Most people in the west just know about hatha yoga—very few are aware that China actually had an entire Yoga system. As Indian hatha yoga was classically a bridge to meditation (see previous article link here), Taoist yoga or what we call Longevity Breathing Yoga was a preliminary practice for other Taoist energy arts, including qigong and the three internal martial arts of tai chi, bagua and hsing-i as well as Taoist meditation.

What Taoist energy practice you started to learn or ended with was often determined by the teachers that were around you and your own interest in a subject. What makes Longevity Breathing Yoga unique (or any of the Taoist energy arts for that matter) is the incorporation of the 16 neigong (internal energy techniques) into the movements and postures.

Most teachers and masters of tai chi rarely teach the 16 neigong in the West, either because the students are not ready or because they were never taught the complete system themselves.  I’ll write more posts about the neigong later because it is at the core of all energy arts and the concept of cross-training. In this posts lets connect many of the Taoist movement forms.

The main function of many Taoist movement forms such as tai chi and qigong (chi gung, chi kung) is really to get your mind fully conscious in your body. You can see how this would be really beneficial as you move deeply into meditation.

Experiencing Your Body from the Inside Out

You can actually experience your mind or your body as something outside of you. This is like looking at your body as something on the bookshelf or the desk. You can have the experience of either having your mind look at your body from the outside or you can be conscious of the body from being inside of it.

Now with Longevity Breathing Yoga (Taoist Yoga) the whole thing moves you towards experiencing your body from the inside of it, each part and the whole, not like you are looking from the outside perspective as an observer, which is how a lot of people go through life. This is especially true of our highly caffeinated society with the immense amount of mental work we are required to do. It keeps us in our heads and many times not feeling our body.

So Longevity Breathing Yoga is all about dropping the energy of the mind back into the body. And this then sets a foundation where the mind gets more and more still. As you progress further the mind is then able to deeply penetrate your body. This happens layer by layer. This sets the stage for the ability for your mind to start experiencing the depth of ‘what is in your mind’, the two go together. The access point and key is the body. You have to ask yourself can you be fully in your body and if so how long can you stay there without gapping out?

Similarities of Qigong and Longevity Breathing Yoga

In this respect qigong and Longevity Breathing Yoga are not really that different. If you are going to be more accurate this was the same purpose of why the Taoist developed qigong. The only difference is that most of qigong practices are standing or done moving. Qigong has many of the same exact goals.

The nice thing about Longevity Breathing Yoga is because you’re not moving as fast it is easier to actually feel and go inside your body. For a lot of people simultaneously moving and the paying attention to what’s inside of them is just too difficult. So in qigong you have to do two things at once and that’s not so simple.

If you were having difficulty staying inside and feeling your body while you were doing a moving practice such as qigong or tai chi, you might want to learn a bit of Longevity Breathing Yoga, because that might enable you to develop the sensitivity required.

With Longevity Breathing Yoga at least once you get in a posture all your doing is focusing on what’s inside you—you are only doing one thing.  Many people find that Longevity Breathing Yoga to discovering and feeling their internal landscape.

Putting the Mind in the Body While Moving

Again everything is connected. Both tai chi and bagua perform the same function that it really allows a persons mind to enter their body—you are making your body conscious.

When you practice tai chi and bagua, once you have been at it for a while, it is possible to use the mind to enter the deeper emotional physic and karmic states.  This is an important step, one that is reached by few because they can not pull this off while doing the movements. Most are focused on doing the external movement correctly and are not able to go inside because it is simply too much to concentrate at one time. The movements and alignments have to become second nature so that you can move toward this point.

So one option is to first learn how to go into the mind in another practice such as Longevity Breathing Yoga and then separately learn a qigong, bagua or tai chi practice. Then once you have it together separately then you put the two things together in one. Combine and separate is a common principle in learning tai chi and any other movement form (you can apply this principle to many western sports such as swimming or golf for that matter).

Sitting Qigong Methods

Let me take this from another point of view from energy cross-training. In China there are also qigong methods that are primarily taught sitting. You sit and through sitting you learn how to have all the chi move inside your body without you moving at all.

Well sitting qigong was also used as a prime practice or as an adjunct practice to doing tai chi and bagua because then you would take that stuff that you were doing in sitting qigong and you would do it moving or vice versa.

Then your sitting qigong practice would then flow into your tai chi and bagua—this is energetic cross-training. The sitting practices would enable you also to have a much clearer understanding of how you could do all of this qigong or tai chi work when you were just sitting.

So everything is intertwined. However,what can be said is depending on your goal and intent, there may be an easy way to learn something and a hard way. Stay tuned for part three and last article in this series. All of this is learning to move toward mastery in whatever practice you are doing.

Here is a 10 minute clip of Longevity Breathing Yoga (with Energy Arts Instructors (Dorothy L. Fitzer, Ellen Pucciarelli , Mountain Livingston)…Notice this form of Yoga focuses on stress reduction, breath and body integration  rather than performing complicated postures, although it should be said that many westerners will have difficultly with breathing smoothly even within these postures:

Yoga in the Mountains (Photo by: lulumon athletica)

The term cross-training is used frequently in the West. Sometimes it refers to cross-training an employee but more often than not it is in relation to increasing athletic performance. Wikipedia definition is:

Cross-training in sports and fitness refers to the combining of exercises to work various parts of the body. Often one particular activity works certain muscle groups, but not others, cross-training aims to eliminate this.

In the west fitness cross-training is associated with the popular physical or impact type exercises. So if you are a runner you might benefit from lifting weights. Within mixed martial arts, cross-training involves learning different martial arts systems so that you are prepared for anything in combat. I did this type of training extensively when I was younger.

What is interesting is the Taoists have been cross-training for thousands of years, finding connections between movement arts, healing and ultimately meditation. In these series of posts I want to talk about Taoist Cross-Training because it can accelerate your path in energy arts and meditation…

The Original Purpose of Yoga – Preparing the Body for Meditation

I want start off this article by sharing my own personal experience of using yoga in relation to meditation because I think it will be helpful for you to put these practices in a more important context.

To set the groundwork, the purpose of both classic Indian hatha yoga and Taoist  yoga was to give a person the ability to sit for extended periods of time so that eventually when they practice meditation their body didn’t distort. So the essence of yoga is a cross-training exercise for meditation. Both the Taoists and the Indian tradition approached yoga as a foundation for meditation, not as the main practice itself.

Now in the West I know a lot of people do yoga for health and fitness, much like running or aerobics, which is all good. Classically though, in the East yoga’s key purpose was intimately linked to meditation.

Now in meditation the body should not lean to the left or the right because this interrupts the energy channels of the body. This then interrupts the flow of energy or chi (prana in the Indian tradition), which also is not often talked about in western Yoga classes. Your spine should be straight and not twisting all of over the place.  In other words you’re balanced.

Every real meditation tradition has very specific ways of teaching how these alignments are done. Learning this can not be underestimated because when a person is able to do that, the body’s in a very neutral state. Then you can focus on what your mind is doing within meditation. If your body is comfortable when you meditate it becomes dramatically easier for your mind to start going inside and inhabit your body.

When the body is in a fairly balanced position the energy runs through the system normally as opposed to becoming distorted. When the body is distorted it results in all sorts of kinks that simply arise from the stress of the body. Often distortions bring up all sorts of emotional, mental and psychic discomforts or unbalancing points.

The rub is many people think their meditation needs to resolve these unbalancing points, whereas the fact is if they were just sitting up straight comfortably they wouldn’t get them in the first place. So here is the key point:

If you prepare the body with yoga to sit better then you don’t have to go through all of this senseless misery. When the body is aligned properly you can more easily go into the deeper levels of the mind which is one of the points of meditation.

It’s a bit like the world of today with modern computers. What you require is a stable computer or a stable platform for all your software to run on. Otherwise your programs run too slow, they freeze up or you have impaired functionality.

So one reason to take up a yoga practice would be if you really want to get the most from your meditation. It is also a great place to learn how to breathe properly and learn about the alignments in the body in a sitting posture.

Bridging Yoga and Meditation

The whole process of classic hatha yoga and longevity breathing yoga/Taoist yoga is to get the breathing going well while deepening the posture and alignments, thereby enabling your mind to completely enter your body. After your mind enters your body then you can start learning how to move your chi throughout your body.

As that happens the energy channels of your body begin to open up. In Longevity Breathing Yoga this is first done with breathing techniques. Later you can open your body directly with chi techniques through utilizing the 16 nei gung.

Your mind starts to have the ability to enter every place in your body. Whenever you bump into something in mediation, you are used to moving directly into it in an extremely unified fashion. All of you gets involved.

So for example as you start going into things that relate to your emotions or your general thinking processes or your psychic sensitivities or your karma then your entire body gets behind what you’re doing. Even when something very shocking or previously traumatizing or an extreme blockage starts arising in your mind, these experiences have a way of moving through your body without getting stuck somewhere.

If something arises and it gets stuck somewhere, what do people often do when they sit and meditate?  Well most often they squirm. Their become incredibly distracted, space out and become disassociated to whatever that emotion was that was available for them to work with. Another common variation when this happens is people feel things that may have been hidden beneath the surface of the mind that are incredibly destabilizing. They may start having visions that have nothing more to do with them than the fact they are encountering how their energy is blocked.

As this happens delusions can occur, all of this process is beneficial but unfortunately really what is happening is they’re not encountering what’s really inside them.  They’re not encountering and seeing their real blockages.  These are sideshows to the main event.

My Experience with Pranayama in India

Not having the energies move through the system naturally is a classic cause of people getting sick and of people getting mentally deranged.  I know that there were times when I did my first really intensive pranayama in India’ where this occurred to me.

At that time I hadn’t been taught about how if you’re really doing chi work, how you should look at your emotions and your mind and your psychic sphere. I was just getting all this stuff blown up inside of me. Lets just say that I had a few emotional outbursts and at the time they were pretty rough.

Once I started practicing the whole Taoist meditation method, I started getting how to make these energy flows smooth. That made the practice a lot better and it also meant that I didn’t get sick from the practices I was doing.

And this same pattern I went through is quite common with lots of people who learn all sorts of energy practices without understanding this. This is also true for hatha yoga practicioners where many people will get sick from practice.  They may describe it as karmic blockages and everything, but a lot of is just that things can’t pass energy cleanly and smoothly through their body.

I mean if you were constipated for a month don’t be surprised if your intestines start giving you a lot of trouble.  The purpose of doing Taoist longevity breathing yoga in relation to meditation is that it gives your body the ability to be balanced. It opens all sorts of things in your body from the inside that would stop you from being able to sit in a balanced fashion.

A Relaxed and Gentle Approach to Yoga

Some people are able to sit in a half lotus or a full lotus.  They can force their body to stay in these positions for long periods of time, however,  often the body in these positions is very tense and causes other larger problems.

So how do you open your insides so your body can sit comfortably? How do you open up so that when you’re sitting properly all these postures don’t pull you apart on the inside?

Lets give some real practical examples of the importance of being relaxed rather than tense. If your tissues inside your ribs are not stretched enough on the sides, the ribs are going to cause you to stretch and tilt to one side.  If the energy inside you is not moving properly through your internal organs then something might cause your spine to displace or your neck to kink.

If the chi is not moving smoothly through your armpits down your arm then that place through your armpit through your arm will cause your body to lilt from one side to the other. All of these will then cause you to have experiences which as you’re meditating will seem very strong but they could simply be avoided if you open up the energy inside your body first.

You don’t have to go through all of this. In fact meditation is not a very good place to work these things out—it simply takes too long. There are better ways to do it.

It’s like a person who keeps on having terrible car accidents in a wintery place because they were never taken out into a parking lot and taught how to drive on ice.  It’s a problem to drive on ice but you do kind of have to know how to do it. So if you are going to practice meditation I would encourage you to cross-train with an art such as Yoga or Qigong or Tai Chi so that you can get your breathing, alignments and posture online first. You will save yourself years of heartache.

The Deeping of Yoga for Meditation Purposes

When you’re talking about how you move from your yoga practice to meditation, first you are evening out your body within all the different asana postures. The way you’re moving energy inside your body is very specifically geared towards opening up your body from the inside out.

Within longevity breathing yoga you will then learn internal practices as opposed to external practices about how you open up your body. At every single stage you will be able to open up more of your body, resolving issues that would prevent your body from becoming quiet, still and focused in meditation. The goal at the end of any practice is to enable your body to be still and focused inside itself so that you can carry this with you when you rise from meditation into daily life.

Again all of this is leading towards learning how to bring your body to a smooth and strong confutation for meditation.  Many people who do more meditation than you can imagine will go on for years before they actually learn how to sit without it being a problem. In fact I’ve met people who’ve meditated for 5, 10 or 20 years and they are still not comfortable sitting.

To summarize here, traditionally in hatha yoga the asanas were taught before any meditation work was taught so a person could sit comfortably. That is also the main reasons to practice Longevity Breathing Yoga, the Taoist system.

So you can see that cross-training is embedded in both hatha Yoga and Taoist yoga systems. My experience has been it is an extremely valuable thing for people to learn some kind of system that helps with alignments, breathing and posture if they are serious about the deeper spiritual work in in meditation—it enables a practitioner to leapfrog over many of the difficulties that people face when doing their meditation practice.

Stay tuned for part 2 and 3 in this series. I invite you to make some comments below…

Death Valley (Photo by: H Dragon)

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but when I was young I was an avid reader. I could read a 500-page book in a day and a half or two and actually digest it. Then, I went through a long period where I didn’t read at all, especially not in English.

I didn’t particularly like fiction when I was young. In fact, I almost exclusively read non-fiction with two exceptions. I actually really liked  Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which is about the French Revolution. In junior high school, when I was 12, I picked up the book The Hobbit on a Friday afternoon and I had read the entire Lord of the Rings series before the weekend was out.

Even still,  I really didn’t care for fiction. I still find most fiction novels boring as hell.

One of things that I did when I came back from China, at some point in the 90’s, was pick up the book Dune by Frank Herbert because a friend of mine said that it was really cool. I found that there are many ideas in Dune that mirror those in Taoism…

The Dune Series and Taoism

I read a big chunk of the Dune series. It’s one of the few fiction books I’ve enjoyed, and there are a lot of things about the book that are very interesting. It has an immense number of quotes and ideas that either parallel Taoist philosophy or let’s just say they can appreciate the point of view–whether or not they agree with it.

I think there are a lot of things in the Dune series that are relevant to my blog subscribers and my students. I would say that my personal appreciation and the Taoist appreciation is that if anything is true you are going to find it popping up in all sorts of different places, times and ways. It isn’t like something is true only for this moment. Truth has a way of repeating itself throughout history.

Contrary to the idea that history begins at breakfast, it actually started before you were born.

So there are lots of points in the Dune book that are relevant. Frank Herbert is a great writer. His message is delivered in a very concise way and leads into some points with which Taoism is concerned. The guy hit the nail on the head on a lot of points.

Fear is the Mind Killer

The Dune series is based 10,000 years into the future. In the world at that time there is a small segment of the population called the Bene Gesserit. “The Bene Gesserit are a powerful and ancient order of women whose objectives and actions formed a critical element in the evolution of humanity and many of the major plot developments.” These women have, shall we say, taken all the esoteric sciences to the highest level and are able to do the most spectacular things with their body chemistry, such as literally changing it at will, and changing their biochemistry if they get a disease.

The Bene Gesserit are trained from a young age and part of their training is learning to tame and use the mind. This of course is one of the purposes of Taoist meditation.

In the Dune series, when fear appears, the Bene Gesserit would repeat an incantation to help move their minds past the fear. The Litany goes as follows:

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.”

Now this is a nice way to look fear in the face and to dissipate its effects when faced with a dangerous situation. It helps to focus the mind inward and to have courage. However, this incantation does not really get to the root of fear and how it arises…to get to that point you have to go much deeper.

Two Perspectives of Fear

When it comes to going beyond fear you can use two different methods. One is the method of hypnosis, which is offered in a lot of the self-help material these days. The other, which is very different, is the method of meditation.

The perspective of hypnosis, to a great degree, uses mind tricks for dealing with fear at a moment in time. Repeating “The Litany Against Fear” in Dune induces a hypnotic state, so as to allow fear to wash over you.  That lasts for a few seconds but it doesn’t necessarily get you beyond fear. It is useful in the moment, but the change is not everlasting, for that we must dig deeper.

From the perspective of Taoist meditation, to get beyond fear you have to go to a place where the mind simply has the ability to stay open–allowing anything to flow through it.  Anything occurring in your outer environment does not close down that space within your mind. Fear is essentially a closing down of the space at the center of the mind and spirit or soul (depending on which term you care to use).

It is impossible to go beyond fear permanently by only having this trick or that trick that can help you for a few minutes. To get beyond fear, you essentially must change your internal landscape. So when fear attempts to grab hold of you, you reside in a place where it can’t.

Part of the process to get beyond fear will involve strengthening your kidneys. At a biological level, at least in terms of the way the Taoists and Traditional Chinese Medicine thinks of fear, it’s essentially a bodily reaction that is rooted in your kidneys.

Once your kidney’s are strong, then that fear-trigger won’t be activated as much. You can then go beyond fear to where the space of the mind, the openness of the mind, the flow of the mind is able to maintain that which allows spontaneity.

Real Fear and Fake Fear

If fear arises it may be a real fear, such as I’m going to walk over a cliff, then you just step back. Or, if a car is moving toward you at a high speed, you must be motivated to move out of the way. But that’s not really the kind of inner fear I’m discussing.

It’s the kind of fear that eats away at your insides. Real fear is nothing more than heightened awareness. That is awareness of a real situation and the fear that arises to protect you.

It is important to recognize that most fear has nothing to do with reality. Most of the time people are afraid of things that will never happen to them. This is an effect of the mainstream media and news constantly bombarding the public with negative images. This puts people in a weakened state of fear and decreases the immune system of the body. Often your mind picks up these pictures and replays them, creating a story about them. This is not useful nor is it good for the body.

So to go beyond fear, one of the first steps is to recognize that fear which is truly helpful: It makes you more aware, in real situations, in real time. Inside your fear is something that says, “Wait a minute, I think we have to do something sensible and prudent here,” rather than running around like a chicken with your head cut off, or becoming paralyzed and ducking under a chair, hoping that everything will pass one day.

Next, to really go beyond fear, you must summon the courage to look at all the fears that are inside you. Fears arise from childhood experiences and from terrible events that have happened to you or that you witnessed.

When you find these fears you can use meditation to get to a place where you simply can move to the space of awareness. Otherwise, you’ll too easily go to a space that contracts your awareness into a tiny, little box that scares the living hell out you.

As you move into the space of awareness, you can then release what is not real. This is the path to finding a peace place inside. This is a destination that can be achieved through Taoist mediation.

Tai Chi Master Bruce Frantzis in Seated Meditation

I am responding to a common question that was asked to me about why you would put one hand in front of or on top of the other in qigong or meditation positions where this is required.

First in my personal opinion, for most people its not that strongly important which hand goes on top or on bottom.  Many schools of thought in the qigong world as well as the yoga field say the energetic anatomy of men and women on the left and right channels is different. One way that this is described in a lot of detail is that one side of the body is either the sun or the moon or the male and the female.

In the energetic schools that have this thought, they will then tell the man or woman to put one hand in front of or in back of the other hand based on either the right or left channels of the body. This is a practical matter and I had this discussion with many of the masters I knew. However, after all my explorations I came to understand that until a person is at an advanced stage and is very deliberately working with their left and their right channels it does not matter all that much.

At a very practical level there is one main point that does matter and may influence your choice. This is that most people’s bodies are slightly imbalanced, either the left or right side of their body where in many small areas some will be more or less stretched than the other. The less stretched side could be that way because of genetics, trauma, uneven stretching, or other activities accumulated over daily life.

Usually the side of the body that is dramatically less stretched is the one you want to put on top or in front because it will stretch that side of the body out. Why will this happen? It will happen because the tighter side of the body, by being put in the forward or top position, will naturally stretch it more.

If you are sitting in meditation and have your hands palms facing upwards (to the sky) that means that the less stretched side would be put on bottom. If your palms are facing your tantien the less stretched side would be the hand that is furthest from your body. What this will do is it will slowly cause your body to release so that both the left and right sides of your body will be equal. This will increase the degree of chi flow and motion of your nerves into the side of the body that is naturally compromised.

Beyond that important practical point, when you reach a much more advanced level of qigong and you are deliberately working with the left and right channels of the body, there are various ways that you would place the hands. This has to do with deliberately balancing out and affecting the energies of the left and right channels. To simplify this, most qigong or tai chi masters will say put one hand or the other in front in general, however, the truth of the matter is much more complicated as you can see.

Although a teaching sound-bite may not be false, it is also may not be completely true. Each circumstance may require a different approach to achieve the results your are after.