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…