In classical Chinese,
the words for medicine, 藥 yuè
and music, 樂 lè
share the same root.

樂, silk strings (丝) over wood instruments (木)
藥, the “music” of plant life (艹）

What Medicine Really Is

Deep within the memory of the human heart,
there was a time when

medicine was not chemicals
extracted, often with cruelty,
from plants and animals,
mixed with fillers,
pressed into pills,
and sold.

Medicine was an elixir of vitality,
already bestowed upon
every human body
at birth—

a living energy
we can touch
when the mind grows quiet
and attention turns inward.

In that quiet,
we may begin to feel the body
as a single droplet of water
within a vast sea of belonging.

We may remember
our birthright:

the body’s ancient knowing
of how to mend,
how to restore,
how to return itself
toward wholeness.

There was a time
when a healer sang,
or danced,
or spoke a chant,
and a few lines of poetry,

to awaken this memory
in another body.

Not a dance
performed to please an audience.

Not a song
to display the musician’s virtuosity.

Not a poem
to prove the poet’s mastery of words.

Song, dance, and poetry
were simply
embodied messages of awakening—

a gentle knock at the door of remembrance,
a call from one living body
to another,

a cry of remembrance
from a healer’s heart
to the heart of the world.

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Cultural Field is Part of the Ecology

In the ancient Taoist worldview, the human body is understood as a microcosmic expression of the larger universe. Qi, the universal life force that moves through mountains, rivers, weather, seasons, plants, and animals, also moves through our digestive, respiratory, and nervous systems.

Through this lens, qigong—a practice for cultivating harmony among body, mind, and heart—is not merely a personal practice.

It is also a form of ecological activism.

Many people who are drawn to qigong today belong to an emerging tribe I think of as regenerative culture growers. I count myself among this tribe. Unwinding ourselves from extractive and unsustainable paradigms—capitalism, materialism, colonialism, and other systems that separate us from body, community, and Earth—we are actively cultivating a culture that values embodiment, relational reciprocity, creativity, and embrace many diverse ways of being and knowing. We grow these values through the ways we relate to family, whether of origin or chosen, to community, to land and to the people with whom we create and collaborate.

From a Taoist perspective, the energy and attention exchanged through these relational fields are expressions of the same living currents that move ocean tides, turn the seasons, and sustain the dynamic balance of ecosystems. Modern science may not yet have language for all of these subtler dimensions of relationship, yet many of us can feel them directly: currents of connection that weave our bodies and lives together with forests, waterways, weather systems, and oceans.

Qigong offers a way of becoming more sensitive to these currents—and of learning how to participate in them with greater awareness.

Upcoming qigong class

A Journey of Remembering of An Ancient Way of Knowing

In many ancient traditions, shamans and medicine people cultivated an intimate sensitivity to the movements of the natural world. They did not relate to nature primarily as something external to be controlled, extracted from, profited from, or manipulated through force. Instead, they learned to attune their inner ecology to the outer ecology, using the body almost like a tuning fork within a much larger living field.

Through this kind of attunement, they could perceive subtle changes in weather, foresee natural events, and sometimes participate ritually in calling rain or snow. Their knowing did not depend only on observation and analysis. It arose through the body, intuition, dreams, relationships, and long immersion in the living world.

Two beautiful books that I love offer glimpses into this way of being.

The first is Original Wisdom by Robert Wolff, which recounts the author’s encounters with Indigenous people in Southeast Asia, especially the Sng’oi of Malaysia. Wolff describes a way of knowing rooted in bodily sensing, intuition, dreams, and a profound intimacy with the forest—one in which the boundary between self and environment is far more porous than in modern industrial culture.

The second is The Wind Is My Mother, which shares the life and teachings of Bear Heart, a Native American medicine man. His stories convey a way of living in which wind, animals, plants, dreams, ancestors, and human beings all participate in an ongoing field of relationship.

Both books remind us that this sensitivity is not something supernatural or exotic. It may be a human capacity that becomes available when we learn to quiet ourselves, listen deeply, and remember that we are participants in nature rather than observers standing outside of it. This is also what we practice in qigong: refining our sensitivity to breath, sensation, movement, and qi until the body becomes quiet enough to perceive its ongoing conversation with the larger living world.

The Chinese language still carries imprints of this ancient understanding. Weather is 天气 (tiānqì)—literally, the qi of Heaven or sky. Climate is 气象 (qìxiàng), the manifestations, appearances, and patterns of qi in the atmosphere. Even in everyday language, the movements of the sky and earth are still spoken of through the language of qi.

I believe we are on a journey of collectively remembering this ancient way of knowing.

Remembering, however, does not mean simply repeating the practices of the past. The ecological, cultural, and social conditions that gave birth to ancient traditions have changed dramatically. Practices that arose within a particular landscape, community, or way of life cannot always be transplanted intact into the modern world and remain alive.

What we can recover is something deeper than form: the felt understanding that our own qi is continuous with the qi of the living world.

From this remembering, new practices can grow. Throughout China’s five thousand years of recorded history, traditions and lineages have never remained static. They have continually changed, adapted, and given rise to new forms in response to shifting cultural, social, and ecological landscapes. Today, amid the speed and intensity of modern development, new forms of practice continue to emerge—seeking not simply to preserve tradition unchanged, but to carry its living essence into the realities of contemporary life.

As this sense of continuity between our qi and the qi of the living world becomes embodied, we can carry it into the day-to-day conditions of our lives. Through our bodies, we may become conduits for the presence of the forests, mountains, rivers, and creatures we love. The mountain does not remain somewhere “out there.” Its steadiness can enter the way we stand. The river can teach our nervous system how to flow. The forest can reshape how we understand community.

To sustain the new culture which we are weaving and growing together, we may need to embody the fierceness of the tiger, the far-seeing sharpness of the eagle, and perhaps even the cunning adaptability of the fox. These qualities are intelligence dormant in the larger field of life from which our own bodies emerged. Qigong practices such as the traditional Animal Frolics (another module for 2027) can help us awaken and embody these different expressions of intelligence.

Qigong can become a practice of remembering this unity.

As we learn to sense the movement of life within the body, we may also become more sensitive to the currents moving through relationships, communities, seasons, landscapes, and the more-than-human world. Gradually, the boundary between “my energy” and “the energy of the world” becomes less absolute.

Rather than conducting our lives from the assumption that we are separate individuals moving through an external environment, we begin to live from a deeper recognition:

Ecology is not only around us.
Ecology is moving through us.

Find out more about the 7-week qigong class.

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This song came through Guan, a Chinese woman in a class I taught called “Spontaneous Musiking: A Pathway for Inner Discovery.”

Musiking is the way my teacher Kaija first guided me into songwriting, singing, and playing piano and ukulele when I was forty-one. It is a practice of listening for the music that is already moving through the body, the relational field, and the living world, allowing it to take form through deep listening, improvisation, and relationship.

Over time, I began sharing this practice with others, inviting them to “allow” a song to come through. One of my greatest joys is witnessing the awe on people’s faces, especially those who have never thought of themselves as musical, when they discover that a song can live inside them too.

When this song came through Guan, our whole class—gathered on Zoom—was moved to tears. We felt something together: hearts trembling, as if a soft and beautiful cosmic presence had descended and made itself known to us through a digital space stretching across the Pacific Ocean.

Since then, I have arranged the song for piano and returned to it many times. Each time, it brings me back to that same feeling of touching something vast and infinite—a presence that seems to hold humanity with compassion, tenderness, and a deep yearning.

That experience also gave rise to the poem that follows.

Lyrics

Setting sun, morning stars,
between Earth and Sky.

Myriad beings,
borne upon an undying current—

Measureless, boundless,
all-pervading, ever-unfolding.

One Shore of Belonging

Sometimes

the mist rising from the river
on an early summer morning,

a fallen leaf painted
crisp green, persimmon orange, and sunset red,

or a great horned owl
gliding silently above me

opens a doorway

into a vastness
inside my body—

a hidden sky,
a quiet universe
folded within creases of awareness
revealing itself through a crack in time

And for a moment
I remember

that this life,
this body,
this name

may be only one shore
of an ancient river of belonging,

flowing towards
the ocean blue
and an undying love.

Then the mist,
the leaf,
the owl

become messengers—

a love note
from the unseen,

a smiling nod
from another Self,

another song of life
sounding in a different octave

yet humming
in soft echo and a deep indigo tint
with this life on Earth

They remind me to follow
the slender tendril of a thread

weaving through joy and grief,
through the dark mouth of death
and the blazing threshold of birth,

through everything
we are asked to love
simply by being alive.

This time,

the messenger
came as a song.

This song.

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In this series, you will immerse yourself in the timeless river of qi, the living energy that flows through body, heart, and spirit.

Through gentle Qigong movement, mindful breathing, imaginative exploration, and playful interaction, we will deepen our capacity to sense and move with the subtle currents of this river. Supported by sustained practice and a community of fellow practitioners, we will cultivate vitality, balance, clarity of mind, and the body’s innate capacity for healing and self-regulation.

First 45 minutes – movement and meditation practice

Next 25 minutes – discussion: the cultural and metaphysical context of the movement, and how to integrate the practice into daily life.

Video recording is available after each session

At the heart of this module is the exploration of the Three Treasures: Jing, Qi, and Shen (精炁神) — three interwoven dimensions of life described in Chinese medicine and Taoist traditions.

Jing 精 — Embodied Essence
Jing is our foundation: the vitality, rootedness, and resilience held within the physical body. It is reflected in our strength, balance, flexibility, and capacity to adapt to the changing conditions of life.

Qi 炁 — Living Energy
Qi is the dynamic movement of life within us and between ourselves and the world. It is expressed through breathing, nourishment, movement, emotion, relationship, and our ongoing exchange with the environment around us.

Shen 神 — Luminous Awareness
Shen is the light of consciousness and spirit. It is reflected in clarity of mind, presence and our capacity to sense what gives our lives meaning and direction.

When Jing, Qi, and Shen are nourished and brought into harmony, Qigong becomes more than a practice for physical well-being. It becomes a way of cultivating greater wholeness—within ourselves, in our relationships, and in how we participate in the living world.

What People Say about Dancing Tao Qigong

“Spring’s teaching clearly comes from her heart and from her deep passion for the spiritual principles underlying Qigong and Tai Chi.”

“Dancing Tao provides the structural and cultural context for Qigong, which makes the movements much more meaningful.”

“I appreciate that Spring’s Qigong teaching creates spaciousness for spontaneous movement, helping me become more attuned to my own qi. The sensation of qi is palpable!”

“The practice brings more centeredness and spaciousness into my daily life. This energy also touches people and the environment around me!”

What is Dancing Tao?

The name Dancing Tao points to an ancient way of knowing through the body. In early Chinese culture, the character 舞 (wǔ), “dance,” is closely associated with 巫 (wū), the ritual practitioner or shaman, whose knowledge arose not only through thought, but through intuition, sensation, spontaneity, and raw experience with the living world.

Across many ancient cultures, dance was not primarily performance; it was a way of entering into communion with forces beyond the individual, into the collective and natural world.

Dancing Tao Qigong brings this embodied way of knowing into a contemporary practice. Drawing from her lineage and lifelong exploration of Qigong, Tai Chi, dance, and movement, Spring invites practitioners to experience the body not simply as something to strengthen or regulate, but as a sensitive vessel of perception, relationship, and wisdom.

Dancing Tao cultivates our capacity to listen inwardly, sense the movement of qi, and rediscover the body as a sacred participant in the larger flow of life.

To register, please click here.

About the Instructor

Spring Cheng, PhD, LAc, is co-founder of Dancing Tao Tai Chi, as well as an artist, author, licensed acupuncturist, and guide for inner transformation. Raised in traditional, pre-industrialized China and later educated in the United States, she holds a doctorate in molecular biology and a master’s degree in acupuncture and east asian medicine.

Her work brings together Taoist philosophy, Qigong and Tai Chi, artistic expression, scientific inquiry, and psycho-spiritual healing, inviting participants to cultivate greater trust in the body and a deeper sense of connection with the living world.

Spring is the author of Resonance Code: Empowering Leaders to Evolve Toward Wholeness. She is a musician whose compositions draw upon ancient Chinese poetry. Her work is inspired by a vision of culture rooted in interconnectedness, harmony, beauty, and the inherent wisdom of life.

Read full bio here.

Wang Wei, like so many great Chinese poets, lived through turbulent times. But the enduring sustenance of his poetry lies precisely there: he distilled peace, stillness, and love for life not from sheltered quiet, but from having seen through suffering and brokenness—and choosing, nonetheless, to sing.

人闲桂花落 In tranquil ease, I watch osmanthus flowers falling,

夜静春山空 The night is hushed, the spring mountains empty.

月出惊山鸟 Moon rises, startling the birds from the ravine,

时鸣春涧中 By the brook in spring, then and again they sing.

Recently, I have done a musical interpretation of this poem. This is a collaboration between me and a friend named 王珲.

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The Chinese word for time, 时间, has two parts:

时, shí—a moment.
间, jiān—the space between.

Time is not merely
the mechanical ticking of a clock,
nor a ruthless commander
marching us through our to-do lists.

Time is the infinite spaciousness
hidden between one moment
and the next.

Within each interval
rests a sacred seed of the cosmos,
waiting to germinate,
to open like a tender pink lotus.

When we pause and listen,
we cannot help but be moved—
lifted and gently swirled
by its unfolding beauty,

like tiny ants
drinking drops of sweet dew
from the petals,
reveling in a world
far greater than themselves.

The dance above is wordless poetry composed by movements and music flowing from a spontaneous moment. This is in collaboration with Daelinar, the flutist. Find out more about his music and art at Brightwolf Creation.

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Our favorite moment was when the audience came up on the stage and performed with us. Make sure watch the last video here!

Yang Tai Chi 24 Forms

Sword Dance

Elemental Flow Improvised

Crowd Participation

This summer, we have more Tai Chi experience, tea, and community gatherings at the beautiful park in Bellingham. Check out here: https://resonancepath.com/dancing-tao/

Today I want to speak about something that has bothered me since I began learning English at eight years old: the word Chinese does not fully reflect the inner identity of native Chinese people.

In Chinese, we have many ways of referring to ourselves because our cultural identity has been shaped across thousands of years, through many dynasties, diverse ethnic lineages, memories, and collective becoming. One of my favorites is 中华 (Zhōng Huá).

中 (Zhōng) means center, middle, or centeredness.
华 (Huá) evokes radiance, beauty, flourishing, and refinement.

Put together, 中华 carries, for me, the feeling of a gentle, radiant glow at the center.

We call ourselves 中华儿女—the daughters and sons of Zhōng Huá, the daughters and sons of the gentle glow at the center. I hear in this phrase something more intimate and alive than a national label.

This gentle glow is not just a pretty idea. It is woven into the soul of Chinese culture and history. Across the rises and falls of dynasties, political systems, social upheavals, migrations, and renewals, something of this center has continued to pulse through the civilization.

The word 中—center—is sacred.

A passage from the Confucian classic Doctrine of the Mean speaks to this:

Before the emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure arise, there is a state called zhōng—equilibrium, centeredness.

When emotions arise and are expressed with balance and right proportion, this is called hé—harmony.

None of this subtlety, cultural depth, or inner orientation is carried by the English word China.

There are many theories about the origin of the English word China. Some sources trace it to the Qin 秦 dynasty, pronounced somewhat like “Chin,” which unified the empire around 221 BCE. Ironically, the Qin dynasty lasted only about fifteen years—one of the briefest imperial dynasties—yet its name came to represent an entire civilization in the Western world.

For me, the Qin dynasty feels far away from the living center of my cultural identity. And the English word china, with its association with fine porcelain, carries another layer of discomfort: the memory of European fascination with Chinese goods, entangled with the painful and humiliating history of colonial-era encounters with the West.

The culture I come from is far more vast, complex, and internally diverse than either an ancient dynasty or an exported object.

China is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural civilization with at least fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups, each with its own histories, traditions, and, in many cases, languages. Across more than thirty provinces and regions, local dialects, customs, cuisines, rituals, and cultural flavors can differ dramatically from one another.

Within such vastness, Confucian philosophy—and the long cultivation of zhōng and hé, centeredness and harmony—has been one of the deep threads that has helped Chinese culture maintain continuity and coherence. At its best, this tradition supports people in rooting themselves in an inner center while cultivating the art of expressing a multitude of feelings in balance.

To root emotional centeredness and harmony in today’s world is a daunting challenge. We live in a time when dominant culture thrives on the maximization of sensory stimulation—through media, entertainment, consumerism, and constant digital input. When our senses are saturated by external noise, we lose the capacity to discern the gentle glow that radiates from a centered state of being.

Without being nourished by this gentle glow, we become vulnerable to narratives and worldviews that provoke maximal emotional reaction. As a result, our social and political landscapes become increasingly polarized.

This polarizing cultural ethos threatens to erode the centeredness every day. I feel it in my body: what I hold sacred—not only for myself, but for my fellow Chinese people, the ancestors before us and children in my family born in America —is being pressed upon by forces that divide, flatten, and provoke.

To survive, I root more deeply into the well of the living center. I entangle my life with the mycelial network of ancestral legacy, planted in an invisible realm beyond the reach of dominant culture.

There, I hear a voice whisper:

Use this field of polarizing forces as your training ground. Let it draw you deeper. At the other end, you will meet a more abundant well of the living center.

This deeper center is also where my discomfort with naming lives. It is not simply a matter of correcting a label or insisting on a different name. The deeper question is: how do we invite truer naming in a way that also allows relationship to form, opening a doorway to deeper connection and mutual understanding?

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Center Is Where We Meet

For years, I carried in my body a discomfort about how the word China obscures the essence of my cultural identity.

This discomfort became especially acute as I made great effort to learn how to use the correct pronouns for people’s gender identities. This was no small task for a native Chinese speaker. In spoken Mandarin, there is no distinction between he, she, and it. The sound tā can refer to all three. Long before pronouns became a widely discussed cultural issue, I was already confusing he/him and she/her in English.

While I was doing the meaningful work of training my speech and mind to honor people’s gender identities through correct pronouns, another question began to arise in me: If names and pronouns matter because they help restore dignity and self-recognition, what might it mean to bring that same care to the deeper naming of one of the largest cultural entities in the world?

I am also painfully aware that I am mostly alone in this inquiry.

For many of my fellow Chinese people—whether living in China or in the diaspora—being called by an English name that carries the original meaning of our cultural identity is not an urgent concern. There are more practical matters to attend to: immigration, livelihood, family, survival, belonging, and the endless labor of adapting across worlds.

So I understand why this question may seem small, even indulgent. To some, paying attention to such a “trivial” matter may appear, at best, like an amusing side effect of my highly educated background. At worst, it may seem like a peculiar obsession, a sign of my nerdiness.

Still, the discomfort would not leave me.

Sometimes I brought this question to my progressive friends, who are thoughtful about identity, justice, and the politics of naming.

One day, after listening to me patiently, my good-hearted friend Ryan said,

“You could start a new movement and ask people to call your culture the name you want.”

I paused.

I tried it on in my imagination. I imagined making the case, explaining the harm, asking people to replace China with Zhōng Huá.

I listened to how that felt in my body.

“No,” I said slowly. “I don’t want that.”

“Why not?” Ryan asked.

“Because then I would still be playing by one of the hidden rules of the dominant culture.”

“What rule?”

“That words come first,” I said. “Spoken and written words. Labels. Correct terms. The idea that if we fix the language, we have fixed the issue.”

A slight surprise passed across Ryan’s face. But his eyes were full of curiosity, inviting me to continue.

“I understand why naming matters,” I continued. “I really do. I understand why people fight to be called by names that restore dignity, accuracy, and self-recognition. I have learned from that. I have changed my own habits because of that.”

“So why is this different?” he asked.

“Because what I long for is not just a different label,” I said. “If someone calls my culture Zhōng Huá but has no felt sense of what Zhōng Huá means, then the word does not satisfy the longing underneath my discomfort.”

“What is the longing?” Ryan asked.

I took a breath.

“To be met,” I said. “Not just named. Met.”

He was quiet.

“If someone does not have an embodied sense of the glow at the center, then calling me Zhōng Huá does not mean much to me. It may be more accurate. It may even be more respectful. But it is still just a label.”

“And if they use the word because you ask them to?” he said.

“Then it depends,” I said. “If the word becomes an opening, a doorway into curiosity and relationship, then yes, that could be beautiful. But if someone uses it only to placate me, or to perform cultural sensitivity and political correctness, then it goes against the original spirit of Zhōng Huá.”

“How so?”

“Because Zhōng Huá is not a badge,” I said. “It is not a claim of a right. It is not a demand that others orbit around my preferred name. It points to a way of residing at the center—where relationship, reciprocity, and living harmony matter more than performance.”

Ryan smiled a little. “So you don’t want a naming campaign.”

“No,” I said. “I want a field of experience.”

“A field of experience?”

“Yes. I want people to feel what the name points toward. The warmth. The stillness. The dignity. The relational intelligence of the center. I want to create practices, conversations, and spaces where this gentle glow can be sensed directly.”

“So instead of asking people to say Zhōng Huá…”

“I want to invite them to touch the center in their own bodies,” I said.

“And then?”

“Then, if the word Zhōng Huá arises, it will arise from relationship, not obligation.”

Jack leaned back. “That sounds harder than starting a movement.”

I laughed.

“Yes,” I said. “Much harder. And much more faithful to the spirit of the name.”

After this conversation, I realized something.

Perhaps this is the deeper reason I co-founded the Dancing Tao Tai Chi school: not to persuade people to use a different word, but to share the felt sense of the center with those with whom I am in meaningful relationship.

And with that, I would like to invite you into two qigong practices that attunes our energetic awareness to the center.

If, after the practice, you feel a gentle glow at your own center, I will meet you there—with a big, warm hug.

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Original music by Daelinar. For more of Daelinar’s music, click here’

If you only have a few minutes and want to do a short practice, you may view the 1 to 2 minute long segments extracted from the whole practice.

Movement Starts from the Center

You Are the Water

Center Generates Movements

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Here we are, two women, one mother.

Both of us carrying the same longing for a scent—the remembered bond between our bodies and the body of the land that once held us: our ancestors, their love and losses, our past and our future.

In many earth-based psychological and spiritual frameworks around the world, our attachment to ancestral land, birthplace, and Mother Earth is recognized as foundational to the psyche—the ground of our being.

For tens of thousands of years, across every corner of the Earth, the land to which we belong has never been merely a backdrop to human life. She is ancestor, teacher, law, and living kin. Her embrace holds the interdependence of human and more-than-human beings.

Just as a parent holds the infant body, the land holds the parent, the ancestors, the language, the seasons, the food, the past, and the future.

Our bond with the land is a primary attachment.

And yet this attachment has been collectively and systematically exiled from our awareness since the dawn of the industrial era. This foundation of the psyche is almost invisible in conventional western psychology and practices derived from western psychology. In many psychology textbooks, primary attachment is reduced to the bond between a child and their parents within the nuclear family.

Yet Mother Earth is still reaching out to her children, speaking to us in unexpected ways. This is a story of such a bond between two women and their birthplaces.

It took place a few weeks ago in a setting called Social Alchemy, a collective healing space where about twenty of us gather to heal from the paradigm of isolation and unwind its patterns from our bodies, relationships, and imaginations. My friend and partner Sara and I are co-facilitating this space together. (For more about this project, you may read it here.)

During one of our sessions, Sara and I were demonstrating an exercise. Sara asked me the same question again and again:

“What home would hold you?”

The purpose of the question was not conversation. It was an invitation to penetrate the surface layers of the conscious mind and allow surprising material to rise from the unconscious.

For five minutes, Sara continued to ask, and I continued to answer.

Sara’s presence was like a warm blanket, wrapping me and the mystery held within me in a soft cocoon.

When I had given all the known answers, there came a pause. An emptiness.

Then what? I asked myself silently.

Just then, something rose from the darkness like a butterfly.

“The scent of the little village outside of Shanghai where I was born.”

I could feel my ego mind becoming perplexed by this answer. But the sensation had already gripped me. I continued to paint the image rising from the place inside me that had stored that scent.

“Oh, that scent… I miss it so much. There were rice paddies, and fields of golden flowers. I don’t know what they are called in English. Oh, how I long for their scent.”

The scent of the golden flowers engulfed me. I was transported back through time. My mind flashed back to when I was a young girl, riding my bicycle through miles and miles of golden flower fields, dotted with pink peach blossoms.

I could feel the wind wrapping itself around that young girl on her bicycle. I could see ten million peach blossoms scattering all around her. I thought I could ride my bicycle through that beauty forever, all the way to the end of time, and be completely content.

The next morning, after I got up, my eyes happened to land on a book sitting on my desk: The Art of Living with Change by Dr. Gong Shu, a Chinese woman, art therapist, and influential figure in the field of psychodrama. Like me, she is an immigrant who has lived in the United States for much of her life. She is also a pioneer in weaving Western psychology with traditional Chinese knowledge.

For reasons I could not explain, I sat down to read.

This was unusual. My mornings are usually devoted to Tai Chi or music practice, a way of setting a contemplative tone for the day. But that morning, despite my routine, my hands began to leaf through the book.

I started crying from the first page.

Dr. Gong is my mother’s age. She was also born in a village near Shanghai, not far from my birthplace. In the introduction, she writes of her earliest memory as a young girl: an encounter with an invading army during World War II. She writes of her love for a homeland torn by war, of her family facing soldiers with guns, of her journey floating between two countries, of being “homeless,” and of turning toward “home-everywhere.”

Just as the resonance I felt with her began to swell like a wave in my chest, I came upon this passage. I could hardly believe my eyes:

“I remember when I was about four years old; we lived in the countryside on a little island in the mouth of the Yangzi River near Shanghai. One early summer morning, I went outside. I saw suddenly in front of me a field of golden vegetable flowers. The fresh smell of the bright golden color was so enticing that I flung myself into the flowers and wallowed in the field. Later I saw golden flowers elsewhere, but they were never as fresh, golden, or enticing as the first time I experienced them as a child.”

I was completely undone.

I cried…

like a lost child

who had finally found her mother.

Here we are,

two women,

one mother.

Both of us carrying the same longing for a scent—the remembered bond between our bodies and the body of the land that once held us: our ancestors, their love and losses, our past and our future.

After the wave of emotion finally subsides, I wrote these words:

The scent of flowers from my homeland
planted seeds
in the dark soil of my imagination.

Through the long years
of my meandering wander,
those seeds have been searching
for a new place to land—

somewhere they may take root,
open their delicate faces to the sun,
and blossom once more

into a field
of golden flowers.

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It is in Bellingham where, for the first time in 30 years as an immigrant, I am living with a sense of coherence in my heart. The cultural river of my birthplace and the cultural river of my chosen home are no longer excluding each other. They are beginning to braid through my day to day life.

This weaving is not just mine, but shared with my community in Bellingham. It happens through the weekly Tai Chi classes, through Social Alchemy, a community healing space, and many shared presence, friendship and creative plays. Here I am welcoming you, my substack community, to participate this weaving through being a witness.

On my recent birthday, my 9-year-old nephew, a second-generation immigrant, drew me a birthday card. A simple image: two flags, and a heart between them.

I was taken by surprise. I am the aunt who visits him and his younger brother once a month. We play games, cuddle and giggle. Rarely do we talk about serious subjects like this. Yet this boy intuitively reads me at a level deeper than adult language can reach.

Last year, while I was in China, a close friend asked me in a gathering:

“If the U.S. and China go to war, where would you live?”

This question pierced me like a blade. My friend cares about me deeply. He knew that cutting off any side would mean a devastating choice.

For a moment, my heart was engulfed in a blackhole of confusion and pain. The room was quiet, waiting for my reply. Then a soft beam of knowing from a field behind the blackhole came into my awareness. I found myself speaking this.

“No matter what happens at the level of nations, I choose to live from a place of connection. Of peace. Of building bridges. And I trust that if I stay true to that, the larger force of life will place me where I am needed.”

Two months after I spoke those words, I came back to the United States. The fires of wars are spreading in multiple places in the world. My friend’s question rings in my ears. Deep in my bones, I felt the time has come to live each day of my life to the fullest and embody the oracle my 9-yr old nephew has drawn for me.

I have invited my Bellingham community into the practice of cultural interweaving. And they have said yes, by holding me with friendship and offering companionship, by joining me in Dancing Tao Tai Chi, by stepping into Social Alchemy, a community healing space where world cultures from many places, play and creativity can meet in embodiment.

In this journey of weaving, I have been blessed with great friends and collaborators. Offerings like Dancing Tao Tai Chi and Social Alchemy were organically born out of deep friendships and shared passions my collaborators and me have cultivated throughout our whole lives.

Daelinar is a visionary artist, poet and musician. For the past 30 years, he has been weaving community through youth empowerment work, teaching ecology, making nature art, gardening, and storytelling. We both share a life-long passion towards movement arts and the in-between space between dance and Tai Chi. We dance not as a performance, but as a kinesthetic language to communicate with the wild and the sacred hiding in the silent unknown. Here are some videos, sword dance and self-defense.

Sara is a poet and a teacher in her humble disguise. She has 25 years of experience of weaving community and uplifting voices unheard. Social Alchemy is born out of the meeting of hers and my life’s work of cultivating a social-ecosystem of care and belonging. You may get a glimpse of our work through our song and poetry here.

As I continue to live into that tough question my friend asked me in China, I am reminded of Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerere’s words,

“The world is not something that happens to us. It is something we are in relationship with.”

May the dance in relationship blossom into fruits of a future beyond what individual mind in isolation can imagine.

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In this chaotic and beautiful time, tending to our own wellbeing matters not only to our individual self, but also to our relational field. The state of our being ripples outward into the socio-ecosystem we are part of: our friends and family, coworkers, strangers we pass on the street, the voice on the other end of a call. The state of our nervous system actively shapes the world we co-create.

In this post, I’m sharing a qigong practice that has lived with me for decades. It is simple, accessible, and deeply effective. In just ten minutes, it reconnects awareness with elemental forces, such as earth, tree, water, and celestial energy, wherever you are: at home, on a train, or in an enclosed room.

In our Dancing Tao Tai Chi classes here in Bellingham, we begin each session with this practice. It serves as a portal into a shared field of presence, nurturance, and flow, where we remember how to arrive in ourselves and with each other.

This is the first in a series that I will be sharing, along with Daelinar, the co-founder of Dancing Tao. He plays the flute in the background in this video. We look forward to offering more practices to this Substack community in the coming months.

Stay tuned.

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Sara and I brought forward the ingredients of alchemy we have each cultivated over a lifetime: creativity, world culture, play, and embodiment.

To learn more about Social Alchemy currently offered in Bellingham, Washington, please see here. A unique aspect of this offering is that it is completely free for participants, and even provides a small stipend for those who complete the four-month training. Our project is sponsored by the Mount Baker Foundation to expand access across the economic spectrum and to honor our belief that everyone’s voice and healing are essential to the community, not only those who can afford services.

Original Poem by Sara Airoldi

Opening

I opened to the Earth elements

Subtle

Tiny

Earth body movements that

Became the wild energies

Of time

And ancient beauty

And rage

And how mountain is telling

A story of “as”

Rock

Tree

Water

Fire

Embodied in the me of human

That has expression

Not yet known.

The tears are of the below,

Sacred,

A listening place

Of silence

That hugs the vast

Darkness

Glowing

With forever

Letting me know

It is time to meet

The compressed

Expanse of anguish...

The compressed

Expanse of anguish

In sound

Heaving forth into

The gift of now

In the stream

Who knows of miracles.

I hear the playful around me.

Last Friday (Feb 14), a group of us gathered on zoom where I shared photo/video storytelling of my recent 75-day trip in China with a focus on the emerging culture of ecovillage. I am sharing the video recording of the zoom event at the end of this post.

Some of the background of the journey

When China’s industrialization accelerated some forty years ago, much of its indigenous wisdom and traditional cultural heritage was pushed underground. Practices such as Chinese medicine were labeled “unscientific,” and ancestral ways of knowing—especially those carried through embodied, oral, and feminine lineages—were largely erased from public life.

In the past five years, however, a quiet resurgence has been taking place. Across China, people have begun reclaiming cultural roots and re-engaging ancient wisdom through contemporary forms.

For the past two decades, my own work has been devoted to reimagining the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle, through an integration of Taoist teachings and modern Western philosophy, infused with embodied play and artistic sensibility. In 2019, I published The Resonance Code. In 2020, during the pandemic, I was invited to teach this work in China via Zoom.

This journey marked the first time I met, in person, the Chinese community that has grown around The Resonance Code since then. After five years of being woven into one another’s lives through screens, we finally stood together on the same land.

This journey marked the first time I met, in person, the Chinese community that has grown around The Resonance Code since then. After five years of being woven into one another’s lives through screens, we finally stood together on the same land.

I also returned to the village where my father was born and met many relatives on his side of the family for the first time. Many of them live near the bottom of the social hierarchy, having built the infrastructure of modern development with their own hands. I visited our ancestral graves and offered the laminated cover of my book to my grandparents. My grandmother belonged to one of the last generations of women with bound feet. She never learned to read or write.

Standing there, I am embracing the full arc of inheritance—what was silenced, what endured, and what is now asking to be carried forward in new form.

Video Recording of the Storytelling

There are three segments of the storytelling, interspersed with people’s questions and discussions.

First segment: 0 - 45 min, Qixi Village of Guangdong Province, 广东旗溪村

Second segment: 45 min - 95 min, Liangzhu Village of Zhejiang Province, 浙江良渚文化村

Third segment: 95 min - the end, Xichong Village of Sichuan Province, my father’s ancestral village, 四川西充县

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Each time an old wound is touched, I descend as a pearl diver. I pry open the hardened shell that once sealed itself around a grain of pain. A stone that scraped tender flesh, or cut open the soft heart.

Sometimes, the shell holds nothing. Only emptiness or fragments of rotten death. But sometimes, through the patience of time, through the quiet waiting of the soul, the wound has done its secret work. The stone has turned into a pearl shimmering in the dark.

This song is one such pearl. The wound between father and daughter drops deeper than one lifetime. It’s a well carved by generations.

So this pearl is not mine alone. I offer it as it came to me: salt-wet, unfinished, breathing.

Recorded on a phone. Untouched by polish. Held open to you …

Falling rose

The other dad, you told me you love me

And I felt the dam I’ve built to block you from my heart

For 40 years, I’ve longed for you, I miss you and I am afraid of you

Your words once have crushed my heart, like a falling rose, frozen in the snow

Your way is strong and your heart is tough

Like a rock weathering the stormy nights

But I’ve chosen my way out of your lane, into the dark water

It’s a choice I carry like a boulder on my shoulder

Now we stand under the same roof

Reaching across but can not touch

I stretch out my arms, but can’t open my heart

I want to be close, but don’t know how

And I don’t know how

Falling rose, frozen to the ground

Waiting for the warmth of the sun

Daddy is getting old

His hair turns grey

I don’t have much time left

I don’t have much time left

[Note: I will be presenting A Daughter’s Return to the Motherland, a photo & video storytelling of my recent 75-day trip to China and its emerging culture of ecovillages. A zoom event at 10 am, Feb 14th, Pacific Time. Register here.]

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Register for the Live Call

Dear Substack Friends,

I’ve been quiet here for quite a while. Over the past six months, I was completely absorbed in what has been the most important journey of my life.

From October 2025 to January 2026, I spent 75 days in China, traveling across five cities. I taught workshops, visited family, and formed meaningful connections with people and land in two ecovillages. It was a trip of reunion, laughter, tears, songs and play, carried by the unfolding waves of emergence when an ancient culture births herself anew.

After I shared some of these experiences with a friend, she said to me:
“You were finally able to experience your true self, in your place of birth, where that self was once not allowed.”

I hugged my friends in tears. Her words rang profoundly true.

I have long known that part of my life’s purpose is to re-enliven the archetype of the Chinese priestess—a role that has slipped into the abyss of time, buried in the dark chambers under the weight of patriarchy. On this journey, I was able to reclaim that role for myself, alongside many Chinese women who are also reclaiming their own inner priestesshood.

This experience is deeply visceral and personal. The best way I know to share it with you is in real time and in my own voice. I’d love to invite you to a Zoom gathering, where I will tell more of the story and share photos and videos from the journey.

Register for the Liver Session

Some of the background of the journey

When China’s industrialization accelerated some forty years ago, much of its indigenous wisdom and traditional cultural heritage was pushed underground. Practices such as Chinese medicine were labeled “unscientific,” and ancestral ways of knowing—especially those carried through embodied, oral, and feminine lineages—were largely erased from public life.

In the past five years, however, a quiet resurgence has been taking place. Across China, people have begun reclaiming cultural roots and re-engaging ancient wisdom through contemporary forms.

For the past two decades, my own work has been devoted to reimagining the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle, through an integration of Taoist teachings and modern Western philosophy, infused with embodied play and artistic sensibility. In 2019, I published The Resonance Code. In 2020, during the pandemic, I was invited to teach this work in China via Zoom.

This journey marked the first time I met, in person, the Chinese community that has grown around The Resonance Code since then. After five years of being woven into one another’s lives through screens, we finally stood together on the same land.

I also returned to the village where my father was born and met many relatives on his side of the family for the first time. Many of them live near the bottom of the social hierarchy, having built the infrastructure of modern development with their own hands. I visited our ancestral graves and offered the laminated cover of my book to my grandparents. My grandmother belonged to one of the last generations of women with bound feet. She never learned to read or write.

Standing there, I am embracing the full arc of inheritance—what was silenced, what endured, and what is now asking to be carried forward in new form.

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Tune in to the podcast: Creative Medicine – Art and Health Intertwined

This podcast is produced by North Sound Voices, with Megan Stephenson, Remy Styrk, and Jason LaClair.

There was a time when people understood

that medicine was more than the extraction of chemical compounds from plants.

In fact, the very act of extraction—when done without reverence—

can sever the Spirit of the plant from its healing gift.

In ancient cultures,

health was not a commodity managed by numbers, policies, or data points.

It was a sacred relationship—

with one another, with Earth Mother, with Sky Father—

a web of connection that could not be reduced to graphs or bottled into products.

In the memories of my ancestors,

healing was not administered—it was sung.

It rose as poetry from the land and moved through us

when we listened deeply to the wisdom of wind, water, bird, and tree.

Quietly, gently,

this ancient way of healing is returning.

Will you listen?

Tune in to the podcast: Creative Medicine – Art and Health Intertwined.

Let the remembering begin.

Rooted in Taoist philosophy, Tai Chi is more than a movement practice; it is an embodied way of peace-making. Its essence permeates any effort that seeks to bridge divides and harmonize polarities.

Here in Bellingham, where my partner Joe and I live, we’ve joined with several colleagues in an initiative to build bridges across the political spectrum, a different kind of “Tai Chi”, Tai Chi in the metaphysical realm.

In a time marked by deep division, we’re exploring something simple yet bold: meeting across our differences not through debate or persuasion, but through listening, speaking honestly, and staying connected.

If you are curious, you are welcome to check out our effort here: meeting.asweare.us

This poem emerged from a creative collaboration with Sara Airoldi when we co-facilitated the Badass Poetry for Social Change workshop at Lovefest Bellingham.

Sara is a consultant, culture-making artist, and passionate poet. It is an amazing blessing that we live in the same town, separated only by a 15-min drive. One of Sara’s superpowers is asking insightful questions that unlock the flow of my creativity. This poem took shape when she asked me, “What are the components of the Chinese character for ‘bad,’ and what do they mean?”

The Chinese character for “bad” (坏) is composed of two parts: one signifies “earth” (土), the other means “no” or “not” (不).

In Chinese, the word “坏” can also mean to rot or decompose. In ancient Chinese cosmology, morality isn’t seen as a fixed code, but as something woven into the cyclical rhythms of nature. What we call “bad” is not simply evil—it is what is breaking down, returning to the soil, becoming earth again.

What parts of ourselves do we deem “bad”? What do we cast as “bad” in others? Can we stay present to the slow decay, participating in the decomposition and witnessing the rot not as failure but as a passage through which new life is born? Can we render our very being as the ground, so others may find their footing?

Earth Says No

No—

I am not a thing to measure,

not a specimen to study,

nor a ledger to balance.

Would you dissect your own eye, in an effort to understand the beauty of the sunset?

Would you dam up your own throat to stop the river of tears from flowing?

Would you bulldoze your own heart down to an empty lot,

claim ownership to occupy it,

and cast away the secret of love it keeps?

No—

I am not outside you.

I breathe within your breath,

pulse beneath your skin.

I am the Earth inside your body—

the sparks in your cells

that are 14 billion years old,

that remember being stardust,

drifting through the dark,

whirling through galaxies

to dive into this velvet blue dream.

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On December 31, 2012, I sat in my apartment in the suburbs of Seattle, talking on the phone with Joe who at the time lived in Port Townsend, where he and I met at a dance retreat a few days earlier.

“What would you feel if your worst nightmare, a total failure in your acupuncture clinic, became reality?” Joe asked, his voice calm and matter-of-fact, exuding warm confidence, like a solid guide leading the way.

This question surprised me. At the time, I was familiar with self-help and personal growth work. The books and advice I had encountered always prompted me to visualize success, focusing on what it would feel like to achieve goals. No one had ever asked me to confront failure head-on like that. But Joe’s question felt deeply honest. Finally, someone had asked the question I had been too afraid to face. I felt even a sense of relief.

If I had to be brutally honest with myself, my deepest passion lies in philosophy, metaphysics and the transformation of human consciousness. The profession of acupuncture, regulated by rigid rules of modern medicine and the mechanical understanding of human health, was too confined and narrow for me to truly express my gifts.

Furthermore, upon hearing this question, the Taoist part of me was intrigued — even excited. The Tao, the wisdom tradition indigenous to China, sees life as an ever-changing flow of interplay of the opposites. Naturally, I am drawn to exploring both sides of an experience with equanimity. I turned inward, searching for the answer.

“Devastated,” I said.

“Let’s map it,” Joe replied.

A few days before this, at the retreat, a trusted friend introduced me to Joe at the Saturday evening potluck. When Joe handed me a postcard with the drawings of what he called “feeling maps,” I was immediately intrigued. Without reading the words on the postcard, I sensed my heart leaping towards it. At that time, I was actively seeking an effective tool to transform emotional energies for both myself and my clients. I told Joe that I wanted to learn his work with the intention of collaboration. “I don’t want to be your client. I want to be your collaborator.”

Before meeting Joe, I had already been drawn to the mystery held within feeling and recognized its central role as a gateway to our essence and true being — though my understanding was shaped by a very different cultural context.

I grew up in China at the time of the cultural revolution, an era bearing characteristics a lot like what many of us are experiencing right now: fractures of societal cohesiveness, violence, breakdown of infrastructures, accompanied by an outbreak of collective drama and pain. Amidst the chaos, as a young girl with a sensitive and empathic constitution, both my physical and emotional being were suffering tremendously. Fortunately, my soul was fed and nourished by ancient Chinese poetry, a wisdom tradition that has carried the Spirit of Living Earth and the knowing of interconnection all through China’s three thousand years of written history, surviving many rounds and cycles of civilization’s destruction and rebirth.

During the cultural revolution, this tradition was thrown into the trash bin. The dominant propaganda at the time said that classical poetry was useless, or even toxic to the mind, whereas the Newtonian framework of science imported from the West was the shining star guiding us towards progress.

When I encountered Chinese poetry as an eight-year-old girl, I felt as though I was a lonely traveler in a desert who finally found a creek, a fountain of life. Poetry not only was the only source in life that validated and affirmed my feelings, but it also taught me how to feel. Poetry taught me all feelings are sacred and beautiful, not just joyful feelings, but also sadness. Not just hope and vision, but also grief and longing. And feeling is not a thing, but a web of flowing streams of consciousness that connect, infuse and enliven all conscious experience.

The poets I loved, many of them were Zen Buddhists or Taoists, taught me to speak the language of feeling, poetic language painting the pictures of feeling through the sensory experience of the natural world, such as fallen leaves painting a path with fiery red or a full moon rising behind the mountain creek with the reflections of pine trees.

When I read ancient Chinese poetry, the part of me that feels desiccated by the concrete and plastics of the modern world, the part of me that feels flattened, invisible and suppressed by the extraction-based social machine, becomes alive and rejuvenated. I can sense the mossy forest and feel the softness of flower petals by simply reaching inward to the poetry imprinted in my consciousness, even on the busiest street corner of Shanghai or Seattle.

When I first heard the way Joe talked about feeling, I instinctively knew that his work was something vital to my inner being. At the time, it was one of the few things I had encountered in the Western world that resonated with the sensibility I had cultivated through ancient Chinese poetry and my Taoist lineage.

Until then, I had never met anyone who spoke about and valued the language of feeling with the same precision, specificity, and meticulous care as Joe. Today he calls this language the proto-language of virtual materiality. It reminds me of how Chinese medicine describes qi, the life energy of the body, through the sensory experiences of the material world such as color, substance and temperature.

Through this language, I mapped the feeling state of Devastated to a space below my belly button, filling half of my abdomen. It was a solid block of lead — cold, dense, and unbearably heavy. Within it, I discovered something embedded deep inside me: the internalized voice of my father’s criticism.

Joe encouraged me to inquire further. Here are some of the thoughts that came to me.

“As a young girl, whenever I had a dream or aspiration, my father met it with harsh judgment and criticism. He urged me to be practical, to focus on survival—because that was all he had ever known. As a teenage boy, he had endured the horrors of famine, and he never truly escaped survival mode.

It wasn’t just him. Nearly every male authority figure in my life treated my dreams the same way. I absorbed their voices, storing them inside this feeling of leaden weight. Under these pressures, I felt forced to follow a pragmatic path dictated by society. That’s how I became a biologist. I was successful. But it felt like I had locked part of my soul in a prison.

Now, as I build a new identity for myself, striving to live out my dreams, I must come to terms with this voice.”

Having this insight felt like a huge relief. It enabled me to see how the oppression passed to me by parents and authorities occupies a part of my own energy, and how this “internalized oppression” continued to influence me unconsciously, even when my father had stopped doing that long ago. Moreover, I was able to penetrate this internalized oppression and feel the deep well of agony and suffering behind its iron curtain.

“What else are you feeling?” Joe asked.

“I feel a deep love for my father,” I said, my voice trembling. “A longing for his approval… and a desire to show these ‘male’ figures that my dreams are real.”

Tears welled up. Not tears of sadness, but of love. A love I rarely allowed myself to fully feel toward my father because of my long-held resentment. Feeling that love brought a huge wave of relief and gratitude.

Twenty minutes later, Joe guided me to “move” the feeling of devastation using the virtual material map we generated.

As you will learn extensively through this book, engaging this proto-language to “observe” feeling, as if feeling is virtual material occupying physical space, lies at the core of the methodology of psychotopology. This idea is not new to me. In Chinese medicine, we use a similar language of virtual materiality to describe energetic properties of the acupuncture meridians. For example, the medical literature associates “green, wood, wind” to the liver meridian, “black, water and cold” to the kidney meridian.

In modern education of Chinese medicine, east or west, there was no explanation or understanding of the kind of perceptual awareness behind this knowledge. As a curious person, I was just not satisfied by knowledge handed down by ancestors. I instinctively felt that there was a whole new way of seeing and knowing a subtle realm of reality that had been blocked by modern education. I had an aching longing to reclaim that way of knowing and find out what else I could discover! When I met Joe, I felt that this longing has led me to his work.

As I would come to learn through hundreds of experiences over the next twelve years, once a feeling is mapped using this language, the map takes on a life of its own. It becomes like a small elf — a living presence that interacts with you, navigating toward a state of wholeness, aliveness, and wisdom. This movement often feels unexpected, even magical, pointing beyond the existing map of reality. Again and again, my rational mind would be left astonished, unable to grasp the deeper intelligence at play.

To my utter surprise, Devastated transformed into a cluster of small, silver, tool-like objects attached to my hands. A quiet voice within whispered: They are your musical instruments.

I immediately dismissed the thought. I’m not a musician! I was almost 40 years old and had never learned music in my life. The idea felt absurd — shameful, even. Who was I to imagine myself as a musician?

And yet, the feeling was visceral, undeniable. A deep pleasure surged through me as I imagined using these “tools” to shape and exchange energy with the world. I called these tools My Sacred Objects. Back then, I had no idea that the potency of this experience would continue unfolding for the next decade.

A year later, my growing awareness of my connection to music led me to find my teacher, Kaija. She taught me to compose songs, sing, and play piano — not through formalized training, but through a purely organic, improvisational approach. As I unlocked my artistic gifts, I found myself pouring my passion into composing music for the Chinese classical poetry I loved as a young girl, and dove back into the source of nourishment that had fed my soul since childhood.

For nine years, I sang these songs as medicine to heal my broken soul. I sang them exclusively to myself in my living room. I never thought I would be “qualified” to perform as an artist. Then, in 2023—ten years after mapping that first feeling — through a series of wondrous synchronicities, or perhaps the blessings of my poet-ancestors, I encountered a movie director from Port Townsend, the same town where Joe and I met.

This director was making a documentary movie about Red Pine, a renowned translator of Chinese classic poetry. Through the life stories of Red Pine, the movie also showcased the mystic hermit culture that has endured capitalism in China, highlighting the men and women who have upheld this tradition through a lifetime of devotion.

The movie director had been looking for a female voice for the movie for the last two years in vain. He had given up. Then he and I met each other at a dance retreat, where I happened to feel called to sing a poetry-song at an open mic night, something I rarely did. Upon hearing my music, the movie director immediately sent over a contract requesting me to make the music score of the movie — ten songs over ancient Chinese poetry. In 2024, the documentary Dancing with the Dead was released. The same year, the music department of Western Washington University invited me to perform my poetry song concert as one of the musicultural series in their concert hall in front of a rapt audience of four hundred. (For a more elaborated story of this journey, please read Rebirthing the Lost Songs of Ancestors.)

This is the profound potential hidden within the selfhood unlocked by psychotopology. When I mapped my first feeling state in 2012, I could never have imagined where it would lead — even in my wildest dreams. Yet this gift is not just about my personal inspiration to become a musician; it is about a purpose larger than my life — serving the Spirit of the Living Earth embodied in those timeless poems. In serving this purpose, I am also reclaiming my innate ability to weave energy and activate synchronicities through resonance and vibration, bending the space of probability and drawing opportunities to empower my journey.

Along with the Devasted, Joe facilitated me to map eight other feeling states as my first constellation of fieldwork. Feelings such as Doubt, Anger and Zombie, as well as the Longing I felt towards my father. Most surprisingly we also discovered an absolutely horrific state called Hell, which contained an aberrant state of total destruction, suffering and death. This was not just a personal Hell, but a collective Hell. In Hell, I felt the calamity and destruction that had already begun to unfold in collective consciousness over the next decade.

It was not easy to move Hell. Rightly so. But after about six hours of work, as Joe meticulously teased out the intricate connections between these states, we eventually moved Hell to a state akin to a transcendent experience called “I Am Nothing and Everything”. In that moment, I had a visceral experience of an age-old truth: while the pain of loss and death is real during times of destruction, suffering often arises from our attachment to the concept of self. When we recognize the self as a flowing stream, unfolding and enfolding, ever-changing and adaptable, we cultivate the capacity to metabolize loss, pain, and death, ultimately giving rise to new life.

This was one of the most powerful, embodied experiences of ancestral wisdom from the Tao Te Ching. In Taoism, opposites intertwine and give rise to each other. Not surprisingly, the Taoist path to heaven often winds directly through Hell.

Final Words

Thank you for opening this book and reading these words. As the closest witness to Joe’s journey, I have watched him pour every ounce of his life’s energy into creating this work. The sheer dedication, the thousands of hours of deep, committed effort, often with little external affirmation, has left me in awe of my partner’s indomitable spirit.

At the same time, Joe is not a flawless guru. Fieldwork did not deliver Joe to a persistent state of enlightenment and transcendence. Nor was that his intention.

Joe’s engagement with this work reminds me of the Tibetan spiritual practice of Tonglen. In this tradition, practitioners breathe in the world's suffering, transforming it with their own flesh and soul into compassion and healing. It is a kind of alchemy of the spirit — like training ourselves to be mushrooms, metabolizing the toxins of the soil into nourishment.

Devoted to this practice, Joe is not immune to the struggles around issues such as belonging, trust, and authority. Nor does he hide these struggles. If you seek a teacher to be perfect, Joe might not be the right one. But if you aspire to embark on an inner journey to embrace yourself exactly as you are, then Joe is a tremendous companion and guide. He has the courage to lay bare his vulnerabilities, shadows, and imperfections — and the loving awareness to embrace them. Having shared twelve years of living with him, spending almost every single day working, playing and sleeping under the same roof, I can attest to this.

I wholeheartedly hope you enjoy exploring the world of psychotopology through his guidance!

Spring Cheng
Bellingham, WA

April, 2025