Has the Tao of love dared new heights? Marriage of Jem and Michael a few feet from a 3000 foot cliff. Jem picked the spot - as close to the edge as possible - atop China's 7,000 ft. Mt. Hua...I love this adventurous woman!
Dear Lovers of the Way of Love,
Blessings on this Black Water Dragon Solstice to all! This is a particularly intense peak in Nature's cycle -- essentially a Fire Dragon Day in the middle of a Water Dragon Year. I did ceremonies today in which I invited the Red Fire Dragon to inhabit me completely, much as I invited the Black Water Dragon to enter my body on Chinese New Year's.
If you want to do high level alchemy in your ceremony, and have the skill, you'll get the Fire and Water Dragons to copulate and birth a powerful new energy for your Inner Sage. This is essentially the energy of Greatest Water & Fire (Kan & Li), aka Planetary and Soul Alchemy. Another way to describe it: Mother Earth is opening the deepest and darkest parts of her womb to Father Sun to enter and fertilize.
Summer Solstice is the time for ripening and bringing things to maturity, so this ceremony is most effective if aligned with that kind of intention. (see Summer Solstice Ceremony Instructions: Capturing the Divine Fire: http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=59). You may need to re-register and get a cookie to open these article links.
It is an auspicious time to kick off our Tao Summer Retreat program, which begins tomorrow. We are accepting last minute bookings for some courses that have room. Call Tynne (registrar) at 828-575-3825.
Commuters are welcome, it's only a $100. facility fee instead of $495 for a week's room/board/facility. The retreats are listed below for your convenience. If you want to ground your spiritual path, get healthy and have fun with a really great Taoist community, for low cost - a summer retreat is the ticket for you.
Many thanks for the hundreds of emails offering Jem and I nuptial blessings - your loving presence was felt strongly on our June 3 ceremony atop Flower Mountain. It was the climax of a 3 week China Dream Trip into Taoist sacred mountains and caves with a wonderful group who bonded deeply, creating a secure cauldron for our wedding.
In the ceremony we invited all souls to dive into the ocean of divine love, flowing from what Taoists call Tai Yi, the Great Oneness. It was powerfully broadcast from Flower Mountain's highest peak, on what I feel is China's most powerful Taoist mountain.
L: Chen Tuan statue, famous 10th cen.Taoist adept of inner alchemy and dream practice, at the base of Flower Mountain, China's oldest recorded Taoist mountain and famed for its immortals. The tiny tip of West Peak is visible in the background. We ascended in the morning from this statue and had the wedding at sunset on top.
R: Jem with her new "sisters-in-love" (to replace the boring "in-law") Robin Winn and Yarrow Walsh - all theme dressed in pink, halfway up the ascent on our wedding day. Just to GET to the wedding was a challenge - everyone had to hike up to South Peak, Huashan's highest point where we married. It is hidden behind West Peak.
L. Yes, DRAGONS and IMMORTALS did show up! One of them in the form of a Black Water Dragon dance by Hilde Broeckhove. Alison Downey (rear) officiated the ceremony, which included group ritual performance of Wu Ji Gong, aka Primordial Qigong or Tai Chi for Enlightened Love. (My book on this is still coming - but I apparently had to re-live the chapter on Qigong & Energetic Love first!)
R. Jem plays on Huashan's famous cliff boardwalk, located 300 feet immediately BELOW our wedding site. It is said a Tao immortal who could fly first created this path, as there was no way to climb sideways with rope 1000 years ago.
L. Jem's gold ring, designed by her, has a vesica piscis (two circles intersecting halfway, a symbol used in Tao inner alchemy meditation), embedded with an amethyst, diamond, and emerald. They signify the flowing Life Force's trinity (yin, yang, and yuan chi).
R. Do we look happy? YESSS!!!! We are deeply grateful to find a soul mate aligned on all three levels (personality, soul, and oversoul-spiritual destiny). A key aspect of our love is mutual desire to consciously conceive, birth, and raise a divine love child as part of our alchemical service to the Tao. Photo: Mike Teeters
L. My bride wakes up in our honeymoon suite: 3 nights in a hard, granite cave. We loved the emptiness! Just us and the spirit of the mountain. This is the same "Snow Flower Cave" I spent a week in bigu (no food, no water) in 2002. Read that article - one of my best - at: http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=32.
R. Back wall of our cave had an altar with a painting of Lao Tzu - the only decor, and the perfect inspiration as I read my tatttered copy of the Tao Te Ching in the cave.
Jem and I spent 3 days in a cave after the wedding, the first phase of our honeymoon. (Second phase will be a raft trip down the Grand Canyon this summer). A cave doesn't sound romantic, but for two souls joined on an alchemical path it was perfect. Here is Jem's experience:
During our cave honeymoon, a smiling female immortal in dark purple robes visited my meditations three times. The first visit, she gave me a hexagram and told me the trail to climb to a powerful meditation spot up the mountain. I followed the trail the next day, and found the same hexagram carved into the stone stairs -- one that bodes well for the longevity of our marriage! I meditated with her at the summit, deeply grateful for the blissful solitude of being in nature, then returned to our cave, where I was equally grateful to share loving silence with Michael.
On the immortal's next visit, she reminded me that I've been a hermit in the mountains before; it's easy for me to be at peace alone in nature, in deep yin. This lifetime, she told me, my evolution depends on bringing the peace within myself, the peace of natural harmony, back into the world -- to my family and community. It will be much more challenging for me, especially in partnership with so much yang, but she says it is my destiny, and the best choice I could make. I knew that, of course, when we agreed to marry a year ago, but it's always nice to have an immortal confirm it! I left the cave feeling the strength and integrity of my lower dan tian aligned with the love in my heart, perfectly content to return to the world and embark on the journey of marriage. - Jem
Many newsletter readers will recall my quest for a "dark goddess" that I saw in vision shortly after my last wife Joyce Gayheart ascended to her Flower Heaven, helped along by a brain tumor in 2008. (You can read an account of our soul merger after she left her body: On Loving the Death of My Wife: Shijie: Taoist Liberation from the Corpse http://www.healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=74).
I made a pilgrimmage to Flower Mountain shortly after Joyce's death, and had a locket engraved with a vow, "I marry a Dark Goddess". I locked it to a chain atop Mt. Hua and then went looking for that dark-haired goddess with Deep Yin Presence. To find such a woman and marry her atop Flower Mountain 4 years later gives me a very deep feeling of completion. Those 4 years were a very long journey that taught me much about what is important in a marriage focused on family and chldren.
Jem and I have a natural alchemical transformative effect on each other. This is both a blessing - the boon of effortless love - and a huge responsibility. All the chi and love generated in multiple dimensions must be put to work. We both have visions about how that will play out, but ultimately of course it is a wu wei process, totally spontaneous.
