people. Half the people who do Tai Chi begin after the age of 50. There is much in Tai Chi - and in Frantzis's teaching - to benefit aging baby boomers, who are in danger of overwhelming the nation's health care systems as their bodies begin to decline. Originally published in The Oakland Tribune. Reprinted by permission of author, Susan Lydon. Cityscape column for Sunday March 31, 2001

Release To Freedom: The Dissolving Process of the Taoist Water Method Taoist Water Method Chi Kung and Meditation gently dissolves energetic blockages on all levels of a person's being. This differentiates it from the Fire Methods which burn or blast their way through energetic blockages. The more recent Fire Methods, better known in Asia and the West, include Taoist and Buddhist practices as well as Kundalini yoga from India and Sexual Magick from the West. The Fire Methods are known for powerful practices and speedy development, but may often make casualties of careless and weak practitioners. The Water Method is a slower, gentler, less precarious path to prime physical health, a calm mind, and spiritual development. The Taoist Fire Method practices were developed in the second century BCE within the NeoTaoist era best exemplified by the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. The failure of the Taoist Yellow Turban Rebellion made it necessary for Taoism to remain unnoticed by local officials. Public displays of Taoism comprised of artwork and individual practices. Taoist Water Method practices come from China's Age of Philosophers in the sixth century BCE. This was the era of Confucius and Lao Tze. Neither of their teachings had coalesced into actual schools of philosophy or organized religions, but their teachings were revered by all. Even in the midst of chaotic and warring political times, all aspects of daily life moved at a slow and steady pace, like the ox carts that moved the nation. The energetic and spiritual practices of this time period reflect this pace, and in doing so, have become the safe and gentle way to health and human evolution. The gentle Water Method begins with a solid foundation in Chinese energy based exercises often known as chi kung, and begins with postural training. Students are taught to stand with their feet parallel and flat on the floor. The knees are bent and aligned over the feet. The hips are down and back, as if beginning to sit on a chair, and tucked a little forward to flatten the sacrum. The spine is straight and lifted upward from the crown of the skull while the chest, shoulders and abdomen relax and drop. The tongue gently touches the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth. While standing, the practitioner breathes from the nose, using the diaphragm instead of the muscles between the ribs. This manifests externally as breathing with the low waist instead of with the upper chest. This diaphragmatic breathing becomes a continuous flow with the practitioner never holding the breath. When open, the Water Method practitioner's eyes are relaxed, allowing the images to come in and not projecting the vision out to the images. This is the Taoist concept of Yin Vision. The practitioner relaxes the mind, fighting no thoughts out and holding no thoughts in. This unbroken flow of thought matches the continuous flow of breath. After the basics of standing practices are understood, the student begins an exercise known as What's Alive and What's Dead. Before an awakened nervous system can feel energy, it must first learn to feel flesh. The student learns to think of the entire nervous system as an extension of the brain, potentially conscious and just waiting to wake up. While standing, the student shuts off visualization, and tunes up feeling. This helps prevent the student from thinking an area has been felt, when, in fact, it was visualized. The student starts at the fop of the head and attempts to feel the hair, the scalp, the skull and the places where the plates of the skull come together. The student feels as much as possible, keeping in mind that what is

felt is alive, and what is not felt is dead. Hence the name of the exercise. Increment by increment the student feels his way down the body, much like visiting fifty floors of a building. At each floor the visit lasts long enough to determine what's alive and what is not. Students must be careful not to get hung up on a floor in an effort to feel everything perfectly. Nothing is perfect in life, so the student must recognize when a reasonable amount has been felt on a particular floor within that particular time period, then continue to move down to the next floor. The exercise is only over when the student gets to the bottom floor. With each practice session, more of the student's body will become alive and aware. Long before feeling the entire inside of the body, the student will begin to become aware of energy blockages. This will lead to the next stage of development, the Outer Dissolving Process. The Outer Dissolving practices begin with a standing exercise that is identical in external content to What's Alive and What's Dead. In this practice, called Clearing Down, the student begins by feeling the top of the aura or energy field, which emanates beyond the skin. The distance between the outer edge of the energy field and the skin indicates the overall health of the practitioner, wider bands indicating stronger health. The student is no longer simply feeling, but continuously scanning for feelings of blockage, congestion, and places that are too tight, too strong, or completely out of sync with the surroundings. These are spots of congealed energy similar to log jams that need to be broken up and used. This process begins with the student locating and feeling this block of congealed energy until it seems to be a solid shape with definable parameters. The student's mind then begins to dissolve this solid shape much like water can dissolve ice, crystalline sugar, and, in time, even rock. As the solid shape begins to dissolve into an amorphous liquid with a less definable shape much like ice becoming water or sugar becoming syrup! the student's mind begins to further dissolve the liquid, transforming it into a vapor. This is similar to water boiling away to steam. This "steam," however, is without heat, and is more akin to alcohol or gas evaporating into vapor. This vapor floats out to the edge of the student's aura where it becomes usable energy. Feeling this dissolving process can be an extremely subtle process. Water Method teachers often give the students an idea of what to feel by having the student tighten the muscles of the hand into a fist until the knuckles become white. The student then relaxes the muscles of the hand without moving the fingers or thumb. The sensation of relaxation that slowly spreads out from the center of the palm and beyond demonstrates and mimes the feeling of the dissolving process. At the center of each blockage lies the feeling that initially shocked the person's energy system, thereby creating the block. When the blockage is completely dissolved, this core feeling will be set loose. At this initial stage of practice, what is felt is usually a physical sensation or even an emotional feeling. This feeling must be recognized and let go. To either repress or hold on to it will re-create the blockage, and the dissolving process will have to be done all over again. Only very small blockages will be completely dissolved in one or even a few practice sessions. Most blockages will be worn down over a period of time as water wears away a rock. Some of them might even be lifetime projects. The practitioner must recognize within each practice session his own limitation at each increment of the body, and continue to move steadily down, and be sure to practice daily. The search for perfection will only cause stagnation. When the student has been working on exactly the same blockages for many practice sessions and stabilization has finally been reached, it is time to move on. After developing the standing practices, Outer Dissolving is initiated within several practices that involve movement. Seated and lying down practices are usually reserved for the practice

of Inner Dissolving. Chi kung exercises are the most common moving vehicle for Outer Dissolving. In fact, the standing dissolving practice is the first exercise in a chi kung set known as Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body. The second exercise in the set is a variation of Cloud Hands which activates the fluids of the body. It shifts the weight to pump the blood, lowers and raises; the hip crease, and squeezes and releases the lymph nodes in that area, thereby pumping the lymphatic fluid, expanding and compressing the joints of the skeleton to pump the lubricating fluid of the joints. The third exercise is called Swings. It is comprised of three variations of weight shifting and arm swing exercises, which include the health benefits of Cloud Hands while adding three levels of organ massage. The Clearing Down Dissolving practice can be integrated into the mental work of both these exercises. The Energy Gates set ends with a unique spinal stretch. This exercise is designed to open the spaces between each vertebrae, moving from the bottom of the spine to the top in both bending over and straightening up movements. Dissolving can be done in each of the spaces between the vertebrae. The second chi kung set in the Water Method is called Spiraling Energy Body. In this set the practitioner learns to be able to clearly think two things simultaneously. First, the student learns to access his own secondary consciousness. The secondary consciousness is the part of the mind that can sing along with the radio while the primary consciousness carries on a conversation, for example. When the Clearing Down practice occupies the secondary consciousness, a safety ground wire is created that protects the practitioner from all kinds of energy blowout or burnout. In Spiraling Energy Body the student learns to use the primary consciousness to pump energy up through the body, and to practice External Dissolving of energy which another living being has projected toward the student. The student may also eliminate energy which has been projected outward (and thought better of!), and begin to move spiraling energy between his energy storage bank and each and every one of the energy gates in the body. Doing each of these practices, the dissolving downward ground wire within the secondary consciousness is maintained. The third Water Method chi kung set is called Marriage of Heaven and Earth. It is a single exercise that can contain the entire Taoist Internal Power Nei Gung System. This is a sixteen part system in which all three sections of the dissolving process (outer, external, and inner) constitute only one part. The fourth set of Water Method chi kung is a method of pumping the cerebral spinal fluid and releasing power from the spine. It is called Bend the Bow and Shoot the Arrow. The fifth and final set in this chi kung system is called Gods Playing in the Clouds. Like Marriage of Heaven and Earth, it can contain the entire Taoist Nei Gung System. To this the six exercise set adds a number of twisting and coiling motions that are indigenous to the martial art called pa kua chang. The martial arts pa kua chang and tai chi chuan also serve as moving vehicles that can carry the Dissolving Process. Tai chi dissolving practices specialize in dissolving through specific patterns of organs and glands. The unique dissolving practices of pa kua chang involve dissolving from the edges of the body into the center and back again. Dissolving in the adrenal glands during fighting practices helps to remove unconscious reaction, fear and hesitation. Similarly, dissolving in the gonads during sexual practices can help eliminate hormonal drive for completion and serve to lengthen the process.

The Outer Dissolving practices help remove block ages from the Physical Energy Body, the energy in the flesh that enlivens it. It also removes blockages from the Chi Energy Body, the energy that runs in channels through the flesh and emanates from the flesh to the aura level. These are the first two layers of the Eight Energy Bodies, which in Taoist belief are the outwardly expanding energy bodies that comprise a human being. The others are the Emotional Energy Body, Thinking Energy Body, Psychic Energy Body, Causal Energy Body, Energy Body of Individuality, and Energy Body of Tao. The Energy Body of Tao is a person's connection to everything else, and is usually accessed only after the Physical Energy Body has been left behind. This means that the average person only accesses seven energy bodies at a time, leaving only enlightened masters with the ability to access all eight bodies at once. The Outer Dissolving Practices of chi kung releases the congested chi in the body and its direct energy power system, and allows the body to utilize this energy, resulting in freedom from weakness and poor health. When the Dissolving Process is moved into the third Emotional Energy Body, the practices enter the realm of meditation and leave the work of chi kung. The Emotional Energy Body stretches from a person's center outward to the stars that can be seen with the naked eye. The other five bodies extend even farther outward and are rarely accessed without the presence of a Taoist Master. The emotional layer can be reached quite easily after the Outer Dissolving practices have been stabilized. "Meditation is that which puts the individual in touch with the Infinite," states Taoist Master B.K. Frantzis. Accessing and feeling the Emotional Energy Body falls within this definition of meditation. Frantzis is the master who brought the Water Method to the West. His story is the classical tale of hard to soft: a young fighter who became a master of healing and meditation. Bruce K. Frantzis began to study martial arts at the tender age of twelve, having been highly impressed and more than a bit frightened after seeing a deadly New York street encounter. Being an extremely bright lad, Frantzis eagerly sought out and studied the healing arts that helped him recuperate from sparring injuries, and studied meditation to remove fear and hesitation from his sparring. By the time he graduated from high school, Frantzis had black belts in karate, judo, and aikido and introductions to external and internal Chinese kung fu. While attending college in Japan, Frantzis re-earned all his black belts in the best Japanese schools and fought on an "All Japan" championship collegiate karate team. He also continued his studies in shiatsu massage and Zen meditation. During his senior year and after college, Frantzis began to travel to the island of Taiwan to study the Internal Martial Arts of pa kua chang, tai chi chuan, and hsing i chuan. He also began to study tui na/Chinese energy massage and Taoist meditation. In the early 1970s, Frantzis also spent the better part of two years studying Pranayama and Kundalini yoga in India. In the late 1970s, he began to travel to the island city of Hong Kong to study with one of the highest level masters of Yang Family tai chi chuan. While in Hong Kong, Frantzis met and began to study with a young Internal Arts Master who had emigrated from Beijing. This young master, named Bai Wa, was the only student of Liu Hung Chieh, one of the last of the great Taoist Masters. Liu was the last member of the original Beijing Pa Kua School; a winning entrant in the 1928 All China Full Contact Tournament. Liu was a personal friend and private student of the founder of Wu Style Tai Chi. He was also the leader of a Northern Chinese Taoist Sect, and a formally declared

Enlightened Being. Bai Wa studied pa kua, hsing i chuan, and Fire Method chi kung and meditation from Liu during his teen years in Beijing. In 1981 Bruce Kumar Frantzis traveled to Beijing for instructor training in the 24 Posture Yang Style Tai Chi Form at the National Sports Institute. He carried with him an introduction to Liu from Bai Wa, but this did not mean that the old master would agree to teach him, having not taught anyone since Bai Wa. Strangely, the night before Frantzis arrived at Liu' s door, the old man dreamed of a Westerner coming to learn from him. The dream and the introduction compelled Liu to make Frantzis the second and only student since the 1930s. Liu decided that this large, young kung fu fighter needed to learn the gentle water method of chi kung and meditation, along with the highest levels of the internal martial arts. Frantzis studied with Liu for a few months, then returned to America. In 1983 Frantzis returned to Beijing, where he worked in a hospital as a tui na therapist to cancer patients and continued to study with Liu on a daily basis. The old master grew so fond of this determined young American that he adopted Bruce Kumar Frantzis into his family and also made him a lineage holder in pa kua, hsing i, wu style tai chi, and Taoist Water Method chi kung and meditation. When Liu Hung Chieh passed away in December 1986, Frantzis returned to the United States and began to spread Liu' s teachings. From his home base in Fairfax, California, Taoist Master Frantzis teaches workshops, seminars, and retreats across America as well as in Western Europe. He has also produced a series of videotapes, and has written books on the Internal Martial Arts and Taoist Water Method chi kung and meditation. Taoist Water Method meditation deals with stillness and inner space and is mostly practiced in a variety of seated postures both on the floor and on chairs. The beginning practice which is akin to What's Alive and What's Dead in Chi Kung, is Following the Breath to Calm the Monkey Mind. This practice recognizes that the mind often hops from thought to thought without even finishing most of them, like the hopping of an agitated monkey. By concentrating the mind on feeling the breath as it enters and leaves the body, the mind begins to slow down and any remaining thoughts begin to drift to the edges of consciousness and begin to eventually disappear. This creates an unbroken thread of consciousness that begins to still the mind. The Water Method meditation practitioner must develop an experiential grasp of the vast amount of space that resides within the central energy channel. This inner space reaches to a vastness equal to the outer reaches of the universe. Inner stillness is reached when a calm mind accesses the vastness of inner space within the central channel. The Inner Dissolving Process of Water Method meditation consists of the conscious use of inner space. When blockages of emotional energy are dissolved, the process becomes solid to liquid to vapor, which then implodes into inner space instead of floating outward as in the Outer Dissolving Process. Emotional blockages are smoother and more subtle than physical and chi blockages. It takes a highly awakened nervous system to detect them. Emotional blockages dissolve away in layers, like peeling an onion and unlike the steady wearing away of water on rock, which is the process of Outer Dissolving. Each of these emotional layers must be liquefied, vaporized, and imploded into one's inner space. As with outer blockages, only the tiniest of emotional blockages will be totally dissolved in one session. Most of them will slowly peel away, layer by layer, session by session. The body can be generally scanned for emotional blockages, or specific emotions can be targeted and specific body areas can be scanned. When the emotional shock which is at the center of the blockage and is responsible for the blockage is released, a powerful rush or blast of the emotion is produced. Special care must be taken to see that this rush of emotion is neither repressed nor dramatize but, rather

simply recognized and released. Only this will free and release the practitioner from the shock and the resulting emotional energy blockage. Water Method practitioners must realize that positive emotions may also arrive in shocking doses and create their own energy blockages. These positive emotional blockages must also be found and dissolved. Emotional Energy Body blockages are literally a person's emotional buttons. When pushed by an ad, word or thought, these buttons trigger an instinctive emotional outburst. It is these emotional blockages and the stimulation of them which drag many people through a life of reactive behavior, a life that is never quite in control, and often consists of bouncing from one emotional reaction to the next. By lessening and removing these blockages of emotional energy, the Inner Dissolving Process releases a person from a life of reactive behavior and gives the freedom for clear, spontaneous action without residual guilt, shame, or merit. There are periods in a person's life when the shock of loss and/or pain becomes overwhelming. Times of contracting a serious illness, having a serious injury, the loss of a loved one or home, as well the loss of employment may drive a person into depression, inactivity, and overall stagnation. Ancient Taoist Water Method Masters taught that through the use of the Inner Dissolving Process the intensely shocking time periods of a person's life can be transformed into stages of great personal evolution. Dissolving practices that are practiced during times of shock will accomplish amounts of clearing within a couple of weeks that may take years of meditation during calm periods of a person's life. The Inner Dissolving Process can release a person from the anxiety of emotional shock, and bring him or her freedom from long-term trauma. When a student has become familiar with the personal practices of the Dissolving Process, the two person variations are learned. Most of these practices use a dissolving loop which travels down the practitioner, loops under and up through the partner/opponent, around the top, and back down again. A few other patterns may be used in certain martial and sexual practices. The most common method of practicing the Two Person Dissolving Loop is during the practice of various slow motion martial arts practices of tai chi's pushing hands exercise, pa kua's soft hands exercise, and the various slow sparring exercises of free fighting. When applied to sexual practices, the Inner Dissolving Two Person Loop can help to dissolve the emotional triggers which cause many differences within a relationship. With this method, a partner may work on one's own blockages, and also help those of the partner, and vice versa. The Two Person Dissolving Loop can be used in martial arts to find an opponent's weaknesses, and to read every nuance of their energy flow before they manifest into physical action. The Two Person Dissolving Loop is also extremely useful in grief management. When a partner is overwhelmed with grief, the practitioner can use the Two Person Loop to help the partner dissolve the overwhelming grief while being sure not to absorb any of it. The Taoist Water Method Dissolving Practices give the practitioner practical techniques to work on balancing all aspect of life. This is the major goal of all schools of Taoism. Being released from reactive triggers, and allowing energy to freely flow, the Dissolving Practices bring the practitioner to freedom from imbalance. THE EMPTY VESSEL, Fall 1999 Frank Allen & Sally Kealy Frank Allen is a senior student of Master B.K. Frantzis and the director and chief instructor of the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association in New York City.

Sally Kealy, CSW, is a senior student at the Wu Tang PCA, an ordained Zen Peacemaker Priest, and has a Gestalt oriented psychotherapy practice in Manhattan specializing in Taoist Dissolving practices. They can be reached at The Wu Tang P.C.A., 71/2 Second Ave. 3rd Fl., New York, NY, 10003; Tel. 212-533-1751. Master B.K. Frantzis can be reached at Energy Arts, Inc. P.O. Box 99, Fairfax, CA, 94978-0099; Tel. 415-454-5243.

The Empty Vessel Interview With B.K. Frantzis B. K. Frantzis began training in martial arts, Oriental healing and meditation in 1961. Fluent in Chinese and Japanese, he spent 15 years studying full-time in Asia. After extensive Zen meditation, Shiatsu training and gaining black belts in judo, ju-jitsu, karate and aikido in America, B.K. Frantzis went to Japan for three years of advanced training. Next he studied Yoga and kundalini meditation for two years in India, and martial arts, qi gong tui na, and Taoist meditation for ten years in China. Raised in America, he is a lineage holder in tai ji, hsing-I, ba gua and Taoist meditation through the late Taoist Sage Liu Hung Chieh. After 20 years of preparatory training with other teachers, he began studying privately with Liu in Beijing in 1981, working with him for many hours a day for more than three years. Mr. Frantzis' previous teachers included the legendary Wang Shu Jin in Taiwan, and Morihei Ueshiba in Japan, the founder of Aikido. Known both for this unparalleled knowledge, unconventional teaching style and exceptionally clear communication skills, B.K. Frantzis has been teaching students and holding formal teacher training courses throughout America and Europe since his return to the West in 1987. He is the author of the new book, The Power of Internal Martial Arts and the qi gong classic, Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body. Empty Vessel: Maybe we could begin with a Iittle explanation of the difference between internal martial arts and external martial arts. B. K. Frantzis: The first thing is that the primary aim of the internal martial arts is not so much to cultivate power for self-defense by physicality, but rather to do so by developing internal power, written in English as chi or qi. In external martial arts you're very much concerned with your muscles, how hard they are, how you look, your cut, your reflexes, the same thing that an athlete is looking for. In internal martial arts your primary mandates are to develop qi, and to develop a mind that will be relaxed and able to operate under pressure without difficulty. On a martial level, they're really a little more advanced than the average martial art. There is a continuum. At one level all martial arts are about kick, punch, joint lock, throw, nerve strike and footwork. On top of that you may or may not add weapons. All martial arts, at any level, teach you self-discipline. It is only how they do it that is different. In the first chapter of my book, I have a section on the animal, spiritual and human approaches to martial arts. The animal approach is really quite simple and most external martial arts tend to fit into that category. Now this doesn't mean people are animals. It is about what people are doing with their physiology, what they're doing with their mind, what they are actually attempting to accomplish with an effective self-defense technique when facing a perceived danger. If you train in an animal martial art approach, what you essentially are

trying to do is to make your body respond in the most efficient animal fashion possible. If we observe what an animal does when it wishes to fight, we see that it tenses its muscles, its adrenals are stimulated, it roars, it twists its face in all kinds of ways. It goes into a frenzy. The animal martial arts approach has the practitioner go into hyperdrive to accomplish what is needed. In human martial arts, the goal is to try to make your body turn on without having your glandular system go crazy. You try to use some level of discrimination rather than letting your primal emotions get control of you. There is a range of middle ground between animal and human martial arts. In human martial arts you don't really want the animal in yourself to take over because that diminishes your clarity and ability to decide what you are going to do and how. Human martial arts exist along a continuum between external and internal martial arts. Here is where you want to be able to still have your body turn on, by primarily relying on using your mind without having your glandular system go crazy. At the human level of martial arts, either external or internal martial arts might be doing that. The glandular revving up of the glands is somewhat obvious in a lot of Karate or Tae Kwon Do. Likewise, many people who practice tai ji, although they may philosophically see themselves as being nonviolent, begin tensing their muscles, twisting their faces and reverting back to the glandular system when the pressure's on and they really feel threatened. So the name of the martial art does not necessarily determine if it follows an animal, human or spiritual approach. Empty Vessel: Tai ji, which a lot of people are familiar with, would then be considered an internal martial art? B. K. Frantzis: Yes. The difference between external and internal in the classic Chinese sense is in how you get your power, in what way do you attempt to focus your mind. If you have an external martial art you're going to try and get power by doing a lot of extreme physical exercises, anything that physically puts resistance against your system to either make it become stronger or faster. Empty Vessel: But you can actually harm the body to do that though. B. K. Frantzis: That is common. External martial art practitioners in their drive to make the body do what they want often damage themselves. As you move into internal martial arts you now start working with things that work with qi or the internal energy of the body. One of the primary dictums in all Taoist practices and internal martial arts of China are usually classified as Taoist martial arts is that any practice that you do must be comfortable and healthy for your body. If a practice damages your body, regardless whether it is qigong, sitting meditation or martial arts, it will ultimately damage your qi and be counter-productive. As such, in Taoist martial arts a person will never do any practice that will hurt the body even if it will enable them, like Superman, to metaphorically jump over buildings in a single bound. Taoist martial arts have the particular goal that a person can use them to the end of their life and it will improve their mind and body well into their eighties and nineties. Within that, as in any martial art, practitioners still manage to have incredible high performance abilities. When you get to the level of internal martial arts you find that there is a great deal of emphasis on mind-training. The lowest levels of external martial arts have very little mindtraining. As you move along the external to internal martial arts continuum there is more and

more mind-training as you increasingly rely upon the mind to fuse with energy inside your body to make your power come alive. You work on getting your mind right inside your body, getting your consciousness to go right inside every joint and ligament until you become as sensitive to the inside of your body as you are to the skin on the outside of your body. You learn how to go inside and regulate the energy inside the body. That's looking at it from the physical perspective. This is important because it is how you create your power. You can create your power from lifting weights. If a person has lifted a lot of weights, probably when they punch somebody they'll go down but that kind of power is a certain kind of power. When you train in the internal practices you learn things that are much more subtle. You can develop power that is just as strong as what you have with external martial arts, but is externally invisible. It's not immediately apparent what kind of power a person is exerting. You can feel it, but you can't see it. Empty Vessel: Perhaps you could say that this power is at a more subtle level. B. K. Frantzis: It's at a much more subtle level. Just as a computer is more subtle than an adding machine. Empty Vessel: For a lot of people it's a case of "l'm not a fighter, I don't really want to learn how to fight" but there are a lot of other reasons to practice a martiaI art, right? B. K. Frantzis: The vast amount of people who are studying internal martial arts are not that concerned with fighting. People who are really concerned with fighting can learn how to use a knife or a gun. Why do most people learn to do martial arts? Even the people who become the top full-contact fighters do not reach that level of skill just to defend themselves. They train to be a champion because they want to be the best or find out how far martial art training can go. In my experience, the main reason Westerners practice an internal martial art is because they want to be healthy, they want their body to work better, they want to learn how to get rid of their stress, and they want to have a way to get into and transcend the very deep emotional and mental spaces that make life uncomfortable and dysfunctional. They want to work those things out. That's why most people are doing it. There are two hundred million people in China who do tai ji every day of the week. Of that, only about half a percent even practice the fighting techniques. The majority of people there do tai ji because it really works for physical and mental health. They want their bodies to work, and feel good, and their nervous systems to relax. For them, tai ji is a method for enhancing longevity and getting rid of stress. People in China also practice because they see so many others who were sick and got better after doing tai ji and qigong. They see people who had every kind of physical malady you could name, and every kind of drifting mind problem you could name, they do tai ji, hsing-i or ba gua for a couple of years and they get rid of most of these problems. They do it for very pragmatic reasons. They're not looking to be Kwai Chang Kaine, of television's Kung Fu series. Empty Vessel: So there is whole qigong level to this? B. K. Frantzis: Yes, the internal martial arts, if you learn the whole tradition, and I must say, that level is not taught very often anymore, at that level the internal martial arts are an extremely sophisticated qigong system, both from the perspective of high performance abilities and from the medical point of view.

Empty Vessel: Especially when you're talking about subtle energy states. B. K. Frantzis: It doesn't even have to be quite so subtle. I taught at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe some years ago. It had suffered the worst prison riots in U.S. prison history. The participants I taught were all lifers, they had all killed somebody. From doing Wu style tai chi, the prisoners chilled out. I was told by the guards that inter-gang warfare had stopped simply because the practice had chilled out the gang leaders in the tai ji class. Tai ji became the national health exercise of China not because it looks beautiful, not because people had fantasies about it, but because it works on a very simple, mundane health level. At more advanced levels, tai ji is also very sophisticated martial and spiritual art. Empty Vessel: Very few people in this country study tai ji as a martial art or even as a qigong form. It seems that for most people in this country it's more for relaxation, stress reduction, low impact aerobics, that kind of thing. B. K. Frantzis: Yes, but one must realize that we are in an early stage of cultural transference between East and West. Most of the tai ji in America is second- or third-level tai ji. Some people are actually attempting to teach high school level tai ji. Except for rare exceptions, there's little beyond that being taught here. I believe that my book will help people learn what it is like to move all the way up to the graduate level. Empty Vessel: TeIl us about the spiritual cultivation aspects. B. K. Frantzis: When the Taoists did martial arts their concern was in terms of meditation: To find some inner unity, so a human being would become able to be whole and complete. If spirituality is about anything, it's about a person becoming complete and how at every level of their being to prevent being at dissonance with the rest of the universe. You can call it the spiritual law of the universe, or the underlying reality, whatever words you choose to use. At each stage of anyone's spiritual practice, once they get a little more experience, they start realizing times when they are not in this state, the places where they are being dragged back to seeing everything as separate and everything at odds with each other. All the meditation techniques are aimed towards your energy not being at odds with itself and having everything being continuous and comfortable with what's outside you and what's inside you. Balance, compassion, harmony, those things only come out when you are internally smooth at the deepest levels of your self. Empty Vessel: I liked the part in your book where you talked about using the internal martial arts to become a hands-on healer. B. K. Frantzis: Methods of cultivating qi are part and parcel of the whole Taoist system. They use the term shen fa, working with the body. Working with the body, working with the energy inside it, working with the mind that inhabits that body. They look at all this. When they physically work with someone they don't just look at that person's physical body, they see both the flesh and every other aspect of the human being that's embodied inside that physical tissue. At that stage, however, whether you are going to use your body to martially break somebody else's body, which is an external event or you're going to use your body to heal another

person's body, which is also an external event, the Taoists see both in the unified context that in effect what you are doing is just using your body, regardless of the specific effects you are attempting to create. Taoists don't have the dichotomy that from the point of view of body functions that healing and damaging is different. The same tissues, chi and mind are performing both, only the motivations are different, not necessarily the means or results. In the original qigong work in Taoism, there is a whole qi tradition that comes directly from the Huang Ti Nei Jing, the Yellow Emperor's Classic. There is a whole way in which you learn how qi specifically affects the body and how what happens in the body affects the mind. They are very, very interrelated. Those bodywork methods which use qi gong to work on someone else are called qigong tui na. Regular tui na bodywork only uses hand techniques, without qi consciously being emitted from the practitioner's body. Qigong tui na is how you use the qi coming out of your body, through your hands to work on someone. It has two branches. The first is when you physically put your hands on someone else's body to cause a therapeutic effect. In the second branch of qigong therapy, after the practitioner puts their healing hands on you to start a healing process, they then teach you very specifically designed qigong techniques which if practiced continue or complete the healing process and are medically specific for your condition. Qigong tui na techniques are very much found within the internal martial arts tradition. The internal martial arts traditions are just part of Taoist qigong tradition. There are hundreds of schools of qigong in China. There are at least fifty schools of Taoist qigong, many of which are incomplete. But in the compete tradition the healing work was commonly taught along with internal martial arts. You learn a whole way of generating energy within your body so when you give qi to others and work on people, you are able to protect yourself from having another person's energy drain you when you work on them. Empty Vessel: Isn't there an old tradition in the martiaI arts of people being able to heal as well as kill? B. K. Frantzis: Yes, but not everyone chose to do that. It would be inaccurate to assume that because a person knew one side of the coin, healing or harming, that they knew the other. A person would have had to put in considerably more effort to learn the other material. A lot of the Taoist tradition has to do with self cultivation, meaning that the responsibility is on the individual. Teachers were not always easy to find, not always easy to work with, and sometimes you had to prove yourself before you got to the real teaching. As a matter of fact, if I had not met Liu Hung Chieh, my final teacher in Beijing, and spent a couple of years with him, I do not believe that it would have been possible to get to the bottom of the subject of internal martial arts. It wouldn't have mattered if I had stayed in China for a hundred years. Empty Vessel: What about the spiritual aspects of all of this? B. K. Frantzis: Well the first book I wrote, Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body, was about basic qigong. My new book The Power of lnternal Martial Arts is about the qi, combat and mind-training aspects of the internal martial arts, and is not specifically about Taoist spiritual practices. My next book will be on Taoist Meditation and will address the spiritual aspects of Taoism and the methods of its Water School. Taoism is concrete metaphysics.

Taoist don't believe in things too much. My experience of the spiritual style of Taoists in China was that they would say you know something, you have suspicions or you don't know at all. Everything in Taoism is extremely pragmatic. The first word I learned in Chinese was watermelon, which I loved at the time. The second word was thank you. The third expression I learned was yung bu neng yung, which means, "Is it useful?" The next question becomes "What can you use it for?" The Taoists tend to be extremely clear about what specific things or techniques are actually useful for. If you want a practice to be useful for spirituality, it has to be a practice which directly addresses the issues of spirituality. If what you want to do is open a can of peas faster then it has to be something that directly addresses how you can open a can of peas faster. You don't necessarily expect that a can of peas, or a qigong or internal martial arts method, is automatically going to help you with spiritual matters. If you have an illness and you want to get rid of it, you need what will be useful for getting rid of that illness. If you want what will heal a physical illness to also be spiritual, your method must directly encompass both of those very clearly. There are areas of ambiguity, which require a person to exercise clarity and insight to discriminate between reality and wishful thinking. The Taoist perspective in China is not based upon belief, it's based upon what will actually produce a result, what is useful. For instance, you can be very relaxed physically but be emotionally or spiritually tense or be spiritually relaxed but physically tense. The Taoists are interested in what actually does what, where and how. They're very direct and not as mysterious as people think. It is so much easier to communicate about the varied aspects of Taoism in vague, general, metaphorical, hypnotic statements, which although true at some level don't actually attach to something that is useful. The way in which my teacher, Liu Hung Chieh, transmitted the work to me was to pragmatically explore what the Taoists call the eight energy bodies of human beings. using the methods of internal martial arts, qi gong, healing others and meditation. His methods were concerned with what practices directly interface with those energy bodies and how they coordinated with each other to spiritually balance a human being using full effort without strain. Originally printed in The Empty Vessel, A Journal of Contemporary Taoism, Summer 1998

B. K. Frantzis a Paqua Master Work in Progress The punch launched out of chamber like a mortar from a tube. It hit the fat man's chest with the power of a jackhammer cracking cement. As Bruce heard the dull thud of bone on flesh, pain engulfed his hand and shot up to his shoulder-again. Ignoring the pain, he snapped a front kick into the big belly in front of him. This only resulted in making his foot feel like his hand. This wasn't right! No one remained standing when this young karate champion landed his best techniques. He fired a backfist at the fat man, who was suddenly gone. Although Bruce hadn't seen him move, his opponent was standing behind him. The corpulent Chinese boxer's escape from Bruce's line of sight was disorienting and caused an uncharacteristic loss of focus in his concentration. His mind wandered over the chain of

events that had brought him halfway around the world to deposit him in this match, which was quickly becoming a humiliating disaster. From the age of 12, martial arts had been the central focus of life for Bruce Frantzis. While in high school, he earned black belts in judo, aikido, and two styles of karate. He also tried a little tai chi, studied shiatsu massage, and spent many hours practicing zazen meditation. While pursuing his martial arts career, he earned a scholarship to a major university. He turned down this offer, however, and instead attended Sophia university in Tokyo, at his own expense, to continue his martial arts training in its homeland. Bruce shook away his reminiscences and spun to face the moonlike, smiling visage of his tormentor. His ridge hand bounced off the close cropped skull and felt like it had just slammed into concrete. A quick downward sidekick into the Chinese boxer's shin only left his foot feeling like the bones in its side had shattered. The kick left the fat man still smiling. A spinning backfist suddenly sent the young fighter hurtling through empty space, causing him to lose focus again. The Search for Power Japan had been a big step in his education. He had earned a black in judo at the Kodokan and multiple black belts in shotokanan and goju karate. He also trained with the Waseda University karate team which won an All-Japan university title. It was here he learned to read, write, and speak Japanese. The highlight of this period involved study at the aikido Hombu Dojo during the last two years of the founder's life. Frantzis was highly impressed by the internal power displayed by the old and very frail Morihei Uyeshiba. In fact, it was the search for others who possessed the amazing internal power of the founder of aikido that led him to Tai Chung, Taiwan and, the man he now fought---Wang Shu-Chin. He turned to face the 5 foot 8 inch, 300 pound master of paqua chang. It was inconceivable that a physique like that could move so fast. It was even more inconceivable that striking that puffy body felt like slamming your limbs into a steel door, but that had become the reality of this sparring session. Frantzis now wondered about the wisdom of having taken offense at the Chinese boxer's denigration of karate as a low-level martial art. The young fighter had spent half his life practicing karate, but his skill didn't seen capable of creating any level of discomfort on the heavy-set pugilist confronting him. As he launched himself forward with his next combination of techniques, Frantzis began to wonder about Wang's yet unproven offensive skills. The thought was cut off in his brain as the paqua master circled smoothly around his attack and reached out to, seemingly, lightly touch the young fighter's head. The lights went out and the kid went down. Frantzis had found his new teacher. The fight he lost occurred in 1968 and Frantzis continued to return to Tai Chung and the teachings of Wang Shu-Chin over the next decade. Wang's paqua teaching focused on the development of chi. Frantzis and his teacher practiced many chi kung exercises and standing meditation. Wang taught Frantzis how to use his chi within paqua footwork to move smoothly while fighting. Frantzis also learned how to use internal energy for knockout power. When Frantzis returned to Taiwan in 1974, he found Wang to be on an extended trip to Japan, so he decided to wait in Taipei. That was the best place on the island to study Mandarin Chinese, in which he subsequently became fluent. Frantzis had learned that Japanese would not be enough if he wanted to learn the deepest levels of Chinese internal martial arts.

Frantzis had been in Taipei only a short time when a friend took him to the school of Hung I Hsing. Hung's paqua and hsing-I were famous on the island because of Hung's personal fighting prowess and that of his students who always won their weight divisions at the AllTaiwan full-contact tournaments. Foremost among Hung's many champions were Su Dong Chen, who was teaching in Japan, and the current school champion, Luo De Xiu. Frantzis liked the school and continued to study there for the nest four years when his trips to Taiwan ceased with the death of Wang. Frantzis found Hung's paqua used smaller frame circles and had a more precise method of bringing the fighting techniques out of the form. Hung was very good at analyzing the palm changes and teaching a martial application for each piece. While Wang taught Frantzis how to get power, Hung taught him how to use it. Hung taught a system derived from the 64 linear paqua drills. These drills correlate to the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching in the same manner as the eight palm changes relate to the eight basic Trigrams of the I Ching. The 64 line drills are used to help teach the 384 fighting techniques. There is one technique for each of the six lines in each of the 64 hexagrams. At 5-feet-7 inches, 240 pounds, Hung, like Wang, used more 45and 90-degree angles in his fighting footwork than half or full circles. While he was studying with them, Bruce saw Wang as having the higher chi development and Hung as being the better teacher. The Journey Begins It was between the periods of his studies in Taiwan that Frantzis spent the better part of two years in India studying Pranayama and Kundalini Yoga. His Indian Kundalini teacher gave him the name "Kumar", which became his first name for the next decade. In early 1975, Kumar Frantzis took a trip to Hong Kong in search of high-level internal martial arts. There, he met a paqua and hsing-I master named Bwa Hwa. Bwa Hwa was a student of a forth-generation master of paqua chang who still resided on the mainland in Beijing. Kumar returned many times to study with Bau Hwa, who taught him how to develop "long power" in his paqua chang. While training in Hong Kong, Frantzis also met and instructor of paqua chang named Jack Pao. Pao was the first small man with whom Frantzis had studied paqua. He taught a hit-andrun style of paqua fighting. This style relied on circling your opponent very quickly then darting in and out to strike. IT is the perfect style for small fighters and differed greatly from the "angle and in" fighting footwork of his previous teachers. When easy travel to the mainland of China became a reality for westerners, Kumar Frantzis' search for the source of his arts took on a new dimension. He knew that the home of highlevel Paqua Chang was Beijing and that city became his goal. In 1981, he received an invitation to go there and study Yang style tai chi chaun at the Beijing Sorts Institute. He became the first American certified by the Institute to teach. While in Beijing, Kumar hoped to make a contact that would lead him to a high-level paqua instructor. Unknown to Frantzis, the contact had already been made for him. Bai Hwa had communicated from Hong Kong to his master in Beijing, on behalf of the American martial artist. This led to Frantzis' introduction to Taoist master Liu Hung Chieh, who was Bai Hwa's fourth-generation master of paqua chang.

Liu had a long and glorious martial arts history. His studies began at age 11, with a Shaolin style for three years, at which time, because of his building talent, his teacher brought him to the southern Beijing school of Paqua Chang. At the ceremony, admitting him to the school, Liu bowed to Cheng Yu-Lung, eldest son of Chen Tinghwa, also known as the famous "Spectacles Cheng." Liu was 14 at the time. For three years Liu studied hard at the school, working with many of its paqua and hsing-I instructors. Then the school closed its door. After the Southern Beijing Paqua School closed, Liu became one of the few serious students of Ma Kuei, who was also known as Ma Shih Ching. When Ma was 18, he became the disciple of the famous paqua master Yin Fu, who was the original student of the founder of paqua chang, Tung Hai Chuan. Because of his slight physique, Yin Fu has often been referred to as "Thin Yin." He was a hero of the Boxer Rebellion, revered for saving the Empress Dowager from the foreigners. Ma Kuei was Yin's best student and his enforcer who accepted challenges in Yin Fu's name. Ma's defeat of a Russian strongman and yang Lu Chan's tai chi student, Huang Chun, made the small man famous in Beijing. Doing Damage Ma Kuei's family owned a lumberyard and, as his fame grew, Ma became known as Mu Ma, or wood Ma. This was to distinguish him from the late paqua master, Ma Wei Chi, who was known as coal Ma because of his line of work. Although Ma remained a lineage disciple of Yin Fu, he learned much from Tung Hai Chuan when the founder of paqua came to live in Ma's house in the lumberyard after the old master retired from court. Liu Hung Chieh represented Ma Kuei's paqua chang in the 1928 All-China Martial Arts Competition. When he told Kumar Frantzis about the tournament, Liu spoke of winning his matches while doing as little damage as possible. He said that this was in contrast to the hsing-I boxers who seemed to revel in executing only full-power techniques, no matter how injurious the results. The police stopped the contest before the tournament ended because of an excessive amount of serious injuries. Although he held lineages in hsing-I and paqua, Liu was happy that day he represented paqua chang on that day. Later in his martial Arts career, Liu was appointed head of instructors at the Hunan branch of the central government's national Martial Arts Institute, Where Wu Jien Chuan's son's taught. After teaching at the martial arts institute, Liu lived in Hong Kong for a time, where he became a formal disciple of Wu Jien Chuan. During his stay in Hong Kong, Liu lived in the home of the founder of Wu style tai chi chaun. Liu returned to Beijing for a period then went to the Tien Tai monastery where he concentrated on the teachings and meditations of the Tien Tai Sect of Buddhism. Liu was in his late 30's when the sect declared him to be a formally enlightened being. For Liu, this was a signal that it was time to find new teachers. He spent the next ten years studying with Taoist masters in the mountains of western China. The change of Government in 1949 brought Liu Hung Chieh back to Beijing to be close to his family. Until his death in 1986, Liu lived quietly at home and concentrated on his spiritual practices. Until 1981, Bai Hwa was his only student during this period. Then he had a dream about teaching a Westerner, just before Bai Hwa sent Kumar Frantzis to him. Kumar studied with Liu throughout the summer of 1981 and then returned to the United States and his own students.

In the summer of 1983, Kumar Frantzis returned to Beijing and studied with Master Liu Hung Chieh every day until Liu's death in December 1986 Learning to Fight Kumar began his meditation studies with Zen sitting while in high school, and continued the practice while at Sophia University. He also spent time studying meditation in India. Liu was as eager to build on Kumar's foundation of meditation as Kumar was eager to increase his martial skills. The two men meditated together every day of Kumar's stay in Beijing. The first meditation that Liu learned was paqua meditation. Years later he learned the Buddhist and Taoist spiritual meditation systems. Liu was informed that Tung Hai Chuan taught a complete system of paqua meditation to only a few selected students. Liu learned the complete system from Ma Kuei and Ju Wen Bao. This system did not need any augmentation from other meditations. Frantzis found Liu's paqua to have large outside movements with big circles. Although Liu stood a mere 5-feet-1 inch and weighed only 110 pounds, his paqua was even larger framed than the paqua of Wang Shu Chin. These large external circles are coordinated with a series of small internal circles that are manifested inside the body. In a martial situation, this style of paqua begins with large movements that turn into small circles once physical contact is made with the opponent. These small circle technique are similar to the small circles in the fighting paqua of Hung I Hsing. Liu was not a teacher that started everyone at the beginning. He only worked with a couple of advanced students capable of commencing at an advanced level. He saw that Frantzis had attained the technical level in which the paqua boxer controls the movements of himself and his opponent. He wanted to introduce Kumar into the energetic level in which the paqua boxer consciously moves with ever changing energy patterns, as he simply observes the physical confrontation. Frantzis learned that each of Liu's basic palm changes is a physical change that develops an energy change within it. With enough practice, one learns how to separate the energy change from the physical change. The single palm change develops a pure yang energy shape and the double palm change develops a pure yin energy shape. These physical and energetic palm changes are represented, respectively, by the trigrams Ch'ien and K'un. The other six palm changes create the energy changes of wind, shock, coiling, waves, stillness to light, and the form of formlessness. These forms are, of course, represented by the other six trigrams. When all eight energy changes can be clearly separated from their corresponding physical changes, each energy change can be put into each physical change. This creates eight variations of each palm change. Because each physical change and each energy change have a corresponding trigram, their combination creates the 64 combined energy pattern, which are represented by the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. When Kumar asked Liu why they did not practice the 64 line drills which were taught in Taiwan, Liu explained that they were already creating the patterns of the 64 hexagrams. He also told Frantzis the 384 techniques could be found within the 64 variations of the of the eight basic palm changes in his system.

While studying with Liu in Beijing, Frantzis became a formally adopted son of the old Taoist master. On the afternoon of Nov. 30, 1986, Liu taught Kumar the final variations of the eighth palm change. Then they practiced a little push hands, with the little old man-as usual--- easily handling the larger young man. The nest morning, an hour before Kumar arrived to train with him, Liu Hung Chieh died---no blindness, no crippling, no invalid stages of any kind; just Liu with his full powers, and then he was gone. The death of a Taoist Master. After the funeral of Liu Hung Chieh, Kumar returned to the United States to resume teaching. It would be the first time he would teach paqua fully and openly, and even that didn't happen right away. While spending a short time teaching in England in 1975, Kumar taught a couple of lessons on the fundamentals of paqua to a few of his English students. That was the first time he taught paqua to anyone. The next year found Frantzis teaching internal shaolin and tai chi in New York City. He taught his two leading internal students, Frank Allen and Jonathon Lewis, how to fight as a team. He then taught them a few semi-private lessons on paqua chang used as a defense against multiple opponents, which rendered their team strategies useless. In 1982, Kumar taught a class of paqua fundamentals to his hsing-I students in Denver Colo. This class included Bill Ryan. It was 1989 before Frantzis, now known as B.K. Frantzis, started to teach paqua chang openly and fully. He did this from his school in the San Francisco Bay area and in an ongoing three-times-a-year seminar series in New York City. Frantzis continues to teach Liu's style of paqua chang from his school in Fairfax, Calif., and in seminars around the globe. This style presents an equal mix of martial, healing, and meditation paqua which differentiates it from the other styles of presently taught in the United States. Frantzis is developing a core of instructors to help preserve and spread this rare style of paqua chang. This group now includes five men who have been with Frantzis for different amounts of time and specialize in different aspects of the art. Representing the martial aspects of the style are Bernie Langan of Oakland, Calif., and Frank Allen in New York city. Bill Ryan and Buddy Tripp in Brookline, Mass., represent the healing aspects of this art. B.K.'s newest apprentice paqua instructor, Chris Chappel, of London, England, rounds out the group. B.K. Frantzis and his instructors and students hope to bring this style of paqua chang into the 21st century as a living and growing art. By Frank Allen and Clarence Lu Article reprinted with permission from Inside Kung-Fu January 1998 Pg. 90

Kumar Frantzis: An Informal Discussion on Taoist Meditation - Part 1 TAOISM IN THE UNITED STATES is known primarily through an understanding of certain of its pragmatic arts. The art of Taiji (Tai Chi) is fairly well known. The taoist martial arts are getting more exposure. As time goes on Qigong is becoming of interest. To a certain extent even Feng Shui (geomancy) is getting familiar. Chinese medicine which is a taoist (daoist) art is being used more. But the actual subject of taoist meditation is less well known because it has not taught that openly. The Taoist Canon consisting of close to 1,600 books that include the subject of taoist meditation has not been translated into English. The rest of the world has not seen it yet. This limits access to the complete view of the whole picture.

Many people are under the impression that a great number of Chinese are taoists. This is not true. It is less than half of one percent of the population. The majority of what the tao is in China is mixed with Buddhism. It has reached a point nowadays where most Chinese do not make a distinction between Buddhism and Taoism. There is however a pure taoist tradition. It is a very distinct one. Taoists have never really pushed to gain adherents. As a matter of fact, in Chinese history more often than not, they have gone underground. The last period in time when the taoists were really open, public and had patronage in China was during the Tang dynasty (A.D.618907). This was basically the last period in which China made tremendous cultural advances. During my earlier years in Taiwan and Hong Kong, I trained in Taoism for about 7-1/2 years. This is when I did much of the energy work, and a majority of sexual meditation work. I was fortunate to have been trained as a taoist priest (Taoshr) during those years. I don't talk about this very often, but I was a fully empowered taoist priest. I did all the things that you do with those types of practices and some of the subsidiary things. I learned arts like exorcism, sending people off when they die, empowerments, charging spaces, providing helpful events for people and things of that nature. This was my preparation for studying with my main teacher Liu Hung Chieh in Beijing. This is when I learned the real tradition. His tradition is that of Lao Tse, the water Tradition. In China there are traditionally the water and fire methods of the tao. They have the water tradition, the fire tradition, and the water and the fire mixing, what they sometimes call kan and li. The taoist meditation Liu taught me is primarily the classical water method of Lao Tse. The method that we seek does not really use fire, instead we end up finding the light inside of water. Taoist meditation can basically be divided into two levels of attainment. The first level contains the preliminaries of what is normally called taoist meditation. The second level is the final completion or what is called intemal alchemy. Liu Hung Chieh was very famous for being a martial artist, but he also happened to be a patriarch of a northern sect of Taoism. He was a lineage holder. He was the man as the expression goes. His job was not to teach. He was responsible for duties in the lineage other than teaching. In China he was what is called one of the Three Guardians of the Empire. I was very lucky to have studied with him. This was not through any good offices of my own, frankly speaking, but because he had a dream about me before I came. I happened to have been one of only two students that he taught in depth since the 1949 communist ascension. In fact, all that I know is that he dreamed about me coming and that is the only reason that he taught me. Almost a year before he died, he began to constantly encourage me to teach about Taoism when I returned to the West. At first I felt uncomfortable with the prospect of teaching. I did not feel that I knew enough, or even if I did know enough I didn't feel comfortable doing it. During the last year he was alive he said, "If you are willing - do it, if not - don't bother." It has only been since 1992 that I started teaching Taoism publicly at all. There are confusions that arise around Taoism. They are very natural confusions because here in America it is a very mixed bag, including taijiquan and taoist meditation, it is all

considered to be Taoism. Specifically now, we are discussing the taoist alchemical tradition, the actual meditation tradition in Taoism. We are not talking about any other arts. The taoists put everything they did into their art. Their primary art of meditation is something different from their martial arts. It is something different from their medical arts. There are two main strains of Chinese Taoism. The original school of Taoism, flourished during Lao Tse's time around 2,500 years ago. In China it is known as the water method. In contradistinction to the neo-taoists, the original taoists had no great drive for physical immortality. Which, if you know much about neo-Taoism, is one of the big focuses. The water method is known for not forcing things. It is known for literally letting things occur in their own time, yet it is far from passive. One does every preparation possible so that when circumstances are ripe, one is fully open and available to the moment. The taoist water meditation tradition had been going on for probably 1,000 years before Lao Tse appeared. Lao Tse did not originate these taoist principles, but he was the first one to write them down. He wrote the Tao Teh Ching on his journey out of the country. He was trying to get away from worldly life. One of his students was a boarder guard who wouldn't let him go until he left behind some principles in writing. The water method stands as the classic practical way to let the whole mind/body release its blocks and fully transform. From the most peripheral of the eight energy bodies of the I Ching right down to bone marrow, one experiences conscious harmony with the tao. Then one naturally acts according to the principals of the Tao Te Ching. By contrast the taoists have another tradition, which is where both a lot confusion and where a tremendous amount of the taoist meditation practices find their origin. This is the neo-taoist tradition which primarily uses fire techniques. They also are very strongly influenced by Buddhism. They appeared around the year 1000. During that time Buddhism was coming to China. Especially Tibetan Buddhism. There are no maybes about the fact that they were very heavily influenced by the Buddhist tantricism of Tibet in terms of methodology and point of view. This Tibetan influence is not as unusual as it sounds. Most people here probably do not have a very good geographic sense of China, but the equivalent is that the Szechwan province of China is to Tibet, as New York is to Maine. It's not somewhere across the world. It is just the province next door. The neo-taoist methods are known for their tremendous emphasis on force. To go until you get to where you want to go. I believe the phrase that most accurately describes it in the West is "pushing forward". This is clearly a point of view. To a certain degree it shows Buddhist influence. Their basic point of view is that it doesn't matter what you do to yourself, because if you become enlightened anything you did was fine. Whatever got you there was fine. Not in terms of doing inappropriate or evil things, but in terms of effort, in terms of spiritual philosophy. They are true believers in the end justifies the means. So this continuous aspect of force, this continuous aspect of pushing the mind and body as far as it can go, this tremendous emphasis on finding ways that can really soup the human system up, really rev it up, is a major thrust in the neo-taoist practices. You can see this in the Buddhist traditions where for example Zen monks will sit indefinitely. Many of them will die sitting. Many of the people who become enlightened in Zen are clinging on to a very tiny thread in terms of their body. They often ruin their bodies with their

practices. They tenaciously hold to the idea that you just keep doing it until you come out on the other side of that light. The classical example is of the Buddha during his years of asceticism. He was virtually skin and bones. He did all sorts of mortifications of himself at that time. After his enlightenment the Buddha preached against extreme practices. His example of youthful extremism exerts a strong influence on many throughout history as well as today. Fire melts metal, the metal of ego. Every fire tradition in the world is driven by the idea of conquest. "If there is an enemy - we will overcome it, if there is a wall - it will be gone through, if there is the mountai - it must be climbed over, knocked down, picked up and dragged away." With practitioners of this method one has a constant sense that they must press forward and emerge the victor. The neo-taoist school also tends to be very heavily influenced by the magical tradition of what they call in China chi chi guai guai (qi qi guai guai) or "making strange things happen." Magic. Lets just say they manipulate the matter/energy matrix for whatever reasons they have at heart. The water practices come from a very different philosophical perspective that pragmatically makes a huge difference in how you live and practice. Whatever you do must feel comfortable. You must have full effort without strained force. In order to do that one must refine a very fine edge in the mind. To use all of your effort and yet not use force, yet not contravene the actual limitations of the body, the mind, and the spirit. This is the tradition of Lao Tse. The taoist water method is more gentle than the fire methods. The fire methods tend to be very cathartic, heavily visualization based, and quite rough on the central nervous system. They are transformative methods in the manner of throwing something into a fire. Whether they are exoteric or esoteric, most religions when given the opportunity will try to build as large an empire as possible. They want to have as many people as possible under their sway as a unit. This is true of the major religions throughout the world: Christians, Moslems, Buddhists...the big ones. The taoists in China are very genuinely different in both the fire and the water groups. They never had any particular desires in terms of meditation to build a corporation. The taoist tradition has always been essentially what you would call mystical. It has only been concerned with the essential nature of human beings and their relationship to the universe. Taoists consider almost everything that happens in this world to be what is called red dust, it comes and it goes. It comes, it's around for a while and it's gone again. Through meditation a taoist finds that which never changes and is always present. Their main work, the I Ching, goes about understanding change and changelessness from many different viewpoints. It teaches through a rich variety of systematically presented real life examples that everything in the world is changing constantly. When you practice the water method, and you practice the fire method, your approach is quite different. My teacher Liu Hung Chieh was a water method person. That is all I practice. That is all I do. Having done the fire method for many years, and in my younger years having practiced both the tantric tradition and the kundalini tradition in India, I reached a point where personally the fire tradition no longer cut it. I was not particularly looking for the water

tradition. It found me. There was no intent on my part. I was originally in Taiwan and Hong Kong where it is very hard to find the water tradition. Most taoist are just very independent and prone to being who and where you might least expect them. The water method of Taoism begins from a very simple premise. It is that a human being has a mind. That for whatever reason, you have a certain degree of control over your destiny. I didn't say all of it. But you have some things that you can do. The basic core of all taoist practices in Chinese is expressed Jing-Qi-Shen-Wu-Tao. The evolution of taoist practice as represented by this progression is: 1. Jing or Body/Sperm begets Qi 2. Qi or Energy which begets 3. Shen or Spirit, Spirit begets 4. Wu or Emptiness, which begets 5. Tao or The Essential, Unchanging Root of the Universe. The energy of the body and everything the taoists work with is Qi. Everything is perceived in terms of energy. The energy of the physical body is converted to Qi. When this Qi becomes stable and is no longer random and confused, the Qi will begin to produce Spirit. When one begins to experience spirit, one moves into the depths of one's awareness and essence. One begins to realize at the depths of ones core that which is not bound by time and space. At the level of spirit one begins to become spiritually alive and connected with oneself, others, and the environment in profound, non-separated ways. Now the genuine spiritual process has begun. There is light inside water as well as inside fire. One is cold light that will not burn and one is hot. After one is accustomed to working with one's spirit for a reasonable time, one's body energy will move through the Qi. Then it will move through the spirit. One starts experiencing everything as not having any content. Ordinarily we experience in the world as having shape, size and some kind of content. It is something. But, as emptiness starts, your spirit starts transforming the energies more and more. Even though a person's body, the house, the tree, airplane, the building is still there, it has no substance. It literally is nothing. As you start noticing almost everything as nothing, it becomes everything. There is no difference between everything being nothing and being everything. One's ongoing awareness spans the tremendous spiritual dichotomy between emptiness and fullness. One keeps playing it back and forth. It usually takes a while to get to this point. Every once in a while one just gets a glimpse of what can not be expressed. There just are not words to describe what one becomes aware of. It is just what it is. The meditation practices in Taoism begin with the Alchemical principle of shifting energy from one Level to the other. Your mind, brain, your total intelligence, or whatever you are, is completely involved. You must place your attention fully on what usually are the sensations of energy and start playing with it. In the practical sense this is the beginning of practice. All energy inside a human being if it is free, easy and unblocked is like a flowing river. There is absolutely no reason why you should do anything to it. It is as it should be. There would never be any reason to do anything with it if we remained in this exceedingly natural state that

is ours at birth. Because of a myriad of conditions and circumstances we do not remain this way. When one starts looking deeply inside of oneself, one starts finding that often one's energy has become frozen in some shape. In some way it has congealed. Instead of water flowing through, the water is gathering in front of the dike. In the qigong tradition of China, initially almost everything is done to get whatever energy is blocked in the body to dissolve and move outside of the body, so that the energy blockage is freed. Condensation of energy assumes an actual form or shape that is recognizable. As you go inside yourself, you can feel this energy. If it is not flowing, not opening, not genuinely just there, one can discern some sort of sensation, feeling, and shape. Then one learns to use one's mind to break these shapes until the energy becomes neutral. This is a contrast to many fire methods, Dakini methods or many Cathartic methods (all Catharsis is fire method - all of it), where there is always a tendency to keep letting out all of these things that are inside oneself. This can make one very irritated. The taoists say that once you have energy, the more it is blocked, in some ways it is better left alone. The more dense the anger and dysfunction the heavier the condensation in the blockages and the repercussions of their acting out. One takes whatever shape is blocked and begins to literally open up that area with ones mind. The phrase they have used in China for thousands of years both in meditation and qigong is "ice to water, water to gas," "solid to liquid, liquid to gas." In qigong physical health and strength is the primary concern, the dissolving practice releases trapped energy away from the body to "outer space." In taoist meditation the initial practices are about going into "inner space" imploding the dissolved energy to the core of one's being. That shape that was totally immovable then becomes relaxed and flowing. Then that which is flowing has to become so amorphous that it has no shape whatsoever. After that, the previously blocked energy usually does whatever its natural function is, and you are fine. At this point there is now something tangible to work with in one's field. Attention is placed on this energy that is inside of you until it goes ice to water, water to gas. Instead of exploding outward which is done in qigong, the challenge now in meditation is to explode in. They will drive it deeper inside their energy field. They will keep on going through layer after layer, after layer, after layer, until they trace the block to the source. Eventually it will just go poof, the blockages are gone and one is freed from one's energetic prison. A taoist is not concerned about whether a person is bothered or upset by something that is usually temporary and limited in duration. They are concerned about whether or not their consciousness is free. The process of ice to water, water to gas is really effective. The taoists, if they are anything, are immensely practical people. To give you an idea of the religious, cultural and historical context of Taoism in China there needs to be an understanding of their three main religions: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. In some ways if you understand these three philosophies and what point of view they are coming from, you can understand how all the taoist Arts came about and the context within which they are taught: the Martial Arts, the medical Arts, the Building Arts, whatever Arts they are.

A Confucian is concerned about correctness. He wants the form and shape of something to be just so. Face is of great importance. External appearance is of paramount importance. Things being exactly where they should be. How well you behaved and in what fashion. Total correctness of relationship. External correctness is central in all they do. Confucians have over 3,300 rules of etiquette governing specific social relationships and interactions. That is quite a number to abide by. There are all sorts of jokes about political correctness today that would essentially define a Confucian. The outer form has to be really together, even if there is nothing behind it. Everything is in its place, everything is where it should be, and everyone knows what they are supposed to do. That is it. When a Confucian comes into a room his clothes must be just so. His bearing must be just so. The way you treat him must be just so. I have no doubt that you will find people who are taoists who will be this way. All you will know then is they have not broken free of their Confucian ties. That is the only thing you can say. We then move to the Buddhists. Even though there are some Buddhist sects that do not fit into this, in many ways Buddhism is not terribly different from Islam or Christianity in the sense that they actively and with great energy seek converts. I studied in China for a little over 10 years. From morning to night this is what I was surrounded by. My understanding is not from having read textbooks. Like Christians, Buddhists are religious zealots. It is comparable to an old time Jew wailing at the wall, or a Christian flagellating himself on a holy day, or a confessional for a catholic. There is this tremendous zeal to find God (or become enlightened) and be whatever it means to be within this presence. There is a tremendous focus on this direction. If taken the wrong way this very commonly leads to religious fanaticism, which was not the original intention. Historically the taoists were a very strange group. A big portion of the taoists in China, beyond a shadow of a doubt, were some of the most educated, talented and powerful people in China. There are numerous taoists who are about as prestigious as you can get. Lao Tse who was the head librarian of the imperial archives in a nation during a time when nobody could read. He was the one who was responsible for maintaining all the knowledge in China at the time. Chang San Feng, the taoist immortal who some believe was the founder of taijiquan before becoming a taoist, was a major magistrate. Lu Tsu, also known as Lu Tung Pin, is a major taoist immortal whose followers comprise the greatest block of fully realized taoist sage/immortals, was also a magistrate. This would be something like a governor in the United States, except in a feudal society there was no democracy and his power over peoples lives, including life and death rested purely on his whims or moods. These are people who had gone into life. They went into it and they were successful. Whatever life had to bring, they went and did it. Finally at a certain point they said to themselves "I don't know, all these rules and all these things just don't cut it, this is not essentially what the universe is about." Basically they got fed-up with the world. This was not because they had something against it. It was not so much that these people left the world. It was more like the world left them. When these people had a tendency to leave the world, they also didn't particularly care what people thought about them or whether they agreed with their ways.

They really couldn't care less about what normal society considered to be important. They didn't care if they upset people, and didn't give a damn what people thought of them. They didn't particularly care what they looked like. The full focus was directed towards understanding the essence of their being? Eventually it came to the question of: what is all of that out there? They were not casual, nor were they flippant. They were very serious about the subject of the essential nature of themselves and the universe. They were concerned with the nature of reality and not appearances that had been the focus of their previous life. The taoists really want to understand the energy of something. There are so many different energies that manifest in the Universe. Part of getting rid of the sense of confusion is to be able to simply accept that Qi is what it is. It does not have to be something different from what it is. It can just be whatever it is and through this process one gains a tremendous acceptance and love of life. One of the things that always amazed me about a number of taoists in China is that whenever they would involve themselves in a particular subject or activity they would manifest the actual energy of what they are doing. For example, in the martial arts you would see a person who, when meditating and doing the things involved in meditation would be smooth to watch, but who at the next second could turn into something that would make Ghengis Khan seem like a friendly fellow. The energy of fighting is a thing, or the energy of healing is a thing, or the energy of the mind going to a certain place is a thing. It is just what it is. If one manifests the energy of a specific phenomena it does not mean the individual is "that kind of person" it simply means they have manifested one specific energy that exists, they are not it, it is not them. It is much the same way that if you change a shirt "you are not the shirt," it is only a "something" you use. After continuous practice over a long time, the ability to create energy allowed them to simply accept that whatever an energy was, that was what it was, and that was fine. Most human beings spend their whole lives fighting whatever energies are around them...wanting Qi to be different from what it is. Wanting to force it to be something that it is not. It does not mean that something can not be changed, but the capacity to let what is, just be, is one of the greatest challenges. Most people find that very difficult. Within the whole taoist structure you have the right and left wing crowd (i.e, conservative and liberal). The right wing crowd tended to go away and live off in the mountains, or put four or five people together inside a cave and not come out for 50 years. Then there are the left wing people who tend to make the hippies look like right wing republicans or the daughters of the American revolution. There is nothing they would not do. They had absolutely no concern for anything that society had to say to them. You have to put this in some sort of context. Taoists in general are extremely open minded. In most cases, they are open about their practice. If they have had a tendency to hide and not really let people know who they are or what they are doing it was to avoid persecution. This secretiveness is because more liberal minded folks throughout history have usually been persecuted. This is certainly the case in China. In taoist meditation the object is to develop as much energy initially as possible, but not from the point of view of obtaining power. That is usually what traps people in the early stages. They become energy junkies. My teacher Liu put it very well. He said you would be better off with a heroin or opium habit. Because you only need the opium. As soon as one life is over,

the drug addiction is finished. But, if you get addicted to psychic energy, the desire for psychic energy will endure for countless rebirths. It will not be something that you drop with the life that has initiated this habit. It goes with you. In taoist practices a tremendous amount of energy has to be developed inside of the body in order for it to be converted to spirit. As one's spirit starts filling, it is very important that one begin to know the facts about the directions life can take. Because as one's spirit increases, one naturally begins to have what is known in the West as "personal power." One gains tremendous power which is often not obvious. People often tend to pursue things that are very trivial at this point. If one stays focused on this power, then one's spirit will never convert to emptiness. It is considered "the big trap." As a matter of fact virtually every esoteric tradition in the world holds the view that "the big trap" is to be hungry for power. The character of the practitioner must be developed so he or she is beyond these traps. Upon reaching 50, 60, 70, 80 years old, most human beings are still living out the neurosis of their childhood for all practical purposes. They are still living things which occurred to them when they were small children or young people. They never go beyond the basic condition of what is inside them from youth. In the first level of taoist meditation one spends a long time learning to become a mature human being. My teacher Liu and I spent a long time on this. This is absolutely necessary before going further. Without this level of maturity, as one starts moving into the world of spirit, one can either only become a power tripper, or one must throw away whatever one gathers in order to be free. If without maturity one starts moving towards some sort of spiritual power, you will find the situation of awareness gone egotistical. This leads to the cycle of getting so much spiritual awareness that you can not productively channel it. A person will do things to blow it off, to get rid of it, to destroy it. It is a cycle consisting of putting yourself in again, falling down, again coming back, again falling down. It is a safety valve of sorts. It is a predictable and unfortunate cycle to fall in to. You must develop past this. All the basic practices of Taoism are geared toward your becoming a mature human being. With that you become physically healthy by having the basic energy channels in the body open and moving. This early stage is critical to master. When the spirit starts opening up and you start converting Qi into spirit it can burn out an unprepared nervous system. Very commonly people's bodies can not handle what occurs in the spiritualization process. The body's circuits get to a certain level and shut down or shred. To avoid this kind of disintegration one needs to master the basic exercises. These initial practices in Taoism have a number of basic exercises. These consist of qigong, and basic standing and Seated meditation. Here we are not yet talking about taoist standing meditation but about Seated meditation. Everything that is done sitting down can be applied when making the mind internally balanced in the midst of what ever situations in life we find ourselves. The core of these taoist practices were all sitting. The first step is simply to cleanse the physical body of whatever energy is clogged inside of it. This is so that the mind gets to a point where it can communicate with the physical energy of the body. As an example, one learns to put one's mind inside the liver to make it start

secreting. Before you can accomplish this you must learn to put your mind in your liver, to at least have an awareness of what is happening there. These are basic awareness exercises. It is analogous to wanting to see God but not even knowing how to feel your head or hand. One learns to walk before learning to run. The initial stage of taoist alchemy begins with bringing to conscious awareness all the essential energy flows in the body. This is not, as many people think, only acupuncture meridian lines, although you may also make those conscious. There are numerous energy lines in the body that are directly connected to the consciousness of a person. These have a major effect on the way in which they think, the way in which their body functions, the way in which their spirit works, and in the way in which their Psychic capacities come out. In terms of the system I teach, the basics of taoist meditation are taught using a 5-step Nei Gung system. Those basics of taoist meditation all have to be learned first, because when you sit, it is fundamentally important in that you have the whole of the body internally connected, functioning as one completely integrated internal unit. Your whole body literally breathes and moves as one cell. Everything, for example your muscles, ligaments, internal organs, glands, the brain centers, the fluid around the spinal cord inside your spine, must literally be controlled and moved by the conscious ability of the meditator. It is important that you have the capacity to start moving with the natural pulsations of the energy of the earth and the different energies that are within the earth, 5 elements and the different energies that exist outside in terms of the stars, sun, planets and the moon; all of which exert major influences on the human body. Involvement in the first stage practice usually is not even taught in terms of Sitting meditation. It is aimed at getting control of both the physical body and the body of Qi that makes a human being function, thereby forming the necessary infrastructure from which to start sitting. This is commonly taught through taoist arts like taiji, qigong, certain basic sitting or standing postures, or through taoist yoga which is something like a more simplified Hatha yoga where the focus is on what is happening internally below the skin rather than external stretching movements. Standing meditation to a certain degree is a misnomer. Qigong is really not meditation. To call it meditation is a bit dicey, although you can work meditation in to it. Standing meditation is better for your body and general health. It is the easiest to learn and forms an excellent preparation for the demands of sitting. Its purpose is to open up the channels and make you strong as a horse. When your body is strong the effects of gravity do not distract you as you sit. You need to have no distraction what so ever, which is exactly what gravity exerts on you if you stand or move. Sitting meditation is better for everything we are discussing here. In Taoism you need good sitting practices. Ultimately it is your sitting practice through which the goals of internal alchemy and meditation are realized. Taoist yoga can also help form this foundation. In taoist yoga the external movement of the body is created when postures are entered into by specifically moving energy in the body. By moving the body in this fashion literally your organs, your glands and your spine are also included rather than purely going for a large

stretch. As a matter of fact most of the stretches in taoist yoga tend not to be anywhere as extreme as Hatha yoga which uses a different methodology. Besides using the methods of seated meditation and taoist yoga you also have the use of the sexual meditation techniques where two people practice. The object here is that through doubling of the Qi each of you, both partners, have more energy to awaken your consciousness. Under normal circumstances each individual has their volume of personal and individual Qi energy; but when you actually engage in sexual practice you may be able to build energy up in effect as if you were four people. Because you are able to increase this energy (this again is during the first stages of taoist meditation) you start to make the energy within the body very fully conscious. Your consciousness grows so that nothing escapes you. An illustration of what I mean is your relationship to the inside of your liver. Under normal circumstances you might be able to visualize your liver but not feel it. In sexual qigong you would gain the capacity to feel your liver in time right down to the cellular level. The sexual techniques are somewhat easy since human life was brought forth from sexuality. Sexuality is what is responsible for the body. The energy that is created when people have sex makes it so much easier to get into contact with what the actual Qi flows of the body are. This is very important. With regard to sexual meditation, some schools do it and some schools don't. There are schools in Taoism that very clearly are celibate monk schools and which believe that one should completely abstain from sex. It is not that they have a belief that one should or ought not to; instead it is usually practiced by people who: A) have never had an interest in sex to begin with or; B) people who are not so inclined towards sexual desire due to the composition of their body/qi systems within the 5 elements. My teacher Liu Hung Chieh explained that every human being is composed essentially of 5 elements or 5 phases of energy. Some of those phases of energy are conducive towards people having extremely sexual personalities, to a point where not only just sex, but food and carnal things are somewhat necessaly to fulfill their basic nature. Without this input their natural energies would be destructively suppressed. Other people have different balances of the 5 elements which will make them predisposed essentially towards intellectual pursuits and physical things, but not toward the carnal pleasures of the world. Some people are extremely prone towards literally wanting to deal with the psychic nature of things, while some people are not. You have to go with what your particular body energy type is. Master Liu for example only had sex in his life to have children. Because he was a Confucian, he was obligated to produce offspring for his family. After he had fulfilled his obligation, he never had sex again in the rest of his life. It is not that he disliked it, he just found the idea of it absolutely uninteresting. But, as he had such a powerful metal energy that he was born with (he was an intellectual of the arch degree) he could sit, read, and devour libraries; gaining the same enjoyment a carnal type of person would obtain from sex or food. There are distinctly different types of personalities within the five elements. One very important consideration when one studies taoist meditation in depth is the discovery of what

one's physical body and ones Qi body are. It is vital that practitioners become completely clear what essential energies are important to them. Those will be the energies they tend to focus on internally. For example, a person with a preponderance of the earth element would initially concentrate on sexuality and making the body very strong, whereas a metal person would want initially to focus on Qi practices to develop mental clarity, flexibility and making their body very flexible and strong. One starts working with all that has to do with Qi of the physical body. These energy lines run the body in terms of your physical ability to have bodily functions- your ability to speak, to see, to hear. You start working with the energies that are responsible for what we know as physicality. After one gets past this first stage, and has the Qi of the physical body on line, one starts doing several different meditation practices. These begin with the dissolving practices which literally release any bound energy that's inside you. After the dissolving practices there are transforming practices. If you so choose you can change one energy into another. For example, you can turn anger into joy, or pain into pleasure. These essential practices are really quite similar in effect to the tantric methods of India and Tibet, but are not used the same way and employ a different methodology. These initial stages in taoist meditation are concerned with the capacity to feel. It is believed that since you are on the Earth and not a discorporal being, and since you are in a physical body, you need to deal completely with the fact of your physicality. This is your ability to feel and to be fully conscious of whatever is inside your body. Once you are able to become fully conscious of what is inside your body, then you go for what is fully conscious inside your Qi. You use the dissolving process to release any knots, bindings or condensations of energy in the physical body or in the Qi. You move through all the different channels and related areas. The next stage that one moves to in taoist meditation is the one that is of great interest to everyone in the Western world. This is the subject of emotion. The Western world tends to be dominated by emotional issues. This is especially a factor in the United States. The United States is a relatively emotionally immature nation. The modern media of the United States for many years has tried to induce this behavior. For example, if you watch European films, some will have sad endings. Things don't have to work out, the hero does not always get the girl, they do not have to win. Where as in America, if you wish to make a successful film it must have a happy ending. It must incorporate a tear jerker, the soundtrack must be able to raise and manipulate emotions to an extent that has nothing to do with normal daily life. It does not remotely parallel normal life. There is an extreme tendency to pry emotions in that sense. At this next stage of the emotions one has developed some understanding of both the physical and the Qi body. Now one starts to find where the blockages are inside both the Qi body and in the physical body and the corresponding emotions related to these blocks. During this process one begins to go through what the Cinese call dealing with your ghosts. These are all the memories and everything that is not present at the moment that has a tremendous impact on you.

As an example a man may have had a tremendously horrible marriage and divorce, and his wife was a flaming redhead. The fact of the matter is that he may, at any time he is around a redhead, want to start the 3rd World War. He will simply repeat his pattern. These patterns affect people in many ways other than just what they are consciously remembering. People can have emotions that are formed in childhood, or even formed in the womb. The birth trauma is something which for example in Buddhism, is one of the four causes of suffering. They talk about birth, old age, sickness, and death. The fact is that the birth trauma can be immensely destabilizing for people. People actually have things from addictions to depression that are locked in from birth. A person may come out to be a fighter because of the actual struggle that they had when they went through 10 or 20 hours of labor. If they had to fight their whole way through the womb it can pattern them for life. Another person may have literally given up in the womb and had to be sucked out. They may have depression for the rest of their life. Many and hundreds of different things can happen. These experiences can be dealt with effectively through dissolving practices previously described. Behavior patterns resulting from trauma are kept in place by energy blocks. By dissolving these blocks the behavior patterns may disappear forever. However this happens only if the dissolving process is 100% completed. The emotional body techniques for the water method of Taoism usually involve the dissolving practice. It is important in the school I belong to. The water method of Taoism is initially strong on the dissolving, or the breaking up of energy in the same way that water wears away a rock. If you throw sugar inside of water, after a while it breaks the sugar down. The water completely emulsifies it. Frequently I am asked if this method of taoist meditation can replace the need for psychotherapy. Generally speaking, no. In modern life, you have to make a living and interact with other people. You can't withdraw to a monastery or ashram where all your needs are taken care of while you work through your problems. I can give you a quote from my forthcoming book on bagazhang (Ba Gua Chang) which deals with this question: "Psychotherapy is more appropriate for dealing with the dysfunctionalities of a level of emotional development where taking full responsibility for one's emotions is not yet within an individual's capacity." "In taoist meditation a worthy student was one whose emotional suppressions were such that the individual could feel that what was emotionally arising within themselves was essentially their own responsibility and not being caused by something outside themselves. The meditator would then be able to use their emotional meditation methods responsibly to resolve their inner conflicts without blaming or attacking others for being the cause of their misery or selfinflicting pain or death to get back at them." When one starts going through all the different ways of dissolving or working out the emotions, one does it to purge or to open up all the lower level emotions. The lower level emotions are basic hate, jealousy, depression, anger, viciousness, greed, vindictiveness, wanting to get back at people, wanting only to be happy, wanting only to covet, all the gross attachments.

All of these basic lower emotions are dealt with by first ferreting them out of where their energy is embedded in the actual tissue of the body; secondly by actually going into the energy channels of the body where they are located; and finally dissolving them all the way inside the system. Then you start to literally transform these emotions as they extend outside of your physical body. Your own personal field has the ability literally extend to the end of the Universe. If you do not clear out your own energy fields beyond the body, then all energies coming in from an external environment activate the unresolved energies in your own personal Qi. This causes you to be somewhat manipulated like a puppet by the energy emanating from the huge Qi fields of the stars. This creates a pattern that comes back in. That is what astrology is based on. At the level of clearing out the emotions, the emotional factors involved with astrology should be able to be overridden. In the next stage of the game there are, for example, methods through which these transformations are done in taijiquan, baguazhang, qigong or taoist yoga methods. In August 1994 I will be teaching a one week retreat devoted to the taoist meditation practices of taijiquan. We will address how to integrate the benefits of meditation into one's taiji practice. When you start reaching into the emotions it is important you start tapping directly into the glandular system, as well as into your internal organs. There are so many techniques it depends upon which ones are appropriate for a particular type of person or a certain situation. I am not going to get down and just talk about this technique or that technique. That is like a cook book approach and the fact is that human beings don't quite work that way. The celibates practice primarily by moving meditation and seated meditation. The methods for example of standing meditation are usually appropriate for working out the physical body and the Qi body. Their effect on the emotions is not necessarily massive. Sitting has the tendency to have the greatest effect and the moving techniques are in the middle. Regarding the emotional residue (for the people who are not celibates), the taoist sexual meditation techniques now make a fundamental shift at the level of working with the physical body and working with the Qi. When you are working with sexual qigong techniques you are concerned with essentially making the body function optimally. How do you make every nerve in your body really come alive? How can one have an orgasm at any point in the body? How do you have an internal orgasm? This is at the physical and Qi level. At the Qi level you start learning how to move energy specifically when making love. Practicing how to move energy through your channels and for what purposes. Purposes such as healing your physical body or setting the stage for being able to extract and transform your emotions later on. When you start reaching the emotional resolution stage in making love via sexual meditation, the process becomes much more interesting. The ability to dissolve energy becomes very powerful. The issue of the right, left and central channels of the body starts becoming very important. The dissolving techniques also start reaching further at this point. The field that you start generating can go anywhere outward of 15-20 feet from your body. At this time you start having a very accurate sense of your emotions going outside your body. This then starts tying in with Seated meditation methods where you are beginning to work with emotional energies that go outside your body. The focus is on how to improve your awareness of

internal emotional energy as it relates to inner space, and resolving and/or transforming your emotional blockages. One is practicing sitting meditation at this stage of involvement with the sexual meditation techniques for emotional clearing. Because you simultaneously practice these two methods, you get double your awareness, double your practice, i.e., dual cultivation. You double your internal awareness if you practice sexual meditation. At this stage of seated meditation in Taoism there is concern with techniques for not only dissolving the energy blockages of your own personal garbage, but starting to work with and extending this to other people who are near by resolving their blocked energies. Sexually each partner not only works on their own blocks, but is concerned with relieving the other partner of what ever bound emotional energies they have inside their system. At this particular moment in time your own awareness has increased. It is a favorable time, if one wants to do certain practices while seated or during sex, to start working on dissolving the emotions of other people. This is an effective and beneficial practice. As a matter of fact, internally, one observation made by both the taoists and the tantrics is that if one is able to emotionally do whatever one wants-without harming others--if you share this wealth, doing what you want for yourself with as many people or situations as possible, you find that you personally will do a lot better. You will create a much finer world in which to live. Finer not only for yourself but for everybody who is there with you. This becomes a pretty important issue whose implications reach far past surface meaning. Bruce Kumar Frantzis, author of the book "OpeningThe Energy Gates Of The Body" has over 30 years experience in meditation, oriental healing, and martial arts, including 10 years full time study in China, 3 years in Japan, and 2 years in India. He is a lineage holder in Taiji, Qigong, Xing-yi, and Baguazhang. He is currently finishing a Bagua book, and intends a future book on Taoist Meditation Practice expanding on the information contained in this article. For more information about his videos, books, and seminars in New York, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay area, as well as London and in Germany. An Interview by Sara Barchus Part l - QI THE JOURNAL OF TRADTIONAL EASTERN HEALTH & FITNESS Vol. 4, No. 2. SUMMER 1994

Kumar Frantzis: An Informal Discussion on Taoist Meditation - Part 2 YOU COULD SAY THAT THE initial level of the first two stages of Taoist sexual meditation are Taoist sexology. They have all this in the West too. Sexology: how to make love better, how to have more fun, how to have more orgasms, how to have a better time, how to like your partner after it's all over. That is basically what it is about. Sexology is how to have better sex. That is reasonable. At the stage of sexual meditation you are starting to deal with the emotions. If you choose to you start using the sexual energy to begin tapping into your primary emotional difficulties. This is where a human being who has not been capable of intimacy finds they become capable

of intimacy. They learned it as a side effect of meditation. It is not a major goal like the West's psychologically based sexology. In fact most sexual tantra you see around in America today is really about how to be intimate with your partner and enjoy sex more. It is not much more than sexology. One uses the sexual meditation practices to release and balance all of one's bound emotions systematically and consistently over time. This is in the context of becoming a mature human being who has decided to be fully alive. This goes beyond images of oneself and others, focusing on essence, not appearance, for long term satisfying sexual relationships. When you get down to dealing with the core energies inside a human being there is no choice but sharing. They become naked in front of you. Their mind becomes naked in front of you. There is nothing to be intimate or not be intimate about. You have to deal openly with the situation for what it is. The more profound stages of sexual meditation practices involve converting emotional energy to spirit, then to emptiness and finally putting yourself on the road: the Tao. Returning to solo practices. At this next stage you become conscious of the energy inside the body that is not really physical, but is making the body happen. The Qi is a part of the body. As your body cultivates increased Qi you have to be extremely aware. There is a mind-body energy interaction that is undeniable. Within your body's energy are stored memories of what we have done from the day we were born. We tap in to cellular memory. In Taoism and to a certain extent in modern psychology, Buddhism, Christianity and all the old traditions it is said the body retains memories from the womb, even from the time you were a DNA molecule. Those memories are conditionings. Commonly these memories do not allow a person to act or be mature. One is constantly being thrown back to the past. The dissolving techniques are done to literally dissolve the whole of the body piece by piece, inch by inch, until everything that's inside a body is dissolved. The next development incorporates what in Taoism are called ghosts, demons, and devils. It is referred to as playing around with the ghosts inside of you. How many people can genuinely say they have gone past their parents? How many can see their parents, their brothers and sisters, and the people they grew up with, purely as human beings? How many relationships are reactively lived out? Very few people can claim this attainment. It is the same thing in China too. This is a basic situation concerning human relations. The Taoists used to say "You want to have children-you should transcend the negative influences of your parents. You wish to produce a spiritual child inside yourself--you must go past your parents." Teachers in all spiritual traditions recognize that all these things from your past that affect you very strongly are like demons. In China they call these internal demons (the traumas, the ifs, the buts, the ways energy of your mind was compressed into shapes, most of which you are not even conscious of). First one must become conscious of their existence. Then, with dissolving techniques, one must literally disperse and convert the energy, then drive it inside the core of one's being. This is the fuel through which one produces spirit.

It takes a certain amount of courage to do this. In China they call it "jumping into the dragon's mouth." It is going to bite you. It is a very strange thing to literally go through terrors in meditation that are stronger than anything you've experienced in your life. At the level of the mind, the level of the energy inside a person, there is very little difference experientially between events that you considered to be real fact, and memories that have no factual basis but are stored in your subconscious. These methods for dissolving the demons inside the body are initiated by systematically moving through the energy of the whole body...over time, gaining the capacity to simultaneously dissolve the glands, brain, muscles, and the internal organs. Virtually all of the cells of the body are scanned. The dissolving process gets rid of these knots. However, it is not a question of getting rid of negative emotional and mental states. They want to take that energy and convert it to spirit, it is Qi. Once the body gets unblocked, the Qi starts moving. One commonly overlooked point in all meditation traditions is that if one wishes to meditate to only become relaxed, one is a fool. That is what people have Prozac for. That is why people take drugs. That is why people get drunk, and that is why people go to sleep. The purpose of meditation is to become aware of the center of your being, i.e. spirit and emptiness; to go far beyond states of physical and mental relaxation. As long as one has any internal demons inside oneself one can not truly become relaxed, one can not become natural. One must to some degree react to these inner emotions because they are etched into the various components of your being unless you do something like the Taoist meditation practices. Through these practices one can systematically dissipate these knots. Eventually dissolving the internal demons. Everybody's got their horror stories; nobody had perfect parents or a perfect childhood. No matter how bad your circumstances, there is always another time and place where people have had a slightly rougher time. You may have been raped and locked in the closet, but were you tortured systematically for weeks or months? Did you have to watch your families assassinated, and killed and tortured by inhumane politics and governments? These experiences are pretty standard in Chinese history. One gets born. The circumstances of ones birth and what one was born into are not always under ones control. Whether these knots that are inside of you are from events that you remember and watch, figments of your imagination, or memories that come from past lives or when you were in the womb, they are real. To you they are real. For you these impressions block your energy. They keep you from living whole. All of the Taoist meditation techniques systematically start releasing these internal demons where they have settled inside the body. From Liu's work I personally became free of my own internal demons. When you get to the point where the energy just releases inside you, it is as though it does not exist anymore. It is just gone. This is the nature of changing the spirit. If one is thorough and meditates completely then things will just change; the change feels as though it permeates past, present and future. It will seem as though, it has always been that way, and will always be that way. At this first level of Taoist meditation you have as I have said before, distinctions of practice between the left wing and the right wing crowds. The right wing crowd is usually conservative. They will strive to attain all of this only in seated meditation by themselves.

They will achieve it by having a life that is fairly quiet so that they can gradually disengage from the distraction of worldly life. They usually live away from people. Often they try living in small communities so all their attention is focused on the subject of spirituality. The radicals (if you want to call them that) will do all of the sitting, afterwards trying to take it into their active life. Deliberately moving the energy coming up in them as situations happen in life and moving into these situations consciously. Disasters and turmoil become the impetus for meditation practice. A practical application is set to work directly, on the spot, in the context of day to day surroundings. Practitioners use these situations and energies of real life, both safe and dangerous, as a tool to transform their internal blockages into naturalness and internal harmony. In the left hand way you are going to meditate and will start finding that you are going to deliberately go into lots of situations where you can fail. Because the Taoist objective is to take this Qi that is bound inside of the system, to look at what life is teaching, and transform Qi into spirit. They play very actively with the world, including sex, politics, business and so on. For example, my teacher in Beijing taught me the active water tradition. He himself was the right wing type. Though it was difficult, he was a virtual recluse in the middle of Beijing. But he managed. That was his way. The way he taught me is different but still within the water tradition. I am very active in the world. His other student is also very active in the world. As a matter of fact, right now he's a major real estate tycoon in Hong Kong. Maturity is a necessary prelude to profound spiritual cultivation. What an individual needs to confront and do is take whatever Qi is bound inside of the body's Qi and emotions to convert them to spirit. At the end of that road as one goes through and one starts releasing the energy inside oneself, one starts becoming mature. The difference between a mature human being and a child is that a child is always quite sure of how things ought to be. They are quite clear the way life must be, should be, has got to be, and if it isn't, they get very fussy. A mature human being finally comes to the realization that quite a few things are just how they are. They can relax and function amidst life's imperfections without the need to be recognized or to condemn. Life is not perfect. Have you ever met the child who doesn't want the gold star? It is a child's perspective. In order to move through life and become mature, one realizes that what happens in life is that people are different. This realization is not just in terms of other people, but also ones self and life's events. A mature human being can forgive people. They can accept that people have limitations, and they do what they can. A child can not. Children want things done according to their wishes. Because that's how they get their place in the world. So, the Tao practitioner moves towards this freedom from one's conditioned emotions and conditioned thought patterns. This challenge becomes a great powerful focus. It takes years and years and years of practice, because it is not easy to grow up. But once one has arrived at this particular level of practice, one is ready to start working with their internal spirit. That is the stage of Taoist alchemy where all ones energies are converted to spirit, emptiness, and ultimately Tao. In this next stage of practice you start dealing with mind and thought and where thoughts arise from. You are beginning to move in to what the Chinese call the shin (hsin). We are now on

the edge of alchemy in this mental level. One is not fully immersed in it, but is getting there. At the level of mental thought one starts working with the techniques of the heart and mind. Through this you start to perceive the place where thoughts originate. You start finding out what your thought is, and the consciousness that generates your thoughts. You are starting to move towards the center of your being. Most of us right now are very capable of recognizing that "I think". "I have something in my head, I say 2+2=4, I'm doing the laundry tomorrow morning, I'm going to buy a bottle of milk on the way home, I'm going to drive my car, I've got to get insurance," this thinking of course is thought. You are able to recognize this. But when you start going to where the consciousness that literally can travel from birth to death from birth to death is generated, you have reached the middle ground. This middle ground is where you start dealing with the mind. The cellular level dissolving techniques tend to be very important until you get to the stage where you start dissolving through the mind flow, and then through the emotions, until eventually you hit where thought is actually being produced. You literally follow the stream to your direct consciousness itself. When you arrive at the stage of consciousness you start using all sorts of techniques to unravel the knots in your consciousness. The major effect of this part of the training is to start getting you aware of the core of your being and accustomed to working with it. Most of us, when coming near the core of our being run like hell. We jump, we run, we get out, we scream. if we are lucky we scream. Usually people simply cut off and become absolutely numb and rigid to it; completely unaware it is happening. The state of denial that arises from that core awareness causes people to sometimes go from the beginning to the end of their life without resolving really major issues in their life, which is why they were born to begin with. In order to deal with these things. So this next stage becomes extremely important. At the next stage is where one starts dealing with the psychic energy. One realizes that one's body goes out. There is the question of a thing called manifestation. Where do things come from and why have they manifested in a particular way? Why do you wear a shirt and khaki pants right now, or why are you sitting down at this moment instead of being up on the roof dancing? Why does this building exist - instead of not existing. Why does this world exist because it could also not exist. This world had to come into existence some way. You had to come into existence sone way. The thought you hold for this next second comes from somewhere. Here one learns to understand and work with the unseen world. After the psychic stage you start dealing with the cause of manifestation, in other words, where everything you know comes from. A person's mind starts going out farther and farther from the physical body in the psychic stage and this is where they start being able to genuinely recognize energetic cause and effect relationships. It is as though in New York City its starting on 59th Street and this stuff is coming down and coming down and coming down, and coming down and when it finally arrives down at First Street it manifests. But you have started tapping in to the capacity to discern what this energy is when it starts transforming up at 42nd Street, and how it differs when it arrives at 23rd Street. This usually is a very destabilizing period for people involved in meditation. The world now ceases to be so solid.

Your energy is running about and you are experiencing these various things, but there is a question of what is real and what is not real. This is the beginning of what in Taoism is called learning to discriminate between the real and the false. It is a very, very difficult stage because most people at this point start learning how to not only to get the message, but what are the mechanics of it. How can you stop things before they hit you? How can you play with and manipulate these energies in order to find a way of transforming your mind and essence until it is still and unmoving. You go beyond being influenced by them. This is not magic. It does however require a lot of honest, sincere effort and work. It is difficult to not be side tracked at this point. There is no intent in Lao Tse Taoism to use this knowledge for power, but only to increase internal awareness so as to free the individual from their internal prison. Some of the Taoists, the magicians in Taoism, play with these things to manipulate the environment. In terms of meditation you can manipulate the environment all you want, but you will still be trapped within that environment if you don't get past it. So this is the real problem. This is the stage where, as the expression goes, they separate the men from the boys, or separate the women from the girls. Much of the ability to know what you will know, forethoughts of what will happen in the future, the ability to cause events, you must see all of this and clearly understand at this point you are not causing any of this to happen. You are simply hearing about the news before it arrives. It is like knowing six days in advance what the stock or bond market will do. That is all well and good. However, the fact is that for everything you can perceive which might turn into a wonderful thing, there is also potential for it to become a disaster. At this stage you start to enter in to the practices that are alchemy. They are called nei dan. Now that you have some of these energies coming down from manifestation, you will have to deliberately rewire and transmute your system to be able to allow them to pass through you without you being affected or affecting them. When these psychic forces come down most of us are very powerfully and directly effected by them. The psychic stage has to be where essentially they come and you are not affected by these forces. You are not and must not be attached to them. It is also a great temptation to want to play with them. It takes a great internal strength to leave them be. I don't know anybody whose gone through the game who hasn't spent five or ten years being bounced around like a ping pong ball with this. It is extremely hard because it is one thing to have the attitude interacting and trying to get something from it, and it's another thing altogether to be humble enough to allow existence to operate when you have the power to manipulate it, but won't manipulate it. It becomes an extraordinarily tricky phase. You might ask, where does one find peace in all this complexity? At each stage of the practices it is important to remember that one must arrive at a place where any yin and yang energetic relationship have become balanced and comfortable with each other. This results in what the Taoists call jing or stillness, the consciousness being unmoving and completely comfortable with itself. This stillness is the basic context of all the classical schools of Lao Tse's Taoism. During the process of practicing these various exercises we have passed through the stage of meditation into the practice of alchemy. The process of doing everything with alchemy has begun. With the passing of the stage of meditation, you are now going to start transmuting the

cells of your body. You are going to start changing your genetic structure. The body now has to be changed into something that is capable of receiving and maintaining these energies. The fundamental principle of alchemy is that things exist in gross and more subtle ways. Is the energy very condensed, or spread out to where it has no boundaries? When you are dealing with energy that is needed inside the body, the Qi, your emotions, your mind, the psychic level, or the place inside you where all of these events that occur happen from, you are experiencing different levels of condensation. Your natural awareness is simply squeezed into a straight-jacket, putting it quite simply. As this releases, as this becomes more open the naturalness of the capacity of your mind and body comes out. This is in terms of both going inside yourself or expanding to the edges of the universe. In one sense, getting more energy is about the capacity to let that which is out go out, and for that matter, it is to also go in as far as it is possible to condense in. There is as much space inside of you as there is in the whole known and unknown universe. There is as much inside of you as there is outside, and the Taoists just keep on ad infinitum. The Taoists have games to make you realize what is out to drive you in, and then when you go in, to drive you out, until finally a human being just finds their place in the universe. You find yourself traveling to places astrally. You find that others are also traveling to places. Once you start to get into Taoist alchemy the presumption has already been made that you have completed the practices of becoming a mature human being. During this stage of Taoist meditation you start by doing the initial (but not advanced) work on the internal organs and then the glands. A major consideration is to be able to unlink the energy of your glands which is the cause of all sorts of emotional rushes in your physiology. Your physiology creates tremendous internal sensations. Through feeling these sensations we experience not only our emotional states but may decide who we are. Your glands contribute routinely to all aspects of your physiology and therefore, your mental states. What we think of as emotions are in reality our neural transmitters or organs or glands relocating energy. Emotions are converted through meditation so we are able to consciously transform our emotions. All of the emotions in the body have practices that one can use to turn their emotions in to opposites. Anger can be turned into love, fear can be turned into courage; there are many and very deliberate ways one accomplishes this. At a stage of maturity in Taoism, you work very clearly with all energy lines that have to do with functions in the body. There are about four or five thousand energy lines you work with in Taoism. Although that may seem like an impossible number, once you get past the first one or two hundred it really starts getting easier. The most important piece is how you connect one energy line to another, the interlinks. In the process of going through all of these changes inside you, deliberately working on your internal organs, intentionally changing the energy from one organ to the next, and linking it to one's mind space, deliberately playing with the energy that is inside the spine, and getting to the point where you start working with the many energy centers inside the brain. You are able to liberate these basic negative conditionings which are stopping a person from becoming mature.

Once one has reached this stage, one now has to decide if one wants to take responsibility for one's own being. Up to the stage of becoming emotionally mature you don't really take responsibility for your own being. The truth of the matter is, to use phraseology of the West, you just clean your toxins out. First you clean out the internal garbage; in other words, all of the negative things that make life exceedingly difficult, exceedingly problematic. At the later end of this process comes what is even more challenging and difficult; you must clear out attachments for everything you like. So you can let things be what they are without what happens in the world influencing your consciousness. You see it's very easy if you have a trauma to take an attitude of, "oh, woe is me", "I wish....", "I get angry", "I get sad", "I get depressed", when instead it is necessary to transform those emotions to neutral energy. Most people can relate to this kind of freedom. But what about when you start doing away with things that you like most in the world? What about this issue of dissipating everything that you greatly desire? You start aiming for a great degree of equanimity with these desires. It is a great and genuine challenge which has troubled everyone who has attained the Tao. As you begin this challenge you are still taking responsibility for your practice. What you have to do is work on things which are most aggravating. How many people like to endure pain and mental anguish? Very few. You may take responsibility for your practice, but this alone is not an indication of entirely taking responsibility truly for who you are. In one sense this could simply be very selfish and self motivated. My foot is hurting me, I just want it to stop hurting. This alone does not mean that I take responsibility for my foot; it only means I don't want to be in pain. That is a perfectly valid reason. However, that alone will not lead one to the Tao. One will only move and operate from the level of Qi awareness in accordance with personal development. One does not just suddenly traject to high off distant places. One needs to understand and transcend everything to do with ones foot, both the good, bad, and the ugly to truly take responsibility. One thing that I should tell all of you is that in the water tradition of Taoism they think the whole concept of enlightenment is a load of nonsense. The Buddhists say "one will break the wheel of reincarnation", a Christian will say, "ah, become one with the Godhead." The word Tao means the way, the avenue, street, drive. Whatever term you want to use when the point of view in Taoism is that it doesn't really have a beginning or end. There is no brass ring at the end of the journey. There is no "boing gng", I got it." There is no ahhhh. It would be nice probably if it was, but Taoism is really not amenable to accomplishing that. There is no big enlightenment experience. The fact is that as one goes deeper and deeper into meditation one just simply gets involved in the essential nature of how things are. Stillness in essence and practical function becomes the guidepost when you start doing internal alchemy, you begin working with the channels of the body. You start changing things inside yourself. You genuinely work with the energy of the environment, of the sun and the stars, the earth, the five elements, and all these things which I am sure you have heard of. But when you sincerely start working on these things you start finding out that probably the most single difficult part is having genuinely to take responsibility for every single individual action you take internally and in the "red dust" of the world. From then on you really begin to practice. Especially when working in the middle and upper tan tiens there are three tan tiens we practice in Taoism all of the time. This has to do

with your body and it's the way of understanding, let's just shall say, what naturalness is through love. This is the work of the heart. Which has essentially to do with relationships. You to people, you to things, you to the earth, you to the stars, you to yourself. The heart practice in Taoism is very strong stuff. Then you have the upper tan tien practices which have to do with time and space, and literally going beyond time and space. As you start getting into the upper tan tien practices you start becoming aware that there is more going on than just here on earth. You start finding out that everything you are doing really doesn't matter because it does not exist long in the grand scheme of things and yet has profound temporary effects at the level of Qi. One starts having to take responsibility for ones actions. Everyone basically learns the hard way. Only the most lucky and evolved of human beings don't learn by the school of hard knocks. There is a thing called human limitations. That is what you start finding out about. Your spirit does not particularly have a limitation but your body and mind definitely do. Working with the three tan tiens of the body in the level of alchemy starts becoming very critical, working with the channels of energy in the body, and then working with the states of mind that go with it. The object now is that in the process of changing the body into spirit and moving the energies, something starts happening to your physical body. The cells start changing. Something changes. I don't really know quite how to describe this. You don't get the body of a normal human being. Your body starts molding into what your mind really wants. You gradually learn the genuine relationships between what is and is not conscious. The Taoists are a funny group in terms of ethics and morality. They genuinely don't believe that anything is good or evil. They are genuine in this point of view and do not use this philosophy to justify being a selfish, destructive fool. It's not a matter of "there being no good, or evil, so go ahead and steal or kill for my interest." They think the human morality system is all hog wash. Because when one starts becoming aware of spirit and emptiness, you slowly but surely start realizing that almost all the good and evils that you are aware of is based on and is being created by an immature human mind. Not necessarily your own. That's how societies stick together. The basic function of society is to keep people from starving and to keep the trains running on time. I don't think that anybody has ever tried to say that there has been a particularly enlightened or even sensible society that has ever existed for a terribly long period of time. What develops is a mentality of "I want my thoughts to win." Everybody has to fight, brood, and all of that. Bear in mind that the concept of democracy is totally alien in China. A very strange idea. Today different issues and events go on, different ideas of right and wrong simultaneously existing in different parts of the world. What has that got to do with essence, consciousness or the Tao? The Taoists always focus on what the essence of something is. What the essence of the situation is. Then they try to look at things in terms of practicality. So that as much harmony as possible can maintain its continuum in any situation.

The objective behind the fundamental driving core of Taoist morality is to start realizing the morality of the Tao. Or at least realize the morality of emptiness. This is very hard. Because if someone does this, they will become the most immensely moral human being you are going to meet. They will never do anything that is really silly. But then the Taoists are known to be pragmatic. Most people don't operate from that point of view. Even if they want to, it takes them a long time. They slip up every once in a while. My teacher Liu would go on about how at their spiritual core: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and actually even Islam (there are millions of Muslims in China), were the same. There is essentially no one point of morality that the Taoists take. Clearly there are Confucian Taoists and they will have lots of points of view about what's correct. The full sense of the basic root of Taoist morality is the golden rule, "do unto others as you will have them do unto you," given your level of awareness. If you don't want or are unwilling to accept something being done to you, don't do it to someone else. If you can actually see it would really be a good thing to have done to you, do it then. They don't have it as any sort of thou shalt and thou shalt not, because there really isn't any point to that, as this creates human morality which ultimately will pervert itself to satisfy self interest. Once you start moving at the level of spirit (especially when you move into the realm of emptiness) it becomes plain that rules, you must and you must not, you should and you should not, are usually created out of peoples hidden agendas. That is what politics are about. "I want you to do this", and if it really comes down to why they want people to do it, the motivation is that these people have finally ascended to their political position and they want to use that political position to satisfy their own self interest. They want you to do it their way because it is politically advantageous and lucrative. They will explain it in many ways with all sorts of euphemistic double talk. Ancient China had a tradition where the ideal was the sage king. Philosophically the ideal ruler was one who was highly spiritually developed and had no need or desire for secular power. This person had usually lived as a solitary hermit, cultivating the Tao until they had cleared out the internal blockages in their being. These sage kings acted from a spiritual point of view where their concern was for the people, the nation and its future and not for self interest and benefit. Historically over time when the emperor was not a true spiritual (son of heaven) China slipped into nepotism, dynasties declined and the people suffered. These are the things of man. These are things of immaturity. Taoist morality is about tapping into ones essence and slowly but surely working into what the essence of the situation is. Being practical with it. You can see why they have had a lot of problems with human morality in China where killing or torturing ones opponents has historically been considered to be a political modus operandi. America would be a solid Confucianist culture in Chinese terms. A Confucianist is not that different from a bible thumping Baptist. "If you do not do the proper thing in the proper place," they seriously contend that, you will: (a) go to hell; (b) should be ostracized by the entire community; (c) you should be damaged in some way. That is it. They will feel absolutely right about the damage they inflict. Sometimes they might be right, they may be right, they may be wrong. It is hard to say. It depends on the situation. Often the love, forgiveness, generosity, and redemption aspects of Jesus is given less then full attention.

This morality that gets developed is one that has to come from very deeply inside a person. The more one contacts essence, the more one has the experience in converting spirit into emptiness, the more moral one becomes. Taoists do not necessarily have any of the conventional moralities of any of the religions of the world, and yet they will start living to the very best of their ability like a Lao Tse, Buddha, or Jesus Christ. This realized way of life is the fruition of all spiritual practice. The Taoists achieve it by the methods I have described. In the water method it emerges naturally as obstructions to ones health at all levels and awareness are dissolved. In almost all the Taoist practices the major channel of energy being worked with is not terribly different in mechanics or structure from the yogic point of view, or the tantric point of view. Basically all it originates with the DNA helix. Putting it quite simply, when human beings are born the essential capacity of yin and yang, and that which is beyond both, is locked in. The central channel of energy in the body is that which is beyond yin and yang. The right and left channels of energy in the body are what are responsible for manifestation. As these two lines start moving together they cause their currents to spin throughout the whole body and make all sorts of interlinks we call energy channels. These interlinks, besides producing energy in many of the tan tiens, are places where Qi focuses. This is essentially where consciousness can be tapped into.That marks the shortcut, the route into the right place. This is one factor that is a great problem. The neo-Taoists are responsible for the obsession with energy channels for their own sake in terms of their ability to manifest power. The attitudes of "I want to live 200 years", "I want to live to be 1,000 years old", "I want to be able to fly", "I want to be able to leap over tall buildings with a single bound", "I want to have the power to have this, and this, and make this, and that, happen". The neo-Taoists tended to have a super fascination with fire, force, getting there, opening your channels, having powerful awareness of what they can do with the energy they are producing, and that kind of thing. That is what I did when I was younger. Believe me I am really aware of their point of view and spiritually it leads to a dead end. It does not make one spiritually free. What you have to realize about the major channels of energy in the body is that when you start moving into consciousness, when you actually start becoming aware of spirit and essence then it starts to emanate. As we know there is the romantic concept of love in the West. But everything being perfectly fine as it is, and truly as fine as it is defines the Taoist point of view on love. The opening of the energy channels of the body in meditation must be done so that genuinely your spirit can move to contact others, and contact other energies of whatever type you come across, internally or externally; about who should or should not have the opportunity to become aware of their essential nature in a fashion that causes them to live. In a fashion that causes them to grow. Just like the sun. Just like the moon. It is not an influenceable power. It is something that eventually comes, it is that which is opening up inside you. You then spread out through the rest of the rest your life and then into space beyond the earth. This complete openness to whatever situation comes up is very critical in the Taoist way of thinking.

There are numerous meditations in Taoism. The basic process of internal alchemy is initially done by feeling. You are going to feel energy. The Taoists believe that you can feel energy. The capacity for feeling is inherent to life in a heavy gravitational field, i.e. the earth. The Taoists believe that you can feel energy, only because you were born on the earth. A highly condensed energy field. Their opinion is that upon dying, you will still see and hear, but you won't feel anymore. Sight and sound are all you get when discorporal. Where you are right now is a seriously condensed energy field. This is your densest energy body of which the Taoists believe you have eight. Like the eight trigrams of the I Ching. At this level of density it is very important to become comfortable with your body. Your body is about feeling. The easiest way not to feel things is to literally disconnect from your body and go into your brain (i.e. get stuck in your head). This capacity to feel then moves into sound and visualizations later on. The Taoists have a very refined method of using mantras and sound. They also have many methods so that if one group of methods doesn't do it for you, don't bother, you can get the same result using a different practice. You can purely go through feeling. At the later stage in Taoist alchemy there are ways to do it primarily through visualization or through sound frequencies and feeling. In the end what they want is for all the external systems of the body to become completely alive internally. They take you through progressive trainings. In terms of what I have seen of the point of view and of energy as it manifests in the mind. The only tradition with an endpoint that is really coming from a similar place as Taoism is the Dzogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism (a practice integrated into the Nyingma and BonPo schools of Tibet which seeks a direct realization of one's innermost nature). It was not originated by the Buddhists. It was around even before Buddhism even showed up. The geographical area where Taoism was very active and the Dzog-chen tradition come from are very close. Tibetan Buddhism in general is the fire tradition all the way. There is very little in Tibet that is not fire tradition. That is their thing. No maybes about it. The Dzog-Chen Tradition is similar to Taoism but by Way of the fire method. Lao Tse's method was the water way. My teachers way was the water method. The gentleness and the letting things be when they get inside of you; a tremendous degree of deep relaxation, this is the Taoist way of doing things. It way of practice is not the same as the tantras. Many of the methods the Taoists use are not dramatically different in end result, it's just the way they go about it. They are much looser. The Taoist inner meditation tradition is not ritualistic. The water method tends to be a lot softer. But don't confuse softness with weakness. A tidal wave is pretty strong too. The whole method of letting everything just come together, with full effort and yet no strain is a real hallmark of the Taoist water tradition . The subject of going from emptiness to the Tao is one which must be directly transmitted to the student. No verbal or written explanation can suffice. Those sort of things have to be done directly from the teacher to the student. I should probably talk about the teacher student relationship in Taoism. In Taoism there are basically three ways the teacher student relationship is handled. If you are with one of the old ones consider yourself lucky. Lao Tse actually means is "old one." If you are actually with a person who is a full blown Taoist (my teacher Liu was one) you are with people who pretty much have mastered what is inside of them. The relationship

with the old ones is usually very quiet and immensely respectful. When people tend to get that old and they are nearing the end of their life, you don't want to be so rude as to disturb them. Grace and respect are imperative. That is the best way I can put it. The younger Taoists in the water tradition, who either are realized or not, tend to have the point of view, and the way in which they operate is that they don't really orient so heavily towards the master/disciple point of view in terms of external respect or guru worship but place great emphasis on the inner connection between the master and disciple. The neo-Taoists placed heavy influence on who was the teacher and who was the student. That relation was extremely binding in terms of required responsibilities and obligations between teacher and disciple. Most of the well known stories that are about Taoism have the people and the immortals in heaven bringing someone down to earth to do this and this and that. These stories are usually referring to the neo-Taoist tradition. In the water tradition of China there is the consideration that all are friends in the Tao.That respect is something which comes from deep inside a persons mind and heart. The outer show of it is not as big a deal. It is not immensely rigid and formal with all positions in the hierarchy being clear. In most religions, for example in India, if you don't know what a guru/disciple relationship is there is no need to worry, you will be told pretty quickly. You're going to get told what to do, how you should do it, how you shouldn't do it, and you get chastised if you do not behave accordingly. To a certain degree the same is true in the Buddhist Tradition. The Taoist tradition is one where they genuinely believe that the natural respect of the student towards the teacher has to come from the inside out. Most of the time if you don't give it to them they'll just shrug their shoulders. It's not much differently from the way a child will come up and do something silly. It's somebody else's kid and even though they come to you, it's ok, just go over there, hope you had fun, hope your mother takes you home soon. Seriously. There is no sense of force. With the Buddhists, the Sufi's, the Hindu's, and the Christian traditions there is a tremendous sense of what and how shall we behave to the lama, priest, guru, monk, and so on. The Taoists are a little more watery. Which also allows them to be quite a bit more human. If a person has genuinely decided that what they want to do is develop their essence, then they are now pointing in the direction where they will reach the end. Once genuine resolve to develop ones essence has been made, you will move until you get to the end of that road. I will put it this way, you will move until you are on the road. It doesn't matter what that person has to do to initiate this. Whether it takes a day, a week, a year, a million years, you are going to get on that road. The road is the Tao, the spiritual essence of a human being which is changeless and beyond influence. At the end of the day you are going to be on the road, and you will be with friends practicing the Tao together. Knowing that this bond of respect for the Tao exists in both of you Taoist masters tend to treat their students as friends rather than as underlings, even though at this point in time they are superior. Their spiritual point of view is very long term. You start from that position of spiritual evenhandedness and act accordingly. That is pretty much the way this teacher/student relationships goes. Unless you are with one of the old ones.

Then all I can say is if you come into someone like that, who is genuine, be very respectful, follow their lead and be happy to even be in the same room with them. Then what is inside of you. If they are not one of the old ones then it's a bit Like family members. Your brother can be a total jerk, but he's your brother. Or your sister does really stupid things and sometimes you want to throw her out, or tell her off, and you do sometimes. You may choose not to talk to them for years while they get their act together. Your brother hits you against the wall because he thinks you need it. Regardless of what happens, by the end of the day he is your brother, she is your sister, it is going to be all right. You are going to go through some nonsense but in the end you are still going to be brothers and sisters with whom you seek mutual respect, love, harmony and balance. This is the type of realization that can not come from formality, rather it is something that comes from inside. It is the nature of love. That is pretty much the basic substance in alchemy. The work from spirit to emptiness is fun, it's wild, it's interesting, it's intense. When one genuinely gets involved in meditation (this to be true of all traditions from what I have seen), once you really decide to get into it, it is a 24 hour a day involvement. It is like the famous Joe Lewis comment to Max Schnelling before their world championship boxing match, "There's no where to run, no where to hide." You have now made the decision to fully engage your life. Once you do that, you ultimately will spiritually end up fine. You also, shall we say, learn a few lessons along the way, both pleasant and unpleasant. Taking the bitter with the sweet goes with the territory. What happens after that is better not put in an article at this moment in time. I think those are things which should to be told to individuals when they have reached particular stages of practice. Not as intellectual information for the satisfaction of curiosity. All I can share with you is what I learned in Beijing with Liu Hung Chieh for a little bit over 3 years. In the Taoist tradition he adopted me as his son. In the three years I was with him he taught me all that he could. I wouldn't say I was a terribly bright student. As a matter of fact I was a total clod, but I did the best I could. As time goes on the spiritual process ripens and things happen. I think the Taoist traditions are as vibrant, practical and beneficial in today's modern world as they were thousands of years ago. They deal with the essential issues of spirituality in a beautiful way that is relevant and applicable in daily life and beyond mere theory. These practices have been proven by the test of time and have been perfected in some of the most sublime and arduous periods of human history. I sincerely hope I have done my best to introduce you to what I experienced and learned about Taoism during my ten years in China. Although I feel my capacity to communicate is only a faint shadow of what the late Master Liu Hung Chieh taught and what the depth and richness of Taoism has to share with the world. Bruce Kumar Frantzis began studying meditation almost thirty years ago and has practiced Zen Buddhist meditation in Japan, Tantric Kundalini meditation in India and Taoist Meditation in Hong Kong and Taiwan before studying in Beijing. His recently published book Opening The Energy Gates of the Body: Gaining Lifelong Vitality (The first ofThe Tao of Enhancement Series by B.K. Frantzis--Published by North

Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) is available in bookstores or by contacting Mr. Frantzis. He is currently finishing a BaGua book, and intends a fiuture book on Taoist Meditation Practices. An Interview by Sara Barchus QI THE JOURNAL OF TRADITIONAL EASTERN HEALTH & FITNESS Vol. 4, No. 3. Autumn 1994

Surfing the Tides of Change Everything changes. Every moment in time is unique unto itself. Every moment in time carries a shadow of the past and in many ways the future is nothing more than a projection of the past. What happened before is going to happen again, although in exactly what way is hard to predict. The nature of change is that you have to have the capacity for it. Whether you're trying to go from one chi gung movement to the next, from walking the ba gua circle to changing directions, going from one meditative state to another or going from one event in life to another, you must be able to change. Some people are afraid of change. Why? They are afraid because they're fixated on something. They're stuck in what happened in their childhood; they're stuck in good or bad experiences they had; they're stuck because they read something in a book and somehow created a mental picture in their mind that this or that should be a particular way; or perhaps they're stuck because they have been influenced and captured by psychic forces that exist. People can get stuck and become fixated for 10,000 reasons. Since for many people the biggest fear they have in life is change—they can't or won't—the primary focus of living the I Ching is the consideration of change. First and foremost is that you have to somehow arrive at the ability to move past being stuck so you can "flow." Second is that most of us take all appearances as reality; we see an object and we think it's solid, although physicists tell us that this is not the case, that matter is actually nothing more than a bunch of fluxing quantum particles. Yet we take everything we see as solid. We take the idea that I'm here as solid. We take the idea that you're here as solid, what we did as solid—as if it all exists. Well, wait a second—what is here is just coming together because of a specific mix of times, places and conditions. Oh, so you think you've seen the most beautiful man/woman in the world. Excuse me, have a look at him/her 75 years later and see if you still think so. He/she didn't go anywhere but changed occurred, his/her body and face changed. Take a person who you consider as the sweetest person in the world, and put him/her under the most horrific circumstances and he/she might turn into the nastiest individual you're ever going to meet. Change happens. Equally take a person who's the nastiest person in the world, let him/her engage in enough meditation, for example, and he/she can turn into the nicest person in the world. So, what ultimately allows this change to happen, stabilize and become somewhat continuous? Somewhere amongst all this change there is something that doesn't change, there is permanence—a permanence that carries no shadow. The ability to let go of where you're fixated and be able to be present to what is always there is what allows change. To understand

the flow between what changes and the permanence is the first real big step to dealing with change. A popular statement is that life is a living I Ching, but what does that mean? Simply that everything is constantly changing. A conservative may have a fear of change, a liberal may have a fear that things aren't going to change the way they want. Everybody's got a fear of change. To get past that fear you have to somehow move into the realm of emptiness, otherwise you can't stop resisting change and you will continue to become stuck in various ways time and again. If you think something is you're going to have a really hard time flowing through it. You get stuck on what you think or feel about it. The next step in truly living the I Ching is the capacity to recognize the energies that are at play in a situation. Sometimes the energies at play allow everything to go incredibly well. Sometimes the energies at play don't care what you do because no matter what you do it's going to be a mess. In my last newsletter I talked about the fact that the warrior spirit enables us to accept that a certain amount of luck is involved in everything. In the case of a spiritual warrior, he/she neither assigns too much credit nor excessive blame to him/herself or others for successes and failures. Humility arises when we acknowledge that we do not have all of the answers. As a result two people can have the same talents and abilities, yet one will become incredibly successful while the other can never achieve anything more than a minimal life. For fun, let's say you had two brilliant people in the field of computers. Let's assume the successful person is Bill Gates. Both people had the same intelligence, same talents and so on, but Bill Gates was consistently in the right place, at the right change, at the right time. Many variables had to come together in order for the changes that occurred to happen—events that were bigger than anything in Bill's life. Of course he'd love to take complete credit for his wild success as many in his position might. He walked in the right door at the right time and got this or that contract. He could have just as easily, at a critical juncture, had an important company refuse to buy his product, or had a boss who decided to cut everybody from their jobs leaving him unemployed for a year without any forewarning. Then again, some of the dumbest most unintelligent people in the world have walked into gold mines and oil fields. In Bill's case it all worked out. You could say it was the old Asian phrase that was made famous in the book Tai Pan, "His joss mighty good," which means he was lucky. In the midst of all the moving and changing, the question is: Can you go into that empty space in the middle of the I Ching and recognize, without getting too upset regardless of the outcome, that whatever the changes are, they're just a play of the energies in the universe? You must continue forward, do what you can and not allow yourself to become stuck. How it all works out is the living I Ching where you can go deeply into the energies of the trigrams that comprise it, all of which are real flows that can and do happen in life. In this way you can begin to understand how energies move and the permanence of emptiness from which everything is derived. At the end of the road you free yourself and that's truly the living I Ching—it's about the way life really happens. Then the questions become: Can you recognize the subtlety of the energies? Do you have the capacity to recognize the emptiness? Do you have the perseverance, the warrior spirit, necessary to go through what it takes? If you do life is easier and if you don't life can be harder. Two people in the exact same circumstances can see things very differently. The first can respond to unexpected difficulties with "Oh well, what are you going to do?" and dust their

shoulders off to give things a go again. While another person can spend the next 20 years of his life tearing himself up, hating everybody and everything because his expectations weren't met. He has become fixated and can't change in the way the universe is changing, whereas the first person is able to change with the universe. This is not to say that downstream things will always go better for the first person who-he may have something even worse happen to him. However, what you can say is that he has internal freedom. All anyone can possibly do is the best they can. You may be better at a given skill than anybody in the world at a particular moment in time. However, given the way things change, at a different moment in time you could just as easily not be the best. In the martial arts game, for example, people like to compare one opponent to another and then assume that the one that seems to have absolute confidence will beat the other. Well, what about all the times someone had absolute confidence and lost? If everyone always hit the jackpot every time they felt they would, well, frankly speaking, a lot of people could be as rich as Bill Gates. In fighting you might be capable of beating every person in a given competition and clearly be better than every one of them, yet at a moment in time an energy can come up and for some reason your key doesn't fit in the lock. Whatever it is, something happens, all of a sudden the stars shine on your opponent. Something can activate inside him or her bringing things together-that person wins and you lose. Maybe it's true that the next five million times you would beat him every single time, but not this time. And so the I Ching churns. In the West, if things work out and everything goes well, we follow it up with "I'm the best,"—blah, blah, blah. Well, okay, but is it really true? It could be that changes having nothing to do with you led to the victory. Then again, if you take an Eastern approach of karma, you could potentially live thousands of lifetimes. Thus it might just be that in this life you have the spotlight that illuminates everything around you with easy success, but equally you can go through thousands of lives where this is just not the case. So all you can say is that events happen in life, regardless of whether or not you stress out, flip out and obsessively try to make things happen the way you want. However, if you don't prepare and opportunity comes along, then you probably won't be able to use it. Then again, that doesn't mean that if you are prepared in every way that opportunity is going to knock. In terms of the I Ching, the whole point of living life is not about wining or losing, even though a lot of people believe that's all their lives are about. The Chinese would call this an overemphasis on saving or having face. My teacher Liu once said something that I've never forgotten because it shifted my entire view of life. After something happened to me, I expressed to him that it would have been better if I had won. He advised me to make a choice right at that moment between one of two things. He said: "You can have face or you can be happy." He explained that I was going to make this choice millions of times in my life, so I had better know which I wanted. You might have heard the phrase "Be careful what you wish for because you just might just get it." When most think "I want this," it usually is in terms of one single point, but what about the 10,000 things that are connected to it? It's equally possible that getting what you thought you had wanted might make your life completely miserable. So there are these different shades of grey that come in different directions around these subjects. The living I Ching is simply to learn to first become comfortable with change and later to learn how the energies are evolving so you optimize your ability to flow with them.

It's also to recognize what matters and what doesn't. The Chinese have two great phrases: one is called wu suo wei, meaning it's neither here nor there; the other is yo suo wei, meaning it's important. Not too many things in life are important. So maybe you don't get what you wanted, but then again so what? The sky didn't fall, the earthquake didn't shake down your house, Martians didn't land and eat everybody. Now we begin to see the many ways people get fixated. Ultimately there is no freedom, no genuine happiness while there is fixation. As you rid yourself of fixations and begin seeing the nature of how fixations work, you can surf the tides of change to the best of your ability. Sometimes a situation can be surfed well, equally, at other times there may no way to do so. We simply have to accept that the best we can hope to do is try to surf with the least amount of grief. This is the living I Ching. At the end of the day, who has anything besides their life? Are your possessions your life? Is your bank account your life? Is your life the praise everybody does or does not give you? There is something inside you that is free, that is not dependent on your external circumstances, which are nothing more than changes. Everything in the external world is about changes. A rock in a sandstorm turns to dust; the dust moves around and turns into dirt; a tree springs from the dirt; the wood from the tree goes away and turns into water. Everything is constantly one thing morphing into another. You might only see what it is at one point in time rather than all its changes in the grand scheme of things. If you look at the nature of change, which causes a lot of people's fears—whatever they may be—you reach a point where you can flow through all the changes of life. You begin to recognize the space that's free in the middle. Most fears simply vanish. So, you do the best you can and you can't ask more of yourself, and that's all there is to it. What you will find is a sense of the universality that pervades everything—something which is ultimately and absolutely critical for a genuine sense of compassion to arise. Real compassion is not dependent on any circumstance. Christians say, "Jesus and everything is love," Buddhists say, "Compassion and wisdom are one" and Taoists say, "Everything furthers." This is a very fundamental point in terms of the I Ching, for truly living and experiencing your life. It all boils down to this: How much do you want to learn and how skilled do you want to become, uh?

Surviving Modern Life with the Warrior Spirit Many people talk about "peaceful warriors" to the point that it has become a cliché, not to mention an oxymoron because war is not peaceful. If you are a real warrior, in the classic sense of the word, it means that you're going to have to go out and fight, beat people up, kill them and be involved in war. Now for most people this is terribly unrealistic and not something they want to do. As a matter of fact the majority of people who have to go through war really wish they hadn't. That said if you want to be a spiritual warrior, at least from an Eastern point of view, you are someone who will fight every battle that has to be won until you become enlightened, giving no quarter to anything inside you that prevents you from persevering. It's a fairly courageous act and one that, frankly speaking, most people haven't got the guts to tackle. The idea is really great. Everyone loves the concept and it's not that the concept isn't wonderful, but actually doing it is rough.

If we look at some of the qualities that warriors have, the first is perseverance through hardship. They seek to win a war knowing there are going to be many battles and they do not make excuses for failure. In the face of defeat they simply state the facts as "I did my best and we lost" without trying to justify their actions. They must stoically and objectively assess what did not happen that needed to so that in the next battle people remain alive rather than die. They have to be capable of and willing to see things for what they are. They have to be realistic-not crying into their beer when they lose nor jumping up and down after winning. Well, except maybe for a day or so to blow off some of the pressure, but warriors don't kid themselves that winning a battle is winning the war-not if they're going to stay in the military, not if they're going to be a soldier in any time or place in history. Only in the rarest of occasions do warriors always win. Most lose some battles and when that time happens there is a great tendency to fall down, to internally disintegrate and to find themselves in direct conflict with how they thought they were wonderful, magical and godlike. They must come to the realization that they are human and human beings don't always get it right. True warriors actually have to do their best to get it right even if it means going back to completing an unfinished and, often times, undesirable deed. In war the biggest concern of the average soldier-not the high-ranking generals, not the politicians who order them but the warriors themselves-is just to get through the chaos alive and intact. Conversely, in sports and business everybody jumps about and pounds their chests with shouts of "We won!" and then the rewards are passed out. If you want to talk about competition and winning, then it is fair to say that warriors have the spirit to win. It's what they do. If you're on a battlefield, whether fighting with guns, swords, bows, arrows or by hand there is no person who wants to lose. Dying or being maimed for the rest of your life is not a wonderful option, so you want to win. On one level, embodying the warrior spirit is useful because in daily life we have to compete, make money, and if we always lose then we end up with less and the trials of daily living become dramatically harder. However, you can't get too carried away with your expectations and complexes about how responsible you are for what happens because at the end of the day no one knows how much they're going to win or how much they're going to lose. People with equivalent talent, intelligence, ingenuity and creativity don't always have the same luck-some end up being incredibly successful while others are not. All warriors know that there is a certain amount of luck involved in everything and so the seeds of genuine humility are sewn. They're not humble because they should be rather because they have the realization that thinking or believing they have all the answers is terribly unrealistic. Not everything will go your way and when it does it's usually not all about your good actions. Likewise, nobody who fights in real wars glorifies the victory. The hero mentality is best saved for competitions-the mat, field, track, rink, ring, octagon, and even the high-rise building-but not for the battlefield. Real wars are not about duels as portrayed in westerns or duels between two samurais. There are thousands of people on the battlefield and you can get hit by an arrow from behind while fighting the man in front of you. Recognizing this possibility and the skills needed to get through it alive are very valuable metaphors for the way in which we approach life: making money, becoming accomplished or winning competitions of any kind. Equally, soldiers are known for having very close relationships with one another. They have to deal with the immense grief of losing people and it has been said that the friends you make

in the middle of war are friends you keep for life. In fact, they often become the strongest relationships warriors have, stronger than the ones they have with their wives/husbands, girlfriends/boyfriends, family members and other friends because the bonding comes from what you could call the ultimate pressure. They carry forward with disparity all around them yet are able to appreciate the delicate balance inherent to the human condition. If the person next to you doesn't cover your butt, you're dead. If you have the attitude that you're so great that everything is going to work out just fine, you might not be around long enough to take that self-delusion any further. Good warriors accept human frailty because in war you see human frailty all the time. Good warriors also accept human courage because in war you frequently see tremendous human courage. What comes with that is the ability to carry the baggage-self-sacrifice-for those who could not carry it for themselves without dismissing the people who lack the courage. With humility all genuine warriors take incredible risks while carefully examining whether any risk makes sense. In war you're up against a whole army, so any move can be fatal. Yet if you don't take some calculated risks you're absolutely going to be filleted for breakfast. The warrior spirit rises above the natural tendency to internally disintegrate, the "Oh my god!" and the wishing for death out of exhaustion, fear and grief. The warrior must be ready to fight when the next battle presents itself. For most of us, this spirit is immensely valuable both in terms of the joyous and the horrible events of life. Warriors have the ability to catch and find happiness at any moment because in war you might only get a few hours a month where you really can be happy. If it's there to be had you take it and you learn how to take it. Many people in life have every reason to be happy, most everything is going their way and yet their own internal world is so unwarriorspirit-like that they can't even enjoy what's right in front of them. Many of the people who rise up to the top and become successful at anything-business, sports, politics-have usually gone through trials and tribulations. The difference is that businessmen might lose their money, married couples may divorce or the star batter may strike out, but not too many of them lost their arms, legs or eyes over it. The warrior spirit enables us to get past even the most tragic and desperate events. You can witness this spirit in some of the kids coming back from the war in Iraq. The news covers fatalities, but there are boatloads of others who have been seriously injured. Modern technology allows us to triage in a way incomprehensible 30 years ago. We see a lot more soldiers with artificial limbs, bound in wheelchairs, blind and so on, banding together to participate in marathons and getting involved in all kinds of competitive challenges. It's the indomitable warrior spirit that goes forward. This quality is very sadly lacking in civilian society. Many people just don't have the kind of grit needed to pick themselves off the floor when everything seems to have gone wrong. The spirit of a warrior can be summed up in two simple words: humility and courage, real courage. The ability to have genuine perseverance that breeds courage under the hardest of circumstances is the warrior spirit, which can be embodied by any of us who are up for the challenge.

For Love of the Game or Ego? We currently live in an extremely over-marketed society and you could sum up marketing at one level as getting people excited about a given benefit followed by affirmations - accurate or not - that they have achieved the benefit. Suddenly, they have bragging rights along with an identity based upon the benefit. However, this process is not what drives people who really want to achieve excellence in any field, subject or sport. Only a very small number of people will do things purely because they will get brownie points, the prestigious title or acknowledgement of some form. When you consider anything that has to do with meditation, or self-cultivation at any level, the idea that you're ever going to get something is blatantly false. And, you cannot reach a high level of excellence unless you are doing what you do because you like the journey. You actually have to like the roads on which you must travel. Now, some people can just get in - they want to win a marathon so they push themselves to run 26 miles and constantly train. But what is rarely acknowledged is that few can really take running to its heights unless they actually like running - they get some degree of joy from it. This goes much further when you talk about chi work. A lot of what is involved with chi work is going to take you through very long plateaus to where you are never going to have any idea about whether you're progressing and this process could become mundane. Let's say you want to build a large, well-run economy. Most people who are working on building a road have no sense of where that road will go - all the transportation and movement that can occur because of it. However, the development of an entire region is possible once that road is complete; the nature of chi work is a bit like building a road. Most of us have distinct growth spurts when we feel like good results are happening. We think: "Wow! I'm really getting it." You're inside and you feel as though you're being opened up step by step. You have effectively arrived at a point where you've bulldozed enough to see a furrow as to where a road is going to be laid down. But, then, you find that you go through a very, very, very long period from when that furrow in the ground was visible until it's actually black topped or cemented, and there's a lot of work that occurs in between. The work is invisible; it's not glamorous; it's not glorious; and a lot of people say they get bored. Well, if you get bored it's because you're looking for the goal, you're looking to have the road finished so you can beat your chest like Tarzan or sit with your knitting needle remarking, "Isn't this a beautiful quilt?!" You want something for show. You see, the point from which that hole is visible in the ground to putting black top over it is a lot work. When this moment in time arrives, you really have to love your game because you don't know how long it's going to last. It could happen that it takes very little time, but you just have no way of knowing. So it becomes very important that the act of delving deeper inside yourself and fixing and developing all the little things that don't have the dramatic glory to them, but without which you never fill in that road, are given proper consideration and time. The nature of going from a plateau to all of a sudden having a period of "Wow! Eureka! I got it!" is that you get excited because everything is happening. In the time that seemed to be

boring you were building your internal infrastructure, upgrading your internal workings, fundamentally changing what was weak inside of you to becoming stronger. Essentially you were changing the way your chi was ambiguous to setting all the conditions so it could become clear. If you are meditating, eventually you could take the murkiness of your mind and go from that furrow in the ground and construct a paved road. When the road is done, well, you can now start driving trucks over it - you start developing. And, here again, you go through another period of, "Wow! These amazing events are happening!" until effectively you arrive at the point where you need another road. You are back to working on the infrastructure. All of the awe-inspiring moments are going to cease if you do not go through the plateau periods which are not glorious or glamorous. At this stage of the game, it is your infrastructure, the work that seems to be boring that is actually setting you up for future development. If you have the first floor of a building, it's setting the stage for the second floor. Of course, each time a floor is complete it's a great event because you're reaching another level. So you push, become re-enthused, recharged because a whole new vista is in sight and your inner world opens up. Although before the second floor is actually built, you're in the same position as if you had a hole in the ground - you've got to go through the hard work to actually construct the road. Plateau points make the difference between whether you will break through to a low, middle or high level of accomplishment. During this phase, virtually nobody can just say, "Well, I have to keep practicing if I'm going to end up at the other end." This is especially true in an over-marketed, stressed out, instant-gratification society. So, the question arises: What makes people capable of persevering? And, you're not going through a plateau phase once with chi work - you'll go through them many, many, many times, depending upon the level to which you aspire. The answer is quite simple and it's not about the hype and need for yet another identity. The fact is that you actually must enjoy the game. In this case, you actually love doing whatever chi practice you're doing. You love getting into your energy - rooting and finding out that which is not working inside you, the places in your mind that are mucked up, the places in your energy that are blocked - an enjoyable or at least worthwhile process in itself. Michael Jordan was originally cut from his high school basketball team. Now he clearly must have had within him the ability to be an insanely gifted natural athlete although he didn't have what it took to be on his high school basketball team. His playing ability is one aspect, but more than that he didn't have the ability to really go inside himself and dredge out what was in there. So he practiced basketball: throwing baskets, dribbling up and down the court and all the other fundamentals. Only a gross egomaniac could keep on doing that for six to eight hours a day, every day after school for a year just on the basis that he wanted to get back on the team. Michael Jordan knew he liked basketball - it's doubtful that a kid in his position could foresee becoming a mega NBA player. He just liked basketball and he really wanted to play, so he got into what the game was: the dribbling, throwing balls one after another, fakes and the movements you have to do on the court. There was no guaranteed outcome - he simply got into the intrinsic nature of the activity he loved.

For Love of the Game or Ego? Part 2 Not everyone wants to learn about chi and not everyone wants to learn to meditate. I asked my teacher why he didn't teach meditation and he replied that most people don't want to learn it. In later conversations he explained that it has a lot to do with the fact that most people can't get into what meditation is and just forget about where they're going to end up. You know if you are building a road that, if you keep at it, one day the road is going to be completed. However, maybe you need to think about the kind of work force you have. What kind of machines do you have? Did it rain so no one could come and work for a while? Or, did you get slowed down because the heat got up to 120 degrees outside in the Arizona desert? You know you'll have a road, but you can't necessarily know how long it will take to construct. The considerations for meditation really are no different. Can you have a long view? And, can you actually enjoy-become completely absorbed intomoving each little piece of dirt around, shoring up whatever is necessary so that the ground underneath doesn't collapse? It's not always sexy stuff pouring concrete; it's not always glamorous making sure you get all the rebar placed properly; it's not always exciting handling all of the tiny details. Yet it's the little things that will eventually help to create a stable foundation for your road. Now, unlike the construction workers building roads, meditation work is not something that you're getting "paid" to do and, in our culture people will do virtually anything if they get paid even if they hate it the whole time. You need money to live, but when it comes to doing something on your own free time there has to be an intrinsic interest in it. When it comes to meditation, you'll have to find some love in being in your inner world and feeling the chi of your body, the way your body works, the way your mind works, the way energy flows inside you and the ways in which your psychic capacities and karma manifest. If you're genuinely interested in meditation, as opposed to getting high as you release all sorts of neurotransmitters in your brain, you will enable yourself to hit bliss states every once in a while. Maybe some people are willing to do a lot of meditation work and continuously practice simply for an incredible sense of happiness and bliss. However infrequent these peak experiences, it's still about getting psychic heroin though. And, that still doesn't get you anywhere because you're missing all the other nuances needed to construct a solid road. Each minute detail contributes to the strength of your road and whether only a kid's wagon or a 50100 ton truck with who knows what loaded on it can go across. You set the stage for what becomes possible to open up inside you in each previous phase. When I was learning people would ask me, "How in God's name, as a 19-year old, can you practice chi gung/qigong and tai chi for six hours a day on your own without anybody watching you, inspiring you, goading you on, giving you brownie points, telling you how wonderful you are or how to practice?" I had a vague idea of where I was going. It became obvious that what I needed to do was to keep looking for that which didn't allow me to practice, as well as that which allowed me to practice. First I started to become reasonably flexible. Next, I went for actually doing movements while internally connected. When I began doing Cloud Hands, for example, I wasn't really moving much more than three or four inches off my center line in either direction. I wasn't turning my waist to 45 degrees and definitely not turning to the back, which I was able to do eventually. I

started looking at every single component as I moved. I could feel this or that as being tense and think, "Hey, I gotta relax. Wow! I can feel this is disconnected." I only got as far as, "It would be nice if I were connected; it would be nice if I weren't tense. I want to be relaxed; I'm clearly not." I just kept going. It felt amazing to be connected rather than disconnected when I finally got there, but I had to go through quite a bit of practice before I could actually get what it felt like to be connected versus disconnected. I never did a six hour practice session. I kept doing an endlessly repeating series of one minute practice sessions. I would go to one side and it was a whole new ballgame from the other side. If I did a swing or a tai chi move, every single time I finished a little piece, I knew the variables were going to change because my insides were changing. Every time I went further downstream, weaknesses would present themselves even though they did not always show up on the surface. They would just kind of come up. When you're remodeling a house, you don't always see rotten wood until you go up in the attic, or maybe down in the basement. You actually have to start looking inside the walls until, "Oh, my God, half of this place has been eaten by termites!" My remedy was to take practicing moment by moment, minute by minute. I used to end up having my arms in the air for six hours at a time. Actually they would go up and they would go down and they couldn't always stay up the whole time. Most of the time, however, they were up and I wasn't standing there with the idea, "I'm going to stand here for six hours." It was a minute-by-minute proposition. What's going on now? What's changing? What opportunity do I have to get the show on the road? I don't know what's going to happen a thousand years from now, but I know what's going to happen this next minute because I'm living through it. I love my game. You've got to love your game.

For Love of the Game or Ego? Part 3 You say you practice tai chi. When my children were younger and every time I would come back from Europe, I'd always bring home a collection of coins from any country I visited. My youngest son would take the coins and mush them around, throw them up in the air and shout, "Money, money, money!" Now, to someone who was three years old, that was money. At most all of it together was maybe two bucks. Take a person making $20,000 a year and having money means making $100,000 a year income. Go to someone making $100,000 a year income and money is having a million or five million dollars a year. It's all terribly relative. So you can do tai chi, but are you really into the game of it? If you are, you don't really care about people's external validation because you're living it. You're practicing. It's happening inside your mind and your body, every day, minute by minute. The things mucking up, or even upgrading your mind and body, have to do with your subjective experience. What someone else says is wonderful or poor doesn't much matter. People who know nothing about tai chi might say, "Wow, your movements are so beautiful" when the person they're looking at is more likely than not doing tai chi at a very basic level. On the other hand, you might see someone who does tai chi really well, he seems to have

something special about him, yet someone else can't make any distinction between this person and a beginner. And, you're depending upon the validation of other people? Instead of taking someone else as a hero, why not make your own life heroic? Likewise, you don't do it so you can beat your chest like Tarzan, "Look where I'm at!" I've noticed that the people who really get into chi work don't focus on where they've gotten. They look more for what's missing. They don't obsess about what they can do because they're constantly searching for the possibility of being completely connected. When they notice they aren't connected, they're always asking, "What's missing?" And, if you get into meditation, you're never going to get bored and all puffed up over your "self-promotion." Marketers will try to sell you this soap, computer or car. And, if you buy that soap, computer or car, you will be happy-you will effectively have this identity or that. But, soap is soap, the computer is a computer and a car is just a car. Loving the game-not the ego's antidotes-is inherent in meditation work. Looking for what you can tell someone you can do or bragging about some mark of accomplishment will not take you to an understanding of the depths of your being. Meditation might. Markers of accomplishment will help drive you forward a bit, but what really drives people forward is that they actually want to understand the nature of the activity they're doing. You have to be in it for the game. Do you think any scientist who receives the Nobel Prize did their research for only the recognition? It might be that they get very competitive, but most scientists who do serious research love the process. When you really get into something you love, it gives you back more of yourself. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter what the particular context of it is. For some people it's playing with numbers, for others it's walking up and down mountains, dancing, tai chi or meditating. You don't concede when everything isn't great. If you have a very old house and you decide to remodel it, every single time you open up a floorboard you might see immense potential and yet at the moment it might be an absolute wreck. I can tell you from experience that doing inner work is quite a bit different from doing things in the external world where you are continuously prodded forward by validations. When you're doing work purely affecting you on an inner level, you have to be in it for love of the game. At every new stage another layer is opened up to you, and you open to yourself.

Bones of the All The phrase “bones of the all” in the Tao Te Ching is sometimes referred to as meaning something old or ancient, but the true meaning is that all and everything is in the earth. Taoists hold the position that the earth is a living entity with a consciousness of its own. Just as you have a consciousness, so does the earth. And just as what is most active in your body changes from day to day, the earth also changes. You have the choice to link with any living being. But what is meant by “linking”? When you go internally, it’s your consciousness that feels inside your body. The way in which anyone can clearly feel inside their brains or bone marrow, for example, is through their consciousness.

Now your consciousness has many interesting qualities. You can feel inside your body by linking with your body, by somehow focusing on, joining with and becoming one with it. Eventually you become aware, in tandem with your body and do whatever it is you’re trying to do. Likewise you can link with an animal, a tree, a human—even the earth. The earth is a funny creature, but it’s no different than a human being or an animal. If you pay attention to and put your energy into one particular human being, that person will respond. Likewise, if that human being does not get attention from any other human beings, he/she will not respond and very often becomes ill or goes crazy. The strongest example of this is babies who are never touched and die of crib death. They die from not having any real human contact. Now if you consider very powerful relationships, there’s always one thing about them— regardless of sex or even the nature of the relationship itself. It’s the ability to just sit together and somehow fulfill each other. For many marriages the biggest single factor that holds it together is that when the partners lie together they are fulfilled. What happens is that each person settles into the energy of the other—each person’s energy flows into the other’s energy. Women are usually aware of this more than men. Making love is not just in the action, it is in the energy flow. And, at the end of the day, that is what people really remember, or at least that’s what holds people together for long periods of time. The earth is no different. Equally, the earth responds to the tension of human beings. The earth doesn’t need us, we need it. All the people on the earth could die, but our relationship with the earth intrinsically has to do with the fact that we pay attention to it. If you use the earth’s energy to rejuvenate you and while you do that, you somehow have the feeling of what is coming into you, then this is a mutually beneficial relationship. I recommend people do this for a simple reason: otherwise the earth might decide to get rid of us just as a dog doesn’t need fleas, but tolerates them. Some people can make contact with the earth and dissolve the energy inside themselves. To a certain degree you will not be able to know if what you are dissolving is yours or if it’s some pain the earth is having. And, it actually doesn’t matter because as one goes the other will go too. It will not be one, it will not be the other; it will be both. It is like when two people sit in a room or when your cat or dog sits next to you and it’s just quiet. You’re just being. You can do the same with the earth. You can use its energy. And, if you care about the earth, you can also help the earth by what you’re doing with your awareness and intent. To start you have to link to the energy in the earth. The mountains are the easiest place to link with the energy of the earth, much more than flatlands. For example, in China many people practice in front of trees so they can link with them. The energies of the different layers of the tree activate the energy layers in their body. All you have to do is simply stand, sit or lie down in nature, close your eyes for about 20 minutes and let your mind go very, very quiet. Then, when your mind is finally still, do your best to link with the earth. Leave your own body out of it and go into the layers of the earth. A little appreciation for the bones of the all truly can go a long way.

The Impact of Words Most of us have heard the phrase: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Yet in the modern age being politically correct has come to a point where society responds to words as if someone where throwing stones at them. You’re likely to offend someone with just about anything you say. Maybe you’re even one of the people who regularly get offended by words. Surely the toll it takes on your body is hardly worth it. So why is it that we get so worked up over words? When someone has a physiological reaction to a word or set of words it’s mostly the result of conditioning. Words can serve as weapons, causing a series of neuropeptides, modulators in the nervous system and hormones in the endocrine system, to be released. This creates feelings that your mind has been conditioned to label as wrong or crazy behavior in the external world. You can’t sort it out and so you go nuts. It’s no different than when people meditate and get sensations of sadness, fear or anger inside themselves and then think meditation is what makes them feel lousy. When you meditate, the way in which conditioning manifests is a funny thing in that it can come not only from societal affirmation or societal condemnation, but also from your own internal world. When I teach meditation I try to help my students see that these manifestations are all just a bunch of sensations. The truth of the matter is not that words will never hurt you rather that internal sensations will never hurt you. Words don’t really harm you, but your brain and entire biochemistry for that matter have been conditioned to respond in a particular manner and create various sensations. Very commonly, conditioning is attached to stress because when your body feels under attack, eventually you produce cortisol and other stressrelated hormones. The effect words have on us goes a lot deeper when you consider the karma you’re carrying. In one sense conditioning is only surface-level. Karma predisposes you not so much to the words themselves, but to the bound energy that could lie behind those words. One person may not carry the karma that lies behind specific words, so one set of words doesn’t affect them while another person does carry the karma that lies behind these specific words and he’s off to the races—going crazy. So, words can activate inside you beyond just conditioning alone and that’s what the Dissolving process is meant to address. You resolve what doesn’t work in the linking between words and your reaction to them. If you want to find out about the energy behind words, or if you want to find out what they are attached to, you can make it an agenda for your meditation practice. Maybe you see a beautiful woman and you compliment her, but she happens to be an arch feminist who finds you to be patronizing. You can’t know how your good or bad intentions will be taken by another person. The main point is to clear out energy blockages within yourself, so at least you’re not feeding off other people and creating more karma. Words trigger expectations, which are locked in a dance with all your neuropeptides that also get locked in a dance with karma. The only difference is that with karma, an expectation is either a projected or an actual habit. The expectations you project are either what you want to be a habit or an established habit. If you’re projecting, maybe you expect to get slapped in the face. It’s an expectation. If you’ve been slapped in the face from an abuser over a period of time, however, you actually take the hit—it’s an established habit. Yet the fear of fear itself is often worse than the act of that

which you are afraid. So, conditioning and karma dance with each other and, at some point, if you can release your attachments you will be free from both. You have to fully acknowledge your expectations and attachments, rather than trying to be perfect or good while you’re doing it. Accept what is and be done with it.

Tai Chi for Lifelong Health--The Perfect Exercise Most of the estimated seven million Americans who practice the ancient art of tai chi do so not for self-defense, but for health reasons. Western medical research studies are beginning to confirm what hundreds of millions of practitioners of tai chi have experienced for themselves: tai chi helps them improve their health, reduce their stress and combat the negative effects of aging. Tai chi is often called the elixir of life because it helps the body and mind to regain its youthfulness and life-affirming vigor. Time magazine has called it the "Perfect Exercise." Tai Chi is the Opposite of Aerobics Rather than asking you to rev up, tai chi teaches you to rev down. Although its slow moving, graceful movements look more like meditation, tai chi is a potent self-healing practice. This is good news for people who need a low-impact exercise that is easy on the joints, can be done with low back or other chronic pain and does not challenge their balance. People who suffer from disabilities and impaired lung function that preclude strenuous exercise love tai chi's gentle movements. According to the Mayo Clinic, tai chi is generally safe for people of all ages and levels of fitness. Tai chi is also perfect for people who are clinically obese or challenged by other physical impediments and do not want to feel embarrassed in exercise classes filled with fit and beautiful bodies. Chi is Life-Force Energy Tai chi is based on a 3000-year-old system that works with the invisible forces of chi or lifeforce energy within your body. If chi is flowing freely, in a balanced manner throughout the body, you will have good health. If your chi becomes blocked stagnant or unbalanced in some manner, tension, discomfort and illness will follow. This principle is the foundation of Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture. Tai chi, like acupuncture, balances chi within your body. Western Health Studies Show Tai Chi Has Many Beneficial Health Effects Researchers from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, MA, found 47 formal studies presenting the beneficial health effects of tai chi. Some studies showed that tai chi improved functioning in the heart, blood vessels and lungs among healthy people as well as those with heart conditions, including patients who have had coronary artery bypass surgery. Other studies showed that tai chi helped reduce pain, stress and anxiety and improve memory, concentration and digestion. Still others demonstrated that tai chi helped seniors improve balance and functioning for normal daily activities. Relief from Arthritis "Oh, my aching joints," is a common sigh among arthritis sufferers. By 2020, an estimated 60 million Americans will be afflicted by arthritis and more than 11 million disabled. But statistics do little to mitigate the large amount of suffering.

Two significant medical studies have been undertaken: one in the United States, one in Australia, showing that practicing tai chi provides relief from arthritis. These studies were widely publicized by the Arthritis Foundation of Australia, which now officially recommends tai chi as an effective alternative therapy. Tai chi's movements increase the range of motion and improve the flexibility of the joints, strengthen the flow of fluid inside the joints and strengthen the muscles surrounding arthritic joints and improving flexibility. Help for Cancer Patients Two studies help confirm what tai chi practitioners have already experienced: tai chi boosts their immune systems and helps them resist illness. And, if an illness like cancer does strike, tai chi helps mitigate the effects of chemotherapy and radiation and calms their fears. Interestingly, a study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles found that people who practiced tai chi for 45 minutes a day experienced up to a 50 percent increase in their immune system memory T-cells, which boost immunity to many diseases, including cancer. The study also found that tai chi helped reduce the chronic stress and anxiety that accompanies cancer. Tai Chi Lowers Blood Pressure A Western clinical study, done by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, showed that tai chi lowers blood pressure in seniors. The study conclusively demonstrated that tai chi's gentle movements were as effective in significantly lowering blood pressure as the higher intensity activity of aerobic exercise. Tai Chi Improves Balance and Reduces Falls in the Elderly One leading cause of death and disability in the elderly is falling down. Two studies initiated by the National Institute of Health (NIH) showed that tai chi improves balance, decreases the risk of falls and dramatically decreases the fear of falling. In addition, seniors participating in the study improved their grip strength, had better range of motion and an easier time falling asleep. Tai Chi Busts Stress The least studied beneficial health effect of tai chi is that it is a powerful stress buster. The ability to let go and relax in all ways-physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, is at the philosophical center of all tai chi and other chi practices. Relaxation allows happiness to flourish; tension diminishes this possibility. One formal study shows that the practice of tai chi produced less tension, depression, anger, fatigue, confusion and anxiety. Test subjects felt more vigorous, and in general, had less total mood disturbance. Tai Chi Moves Us Closer to Feeling Truly Alive After my 20+ years training in energy arts in the Orient and teaching tai chi, chi gung/qigong and meditation to more than tens of thousands of Westerners, I know first-hand that these are miraculous health practices. Tai chi helps people take control and responsibility for their health so that life is a joy to live and not a burden to carry into old age. Tai chi has helped heal my own body and calms down my mind when I need it from the stresses of daily living. Tai chi disposes me to look for ways

to positively engage with life. Most importantly, tai chi has given me the ability to realize the great human potential in myself and to have genuine compassion for others. It has the ability to do the same for you. Now how ‘bout some practice?!

Ziran for Wholeness The word Tao has many meanings. First, there is the Tao of doing anything, which is the same as the ideal way of doing something. You must travel on a particular path in order to wind up where that path leads. Going a little deeper, the word Tao considers the question: What connects everything and yet has no specific quality of its own? That’s the center of the I Ching. It has no quality and yet everything is connected to it, everything comes out of it, everything flows through it. The word Ziran embodies a very important concept in Taoism and has a number of large meanings. If we go from the deepest to the most superficial meaning, it essentially has the same meaning as Tao. The Chinese actually call it Tao Ziran, which means “the great natural.” Ziran means naturalness. In one sense, it is about the natural way of the Universe, so you could also refer to this natural way as the Tao. Very often Taoists do not use the term Tao and instead use Ziran, albeit making translating Chinese texts even more difficult. The next level of Ziran embodies a major Taoist premise that balance is a possibility. Once you become reasonably balanced the ability to tap into the ultimate source from which all the balance derives, whether regarded as Emptiness or the Tao, also becomes a possibility. So the implication of Ziran is the ultimate goal of behaving, acting and thinking naturally in both your internal practices and your external behaviors in order to arrive at Emptiness, which Taoists refer to as the Body of the Tao. Ziran is very important in terms of the energetics of the body—yin and yang must become balanced on ever-more refined levels. The only way that balance can be maintained is if yin and yang are configured to flow freely inside you as well as in the natural environment. Once you lose naturalness, the Taoists say you will go off into the mind of man. You get stuck on what you are thinking about. The human mind can create billions of thoughts that do not lead to any resolution or balance. The Taoists believe anything that is unnatural is ultimately unsustainable. When practicing tai chi or chi gung/qigong, all movement should be natural. Nothing in the human body is linear. Even your bones are slightly curved because the gravity field creates a rounding effect. Thus all movements, including the way chi moves in the body, should have the quality of circularity and spiraling. This is the natural way of working with the force affecting everything on this planet. From the Taoist perspective, you do that which requires the least amount of energy and strain to be consistent with natural forces. You can look at any small aspect of human life and consider what may be natural about it. Maybe it is no longer natural when you subsequently connect it with larger aspects of the fabric of life. For something to be ultimately natural, it must not be in conflict with anything else. It must somehow flow smoothly both in temporary and long-term circumstances. For example, it is natural for human beings to abuse and even kill other human beings. It is natural for animals to engage in these behaviors too. So, the question then arises: Is the natural state of a human being to be an animal or to move somewhere beyond animal instincts? As long as

we remain purely animalistic, there is no way in which we will ever be completely in sync or in rhythm with the entire Universe because polarization to one very tiny, specific quality takes place and conflict emerges. As you go through the eight energy bodies of human beings, you may find that what is natural to one energy body may not necessarily be completely natural to another. Eventually you must find the ways in which the higher bodies can be integrated so that each is in harmony with all others. In Taoism there is tremendous emphasis on individuality. Buddhists say there are 84,000 passes of the Buddha. This means that there are 84,000 different ways human beings can practice. The Taoists had a similar phrase long before Buddha was born: There are 36 million passes of the Tao. Thus it’s true that some things are relatively natural to all beings and some things are more natural to one individual. However, this is not necessarily true at each stage of our evolutionary development because what is natural at one stage may not be natural at the next. There is relative and absolute understanding, but the Tao is the absolute. Until you consider the trillions of connections of all and everything, you are working on a purely relative basis. This is where the Taoists differ from most other traditions that have very clear rules about how to act. Taoists focus more on arriving at a natural state. Eventually you want to have synchronicity between chi and virtuous action. However, having more chi or more virtue will not create balance if the subparts that lie between them are not in harmony with one another. Many people keep on repeating the same negative habits. On an evolutionary scale, we need to work out the glitches that cause conflict until we find the natural connection, an integration point for our existence. How do you find it in yourself? How do you end up there? Recognizing where you’re at and being ticked off about it is not enough. Once a natural connection emerges, you realize that there is no “I should” or “I shouldn’t.” There is only the question of integration. What is it that gives you more of a sense of being whole?

Wu Wei: Action, Non-Action Wu wei is a very fundamental concept in Taoism, similar to wu wei wu, which means action, non action. Wu means nothing and wei means action. In the West most people have clear agendas and they set out to accomplish specific goals. However, in Taoism one of the central themes is not acting until the timing is right. In fact Taoists say that until the time is right nothing will happen anyway, so a large part of wu wei is the ability to be as connected as possible to the universal flows of the TAO. When all of a sudden it becomes obvious that the time has arrived, only then do you take action. Action is determined by the time, places and forces that all come together at a unique moment in time. You can envision an outline and stages of progress for any action, but you may actually thwart bigger messages coming through if you push your agenda too much. The idea of non-action is that instead of having the conscious will, intention or demand that something happen deliberately, you have the inclination, willingness or preference for that something to happen. The pre-supposition is that by not being attached to a specific end result, you can allow what is actually motivating and generating your actions--not your own personal agenda or ego--to occur and the larger purpose is therefore served.

This does not negate the ability to plan. Winston Churchill said, "Planning is important. Plans are worthless." Maybe you can see something that needs to be done 20 years in advance; then again, maybe you can see that something needs to be done three seconds ahead of schedule yet you still may not be moving with the flow. So, this whole concept of deciding between action and non action is very tricky. Action has two implications: the first is that you're going to do something--walk across the street, for example. However, there is also the space that is more about wu wei wu, or action, non-action: you simply wait until whatever that universal force is flowing through you says "do" or "go now." In that process you effectively lose the sense of self and simply follow the universal flow. After you've taken some action, whether it succeeds or not, you are then essentially at peace and whole within yourself. The TAO is extremely mysterious. The forces of the Universe flowing through you may not actually have anything to do with you and may be part of a much larger chain of events. You can become tuned in and actually synchronize with the flows of the Universe, but that does not always mean that you will understand why it's happening or why you're engaging in a particular action. One of the hallmarks of genuine non-action is that there is no sense of internal resistance whatsoever. It's an extremely difficult concept to embody and it requires the absolute ability to be non-attached, to be in Fourth Time. All the practices of wu wei or wu wei wu are completely based upon a person having found their center. You first need to have found a place of peace or emptiness--something beyond your own personal sense of me, myself or I. All of your attachments will go with your identities. The doctrine of action and non-action requires an immense amount of personal courage because you have to give up a sense of control. You have to be able to admit that you do not know. You also have to be able to identify when you're operating in essentially an emotional, mental or psychic state of non-action. So, truly embodying the principle of wu wei wu is an art form. If you are in a complete state of emptiness and do something deriving from that state, with no intrinsic planning or motivation behind it, then there is no sense of ego. You are connected to the flow of the Universe that is moving inside you.

Shou-yi: Embracing the One Shou-yi or shou-i means "embracing the one." This is very tricky because embracing the one means embracing the Tao. The one is the Tao. Lao Tse writes in the Tao Te Ching, "From the one came the two, came the three, came the 10,000 myriad of things." To embrace the totality while doing an everyday mundane task means you never leave the totality regardless of the action you might undertake. This is the principle of shou-yi, which is extremely difficult to do. Initially it requires that you are able to embrace the whole--that you have the internal motivation to become capable of embracing that which is invisible yet connects everything, including the underlying currents. Everything in manifestation is relative. If you talk to a two-year-old about a high-rise building, you're going to get a very different take on that building than if you were speaking with an architectural engineer. All of a sudden there are 24,000 things that come to mind--

almost instantaneously--all of which have something to do with the building. So, to embrace the one is to cultivate the Tao, called Yi Ke Tao or I Ke Tao. This underlying ground rule from which all is derived usually results in the practitioner having an extremely open mind, especially in terms of thinking. Most thought processes tend to consist of varying degrees of closeness. They define a parameter and they stick within that parameter without going an inch beyond it in one direction or another. In shou-yi, although you might stay within a parameter, you also have to connect with the little tiny pieces, never forgetting the much larger framework connecting it to all and everything. Small mindedness, petty thought and over-concentration is intrinsically not seeing the forest for the trees. So, if shou-yi is really about seeing the forest, then when considering how someone functions in the world, it becomes much more about wu wei wu, or action and non-action, as discussed in last month's article. You are aware of not only of the forest, but simultaneously of each individual tree for which you might wish to take some sort of action or non-action. Regardless, you are always aware, or at least doing the best you can to be aware, of the entire web to which everything is connected. In one sense the term shou-yi has a parallel in Buddhism to the Doctrine of Interdependent Origination, which says that everything is interconnected--nothing exists in and of itself. The doctrine further explains that everything in existence is a part in a series of causes and conditions that concern the way in which it interacts with all other causes and conditions and therefore often has the appearance--at a given time--of being something distinct and concrete. Let that sink in a moment... Listen to a liturgy to help you. So, we say something exists and we try to define it. However, if you were to really look at anything very, very closely you would realize that nothing actually exists except a conglomeration or a flux in force that just happens to appear to be completely coherent unto itself--at a particular moment in time. And so, at that moment, embracing the one is about embracing the flux, embracing that from which everything derives. The parallel to mysticism is the constant awareness of God pervading everything and that if this is the basis upon which your actions come through, then the nature of God will flow through you. So, embracing the one does not mean that you are beholden to someone or something no matter how discretely it can be defined. The one is all and everything that can neither be defined nor pinned down and yet is always there. For anyone who wishes to practice shou-yi, they must be in a meditative state most of the time. Even if they are not in a meditative state at all times, for example when major decisions have to be made, there is still consideration of how everything that will go on within those parameters will affect all the interconnections into the one. You see all the forces around that decision, action or non-action as nothing more than considerations. Most people will not allow the consideration of the one to even enter into their decisionmaking process or how they will implement any action or non-action. So finding even small ways to embrace the one in the beginning could be immensely valuable to daily living. You might be able to release some of your expectations and the pressures that make your decisions seem so important. Once you understand that nothing exists--not even you--then you might find that you don't become as revved by daily events and enjoy the clouds passing by in the sky more often.

Easy Energy Boosters to Conquer the Yawns So you've got the yawns, uh? Your eyelids are drooping. Your mind is sluggish and running on empty. It's way-y-y-y too early in the day... One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is: What should I do to combat exhaustion at my desk? Try this: Stand up. Take a deep inhale. Then bubble the exhale through your lips. Make them shake, rattle and roll. Do this 10 times. Caution: You might laugh a little, and that wouldn't be so bad, uh?! Yawning is due to the build-up of carbon dioxide in your lungs, which most people know. However, what they don't know is that you can get rid of the yawns by bubbling your breath. The great side effect is you'll rev up your chi and give yourself a serious boost while you're at it. Okay, so you say that you're not bubbling your breath at your desk--you're way-y-y-y to cool for that. I understand...really! Stand Close your eyes. Let your arms hang at your sides. Put your mind on the top of your head. In this order, consciously relax your eyes, next your cheeks and then your jaw. Let your shoulders, arms and hands go limp. Release the belly and butt muscles--don't worry, no one is looking. Feel your feet on the floor. Say aloud or in your head, "Just let go..." Breathe Take five slow, easy, relaxed breaths. Caution: Skip the next part if you're too cool to bubble in public. Now, inhale deeply and bubble the exhale through your lips. Make those lips rock 'n roll. Do this five times. Up on Your Toes Inhale, raise yourself up on your toes; suddenly exhale and drop down on your heels. Let go... Why it Works Standing and scanning down your body brings energy down from your head to your feet and back into the body where it belongs. You clear the monkey mind swinging around from tree to tree. Relaxing and letting go of muscle tension naturally brings more blood and oxygen into your body. And, where there's oxygen there is life. Try It The more you relax and let go, the more stamina and energy you can bring to your life. I've got students who've studied with me for nearly three decades and others for less than three minutes, but there's always something you can do to start living a more fulfilling and relaxed life, wherever you might be on The Path. There's no time like the present, so don't let me stop you!

THE ART OF BA GUA CHANG The most important thing in martial arts is not what style you study, or the brand name, but rather the level of fighting skill of the individual. A world-class racing driver in a so-so car will beat a poor driver in the world's best car. Only when two drivers are of equal skill will the technology of the car be the determining factor in who wins the race. Each martial arts school has its special kung fu or "skill technology." For example, the lineage of Tung Hai-Ch'uan became famous for its special kung fu techniques. All students could learn the movements, but only a few learned the kung fu techniques that had ba gua's unique flavor and power. This kung fu is genuinely internal and is a subject of doing, not talking. Many people today, even so-called famous teachers in China and the U.S., cannot apply traditional ba gua techniques to unrehearsed fighting. Either they perform movement arts or they do ba gua movements using the power, flavor and kung fu techniques of Shaolin. An excellent external martial artist will beat a poor or so-so ba gua practitioner. There are monastic forms of ba gua that are purely about chi cultivation and meditation, making no claims to be martial arts, although some also make those claims. Even within the internal martial arts family, it takes years of training to clearly separate ba gua, tai chi and hsing-i in a manner that each retains its own separate characteristics. Each of my three ba gua teachers was always after me to separate the three, and it took me almost 20 years of study and practice to do so. Learning the movements alone took two to three years and when I finally got to the stage of learning the kung fu techniques, it always became much more difficult and satisfying. However, fighting is only one part of the art. Ba gua is also a purely Taoist art. Tai chi is different--it may or may not be Taoist, but its movements without question came from Buddhist Shaolin. Tai chi, as it descended from the Chen Village, was not used as a meditation technique; it was simply a method of destroying your opponent with extreme efficiency. Only at higher levels could it become meditation. Most people aren't capable of practicing tai chi as meditation at the beginning or intermediate levels. Chen Style Tai Chi was more the equivalent of an AK-47; it was essentially a military weapon. Ba gua is a different matter; it is completely Taoist. The whole method of ba gua is manifesting the Eight Energies of the I Ching inside your body and finding that still place that does not change. It is about meditation, but Tung Hai-Ch'uan didn't teach it to everyone because not all of his students had the capacity to understand it. From this meditation base, the real function of ba gua is to make Heaven and Earth actually reside inside your own body. Eventually what is inside of you and what is outside of you will come together, and that is when you have joined with nature--the TAO. A picture of a tree is not a tree. The I Ching represents in written form the energies from which the Universe is constructed. However, ba gua practitioners are not concerned with these intellectual or symbolic representations. They are concerned with directly experiencing these Universal Energies within their own bodies and minds. If you establish these energies inside your own body and mind, you will personally understand the realities behind these symbols. The goal of the pre-birth physical exercises and sitting meditations of ba gua is to directly experience the energies of the eight trigrams.

One of the things that makes ba gua unique is the fact that it starts off from that meditation basis. Fighting is nothing more than manipulating those energies for a purpose. Using ba gua to develop the practitioner's capacity for meditation--to develop the ability to be simultaneously multi-dimensional, to be able to simultaneously manipulate things inside your body and inside your mind as you are practicing--these are things the average human being doesn't even know exists. For millennia only formal disciples were taught inner meditation aspects of ba gua. My teacher, Liu Hung Chieh, learned it from Ma Shih-Ching (also known as Ma Kuei) who learned it from Tung Hai-Ch'uan, and Liu taught them to me. When I was studying in Taiwan and Hong Kong I did all kinds of energy practices, but I never really learned the real meditation art of ba gua. In fact, I never thought I would because it is a very challenging subject and few teachers will share it. I'm open with my teaching because the healing aspect of ba gua is incredibly valuable and I want to make it widely available to help counteract the looming healthcare tsunami. It is a real problem that few acknowledge even as there are shortages of doctors, nurses and other professionals, and services are denied due to lack of resources for some of those with the greatest need. Ba gua is in the throes of death and future generations are in danger of losing the powerful benefits offered by this unique art form--not to mention aspects of their cultural heritage. Universal peace and brotherhood will ultimately be found through spiritual means like meditation and not through war. Read about Bruce's first-ever Ba Gua Chang Instructor Training and retreats scheduled for summer 2009 in California.

THE TAO OF SELF-DISCOVERY If you want to find out who you are, you have to get behind anything and everything that has happened to you in your life. It doesn't matter what could occur. It doesn't matter what you might be experiencing at the present moment. It doesn't matter what you possess. It doesn't matter what you have been given. It doesn't matter who told you what you know. To understand who you are you have to find the incredible space that exists within you. When you find that incredible space, it will be intrinsically balanced, full of light, filled with sound and overflowing with love and compassion for yourself and your fellow beings. If you find that place, you will find out who you are without question. Nothing you could ever think about it will get you to that place. Consider each day: * Who am I beyond what's occurring? * Who am I beyond the experiences I've had? * Who am I beyond what will happen to me? * Who am I beyond what I think? * How do I become a mature human being who is fully alive? * How do I reconcile the needs of a physical body with being spiritual?

For more than five thousand years, Taoists have used meditation to seek answers to these primordial questions. My main teacher, the late Taoist Sage Liu Hung Chieh of Beijing, China, accepted me as a disciple and empowered me to teach the Water tradition of Taoist meditation, which has been passed down in an unbroken lineage tracing back to Lao Tse, who authored the Tao Te Ching over 2,500 years ago. The methods within this ancient tradition are still very relevant today and potent antidotes to stress, poor health and the feelings of disconnection that plague modern life. At any moment are you able to recognize when stress is happening inside you? Can you find a few minutes of peace even when the events taking place require your full attention? Simply notice what the nerves of your body feel like. Notice the nature of your mind and breathe. Relaxing into your life, into your being, is the key. Breathe very deeply until you can relax. Slowly smooth out all the firings and irregular glitches until your breath becomes very clear, long and calm. In the process of breathing, you open the door to inner awareness where you will find something in you that is beyond your thoughts. At every new stage another layer is opened up to you, and, in so doing, you open up to yourself. The stressful, swirling circumstances of life are replaced with inner comfort and the discovery of your relationship with the vastness of eternity.

A Servant in the Master's House? Hi folks, In ancient China, the Chen village kept tai chi a closely guarded secret for over a century and refused to teach it to a single outsider. Having a superior martial art enabled the village to stay safe from marauding bandits and securely conduct business without their goods being stolen or having to pay protection money. The villagers developed this internal martial art to a very high level. In the nineteenth century, an immensely talented and motivated young man with a great love of martial arts, by the name of Yang Lu Chan, was told by his teacher that if he wanted to progress, he needed to go to the Chen village. Yang went to Chen village, asked to be admitted and was summarily refused. The teachings were secret and forbidden to non-family members. Yang devised an immensely disciplined strategy. Posing as a deaf-mute, he obtained work as a servant in the house of the teaching master. A diligent and cheerful worker, over time he became trusted enough to be given free reign of the house, including the keys to the locked doors surrounding the training hall. Keeping himself hidden, he secretly watched the classes and practiced late into the night when everyone was asleep, no doubt overcoming years of sleep deprivation to succeed. At the time, the Chen teaching master had a dilemma. The next generation of the village was resting on the family laurels and not training sufficiently. The master was greatly concerned and saddened, and feared that his family's art of tai chi would be lost. One night Yang was caught. He was dragged down to the training hall. The students, not wishing their position to

be usurped, demanded his execution for breaching security-a reasonable response in nineteenth-century China given the circumstances. Speaking for the first time, Yang profusely apologized. A shocked Chen master then pondered the implications of the discipline required to maintain this deaf-mute act for years. Yang begged the Chen master to be allowed to learn his art. He then challenged his would-be executioners and, one by one, using their own techniques, Yang managed to defeat them. The master, who was truly searching for a good student to pour his knowledge into, wondered what Yang could do if he got the full meal rather than only the crumbs. After a psychologically grueling three-day test of character, Chen accepted Yang for what ultimately became an 18-year apprenticeship. After completing the full training, Yang left the village with his teacher's blessing to go out into the world and teach however he thought fit. So keep practicing as Yang did. Keep focusing on going inside and becoming aware of what's inside. All you're going to find is what's there. And, make sure you take the time to find out about your teachers because it can mean the difference in how far you advance in a subject. By the way, after receiving his teacher's blessing, Yang traveled around and challenged China's best martial arts exponents. He convincingly defeated all of them without injuring anyone-a sign of truly remarkable skill. Gradually he found his way to the imperial capital Beijing, did the same there, and became the teacher of the imperial guards and many aristocrats. Although most wealthy aristocrats were not fighters, they found that the tai chi's energy work did wonders for their health and general vitality...maybe you will too. I'll share more on how to go about finding good teachers-for study in any subject-in the coming months. Stay good, Bruce