Inside Tao News:
Article: What the ancient Celts and Taoists had in common: the
Fundamentals of capturing the life force.
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Dear Chi Lovers,
I recently returned from Newgrange, Ireland where we had a wonderful
star alchemy retreat. We were practicing the Daoist Hermit One Cloud’s 5th
alchemy formula, also known as “sealing of the senses”. We turned our mind
deep inside and expanded that inner mind to open up direct perception of the
inner nature of the outer cosmos.
We aligned the axis of our body’s chong mai (core channel) with the Pole
Star and the precession of the equinoxes, the wobble in the earth’s axis
causing it to trace a grand orbit around the zodiac every 26,000 years. We
absorbed the stellar chi from the zodiac inside us. It activated a profound
inter-galactic awareness of our collective human nature, what is called the
oversoul in the west.
5000 years ago ancient Celtic adepts built a massive stone mound in
Newgrange, older than Stonehenge. The mound aligns with a shaft of sunlight
that shines through a narrow opening and reaches 100 feet into the innermost
chamber on the Winter Solstice. More amazing than the enduring construction
and design of Newgarange was the purity of vibration within this inner
chamber. It was energetically still intact.
These ancient architects laid profound importance upon the fundamentals
of alignment with natural forces. They used stone to capture the power of
the Sun and store it deep within the earth. I could not only feel it, but I
could actually internally HEAR this vibration – a very fine high pitched
pure hum. I remembered one researcher called Newgrange “an advanced
astro-acoustic chamber”. It concentrates the inaudible high sonic frequency
of the sun entering the earth. But with the practice of chi kung and inner
alchemy, you can internally hear these super-fine frequencies.
Newgrange got me thinking about what is fundamental in life. What makes
Chi Kung (qigong) Fundamentals so fundamental within Daoist practice? Why
are the Inner Smile, Healing Sounds/Five Animals, and the Microcosmic Orbit
(“embryonic breathing”) considered the fundamentals over so many millennia?
Why have they endured for thousands of years, through huge gyrations in
Chinese culture and history, to now blossom in the West? Why do these
fundamental structures of yin-yang and 5-phase energy practices appear
throughout all of One Cloud’s seven Daoist formulas for immortality?
Chi Kung and internal alchemy use exactly the same principle tapped by the
ancient Celts at Newgrange: they align our multiple body intelligences and
energy pathways in order to capture the life force shining naturally within
us. Using sound, breath, feeling, color and movement these energies are
concentrated deep within the chamber of our inner body-mind space. What the
Celts did with outer architecture the Taoists do with inner body
architecture. Of course, the Celts likely had similar internal practices.
Chi Kung Fundamentals are fundamental because the movement forms and
meditations give us a practical way to feel and stabilize this flowing
energy of nature inside our body’s “elixir field”, or dantian in Chinese.
But if we practice Chi Kung Fundamentals from the perspective of inner
alchemy – the way I now teach it – they become even more powerful.
Inner alchemy gives us an internal map for navigating the biological,
psychological, and spiritual processes that are all happening simultaneously
inside us. Alchemy is humanity’s oldest and our original spiritual science,
and it satisfies our craving for some practical and definable spiritual
process beyond praying to an invisible god(s) somewhere out there beyond the
night sky. It concentrates the god-power of Nature inside our own body.
The forms we learn in chi kung fundamentals are not creating or building
up chi – it’s already infinitely abundant within us our body-mind. We’re
just learning to communicate with the pre-existing chi field inside us.
We’re learning how to play with the external chi field all around us. Having
inner alchemy’s map of our body’s vital organ spirits, and knowing their
behavior is governed by our internal energy pathways, makes it easy to
continuously feel chi flow in our daily life.
If you want more flow in your daily life, I invite you to learn the
fundamentals of chi kung. If you’ve already learned them and left them
behind, you’ll find them worth a second, deeper visit.
To the Inner Light and Sound of the Tao (Dao) within Us,
Michael Winn
“Who takes Heaven as his ancestor, Virtue as his home,
the Dao as his door, and who escapes change is a Sage.”
Chuang Tzu, Inner Chapters
“The Dao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
— Daoist Sage, 200 B.C