3 Amazing Stories: How Tao Practice Changed My Life (sent to Elist)

Dear Lovers of the Way,

Welcome, Cycle of Summer. We had a powerful summer solstice ceremony at Heavenly Mountain, my bone marrow is stil vibrating from it. I hope each of you are enjoying the magnificence of summer’s flowering. I’m starting to see fruit from 14 trees planted nearly 3 years ago, my last garden project with Joyce (my spirit-wife) before she passed.

The fruit blooming reminds me of the endless cycles of deathing and birthing flowing in each moment. I’m feeling an ever-deepening embrace of the Cosmic Lens of Time-Lines as the Earth’s vibration speeds up. sometimes I’m looking back in time, sometimes feeling my way into the fuzzy shape of the future.

Time-Lines feel linear when we live them, but when they are all laid one atop another, we can see they are really part of larger Cycles that spiral ultimately into the Original Breath, as it inhales back its Creation. The Tao breathes Life-Force into Creation, then breathes it back to Source, apparently in some kind of eternal digestion and rebirthing process.

I’m still contemplating the “big moment” for humans in this yin-yang mega-cycle.That finds me meditating on what happens spiritually to allow birthing of a soul into a physical earth body. Is it possible to stay conscious of the entire continuum of human creation, from source to soul to embryo to crying infant? I’m still open to finding a partner to explore this process of Conscious Conception. After several near-misses, I realize the successful soul-pairing process is largely a question of entraining with someone at the right cycle in their life.

We cannot escape cycles, that is how Heaven and Earth pulse into each other, how love crystallizes in human hearts. I consider the moment of human conception to be a kind of cosmic cross-over point, mixing both heaven-earth and man-woman cycles in a special orgasmic cauldron. The I Ching clarifies it. Human, earth-bound intention of man-woman as The Receptive. The collective impulse of Heaven to evolve and re-seed itself as The Creative. These are the first two hexagrams of the I Ching.

Being open to change (Yin) and initiating change (Yang) is the main theme of all Taoist cultivation practice. I’m enclosing three tales of Taoist cultivation by ordinary Western seekers, people much like you and I. Each tale is totally diferent, involving very different approaches to cultivation. One is using Taoist bodywork, Chi Nei Tsang, from Elandra Meredith in Hawaii. Alice Uchida in Brazil based her life on pursuing harmony thorugh Tai Chi practice. The third story, from Lisa Sarasohn in Asheville, North Carolina, is focused on deep internal transformation of her darkest demon, using One Cloud’s Inner Alchemy Water & Fire formulas (Kan & Li).

Each story gives insight into the profound changes that are possible, even when you are uncertain of your own connection to the Tao or of the scope of your own power to shape the Life Force (Chi). As a long time teacher, I know that the most difficult thing is to feel that you’ have the power to consciously CHANGE YOURSELF.

These three stories are about people who changed themselves using Taoist practices. The essays were submitted for the $500. scholarship contest for tuition at this summer’s Heavenly Mountain Tao retreats. The theme: “How Tao practice has changed my life: my most powerful experience”. I decided to award all three a scholarship, because I was so moved by their sincerity of heart and dedication to Taoist practice. Deanna Mclaughlin from Pennsylvania also won a half-scholarship.

I’d like to remind readers that these stories could be yours. It is all a matter of practice. Practice is just a way of strengthening our communication to the Life Force. Qigong or meditation is a way to tell it that we need something specific, depending on our practice.

It’s never too late to start cultivating. You can practice at home, using DVDs and homestudy courses, or better yet, come enjoy the power of a live training THIS SUMMER. It’s wonderful to feel the energetic support from a community of other Tao cultivators.

This Friday evening (July 2) is Chinese Calligraphy as a shamanic form of qigong, with Zhongxian Wu. Myself and Minke de Vos are revealing the Taoist Sexual Secrets of single and dual cultivation for health and bliss. Karin Sorvik is a master teacher of Chi Nei Tsang (Deep Order Massage). You’ll learn to give as well a receive CNT treatments, so if you are in need of a healing, it’s a great workshop to receive deep bodywork that releases the core knots of your Energy Body.

We accept last minute signups at Heavenly Mountain. You can simply call our Registrar Tynne Clifford at 828 450 8521 (her cell), or leave a message from within USA on 888-750-1773. The summer course schedule is below, so you can sign up directly from this email.

Later in July: Frank Allen has three master workshops around the theme of Bagua, combining self-defense with Taoist meditation. Tina Zhang shares her mastery of tai chi and Three Treasures medical Qigong. Karin Sorvik takes you a journey of Tao Yin (Taoist Yoga) and dream practice. Minke de Vos initiates you into the Tao Basics and Sexual Energy Yoga. Madame Wang Yan always excels in her Weight Loss and Medical Qigong.

And eternally devoted to the newly re-emerging global science of inner alchemy is my own sharing of the higher Kan & Li formulas. Every year, we go deeper and deeper, so please come back and review. This year we explore the mysteries of the oversoul/stellar mind in Star Alchemy.

Looking forward to hearing your Tao Story of Change,

Michael Winn

ps. if for some reason you cannot read the schedule below, or link to the URLs, just visit http://www.HealingTaoRetreats.com to put your $100. deposit to reserve your space. Tynne will arrange extended payment if needed, so don’t let money stop you!

Contents:
» Fabulous Tao Summer Retreats – 15 remaining!
» CNT: Deep Organ Massage and a Miracle Healing
» An Alchemical Conversation with My Inner Demon
» How Tao Opened My Heart to a Tai Chi Life of Flowing Health

CNT: Deep Organ Massage and a Miracle Healing
By Meredith Elandra

Funny thing, even as I was being born (during the war in occupied Denmark) I was searching for the way “back Home”. This Earth plane was not my true home, how could I find my way back? I had to know, and be able to get back there consciously. As a child I watched for signs. There was a way my heart would leap up and my body shiver whenever I got near to a clue. My feelings of joy at being in the beauty of nature, the love in my heart recognising the power of art … at age six I made notes for myself, resolving not to forget, but just as in the fairy tale Hansel had dropped bread crumbs to find his way home, only to have them eaten up by birds, the answer eluded me.

After several decades of teaching yoga and healing, plus many transcendental experiences and a miraculous personal healing I was still searching.

Then Hawaii called as Hawaii does. The word means Home. It was on the island of Kauai in the Hanalei health food store that I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

My body knew from birth what I was questing for, a consciousness that would show a predictable way to heal, sustain and maintain ourselves in healthy ageless bodies. What if everything we had learned about healing consciousness and the body was – not what you think it is! What if instead it were easily possible to live in a body secure and free from all the ills it is subject to, and then be able to leave it deliberately in full consciousness? What if the body itself knows how to do this?

What if there is a place, an actual address within the body where we can uncover that knowing and activate it for permanent healing and health maintenance…Michelangelo as he sculpted tells us how the stone spoke to him, so that he could “Cut away all that is not IT.” What if the body could speak and tell us how to let go, all that is not IT, so that it would resurrect itself to its original divine destiny…and then be Home.

Mind racing, heart beating I stood reading this flyer on the notice board. From Gilles Marin. A workshop in Healing Tao, Master Mantak Chia’s Chi Nei Tsang.

I wrote down the contact info, feeling this must be it! A map, with which I could navigate my way Home, on/in my own body. Like the great explorers of old, using the stars and remote viewing to the stars. There at the source I would find the answers, the secrets, the origins of all physical problems, and this human condtion could be healed and evolved.

In the workshop I learned that the way Home was indeed Within. Inside, not out there. We learned to open the windgates, and there it was, a map through the gates and channels of the body, with addresses! Those negative feelings so often stuffed and repressed actually had origins, an address in the body! Problems weren’ t “all in the head”!

I raced home and practiced on my husband with amazing results for us both in clearing our emotional states. But when I used it on my clients they were afraid, it was “too painful”. This was sixteen years ago when the belly was a very taboo place, and still is, even in Hawaii. I lost my healing practice.

I went to work as a gardener and soon was directly communicating with the elements. The trees spoke to me, showed me that in the same way as I was pruning them, I could clear the old negative chi to make room for the new. They taught me how to relax into my inner Knowing in the application of Chi Nei Tsang with my clients.

There was more power and more softness in my hands now. I loved reminding the organs of their own joyfilled jobs of moving stuck energy; lovingly making room for the Large intestine/Lung to reclaim its job of letting go on all levels, and the Small intestine/Heart to digest and integrate together with nurturing mother Earth and Spleen the negative charges. I felt the ease and joy of the body/belly intuition that KNOWS how to empower the Chi flow path to consciousness, without need to figure it out in the head. I experienced the organs as interdimensional portals. The cells were the time machine. I was home.

One day it happened, my most powerful experience of Healing Tao. A client had come all the way to Hawaii, and I had the privilege to facilitate and witness what he said was his last chance. I saw no aura, so I knew he didn’t have far to go. He lay there, very skinny, no electromagnetic energy, no auric field, skin greyish white, dying. He told me of his four year struggle with advanced end stage cancer in ALL his organs and intestines.

He had traveled from the other side of the world to find Chi Nei Tsang in Hawaii. My hands on his abdomen, the chi started swirling deep within his intestines, organs and cells, bubbling, whirling, vibrating and sucking my hands deeper, the activity increasing, my hands being augmented by ever more power.

His energy field started to brighten and lighten. With my elbow on the windgate point to the kidneys I spoke to him of those great “guardians of the life force” that protected and supported him. I invited him to make a loving look in his own eyes and join me in smiling to them. At this his Chi life force surged through him so strongly it caused the penis of this almost dead man to come to life and the ghostly grey skin to start to color and turn pink.

Some ten days later he called me, saying “You wont’ recognise me”. He looked thirty pounds heavier, radiant and suntanned, healthy, smiling, truly unrecognizable as the same man! He had just been declared by all medical tests to be in remission, totally free of cancer.

Wow. I gave grateful thanks to my teachers of Tao. How is this possible, what is it about Chi Nei Tsang that can do the seemingly impossible, what we call a miracle? Could it be because Healing Tao is free from our western cultural belief in separation from Spirit… In Tao the body, nature, the elements, ALL IS Spirit, one and the same with God. Not lower or lesser than and shamefilled -cast-out-of-Eden. To acknowledge this truth and to experience this vibrational frequency of wholeness is already in itself a major healing.

Everything is in the body (and the body of the Earth). I am experiencing them as a transmitter, with everything there in each organ and each cell, the perceptions that create beliefs, all there under my touch. Dr Candace Pert (Molecules of Emotion) says “Your body is your subconscious, your subconscious your body.” The Mother (of Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram in India) said, ” Salvation is in the cells.” And when I heard the voice of science – Dr Bruce Lipton (Biology of Belief) – say “Our bodies and our digital technology share the same definition, they are semiconductors with gates and channels” I thought “Yes, that recognition and acknowledgment is already embedded in Healing Tao/Chi Nei Tsang, no wonder it is so miraculously effective!”

The Healing Tao has given me my life’s calling, gift and joy: The Way Back Home through self- honoring self-healing practices. And every day I am in gratitude to my teachers.

Meredith Elandra

BE the HEALING you wish to see,
BE the LOVE you wish to feel.
I AM the HEALING I wish to see,
I AM the LOVE I wish to feel.

————————————–

An Alchemical Conversation with My Inner Demon
By Lisa Sarasohn

photo: ancient Taoist diagram of Water & Fire coupling to open the Inner Cauldron of Yuan Chi (Original Breath). White Cloud Temple, Beijing.

I’d felt shut down since the summer of 2009 when, at the end of the Lesser Kan & Li Inner Sexual Alchemy retreat, we did a powerful meditation gathering up all our negativity. We invited our inner demons into a single black pearl, and then deposited it into our inner cauldron of yuan chi. We let it cook in the darkness of our unborn self. Then, out of the cauldron, we allowed it to re-emerge, bringing up an image of —?

What arose out of my cauldron was an enormous mirror ball. A huge sphere covered with square panes of mirrored glass. I was appalled, frightened.

Seeing that image through the screen of fear, filtering it through habitual thoughts of not being good enough, I understood it as the ultimate indictment: I reflect, deflect all light; I don’t allow light to reach me. I’m alone, encapsulated in darkness. I’m entirely unworthy.

[And how does that interpretation work for you?]
Not too well.
[You might remember: If an idea doesn’t make you feel better about yourself, more grateful, more glad to be alive — it just might be a delusion.]
Thanks. I’ll remember that.
[Yes, do.]

Something happened last night that blasted those old incriminations — I’m not good enough, I’m not deserving — out of the water.

Earlier in the day, I’d been working with poems by the 17th century Sufi poet Zeb-un-Nissa. Taking her poems from the convoluted syntax of their early 20th century English translation into contemporary rhythm and diction, I’d pondered what to do with the translators’ florid metaphors: “the flaming furnace of my heart,” “my burning heart,” “the mirror of my heart.”

Crawling into bed, I picked up The Sufi Book of Life by Neil Douglas-Klotz, a meditation on the 99 names of God. Opening the book to a random page, I came face-to-face with number 34 — Al-Ghafur, the Forgiveness of Light. According to the author, “When you are guided to this pathway, take the opportunity to touch the place in you that can deeply understand a situation, and so release an impression you are holding or heal a wound you are nursing.”

I went on to read that, in Sufi understanding, “God created the human being as a mirror capable of holding and expressing the totality of the divine reflection, including the whole consciousness of nature and the universe. This is what, in the Sufi view, being fully human means.”

What better image of the capacity to hold and express “the totality of the divine reflection” than a sphere of mirrors? It fit perfectly with my alchemical Tao meditation on my reflected demon.

When I gathered up my negativity into the black pearl during that Lesser Kan & Li meditation, I must have missed my attachment to the thought that there’s something irrevocably wrong with me. The image of the mirror ball surprised me and, as I understand now, challenged my belief in being flawed. My reaction: fear. I could have been delighted, receiving this gift fully, graciously.

[Are you ready to receive it?]
I wasn’t then.
[And now?]
Yes I am.

Last night, as I understood the image of the mirror ball in this new way, I cried, sobbed, felt my breath release. I felt chi moving through me, cold trickles of sensation tickling through my nerves. I saw light penetrating the mirror ball, reaching into the dark inner chamber, reaching to me, curled there in a fetal curve. Mother Mary, blue-robed, white-gowned, joining me there, enfolding me in her arms and wings, soothing and warming my heart.

Light, lines of light, penetrating the mirror-sphere’s inner chamber. I’m not alone. Her presence, the Divine Mother, the forgiveness of light.

Today, new thoughts replace the old. I don’t have to keep myself from what I desire. I don’t have to punish myself, be ashamed of myself. I’m good enough. I’m eligible to want what I want, receive what I need and desire. I’m entitled to act, to fulfill my aspirations.

Christmas came early this year: Emerging from the black pearl, the birth of light. With support from Sufi and Christian imagery embedded deep within me. Tao embraces all, brings all to completion, using its own alchemical magic.

Lisa Sarasohn

How Tao Opened My Heart to a Tai Chi Life of Flowing Health

by Alice Uchida

Everyday I give thanks for taiji (tai chi) in my life. I practiced for more than 20 years, and like my best friend, taiji has helped me to pass the difficult phases in my life. I’m especially grateful to Healing Tao practice that provided an upgrade in my taiji practice, going deeper in the internal structure, and the very objective Taoist qigong methods that really contributed to my transformation, self knowledge.

It is very common that we want to do things in a different way than we usually do. For example, not to be so impatient. But in the heat of the moment we don’t think and we react very impatiently. So we continue with the intention to be more patient, we hope to be more patient, we try, but, it is so difficult…

For me, the Tao Six Healing Sounds were a revelation. Instead of thinking to be patient, I learned to substitute my arrogance and impatience in my heart with love, the natural virtue of the heart. It was something fantastic. It is so simple. When we act with love, trying to understand the other person, it is easy, natural to have more patience.

I always respected my mother, all she did for her many children, but still daily life with her was very difficult. I was often very impatient. And I was not happy with my behavior, but I couldn’t change. Only through the healing sounds and inner smile, I achieved a good relation with my mother. Of course, it didn’t happen immediately, but only by really trusting in the methods and doing them regularly. And things become better not just with my mother, also with my family, friends, and all persons.

I believe each day I am seeing better, deeper, more clearly, and I am learning to really listen, trying to understand what the other is feeling and trying to transmit. Each day I’m improving my communication with others, integrally, with mind, heart, body. About body, we see how important is the physical structure, the correct alignment to allow the chi flow, and how all this help people to feel better. I am so grateful to qigong for this lesson.

And I would like to thank Michael Winn and other senior Healing Tao instructors that taught me a lot, not only with their serious work, but with their example, each one with their way of being. I always remember how I was studying and practicing taichi chi kung day and night, with effort to do my best, because I was going to submit to test for certification. The night before the test, Michael Winn observing my form, simply said “smile”. Really, it made all the difference in my taichi chi kung practice. Masahiro Ouchi was so generous with my Brazilian friends. KarIn Sorvik transmitted her marvelous sensibility. Marie Favorito shared he deep rooting energy. And so on.

I can feel the tao practice changed my life. But I can only confirm that I really changed when other people observe me. I met recently one taiji colleague that studied together in the beginning several years ago but didn’t continue. He told me that before I was a common person, but now I was special, with a unique kind of energy. And I believe him. Because nowadays it is very common that people say that I am beautiful. But I know that I’m not an example of physical beauty. I think that these people see inside me, see my cultivating a beautiful virtuous energy.

Before it was very difficult for me to speak in public before others. But with taiji naturally I began to teach class, and later at events I was able to be in front of hundreds of people without it being a big problem. I’m still not a great oratress, but compared with before, I am not so shy anymore. I don’t run away from speaking publicly because I believe in what I say, in what I do, and I want to share with others from my heart.

My mother is 92 years old and she is very grateful to me for improving her health. When my father passed 7 years ago, she was weak, without courage to walk out of the apartment. My family also recognizes that she is now healthy because of the things I transmit to her. I also have a 90 years old student who thanks me for each taiji class. Her doctors are surprised with her good condition. But, of course, it wasn’t just their will to be well, their dedication, no such chance – it is the chi flowing through them. And in these examples, I am grateful to see how the teachings transform each person’s life. I learned a lot from them as well. We learn from each person we teach Tao to.

So, I’m very happy and deeply thankful because the Tao is continuously giving opportunity to learn, to have more consciousness, and share good health with more people.

I like very much the message always Michael Winn sends:

“THE TAO IS VERY CLOSE,

BUT EVERYONE LOOKS FAR AWAY.

LIFE IS VERY SIMPLE,

BUT EVERYONE SEEKS DIFFICULTY.”

Taoist sage, 200 B.C.

Alice Uchida,

Brasilia (Capitol of Brazil)

Thanking the Tao for each soul that it so graciously touches,

Michael Winn