Qi Flow! Secret of Creative Living

1. Please send in your experience of how Qigong or Taoist meditation influenced your Creativity. It may go into a book on Qi and Creativity.

2. Thanks for “LIKE-ing” my new Healing Tao USA fb page (it helps search engine ranking). I’ve added more videos & photos! Please visit: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Healing-Tao-USA/339082189537257

 3. Ongoing Tao Cultivation Special Offer good until May 15! Save $15. to $100.! 35% off Sexual Vitality Qigong DVD/Audio. See details below.

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

Inside Chi Flows Naturally:

Modern CHAOS theory holds that creativity is the rhythmic interplay between chaos and order. Taoists figured this out thousands of years ago – all creation is the creative play of Qi (Chi).

Dear Lovers of Creative Energy flow and Highest Self-Realization,

I was recently interviewed by Michael Gelb, the author of How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: 7 Steps to Genius Every Day. It’s a wonderful book about the definitive Renaissance Man who accepted no limitation in his personal development. Da Vince (1452-1519) was the son of a peasant, famous for his Mona Lisa and Last Supper paintings. Gelb debunks myths about the brain aging and getting rigid. He gives useful tips on cultivating curiosity and staying practical.

Gelb, it turns out, is an avid qigong practitioner, and is now writing a book on Qi and Creativity. This did not surprise me, as I feel that anyone exploring the roots of human creativity will (by the grace of the Tao) be inexorably led towards the study of Qi (also spelled Chi, both pronounced “chee”). The Life Force is the medium of ALL creation. If you get in touch with Qi, you by definition become creative. If anyone has stories about Qi affecting their creativity, send them into me for possible inclusion in Gelb’s book.

I Was Born Feeling UN-Creative, a Clever Monkey

Perhaps the most interesting detail to emerge from Gelb’s interview was the fact that I felt distinctly UN-creative when I was younger. I recall thinking to myself in college: “I am just a clever monkey. I attend an Ivy League College. I read classics written by creative geniuses and make clever commentary on them for my professors. I am in the top of my class. Yet I have created nothing worthwhile or original. I look around me and see a lot of smart monkeys with bright intellects – but that like me, are spiritually and creatively still primitive, if not downright stupid”.

I felt depressed and bored by the thought that my whole life would continue this way. I had discovered no special artistic talent. My life story is how I went from being a “monkey-see-monkey, monkey-do” clever copycat to being a Monkey that realized its inner nature  was Infinitely Creative. Ironically, it wasn’t until 20 years later that I looked at my Chinese astrology chart and saw that 2 of the 4 animals in it (year, month, day, hour) were Chinese zodiacal Monkeys!  I feel one reason I am so compatible with my wife Jem is that she also has a Monkey as her personality controller (day stem). To check out your chart, go to: https://healingtaousa.com/ZiPingWeb/ziping-reading.html

After college all my friends found a secure niche in the economy as doctors, lawyers or professors. I had no career ambition, just wanted to explore life. I spent my summers rafting down the Grand Canyon as a guide. The prospect of a 9 to 5 job seemed pedestrian. I spent a year in the south of France, living the romantic ex-patriate life. I drank wine, stared in frustration at the sea of half-naked woman on the famous Cote D’Azur beach in Nice, and taught myself French. I didn’t have the foolish passion to even attempt writing the Great American Novel. I knew I needed more life experience.

First Step: Marry Someone Creative!

I returned to New York and drifted into book publishing. It seemed I had some imaginative flair, and soon found myself at age 23 as the youngest publicity director in NYC. I leapt into a green card marriage with a beautifully exotic Ethiopian girl named Shamaie, or Candle Light. After we got married, I fell in love with her. What did I love about her? She was totally creative.

She re-invented her personality every moment. She constantly invented a private language to describe her world. It was amazing to me, a source of endless fascination. She was the only adult I’d ever met whose Inner Child was 100% manifesting creatively in the Present Moment. Perhaps I had the material for a novel…or was that just a clever thought?

Then I got fired from my publishing job. The reason? “You are TOO CREATIVE for this corporate world. You don’t belong here,” my boss told me, as she handed me notice to clean out my desk. I felt numb and shocked. My security blanket had been ripped off. Later I would thank her, a thousand times, for seeing my truth. Within the same week I sent my Ethiopian wife off to Jamaica. She’d met Bob Marley and become a 24 hour-a-day pot smoking Rastafarian with dreads and newly acquired anger at whites. The pot was making her violent – plates were being thrown at me. She couldn’t help it – her Child was having tantrums. But it was just a bit too creative. I still loved her – it took me 12 years to finalize a divorce.

My creative solution to losing my job and wife in the same week? Escape. Within a few weeks I had packed my bags and headed to Ethiopia as a boatman on a raft trip down the Omo River, a gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon. When I arrived in Ethiopia, the raft trip was cancelled – a revolution and civil war was brewing. The other rafters left for Kenya. I stayed on as an undercover journalist, and soon found a new career as a free lance war correspondent and photographer. I discovered that I loved living on the edge of the unknown, of only being as good as my last story. I HAD to be creative to survive.

A few years into this career, I had a spiritual breakthrough. I was in Africa on an assignment for the New York Times covering the war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I accidentally induced my first kundalini awakening. I did it with a simple breathing technique that I now teach as part of my Medical and Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4 (https://healingtaousa.com/ckf3.html). That kundalini experience was cosmically orgasmic. It showed me that creativity was really multi-dimensional, not merely a function of having a creative personality. That inspired me to practice kundalini yoga, which at that time (1979) was deep underground.

How I Used Qigong to Guide My Career Decisions

Yoga eventually led me into Qigong and Taoist internal alchemy meditation. Now the story comes back to Qi and Creativity. I discovered that cultivating my Qi got me out of my head and into my deepest gut instincts. I would do qigong or tai chi and then sit to practice Inner Smile, Fusion or Kan & Li (water & fire). These were dynamic Tao meditations, not just sitting there and trying to empty the mind (ala zen). I now had a way to capture the creative energy from my vital organ spirits, and let it spontaneously combust. Ideas would just float up from my belly center. I wrote the ideas down, and they always proved to be the brilliant next step in my path as a free-lance adventure travel writer/photographer. My body had become my Creative Muse.

Author, atop the Great Pyramid, Spring Equinox 1981 (beginning of the 36 year Mayan calendar crossing of the Milky Way’s Galactic Dark Rift). I had the experience of merging into the entire energy body of planet earth.

I would sit in meditation and ask, what is the most interesting story in the world for me to explore?  OK, North Yemen would come up. I’d sell the story and photo assignment to different magazines and head off to Yemen, or the Himalayas. Or get myself locked inside the Great Pyramid. Or hitchhike across the Sahara Desert, enroute to visiting the largest mud mosque in the world in Mali. And so it went. Suddenly, my life was an endlessly creative play between cultivating Qi and my creative career. I began to actually love myself.

I wrote a story about the Black Jews in Ethiopia, known as the Falasha. That led me to a new career, smuggling in white Jews into Ethiopia to visit (and help) long lost black Jewish cousins. To avoid scrutiny, I’d rent donkeys and take people into remote mountain villages in Ethiopia’s Mystic Mountains. At the end of one of these trips, I got my ultimate lesson in Creativity.

A Taoist immortal floated into my hotel room in broad daylight, and zapped me with a beam of SOLID light that emanated from his navel. It hit my navel with the force of 100 pounds. I exploded into an atomic mushroom cloud. It completely dissolved my body. I then watched as my body reformed from tiny “raindrops” of consciousness. (If you want the full details on that amazing story: https://healingtaousa.com/blk7.html)

Painting of Tao Immortal Chang San Feng of Wudang Mountain. The immortal that visited me looked much older, like he was 2000 years old, with long white beard. I had never seen an image of a Taoist immortal prior to visitation. Through psychic research I discovered his name was Jing Ming Tzu, that he was blind, and was appointed to be my guardian. He visited me because I was about to spend the night locked inside the Great Pyramid.

This experience taught me two things. One was that personal creativity can survive beyond death (Taoist notion of spiritual immortality – not Western notion of physically living forever). I stopped buying into the common story that the individual self was an illusion that would totally dissolve at death back into the ocean of Source or absolute emptiness/void. I had witnessed directly that the human soul spark could continue evolving creatively in other dimensions. Second, it led me to discover that creativity required the alignment of the multiple layers of one’s Energy Body, so the Qi (chi) could flow through smoothly.

I kept asking myself one question: Who is CREATING my physical body? Am I the created puppet of a remote God, or am I a self-creating God-spark of Free Will and Divine Imagination in human form? That question led me deeper and deeper into what people call the sub or unconscious parts of my Self. I had to develop a sophisticated map of Taoist cosmology to navigate the shadow realms.

As I followed my path of Highest Creativity, it naturally led me to teaching a dynamic integration of qigong (movement) and inner alchemy meditation. They are the most effective tools I’ve found for consciously and creatively shaping one’s destiny. That is where I am today – trying to help my fellow humans overcome their resistance to unfolding their own uniquely creative path in life. When the so-called “unconscious” is brought to light, it becomes creative energy that can be focused on whatever destiny we choose.

Qigong and meditation can be focused on whatever level you feel comfortable with: better health, creating abundance, finding love, growing wisdom, or the path of eternal creativity beyond death. All are expressions of Qi, shaped by creative human intent.

Take the Time to Concentrate Your Qi

If you are seeking a breakthrough, my suggestion is that you consider coming to a week long Tao retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains this summer, June 21- July 22. What I found for myself and for many others is that the extended period of group concentration on Qi Cultivation results in major creative breakthroughs. Typically, at least one third of the people who signup for one week end up staying two or three weeks. They WAKE UP when they FEEL the Qi, and they get excited. They realize it is the single most important thing in life.

These retreats are my love offering to humanity.  My 501c3 non-profit subsidizes the costs. We offer small scholarships and workstudy. The week long tuition is the best bargain you’ll find for such a high quality retreat – it has been $495 for the past seven years. Plus discounts for multiple tuition, seniors, juniors, and dues paid instructors. Commuters pay a $100 facility fee, but can eat our delicious high quality meals for only $105. a week.