Michael Winn's Qigong & Tao Meditation Courses Frequently Asked Questions concerning taoism qigong alchemy primordial taoist confucius wisdom form life deep symbol elements learn energy system

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Taoist qigong is famous in China for being the most sophisticated and developed type of qigong. Qigong itself is probably older than any organized group calling themselves “Taoist” (or Daoist). Since ancient times the Taoists were keenly interested in exploring the human body, not just for good health, but also for its importance in spiritual cultivation.

This led Taoists to adopt and refine ancient shamanic movements, such as the Five Animals and the Six Healing Sounds qigong taught in Fundamentals 1. Taoists also developed “nei gong” or “inner skill”, a meditative form of qigong movement in which energy moves through internal channels in the body, even though the body is still.

I believe that parallel to this shamanic tradition, the Taoists developed a very advanced energy science called “neidan gong”, usually translated as “inner alchemy”. My Qigong Fundamentals offers a simple and practical integration of qigong and neigong, as I have found the combination offers the most powerful results.

Qigong Fundamentals also lays a good foundation for studying Tao inner alchemy, which maps out seven stages of growth for a human seeking complete integration of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Alchemical methods offer a practical way of harmonizing oneself with the natural process of change.

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Note: Tao is pronounced “Dow” (like Dow Jones stock index) and in the pinyin system used by modern scholars is spelled as “Dao” or “Daoism”. Tao and Taoism is however still the preferred popular spelling for the Western public, so I mostly use it.

Tao is an umbrella term in China used by many spiritual groups as a way to speak about the highest level of spiritual realization. Loosely translated Tao means the “Way” or “Natural Path”. It can have multiple meanings; Tao can also mean “true speaking”.

Tao is sometimes called the “pathless path”, because Tao is neither dogmatic nor fixed, and thus cannot really be followed, but only “allowed to unfold its natural essene”. It is thus a path that is only revealed in the spontaneous process of the present moment.

My favorite translation of Tao is “Way-making”, as the “-making” highlights that any path that one chooses to follow or to create is always in process. This definition of Way-making was suggested by Tao scholars Roger Ames and David Hall in their brilliant philosophical translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Their book is titled in pinyin: Dao De Jing: Making This Life Significant, by Laozi.

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My Taoist Energy Body training takes you through a progression of qigong exercises, each a little different energetically. As your skill grows, your experience deepens. The end result is that students of this progressive qigong training learn to quickly spot the operative principle within any qigong exercise, whether its moving or meditative.

The Energy Body is really just another way to describe the functional levels of the western concept of “soul”. You could say you are learning to merge your personality with your soul in a very practical, grounded, and safe process. You begin by moving energy (subtle breath, or chi) in the field very close to the physical body, also known as the astral body. Then you gradually shift to other layers of the Energy Body, such as the emotional and mental bodies (western terminology).

Eventually you shift from training the personal or micro-cosmic levels of the Energy Body and begin to work with the larger Energy Body of Nature, the macro-cosmos. This involves attuning to and absorbing into our personal energy body the energetic fields of the planet Earth, the five core planets, the sun & moon, and the energy bodies of the stars and the formless beings beyond the stars, who are so vast that we can also say they are already inside of us as well.

Ultimately I am not interested in getting you fixed on any one qigong exercise or inner alchemical method, but rather to get you comfortable with the energetic process itself. I want you to learn to communicate directly with the Chi Field, the intelligent field of energy that permeates all realities. I want each student to unfold their destiny and experience deep balance and harmony in their life.

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First, let me be clear: I do not have a hidden agenda to push “Tao-ism” on anyone. Qigong and inner alchemy are not religions in the conventional sense of the term. Nor do I advocate following any one Chinese lineage controlled by a particular master. A lineage represents a vibrational frequency and a set of energetic boundaries. It is controlled by specific spiritual and physical beings, who helped someone in the past to connect their individual self to the greater divine process of the Tao.

My attitude is, lineages are valuable holders of pathways used in the past. But why limit yourself to just one lineage? Just see a lineage like you would any teacher - as a potentially valuable resource. I recognize that no one teacher or lineage can “know it all”, however powerful they may be. A lineage can only know what it has tested. Any lineage is only a small part of the larger process of the Tao. I have gathered together within myself a whole library of lineages, but I've only kept aspects from those lineages that I felt I could integrate in a very practical way for myself and other Westerners, living in the 21st century.

In the old days, travel and communication was slow, so studying with more than one teacher was more difficult. There were strong cultural and economic pressures in China to stay with one teacher – you became like family, and were expected to support your master in old age. But even with these pressures, Taoists in ancient times were famous “wanderers” who traveled about for years, gathering practices and insights from different teachers they found on different mountains.

Whatever the pros and cons of the “old way” of following one lineage, it is not practical for most Westerners in modern life to move in with their teacher as an apprentice. I have integrated into my progressive Energy Body training what I’ve learned from many dozens of different qigong masters in China and in the West.

As I studied in many different meditation lineages, Taoist and other, I was fortunate to have the structure of Taoist inner alchemy from One Cloud as a way to organize and sort what was valuable. Otherwise, you can end up with a soggy mishmash of practices that really lead nowhere. I am constantly refining what I know, boiling it down to its most essential aspects.

My goal is NOT to re-create a “Chinese” lineage in the West, or to build physical Tao temples. I envision the ancient Chinese tradition of Tao nourishing a new integrated energy science in the West that is embodied, heart-centered, and embraces the alchemical process of change. I want to re-birth the principles of the ancient Tao masters in the West – but not with the same cultural packaging that one finds in China. That won’t fly in the West.

We need to live in the moment, and in the present cycle of time. There are many Taoist lineage groups whose methods and beliefs I do not fully share, as I feel they are from a past cultural reality or do not contribute to the new spiritual science I envision.

I completely support people having whatever religious beliefs or lineages anyone feels will support the integration and unfolding of their soul’s natural Way. I’ve benefited much from my experience in other meditation and health traditions, both Eastern and Western. This is our destiny in modern times – to live an intense period of creativity and synthesis.

So I am eclectic, but have settled on what I feel is the most practical and effective process from all that I have studied. It is my experience that everyone – Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Moslem, esoteric, pagan, atheist, agnostic - can greatly benefit from the body-centered methods of specific Taoist qigong and inner alchemy meditations used to cultivate the Life Force. There are many powerful models for spiritual growth, but many do not fully incorporate the importance of “whole body enlightenment” into their path.

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There is a lineage behind the hermit One Cloud. These alchemical formulas originate with one of the "Eight Immortals" in China -- Lu Dong Bin, who is considered the "patron saint" of internal alchemy in China. He is real person who lived during the 10th century Song Dynasty in Shaanxi province, near the ancient capital of Xian. You can see similarities in the structure of the 20th century One Cloud's formulas with formulas attributed to Lu Dong Bin a thousand years earlier. That is the historical side of it.

One Cloud was a hermit who felt limited by his Taoist monastic tradition. His abbot suggested he leave, and try to find a higher teacher of inner alchemy in the mountains. One Cloud left, and succeeded in finding a neidan gong teacher, a hermit on Long White Mountain (Changbai shan) in northeast China. His Seven Alchemy Formulas thus come from a “mountain Tao” lineage.

Mountain lineages includes those “wandering” Taoists who lived alone or in pairs in the wild mountains of China, where they lived in deep harmony with nature. They usually built a small hut or lived in a cave. One Cloud attained the state of “breatharian”, which means he was living on subtle breath rather than solid food for many years. Please note it is not necessary that you to become a breatharian in order to study these practices! Consider it a spontaneous side effect rather than a goal to be sought after.

I resonate deeply with the Seven Alchemical Formulas for Attaining Immortality that were transmitted by the Taoist hermit One Cloud through Mantak Chia. The Seven Formulas are a beautiful and naturally simple map to help anyone navigate the depths of the Great Way-making. This map charts a journey that begins inside one’s body, and gradually absorbs the essence of the entire cosmos into that human body. I’ve used One Cloud's Seven Formulas as the inner structure for my progressive training. I have integrated insights from other lineages, both Taoist and other, into this seven formula super structure. Linked below is a long paper a wrote on One Cloud's system of internal alchemy, for a national conference of Taoist (Daoist) scholars and adepts.

Daoist Internal Alchemy: A Deep Language for Communicating with Nature's Intelligence

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Scholars used to divide Taoists into two types, philosophical and religious. But these were categories created by and for Western intellectuals, and didn’t really exist in China. It is now widely accepted by most scholars that Taoism is the only native religion of ancient China that has survived into modern times.

It is true that there were “literati” types who focused on Taoism using the seemingly philosophical language of their day. But if we define religion broadly, as “any method or belief used to connect the individual with the divine”, then Taoism is a religion. But because of its uniquely flexible spiritual process, Taoism produced a range of religious forms, ranging from esoteric and martial schools, folk cults and festivals, as well as Emperor-supported public temple traditions. These expressions of Taoism surfaced over thousands of years, and differed widely in their appearance, beliefs, and practices.

For this reason Taoism wasn’t recognized as a religion by the Christian missionaries who first arrived in China and were the first to translate the philosophical sounding texts of early Taoism such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Because there was no clear Taoist dogma or revered divine figure, no “God-ruling-from-the-top” hierarchy, similar to other world religions, early Western visitors didn’t realize Taoism was the native religion. They certainly were not privy to the secrets of the inner alchemy tradition and other esoteric schools.

It took Western scholars an extra century to figure out that despite all the diversity and freedom of belief embraced by Taoists, there were common underlying spiritual principles that constituted a kind of natural religion. (but not pagan). The principles of Tao center on the Life Force, or chi (qi) field. The diverse expressions of Taoism all accept that humans can consciously experience the three main principles of this chi field:

1. Underlying ground holding Unity, the primordial (yuan) chi. Non-dual stillness stabilizing the center, while paradoxically transforming itself into yin-yang and five-phase movement.

2. Balancing process of Yin-Yang, the polar flow of chi. Governs all male-female, sun-moon, night-day, inside-outside, good-evil heaven-earth processes.

3. Harmonizing process of the Five Phase flow of chi (also known as Five Elements or Five Agents). Governs all cyclical relations. In Heaven the four quadrants & center of the zodiac, on Earth the seasons in Nature, in Humans the five vital organs in human body.

So instead of worshipping a “hier-archy” with a Ruler God or Absolute-State-of-Being on top, Taoist religious process is a “sphere-archy”. It envisions Heaven as a sphere, and Earth as a cube inside the sphere. Humanity embodies both Heaven and Earth, and mediates between them.

That is why every human being has a free will. It inwardly arises from the common center/ primordial ground of being that is at the unknowable, mysterious center of both the Earth-cube and the Heaven-sphere. That free will gets individually expressed in the yin-yang and five-phase manifesting process as the “Ten Thousand Things”.

Taoism embraces a kind of Divine Natural Process that integrates the Ten Thousand Things born from Heaven and Earth into a single process. Qigong and Tao meditation is designed to help us integrate this continuum of form-formless energy. It is accessible through every day human experience of living in a body. The key to finding our Way is to integrate one’s inner spiritual and outer worldly experience.

A human being is considered a microcosm of the larger macrocosmic process of Nature. By knowing our human self and our process of embodiment deeply, we can thus discover inside ourselves the Original Wholeness, or the Great Tao.

View symbol and description of Taoist cosmology based on I Ching

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The Tao Te Ching is most commonly translated as “The Way and its Power”. This famous text was compiled about 400 b.c., but clearly holds the gathered wisdom of ancient Chinese masters that is hundreds or thousands of years older. It is densely packed into eighty-one poetic verses, filled with insights, wise sayings, and advice about “te”, or “spiritual power/virtue”. Some scholars believe Lao Tzu, the author, is in reality a composite of many generations of masters that came before him.

The 5000 characters in the text are in classical Chinese and thus hard to translate, so the dozens of translations into English vary considerably. But its main focus is the spontaneity and simplicity of the Tao itself, that operates unseen within the complexity of the Ten Thousand Things of manifest life.

The first line of this Taoist classic is perhaps its most famous.

Two CORRECT translations:

“Way-making that can be put into words is not really Way-making”. (Professors Ames & Hall)

“The Tao that can be spoken is not a constant Tao”. (Prof. Chet Hansen)

Both of these translations by top Taoist scholars emphasize that the Tao is always in process. Thus it cannot be fixed or limited or made constant by any description or concept of

Many translators, unfamiliar with classical Chinese from the period of 400 b.c. China, and unfamiliar with the nuances of Taoist process-thinking, miss this point by mis-translating the opening line as:

Common INCORRECT translation:

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the Eternal Tao”

This common mis-translation can lead to the wrong implication in Western minds that there is some fixed or absolute Eternal Tao to be sought elsewhere, like the permanent “heaven above” or God found in conventional dualistic religions. This translation might imply that the Eternal Tao is separate from the ordinary every day Tao, and different from the physical plane changes that each of us is experiencing each moment. This in turn can lead to dualistic thinking, common to many religions, that separate Heaven and Earth, good and evil, absolute and relative, etc.

There is only one Tao, and its Way-making embraces fully everything in Heaven-Earth, spirit-matter, absolute-relative, and all other yin-yang polarities. Taoism is not an “other worldly” philosophy or religion. Heaven-Earth is a single continuum. So Tao should not be confused with “heaven” or the “formless” of Western or other Eastern religions, which often imply a creator God or Absolute Nirvana state that is somehow separate from its process of Creation.

Tao is a “here-and-now” approach to self-realized living that emphasizes simplicity and spontaneity. Its main practice is how to live in complete attunement to the eternally changing process of the Life Force – in this human physical life. It does NOT defer the rewards of this life to the next life. All meaning is to be found in the present moment.

Humans able to consciously merge with the Life Force’s process during their life in a physical body on earth are called Sages. Humans who stay conscious with the Life Force’s process after physical death are called Immortals.

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The first part of the Taoist or Way-making process is to strengthen and integrate one’s body-mind, or “heart-mind” (xin in Chinese, pronounced “shin”). This is One Cloud’s first formula - open up the chi flow between the five vital organ intelligences. These are the five “shen” or spirits that make up the heart-mind and their functional pathways through 12 regular meridians and eight extraordinary or deep vessels. The practices taught in Qigong Fundamentals and the Fusion of the Five Elements train you to open up this level of communication with your “mind”.

The western concept of “mind” is best described as the combined function of these different types of chi (or “qi”), or what some Taoists would call the Energy Body. Mind in the west defies any scientific attempt to measure it – it is a concept for describing what we know exists, but cannot prove it. The Taoists don’t bother trying to “prove” anything, they just want to make the mind more effective in creating good health and harmony with its environment.

The second stage of the inner alchemy process is to open a clear communication with the “ling” or personal soul, and to help it complete its destiny and unfold its virtues in the world.

The third stage is to cultivate one’s inner spiritual essence (“xing” or “shing”) by opening the three portals within the core of each human and functionally integrating them into the greater fabric of the cosmos. In the West this might be described as the “oversoul”, or “soul collective”. This goes through different stages. This is the merging of the essence of Heaven, Earth, and Human into a being that is immortal, i.e. continues to function beyond physical death.

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Neither Confucianism nor Chan Buddhism focuses on the process of the Life Force and its primordial, yin-yang, and five phase principles. However, because these Taoist principles became so deeply embedded in everyday Chinese culture, there were strong cultural forces that periodically sought to integrate the “three teachings” of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. This resulted in Taoist ideas being absorbed into these other traditions, and vice versa.

Confucius (Kon tzu, or Konzi) sought to be in harmony with Tao. Confucius promoted his idea of the Tao of society, and his teachings could be considered as a philosophical or secular religion. Confucianism supported a civil bureaucracy – in effect the world’s first super corporate state - that offered Chinese culture great stability over the last two millennia of change. So it didn’t matter if the Emperor was overthrown or the Mongols invaded, because the Confucian civil servants remained effectively in charge of operating things.

Confucius focused on the human social aspect of the Tao, rather than the Taoist focus on the broader process of all Nature and the mystery of human embodiment. But unfortunately Confucius considered women inferior, refused to educate them, and created the notion that they should always follow men. Taoism, on the other hand, could be considered one of the world’s earliest feminine-honoring, earth-centered religions with an underlying sense of eco-responsibility.

Buddhism entered China as a foreign religion via Tibet, and then morphed into Chan Buddhism, after appropriating Tao as its ultimate goal. Chan Buddhism, called Zen after it moved from China through Korea to Japan, also appropriated many Taoist meditation methods, especially the preliminary clearing process in which Taoists focused on the stillness at the center of a turning wheel, and on “forgetting the self”.

Chan dressed up Buddhism in Taoist spiritual terminology in order to be accepted by the Chinese, who are by nature suspicious of foreign beliefs. This connection to Taoism in Japanese Zen can still be seen in phrases like the “do” in Aiki-do or Ju-do, as the Japanese term for Tao or Dao. Shinto in Japanese derives from “Shen Tao” , literally “spiriti of the Tao” in Chinese.

In the five elements of the native Taoists and in Chinese culture, the center element is Earth. The other four elements or phases the Life Force flows through are fire, water, gold and wood. The Taoist 5 Element/5 Phase theory is a symbolic system used to describe cycles that the Life Forces flows in, whether inside the body’s organ or in the seasons of nature.

The foreign or “imported” elemental theory of Buddhism remains visible in its use of the Hindu set of four elements: fire, water, earth, air, plus Ether as the center or fifth element. Thus Hinduism and Buddhism tend to be more “ethereal” and Taoism, with Earth as the center elements, more “earthy” and grounded. This is not a “right/wrong” issue, just two different approaches to a single underlying truth. Having practiced both systems, I prefer the more grounded, body-centered Taoist approach.

Chan Buddhism softened and simplified the complex pantheon of Tibetan Buddhist deities. The male god Avolokiteshvara morphed into the female Goddess of Compassion - Kuan Yin - in China. Tibetan Buddhism had many esoteric schools with similar underlying principles to Taoism, although its practices, rituals, cultural images/archetypes, and hierarchical priesthood are quite different.