Qigong at Northwest Ballet Center

08/05/2025

08/27/2024

06/24/2024

Let's post this in every classroom.

06/15/2024

05/21/2024

❤️❤️❤️

09/12/2022

RETURN TO THE NATURAL

The Taoists advocate wuwei (nonaction). That means being natural, a concept that many people struggle to understand.

It might help to look at what being natural is not. Some of the opposites of natural are artificial, imitation, contrived. Throughout Chinese history, it was assumed that if one acted as if one was genuinely moral then one would be. That clearly allows for insincerity, hypocrisy, and failure. In art, it was assumed that if one copied the masters enough, one would become one as well. The Taoist would instead prefer us to be genuine, to be spontaneously correct without calculation, and to have all our actions be an expression of our inner natures.

This has to truly be a matter of our own natures and not an excuse for careless subjectivity. Many people want to "be natural," but they think that means they can act out of any impulse. The results speak for themselves. For one thing, such people may not be in touch with Tao, and so their actions might not accord with circumstance. For another, they may confuse what's natural with their own deep socialization and unquestioned drives. In addition, aging is natural too; one has to adjust continually to that.

That's why some people have to go through a process of introspection and eliminate aspects of themselves that are not natural. As a result, self-cultivation continues to be a needed process. We have to be honest if we find ourselves tainted by socialization, trauma, and erroneous education.

We journey to return to the natural.

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The Sixth Patriarch of Zen at the Moment of Enlightenment, 1635–45
Kano Tan'yū (1602–1674)
Hanging scroll; ink on paper
0 x 9 1/2 in. (101.6 x 24.1 cm)
TheMet, New York

08/03/2022

The idea that we are Ascending is a trauma induced fantasy. I wish it were true, but I feel certain that it isn’t. There is nowhere to go but here. And if there is a next place that we can ascend to, it won’t happen until we learn how to heal and inhabit all that we are in human form first. It’s so excruciating for so many people that they turn to these ungrounded imaginings to get through life. But it just delays our arrival as fully realized beings in human form. Better we put our energies into healing and humanizing our own consciousness. And if we do that, we will soon realize that we already living in heaven on earth. It’s all right here, in these flesh temples, on this abundantly beautiful Mother Earth.