According to ancient Daoism our challenging emotions can be transformed into wisdom! 

It's not as hard as we might think!  According to this yogic tradition, each emotion is an expression of an "element" - a type of movement of somatic energy.  When this movement of energy shows up as an unpleasant emotion, it can be very uncomfortable, but there's actually nothing wrong with the element.

Our emotions are literally energy in motion.  They exist as a way for our body to communicate with our mind, in order to get our essential human needs met.  The problem is that we can clamp down on, exaggerate , or just get confused about our emotions, and this can spiral into something very overwhelming that makes it harder to get our needs met. 

The yogic secret is that the elemental movements of energy exist on a continuum.  On one end are the most unpleasant versions of our emotions, but on the other end are very powerful states they referred to...

Back pain is truly a pain!  Fortunately, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Qigong have some unorthodox answers that really work! 

This simple qigong technique combines breathing and visualization, and can be used anywhere and anytime.

It was taught to me by respected masters of the craft, and I know it works because I used it myself, when advanced martial arts training went a little too far, resulting in pain and stiffness that just wouldn't go away! 

The technique is simple: 

When you breathe in: imagine a beautiful, deep blue light is being gathered from the entire universe.  Draw this light into your kidneys (just beneath the ribcage in your lower back)

When you breathe out: imagine this light has nourished the kidneys and they are now radiant and glowing with this rich blue color.  

That's it, that's the whole exercise!

It works because according to Chinese medicine, the lower back is the "Palace of the Kidney...

Winter is a great time to heal your knees, according to Chinese traditional medicine, because the knees are associated with the health of the Kidney meridian - associated with this season.

Because of this, I put out a FREE course called "Knee Gong" as a gift to you!  I wanted to give some explanation of the practices that I chose for that mini-practice, so here's a little explanation of how it  works!  

First, the warm up - which is to both increase circulation of blood and vital force, but also help get the structure regulated - the knees are put into balance, but the hips and ankles are also important, because they impact the position of the knees.

Next we "remove stagnation" by working any trigger points we find using self-massage.

Then it's time to "regulate the structure" and we use stretches for the main muscles that will impact most knee pain - the quads, the glutes, and the hamstrings.

Finally, we "regulate the Qi" by working with the meridians.  The...

Have you heard that to develop spiritually you must "transcend the ego"?  

There's a lot of truth to this, as the claustrophobic sense of a cut-off "self" is the cause of many of our problems, both personally and socially.

But when we attempt to bypass our sense of self prematurely, it causes more harm than good.

Traditional wisdom schools have built-in ways of cultivating a healthy sense of self, so that as we surrender less-functional ideas about Who we are, we are not left adrift, or less stable than before.

This brief clip from our most recent Compassion Alchemy meditation retreat talks about this type of training. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to sign up for our next retreat, coming up on November 12th! 

Alchemy started out as a form of pre-scientific chemistry -  attempting to turn lead into gold.... or did it?!?

Psychologists like Jung noted that the Alchemical processes described in ancient texts seem to correspond quite precisely with stages of psychological healing and transformation. 

Some feel that alchemy gradually changed its focus from premodern chemistry to inner spirituality, but there are many lineage masters of inner alchemy who will tell you that this inner transformation was always of primary importance.  

Among all the alchemical process one will encounter, of greatest importance is to find or create THE STONE. 

Called the Philosopher's Stone (popularized as the 'Sorcerer's Stone' in Harry Potter fame), this is the alchemical agent that allows all the other work of transmutation that follows.  

In the inner Work, this esoteric-sounding concept actually has a straightforward psychological meaning: the "stone"...

Meditation has many benefits, more and more of which have been documented scientifically in recent years.  It's these benefits that inspired me to teach the upcoming Compassion Alchemy Meditation Immersion over the next 4 months through Autumn!  

I wanted to briefly share a few of these benefits with you, as well as clue you in to the template from which I'll be teaching this course.  To navigate the many styles and techniques within the wide field of "meditation", we need a map.  The one I'm using is an ancient system of the four great metaphorical "elements" - Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind - each one describes a certain aspect of the meditative path, and specific benefits that meditation practice offers us.  

Earth refers to the Calmative, Grounding, and Comforting aspects of spiritual practice. 
Water pertains to cultivating our capacity for Reflection and Clarity.
Fire relates to the Alchemical work of our Emotional body and its Living...

In Daoist alchemy, it is said that in nature, fire blazes upward and water flows downward, but in life the fire must be brought downward and water upward.  

A traditional imagery is like a tree - it must bring the fiery energy of the sunlight all the way from its branches down to nourish even its roots, and it must pump the water from the ground all the way up to its branches.  

In a human body, it was felt by alchemists that you should have a warm belly, and a cool head. 

Traditional Chinese Medicine believes that if there's too much hot energy rising up, you'll get heart palpitations, racing thoughts, extremes of emotions, and insomnia.  Later you may even get problems with your physical heart.  On the other side, if the water energy is sinking down, they say you'll start to feel cold and achey in your lower back, have weak knees, achey and cold feet, and feel sinking and tired.  For many of us in modern society, we'll...

Chakras?  Aren't those the things that people culturally appropriate to fuel their spiritual bypassing?

well... yes, that too

But the teachings on chakras are extremely valuable!  In fact, if one really understood them well, it would help us to avoid spiritual bypassing and lead more integrated lives.

Most simply, what we're calling "chakras" here, are psycho-emotional potent points of body-mind interaction. 

Most ancient cultures of the world had some system like this because it's really quite obvious that your guts hold different strengths than your head, and your throat stores different emotional experiences than your heart.  

We moderns, though, seem to forget that our body and mind are continually communicating.  In one sense, it's almost like the body is your subconscious mind! 

Learning to speak the symbolic language of the chakras is one way to facilitate healthy communication between the conscious and unconscious aspects of our...

If you've been around the healing arts scene for any length of time, you'll have heard the term "Chakras" thrown around.

Chakras have maybe gotten a bad name, because sometimes people appropriate aspects of yogic practice without respecting the richness of the tradition it comes from.

I think we all should know about chakras!  Why?  Because they're not just some new-age woo woo belief system, but a map to the psycho-emotional potencies of our body!! 

Huh??  Put more simply, they're a map to the mind-body connection.

There's a reason that we tell people they're too much "in their head", or that they need to "open their heart", get my "feet back on the ground", or "go with your gut".  It's because this is a map of the landscape of feelings in most human beings.

Many ancient cultures knew that we are not just passive recipients of the workings of these psycho-emotional centers, but that we could also use this understanding to create greater health for...

Summer is here and for many of us that means that we'll be ramping up our expression of "work as love made visible"

In ancient times, the summer was the time when you could get the most work done, because you had the most light, but in Daoist tradition they also cautioned against getting overheated physically, or emotionally "burnt out!"

In alignment with this theme of taking good care of ourselves in light of the physical or emotional stresses we may find ourselves under, I've decided to make my latest course on Qigong and Yoga for Back Pain FREE on Youtube!!!  

The first session is up and it is based on the idea in Chinese medicine that all pain comes from stagnation.  This is similar to how musculoskeletal pain works according to physiology too.  Waste products can get backed up and irritate the pain receptors.  So if we can increase circulation, we can reduce our pain!  This first session is all about increasing circulation to the vital...