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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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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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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Documentary “Dancing with the Dead” be available for viewers worldwide for the limited time of September 20-29th. See the film as many times as you wish over 10 days. 

Follow this link to get ticket: watch.showandtell.film/watch/redpine

It will be a rare opportunity to experience the power of art in bridging time, places and cultural legacies with a worldwide audience!

Documentary Dancing with the Dead features the life story of Red Pine, the world-renowned translator who dedicated his life to the translation of Chinese classic poetry and sutra into English. It is also a rare portrait of the mystic hermit culture in China that has survived capitalistic development. The movie incorporates ten songs I composed over Chinese poetry.

For how the movie and my music found each other through synchronistic events, read this story. For background about how the colonial history has squashed the spirituality of China and how the culture lineage perseveres through my life, read this story.    

Join Red Pine, Director Ward Serrill, and Singer Spring Cheng on Sunday, September 29, 12:00pm PT for a free, Live Q & A. To learn more and reserve your spot, or register for the online premiere: watch.showandtell.film/watch/redpine

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Hello Earth Song friends, I’d like to introduce you my offering of the Living Song Mentorship, in which I support you to reunite with the core essence of your being through the portal of voice and song.

Do you have a secret longing to sing as an expression of your being, and yet you are being held back by beliefs such as “my-voice-is-not-good-enough”, “I-am-not-musical”, or “it’s-too-late-to-learn-music-as-an-adult”? These are all modern-day spells that have been wired into our our nervous system, suppressing the blossoming of our core essence and enlivened expression of life energy.

In playing music, we are reminding ourselves that we are vibrational beings. Through music, we metabolize emotions and channel holistic energy through our body. Scientific studies have shown that music integrates and stimulates brain activities, making us more intelligent. Healing may spontaneously occur and intentions carried by the music may blossom into manifestation through the law of resonance.

In my experience of offering this mentorship, I find the biggest obstacle is that people can be overly critical and judgmental, comparing themselves with the professionals. In Living Song Mentorship, we will prioritize making music for the joy of doing it and the pleasure of connecting with oneself, rather than for external approval. This way your can connect to your innate river of music and progress much faster than being fixated on performative results.

Mentorship can happen both in-person (Bellingham Washington), or over zoom. Watch the video below and see what people say about Living Song Mentorship.

Here are the some of the things that might happen during a Living Song Mentorship session. However, each mentorship will be different as it is tailored to each individual’s specific needs.

• Somatic attunement to support your voice organically.

• Inviting your own song through an organic process, and nurturing it into a full piece.

• Cultivating music as a source to process emotions such as grief and fear, connect to your deeper core of being, and amplify the joy and inspiration in your life.

• Using a piano or keyboard to learn musical theory including scale, chords and simple composition. Accompanying yourself while you sing.

• Working through the inner critical or judgmental voices and transforming them into allies instead.

My Story

As a child, I loved to be in communion with Earth and creatures around me. I remember the pleasurable sensation of being one with the environment. But that experience was short-lived. Soon my family moved into the city and I was swept into the forces of the techno-materialistic-individualistic culture.

Parallel to the loss of an intimate connection with the Earth, throughout my childhood and youth, I was also immersed in the grief of losing my ancestors’ songs. For decades, I felt as if I was under a spell that separated me from the core essence of my being. This separation was the source of much of my suffering.

What I didn’t know was that the ancestors’ songs were searching for me as much as I was searching for them. At age 41, I met my music mentor Kaija who taught me to sing songs spontaneously welling up from my heart. Eventually these songs led me back to reunite with my ancestors’ songs. Click here to read the full story about my journey to discover my voice and reclaim my lineage.

My music can be found on Substack or Bandcamp. Save the date for my concert at Western Washington University on Nov 7, 2024.

For new clients, I offer a free 20 to 30 minute meet-and-greet session. To set up an appointment, please use the contact form.

Singing my own songs has connected me to a life source larger than my own. I started trusting my instincts and intuition, and sharing my unique expression with others around me. - Spring Cheng

Ten years ago, at age 41, I met my music teacher Kaija who changed my life. She taught me that singing and songwriting is a birthright everyone can claim, regardless of age, skill level (or lack of) and experience.

Singing has always been a central presence for community members in almost all indigenous and traditional cultures. Through industrialization and commercializing music has singing become a privilege reserved only for “talented” people.

I never sang before meeting Kaija. Actually I always thought my voice was terrible. However, with Kaija’s teaching, I discovered the “key” to unlock the source of music within. Not only did I start singing my own songs that flowed from my heart, but my whole being was transformed. I showed up in the world as a leader for social change and transformation, even though as an immigrant and Asian Woman, I had no visible position or status.

I started taking a stand for things I believed in and daring things that I had never imagined before such as writing a book in English as a non-native speaker, speaking publicly on behalf of voices unheard, and singing in front of hundreds of people.

Would you like to also discover your voice? Join one of next month’s masterclasses and experience an earth-rooted approach to musicmaking accessible to everyone regardless of their age or experience. Through these practices, you will learn to connect with your own unique life source, which will nurture, inspire and amplify your actions and presence in the world!

I’ll be leading these masterclasses with my colleagues Paul Kwiecinski and Judi Neal. Both Paul and Judi are accomplished leadership coaches and songwriters with decades of experience. We co-produced a song “Children of the Earth” earlier this year.

These masterclasses are a prelude to a full course: Tao of Leadership - Unleash Your Mojo through Music and Songwriting.

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To shift the paradigm from Dominance-and-Separation to Reciprocity-and-Unity, it takes leaders like you and me, ordinary citizens caring about the planet and our community.

- Spring Cheng, Founder of the Living Resonance Leadership Program

Planet Earth is birthing a new era through humanity. Before a baby is born, the baby needs to turn herself upside down. Sometimes, the baby, unable to turn, can get stuck. That can be a dangerous situation for both the mother and the baby.

The current social systems are struggling with this turn, jostling for supreme dominance, locked into unlimited extraction of resources, in subservience to the military-industrial complex. Yet they are being turned upside down against the inertia built up for thousands of years.

One of the signs of this inertia is that people who are supposed to uphold the highest moral standards, our so-called “world leaders”, are exhibiting the lowest moral and ethical traits, leading nations into wars and ecological degradation. (Aside from the two violent geopolitical conflicts we are living with, Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel, politicians are strategically engineering another one: China and US. For more, please watch this program.) 

At the same time, the age-old, life-giving way of stewarding the Earth and honoring the reciprocity of life is being reborn again through many traditions and cultures.

Signs of new birth are subtle, only perceptible to those who would stop walking and crouch down to notice.

Have you noticed the first signs of life in a new spring season? The tiniest bud shooting from the branches, or the thinnest blade of grass shining with a glossy green?

Last weekend at Bellingham, the Pacific Northwest town where I live, the Indigenous tribe of Lummi people were welcoming back “Gathering of Eagles”, a traditional ceremony that had been outlawed since the colonizers declared it to be “devil inviting”. The trauma the tribe has endured and is still enduring is so deep that it was not until ten years ago that they re-established this sacred ceremony.

I attended the ceremony with about two hundred people of different races and walks of life. The Bellingham mayor was there. People from four different continents gathered at the waterfront beach blessing the water and celebrating the unity that the water stands for.

Rain poured down through the first part of the morning. Miraculously it stopped right around the time when people started gathering. Native languages and ancient teachings from the Lummi tribe, New Zealand, Africa and Asia were spoken. People sang and chanted together in tears. The air trembled with an electrifying energy.

This was one of the most exciting and inspiring things I have witnessed in years. This remarkable event was led and organized by Lummi leader Freddy Lane, who worked on this project tirelessly for a decade. He pulled out this multi-continent event with shoestring funding, while working gracefully against bureaucratic regulations against such traditional gatherings. Yet there are no reporters or cameras around. Our major news outlets somehow are not attuned to enlivening events like these.

Leaders like Freddy who choose to step into this fresh and generative stream of life are like the new blades of grass, shooting up everywhere. It takes a different way of perceiving, knowing and being to inhabit this leadership. This lies at the core of the leadership paradigm promoted by Resonance Path, the institute my partner Joe Shirley and I co-founded in 2016.

This leadership paradigm is for ordinary citizens, like you and me, and anyone who desires to build a new culture through their relationships! It is not about “doing more things” or “achieving higher goals”, but about living fully into who we are and sharing our being with the community around us.

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From Jun 17 to Jun 21, in partnership with Ubiquity University and Humanity Rising, Resonance Path is hosting a 5-day, free online gathering as an intro to the Living Resonance Leadership MA/PhD program. Each day we will offer a 90 min program with Resonance Path faculty members, which will be livestream on YouTube.

All courses offered through this program are open to the public. You are welcome to sample and experience different courses at your own pace. When you are ready for a more committed goal for your study, you may apply for a degree through Ubiquity University.

Living Resonance Leadership and Universal Mother

Many ancient traditions and indigenous cultures see the world as a living being. At the core of this way of being is resonance, the experience of a profound coherence and synchronization between our inner self and the outer social, natural and cosmic environment.

The archetype of Universal Mother mythically embodies resonance, embracing and uniting all life as a continuous presence from which we are never separated, to which we always belong.

Living Resonance Leadership is a pathway to discover how Universal Mother as leader resonates through your being, your body-mind-heart and your life. Every one of us is born in deep connection with Universal Mother. However, the trauma we endure as we grow into adulthood and the unhealthy social conditionings we internalize can cut us off from this connection, replacing it with proxies such as inflated status, wealth, societal approval, prestigious membership or moral superiority. When we re-orient ourselves to our Inner Presence, when we strive to see others across the gap of judgment, when we tend our communities with humility and express ourselves freely and joyfully, we can restore our connection with Universal Mother as our true leader.

This program offers courses that amplify your resonance with Universal Mother through your being, your voice and your work in the world. With this resonance, you can weave a culture of belonging, compassion and reciprocity with people around you, offering your presence, your purpose and your connection with Universal Mother as a resource and a beacon of vision for your family, relationships and workplace. Meanwhile, you will embark on an evolutionary journey where your inner feminine and masculine, rational and intuitive, past and future selves embrace each other in an exhilarating and nourishing interplay.

Samples of modules offered in the program:

All courses are open to general public. You only need to apply for Ubiquity program when you want university credits.

• Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity: Develop harmonious and mutually beneficial personal and professional relationships across polarizing gaps and cultural boundaries

• Songwriting, Creativity and Leadership: Approach songwriting as a way to express the authentic self and connect with ancestors and guidance beyond the ego’s limitation in service of making a positive impact in the world. No prior music experience is required. We believe singing is for everyone.

• Life as an Oracle I: Memoir Writing to Weave a Personal-Planetary Narrative. When we develop a perceptual lens to see grace threading through all the stories of our life, including the dark and painful periods, we start to experience our being resonating with the Universal Mother. We start to swim in the river of synchronicities.

• Life as an Oracle II: I Ching through the Lens of Resonance Code and Taoist Human Development. A deep study of how the inner being resonates with the outer environment. An investigation of a self-designed evolution journey.

• Restoring Feeling as Your Inner Compass: Psychotypology Coaching. A ground-breaking form of one-on-one or self-guided coaching that placed the wisdom of feeling and mystery of being at the center.

What is the origin of this program?

As a young woman living in China, I witnessed and experienced first-hand the onset of modern industrialized development, which involved aggressive, sometimes brutal attacks of pristine ecological systems without considering the harmful impact. I kept hearing the painful cries of rivers and mountains, which haunted me for decades. I didn’t understand why humanity would act this way. I responded by enclosing my inner world in isolation.

Eventually, I understood that my nervous system retained the primordial capacity to resonate with rivers, mountains and other non-human beings. I owe thanks to my father, who took me to learn qigong when I was a teenager. Qigong helped me retain this energetic resonance. Yet this ancient practice has been marginalized and sometimes outlawed in China, its native land, due to its “scientific illegitimacy”, a legacy of colonial influences and suppression of China’s indigenous worldview. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, systematic intellectual campaigns were put in place to lead the public into distrusting traditional healing and energy modalities so that the modern pharmaceutical industry and western medicine can dominate China’s market for profit extraction.

In today’s western world, qigong, Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine have gained increasing popularity. I am a Tai Chi/Qigong teacher as well as a licensed acupuncturist. However, I felt acutely something critical is missing. In ancient China, practices such as Qigong, Tai Chi and traditional medicine were kept alive by vibrant cultural and relational practices that prioritized mutual respect, connection, trust and reciprocity above wealth extraction. This web is being systematically torn down with the economic infrastructure that prioritizes unlimited growth and profit above all.

The philosophy embodied by Qigong, Tai Chi and Chinese medicine was not limited to just physical well-being. It permeated every fiber of culture, influencing every relationship. I believe re-weaving this kind of cultural fabric is crucial to restore the vitality of these ancient practices and revive and strengthen our connection to Universal Mother.

I Ching, the Book of Change, is the source book of the ancient Confucian/Taoist culture. In ancient China, village and community leaders were fundamental pillars in society. Every village had elders embodying moral and ethical principles that cohered the communities. People cared for their communities like caring a living organism. When presented with challenge, both community leaders and medical healers would consult I Ching for guidance.

Today, I Ching is primarily known through texts written two thousand years ago at the onset of China’s long history of patriarchy. However, prior to that, the ancient Tao was primarily led by feminine Spirits and Goddesses.

When I was being guided to study I Ching sixteen years ago, I held this inquiry dear to my heart: after being submerged for two thousand years, how can we welcome back the feminine spirit of the I Ching? An answer came in the early years, as I was trying to crack the code of this ancient mystery, through an unforgettable dream.

It is a dark night. Pitch darkness engulfs me. I am standing on the shore of a raging sea. Storms roar, stirring waves to rise hundreds of feet high. With a flash of thunder, suddenly the ocean parts, revealing thousands of feet of depth. At the bottom of the ocean is a dying whale.

The whale is a giant. Her meat is rotting, revealing the huge rib cage. She pants in agony. Yet she is still conscious. She stares right into my eyes, communicating to me telepathically, “Come here, my child! I am glad that you came to meet me. In my rebirth, I will be living in and through you.”

This dying whale is a symbol for my ancestor’s way of being, the ways of inhabiting one’s body and one’s life as a vibrational being, extending far beyond our skin as waves of energy, reverberating, singing with the environment we are a part of. This dream and many other adventures I have experienced have guided me on a journey to revive the ancient Tao, the return of the feminine spirit, and a rebalance of the masculine and feminine. I wrote the story of my journey in my Chinese memoir Earth Song, which will be published in 2025. (You may sample some of its chapters here.)

Guided by the Spirit of this dying whale, I realized that to welcome the Universal Mother back, I needed to penetrate the existing texts of I Ching which were under the influence of China’s long and powerful patriarchal history. After a decade of effort, with the help of many collaborators (some of which have become faculty members such as Joseph Friedman, Joe Shirley and Tong Schraa-Liu), I designed the Resonance Code using the I Ching hexagrams as a “meta-language”, a system akin to musical notation. I used the Resonance Code to capture the different vibrational states of our being in resonance with Universal Mother. In this way, the Resonance Code enables each person to generate their own “oracle dictionary” to observe, notate and interpret their unique, personal frequencies of resonance with Universal Mother.

Along this journey, my connection with Universal Mother has guided me to form alliances with faculty members who are accomplished practitioners in fields such as healing, women’s studies, leadership development, organizational consulting and music. For this program, we created a diverse palette of modules such as Memoir-Writing, Songwriting and Creativity, Restoring Feeling as Our inner Compass, and Embodied Cultural Sensitivity. All of these modules are designed to restore the many parts of us to their natural-born resonance with Universal Mother

In 2024, vote ourselves into natural leadership and allow Universal Mother to guide us in caring for our community like caring for a living organism. Grow a culture where our family and future generations can thrive!

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