Breath is Root of Life: Get Rooted!

      Nov. 27, 2016                                                      
 

Tree trunks are about Rooting; their leaves are about Breathing. Together, the Tree of Life. photo: Michael Winn in Joyce Kilmer Forest, North Carolina.

1. Dec. 3- 4, 2016 (Sat/Sun): Medical & Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4

                     Internal Qi Breathing, Bone Rooting.

Prevent & Heal Chronic Illness, clear Ancestral (genetic) Issues

Only $144. Contact Jan: info.healingtaousa@earthlink.net    888 999 0555

2. Dec. 21 (Wed.): Winter Solstice Black Dragon Ceremony (Free)

Details below. To RSVP, hit reply.

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The letter below is a reprint from 2015. When I re-read it, I felt I could not improve it, apart from a few sentences added to clarify. We normally only absorb a fraction of what we read. Please enjoy absorbing this essay again, and hope a larger fraction sinks into the very root of your Being. – Michael

Dear Lovers of Living a Grounded Life,

Do you LOVE to Breathe? Do you LOVE to stand tall and walk easily? These two powers of LOVE are the root foundation of human freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction. It may originate in heaven, but it demands functional physical integration in our body, which is our personal earth. You could call our body the root or ground of our Being. If we don’t love the Root of our Being, we are in a struggle with our subconscious  self.

One of my Tao teachers in China put it simply: “Breath is the root of life. Take it away, there is no life.” Everyone accepts this, but our breathing is still largely unconscious. That links into our personal subconscious, and the collective unconscious of humanity. How to move all that into consciousness? One conscioius breath at a time!

There are hundreds of different Taoist breathing methods – more than any other tradition I’ve studied. All are designed to make CONSCIOUS some aspect of our breathing, which ultimately connects our physical breath to our subtle breath (Qi). Simple “self-awareness” is not enough. It’s a great first step. But using the breath to CONCNETRATE Qi is what evolves us quickly. That is what Tao of Breathing is about – harmonize yin & yang breaths deep within the body, then concentrate the subtle Qi breath into a more tangible essence. That is essentially a process of converting spirit into matter.

The Human Tao, Man’s Natural Way, is about listening to and receiving guidance from your body. That includes listening to what your breath is saying. The Lung Spirit is said to be the master organ in the body in charge of teaching the other organ spirits about the Way of Breathing. If we love and support our Lung Spirit (Po), then it will reward us with more effortless breathing and more efficient energizing of our body. That means a longer, healthier life, with less disease.

  Controlling the Breath vs. Loving the Lung Spirit

Taoist breathwork is not about controlling the breath, unlike many forms of yogic pranayama. It is about embracing our power to breathe, and loving our Lung Spirit at a deep internal level. One of the best ways to nurture our Lung Spirit is to get energetically more grounded.

“Energetic” includes the whole spectrum of our physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and soul etheric layers of our personal Energy Body, also known as the Soul. When our body’s Qi sinks down through various channels into our bones and into the earth, our Lung Qi also shifts from shallow chest breathing to deep, whole-body breathing. That energizes all the vital organs, cells, and bone marrow where our blood is manufactured.

This need to energetically ground to support our breathing  is what we call Rooting. Nature itself defines what is “grounded”. We could say that Tao is the invisible spiritual ground of physical Nature. Nature is traditionally called the Body of the Tao. The single most common challenge I find in people, whether they are on a spiritual path or not, is lack of grounding.

    We Need Grounding to Deal with Rapid Changes in the World

Lack of grounding adversely affects both physical and spiritual health. This is especially critical at a time when the planet is quickening its vibration, part of our global re-birthing process. This quickening is flushing out Dark Side activities into public awareness.

There is a great “psychic turmoil” happening in humanity – the constant shooting of innocent people both here and abroad, the great evil of war and its many side effects cannot be brushed away any longer. To digest this kind of violent change requires deep grounding. If we are not grounded, we will fall into fear – the very goal of the manipulative and heartless forces behind the violence. It is easier to control people when they are in fear. I include in the shadow side category the intelligence agencies that effectively funded and created ISIS in order to purposefully destabilize the Middle East.

Rooting Our Qi is Easier in Winter Time

   I always schedule my Internal Chi Breathing and Bone Rooting workshop in December. It is easier to teach it during a season (fall-winter transition) when the Qi of the larger field is flowing downward into the earth. Nature’s Qi is “rooting itself” (in the northern hemisphere) to gather strength for the next cycle of yang expansion in the spring and summer. Winter is governed by the water element, which naturally flows downhill and soaks within. So our human Qi follows the flow of water this time of the year.

In this seminar, also available as homestudy, I devote one day to learning the three basic types of breathing: natural, reverse, and counter-force breathing. Breathing opens the “root” of the body, which is the lower dantian (lit.”elixir field”), a.k.a. the belly center. I’ve found that when you are grounded in your breathing, then your emotional and mental bodies quickly get more grounded.

A strong “belly-root” creates a feeling of calmness and peace, even when things are chaotic around you. I developed a special qigong form, Ocean, Sky, & Great Heart Breathing,  to speed up the rooting process. This shifts your breathing focus from gasping at outer air to breathing more internally, through chi channels in different layers of the body. This form, nicknamed “Blissful Breathing Qigong”, is the best “quick-energizer” qigong that I teach.

              How Bone Breathing Pushes Sick Energy Out of Bone Marrow

The second day at this workshop I spend working on opening up the bones in our body, using bone breathing, bone beating, bone compression, and bone spiralling. These are all part of the Iron Shirt method I learned from Mantak Chia, but adapted into some different standing postures. These deepen the breathing power of our bones, and help to both prevent and heal chronic illness. Much chronic illness is simply “sick chi” stored in our bone marrow.

When we breathe it out, the sickness goes away. What appeared to be terminal illness, gradually becomes forgotten. This is why qigong has such a good reputation (based on track record) of healing chronic illness in China. This reputation is well documented scientifically (see 3500 studies summary: https://healingtaousa.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=40).

In the Breathing and Rooting course I describe the two different kinds of grounding that people commonly need, which are quite different. One is grounding into the physical earth below our feet, and correspondingly, into the physical tissue of our body. The second is energetic grounding into your meridians and the core channels that define your Energy Body.

If you want to read more about this, check out my Medical and Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4 page: https://healingtaousa.com/ckf3.html. For convenience, I’ve posted some of that web informatioin below.

If you want to attend the course (it’s only $144. for the weekend), call Jan at 888 999 0555 or email info@healingtaousa.com.

If you cannot attend Asheville workshop but want homestudy DVD & Audio, please visit: http://www.healingdao.com/ckf3.html. Note that there is a huge discount if you buy the package with Fundamentals 3&4 together (nearly 50% off).