Easy Breathing + Grounding = Good Health

                                                                                                                                            

BREATHING and ROOTING are the Tree of Life. Tree trunks are about breathing deep into the earth, to create Solid Rooting,  Leaves are about Easy Sky Breathing. photo: Michael Winn. Joyce Kilmer Forest, North Carolina.

1. Dec. 9 – 10, 2017 (Sat/Sun): Medical & Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4:

Internal Qi Breathing, Bone Rooting. Basic Iron Shirt Qigong.

Prevent & Heal Chronic Illness, clear ancestral (epi/genetic) issues. Details below.

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

 

2. Dec. 23 (Sat.): Winter Solstice Black Dragon Ceremony & Concert (Free)

Details below. To RSVP, hit reply.

 

3. Coming Soon: My review of best book on modern Taoism, just released:

Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Crisis of Modern Spirituality

by David Palmer and Elijah Siegler (U. Chicago  Press, Nov. 2017)

 

FEEL FREE TO HIT REPLY and RESPOND. I love hearing from you!

 

Essay below is adapted from a previous newsletter. I’ve polished it, but the basic message deserves re-reading. We only absorb a fraction of what we read. Please enjoy re-absorbing this information, and hope it sinks into the very root of your Being.   – Michael

Dear Lovers of an Easily Breathed Life that is Grounded,

Do you LOVE to Breathe? Do you LOVE to stand tall on solid ground, and walk firmly on it?

These two powers of LOVE are the root foundation of human freedom. Our love of freedom is not an abstraction. It may originate in a subtle heaven, but it demands functional physical integration in our body, our personal earth.

Our physical body is the root or ground of our individual Being or Soul. At the other end of the spectrum of consciousness all Beings are rooted in Source/Tao. If we don’t love the Root of our individual Being, it blocks the flow of love to Source. It creates separation. We will find ourselves in struggle with our subconscious self. Struggle is just another word for Resistance to being who we truly are. Resistance = lack of Self-love.

Who are we, at root? A vibrating field of Qi, an Energy Body, that has a relationship to the Cosmic Energy Body. Physical body is just a slow-motion printout of our Energy Body, its most dense layer.

Tao is the Way of exploring our human power to effortlessly co-create with the Cosmic Energy Body our highest destiny. This requires attuning our personal Energy Body to its highest possible vibrational frequency. Breathing is an EASY WAY to modulate our Qi. Easy Breathing = ease of Self-love.

One of my Taoist teachers in China put it simply: “Breath is the root of life. Take it away, there is no life.” Everyone knows we are one breath away from Death. Breath stops, we stop. No Breath = Death.

But as precious as breath is to us, our breathing process is still largely unconscious. Our personal subconscious and its resistance arises from the collective unconscious of humanity. How to navigate our Way through countless layers of Resistance into higher consciousness?

ANSWER: One conscious breath at a time!

Tao of Internal Qi Breathing

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”, just watching our breath is not enough. It’s a great first step. It relaxes us, releases our daily stress.

But using breath to CONCNETRATE Qi is what evolves us quickly. That is what my Tao of Breathing training is about. How to harmonize yin & yang breaths deep within the body, then concentrate the subtle Qi breath into a more tangible essence.

That is essentially an alchemical process of converting spirit (subtle breath) into matter (tangible breath), and vice versa. That free flow of breath back and forth creates an internal feeling of being spiritually grounded. Said another way, it builds trust in our authrentic Self. Self is a vibrating string of consciousness that links physical body-mind to Source.

The Human Tao or Way is about listening to and receiving guidance from Self through our body. Body is our ground wire. There is a lot of cosmic information floating about as Qi patterns, but all that really matters is what gets downloaded into our body in the present moment. Listening to body 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 Qi. If we love and support our Lung Spirit (Po), then it will reward us with more effortless breathing and more efficient energizing of all twelve of our body-mind organ spirits. Listening inwardly to our Lung Spirit results in a longer, healthier life, with less disease.

  Controlling Physical 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, collextively known as soul in the West and ling in China. 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 our breathing is what we call Rooting. The Body of 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 dark forces behind the violence. It is easier to control people when they are in fear. I

Rooting Our Qi is Easier in Winter Time

I 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 and connected to our belly center.

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 Qi 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

                          

Ten students attempt to push me over – unsuccessfully. In the seminar I teach everyone how to develop this kind of deep rooting power.

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 traditional Iron Shirt methods that I’ve adapted into 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. It gets omposted by Mother Earth. 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@earthlink.net.