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.

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

Forces such as colonization, hyper-individualism that exalts competition and winning and drives towards isolation, the toxic strands of patriarchy that suppress the soft, sensitive and ambiguous ways of being, and a culture of hyper-materialism that numbs and wounds our soul... The list goes on.

At the end of 2012, I met my partner Joe and his work Psychotopology. His work offered both a framework and a method for uncovering the inherent wisdom hidden within our feelings and emotions. It has helped me reconnect with my ancestral lineage and reclaim the unique gifts life has entrusted to me.

Through Psychotopology—and the journey of partnering with Joe—I’ve begun to liberate parts of myself long held powerless and invisible by oppressive forces within both Western and Eastern cultures, including colonization and patriarchy. As a result, I found the courage and source within to chart my own path—the Resonance Path —and claim an identity as a cultural architect, philosopher, and writer in social fields where voices like mine—as an Asian woman, non-native English speaker and first-generation immigrant—are almost entirely absent. I have had a thrilling ride surfing the waves of odds stacked against me —my soul has soared!

With gratitude and excitement, I wrote a foreword for Joe’s new book, Frontiers of Psychotopology, Volume 1. We will be hosting a series of free workshops to introduce a synthesis of our work integrated as one.

On December 31, 2012, I did my first fieldwork mapping (Psychotopology’s methodology) with Joe. Since then, I have learned the practice and applied it to my own journey, integrating it into my work with individuals and groups, and incorporating it into a curriculum I teach in China. Joe’s work has been instrumental in reconnecting me with the boundless, formless essence of my being—like a pure, resonant tone unfurling from a temple gong, vibrating in the crisp mountain air.

To me, Joe is a mystic hermit living in the midst of the city's hustle and bustle. To preserve the integrity and purity of his work, Joe has chosen to remain outside the established professional fields for the past thirty years, embracing a simple life with minimal material needs. His work carries a level of purity in its spiritual essence that deeply resonates with my aesthetic sense as a Taoist mystic.

Mystic hermits have been a uniquely potent presence in China, choosing to exist beyond the bounds of mundane life, cultivating themselves as a vessel for the wellbeing of the collective and evolution of planetary consciousness. Throughout history, some mystics came down from the mountain to share their gifts with the world. I am deeply grateful that Joe, after more than thirty years of solitary exploration, is choosing to emerge from his own “hermitage” and distill his knowledge into this book.

Joe amazes me that, without an external structure and tangible reward, he has been able to sustain long years of hard, disciplined work, completely propelled by an inner will and guidance. He is a rigorous scientist, meticulously tracking the research he conducted on himself, his clients and students, while staying abreast of the latest developments in mental health and cognitive science. I often joke that his office is the shell of a hermit crab. (His astrological sign is Cancer the crab.)

With brilliant ingenuity, Joe has wielded the sharp blade of scientific inquiry to navigate the uncharted realms of feeling and inner experience. He has unlocked secret pathways through what I call a wildness within, a territory in the inner landscape outside the boundary of existing maps of mainstream knowledge.

This territory lies deep within, yet it also powerfully connects us without. Adrienne Maree Brown has beautifully articulated this awareness of selfhood in these words:

“I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do.”

Adrienne’s words illuminate a simple yet profound truth: Who we are at deepest core of our inner being is, by its birthright, connected to all of humanity. This inner core of being, beyond what we do, produce, or perform, is one of the most powerful yet least understood forces for systemic change.

For those of us steeped in the modern mindset, this may seem contradictory to our experience. Removed from the deep core of our being, we cannot perceive how we, as individuals, are intimately connected with the whole at all times. We have been conditioned to believe that our essence, held within the core of our being, has no inherent value or impact on the world. Without measurable performance or production, we don’t feel we deserve belonging, or that we can even sustain our livelihood, let alone become a potent presence in the system.

In reality, the fractal connection between the individual and the whole is embedded in our very biology. Each cell in our body carries DNA that holds the imprint of billions of years of evolution on this planet. Remarkably, our genome shares 98% of its information with chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom — a testament to the deep interconnect-edness of all life. Yet most of the time, this interconnectedness only exists as an enticing concept rather than a lived experience.

To reclaim his birthright to the full brilliance of being, Joe has trekked through this wildness without tracks and guardrails, bearing poverty, living on the edge, walking only with faith and the intimate connection he has cultivated with mystery.

This choice has enabled him to carve out a path that is unique and innovative, while preserving the integrity of this inner wilderness. Unbeknownst to Joe, my ancestors, the ancient mystics and Taoist and Buddhist hermits of the east have also trekked this inner wilderness, through pathways and methods molded by a very different cultural and temporal context.

When I met Joe, I knew for certain that the souls and visions of my ancestors have guided me to meet him and his work, so that a cross-cultural dialogue and an intimate meeting of our ancestral lineages could unfold within our relationship.

Encountering Joe in My Dream

In August of 2012, I graduated from acupuncture school and started to launch my acupuncture clinic.

This was my second career. In my first career, I worked as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company after receiving a PhD in molecular biology. I was a “model immigrant,” earning top dollar plus full health benefits and a fat 401K portfolio subsidized by the company. My ex-husband (whose name happened to be Tao) and I co-owned three houses in prime neighborhoods near Microsoft’s campus, living in one and renting out two. I had achieved everything shiny promised by the “American dream,” yet inside, I was consumed by an intense pain associated with a deep betrayal of my inner being and ancestral lineage.

In my grandparents’ generation, China was sealed off from the rest of the world, untouched by modern technologies. The majority of the population was steeped in the traditional farming culture that had prioritized sustainability over material progress for two thousand years. My paternal grandfather was a Chinese medicine healer, the only doctor for his entire village. Hence, he also played the role of a community elder. My maternal grandfather worked for a Chinese herbal pharmacy.

Beginning as early as the start of the twentieth century, lured by the immense profit potential of China’s vast population, capitalism and modern medicine began forcing their way into the country. The Western pharmaceutical industry and its investors launched a campaign in the name of science, systematically undermining the credibility of traditional healers. Holistic practitioners were dismissed as wacky, untrustworthy, and backward, and the spirit of traditional medicine was all but crushed. As a result, today, many Chinese, especially those with advanced degrees from Western-influenced education systems, harbor a deep-seated distrust, and even shame, toward their own ancestral healing traditions.

Modern medicine, rooted in a Newtonian understanding of the physical world, focuses on concrete, measurable anatomical structures. In contrast, the holistic medical paradigm of the East perceives the body primarily as qi, a dynamic field of energy, unbound by the physical form. Practitioners cultivate their awareness as both a means of perception and a tool of intervention, using their own qi as an instrument for healing.

The relentless suppression and destruction of the traditional paradigm has been devastating to my native culture and my own soul. The gap between ancestral wisdom woven into my being and the scientist identity I adopted to make a living became a deep well of grief, sorrow, and anger. At times, it left me feeling like a brain prostitute, forced to trade my intellectual prowess at the expense of my authenticity.

In my 30s, life’s journey led me back to the deep knowing of my heart. I embarked on a series of pilgrimages to remote sacred sites in Tibet — at that time, one of the last places on Earth untouched by modernity. Blessed by the spirits of the Tibetan mountains, I discovered the will to break free from the golden handcuffs of a cushy job and set out on a path to reconnect with my ancestral lineage through the study of acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and Taoist spiritual cultivation.

However, running my first small business as an immigrant filled me with anxiety. Folk medicine used to be an integrated thread of a cultural fabric woven by reciprocity, deep attunement to nature, and interconnection based on trust and belonging, all of which was destroyed during modern development. I had grown up in pre-industrial China and spent my adult life in academia and research labs. Entrepreneurship was foreign to me, and I held strong resentment towards the traps of capitalist extraction.

On the day I was filling out the forms from Washington Department of Health to apply for a license, I was envisioning what my acupuncture clinic was going to be. I was both filled with hope and longing, and bothered by a persistent anxiety humming in the pit of my gut.

That night, I had a dream. I saw my clinic nestled on a bustling street in China, surrounded by small eateries offering the familiar, nostalgic flavors of my childhood. Stepping inside, I found its space dark and cramped. I climbed to the attic on the second floor—only to discover, to my astonishment, that it was a portal. In an instant, I was transported to the vast, high plateau of Tibet, the place where my spiritual journey first began a decade earlier.

In contrast to the cramped, noisy street below, here, an immense stillness stretched beneath an endless expanse of deep blue sky. The air was crisp and pure, a gentle breeze stirring the soul awake. Snow-capped peaks lined the horizon, their quiet majesty filling me with awe. As I stood there, happy tears welled in my heart — I had returned to a place that held the very essence of my spirit.

On this plateau, I roamed freely, my spirit light and unburdened. I thought I was alone, yet to my surprise, I encountered a man tending a small garden under the scorching sun, his focus and devotion absolute. Both shy, we didn’t exchange greetings, only a quiet, mutual awareness of each other’s presence. I watched him with admiration, moved by the care he poured into his work, his quiet humility, and his down-to-earth dedication.

To ensure I would recognize him when the time came, my dream revealed his surroundings — a hobbit-style stucco house, painted a soft golden hue, nestled within a lush garden. A wood-burning stove radiated a gentle, glowing warmth — an object dear to me, one of my most beloved household items. Months later, when I visited Joe’s home in Port Townsend for my first in-person fieldwork mapping, I saw that very house with the unique architecture style, the garden, and the wood-burning stove. At that moment, I knew without a doubt — he was the man from my dream.

This prophetic dream was not a new experience. For years, I had cultivated an awareness that allowed me to receive visions of the future in my dreams. The dominant paradigm of modernity dismisses the validity and sacredness of such experiences, along with other psychic abilities such as clairvoyance, telepathic communication and self-healing. These psychological traits are labeled as paranormal, supernatural, or even borderline “craziness.”

In many indigenous and traditional cultures, these traits are seen as innate potentials of human consciousness, natural gifts we are born with. When nurtured with openness and intention, as shamans and medicine people have done in Earth-centered cultures for millennia, they can evolve as profound expressions of evolution — manifestations of the interconnected intelligence flowing through us all.

The legacies of my native culture have allowed me to preserve awareness of my being, the inner wildness, exiled by the modern dominant paradigm. My relationship with Joe has empowered me to find the will and agency to bring the gifts and insights from this inner wildness into the dominant cultural paradigm.

For the past twelve years, I have been exploring how to live with the integrity of my being as a catalyst for transformation, while holding a loving witness to humanity. With that intention, I will offer this story as an introduction to the kind of transformation enabled by psychotopology.

(To be continued next post in “A Taoist Way to Heaven is Through Hell.”)

We are living in a time when the world as we know it is dissolving rapidly. For those fortunate, uncertainty seeps into our daily lives through the rising price of eggs and haunting images of fire and destruction in distant lands. For others, it arrives as job loss, displacement, or even personal attack.

This is not the first time humanity has faced such upheaval. I was born during the Cultural Revolution, a period of painful chaos and destruction in China. People turned against one another, and the entire nation suffocated under authoritarian rule.

My mother conceived me in secret during a visit to my father, who had been imprisoned in a detention “shed” under false political charges. When the pregnancy was discovered, my parents were publicly denounced and shamed.

My parents named me 春, the season of spring, when new life burgeons. Because, despite the hardship they endured, they held onto hope, the hope wielded by generations of ancestors will to survive destructions and annihilation. That hope was passed down to me, woven into my very being. I know in my bones that no matter how bleak things seem now, this too shall pass. And from the ruins, something new will emerge—something we may not yet recognize, even if it stands before us today. But we can sense it, reach for it with the tendrils of our imagination, like a blind person tracing the contours of an elephant with the soft pads of their fingertips.

In times like these, my instinct propels me to learn new ways to feel, to touch, to listen, and to see. I realize that by awakening our senses, feelings and emotions, we ignite our imagination and creativity, allowing hope to take shape in reality. This is the wisdom passed down to me—wisdom that has carried my family and ancestors through chaos, helping them not just to survive, but to thrive and to rebirth.

In Bellingham where I live, my colleagues and co-workers are actively weaving strands of hope into actions and projects. For that reason, I have chosen to direct most of my energy to local work. If you are not in my local community, and want to stay connected with Resonance Path’s work, feel free to browse through our website and get a sense of the ecosystem that we are a part of, such as the Social Alchemy Lab, Dancing Tao Tai Chi School, and Echoes of the Heart Ensemble.

Meeting the Spirit of Explorer in a Norwegian Fishing Museum

In 2019, my parents and I took a trip to Norway. In Oslo, we visited a museum dedicated to the early fishing industry. The Norwegian people are renowned seafarers who have pioneered sea travel and the overseas fishing industry. One of the quotes from the late 19th century expressed this sentiment, "There is an infinite number of fish in the ocean. All we need to do is build bigger boats and more powerful equipment, as we can never exhaust this pool of resources."

Of course, today we know that this belief was not true. In just about one hundred years, the fishing industry has brought many species of fish in the ocean to the brink of exhaustion.

I was amazed by the quote; it felt deeply jarring to my intuitive sensibility. Forty years ago, when I was a young girl, I experienced the onset of industrialization unfolding in China, a country of over one billion people. Even then, without access to scientific data, I intuited the ecological collapse and inevitable climate change—both of which happened much faster than I had anticipated.

At the same time, visiting the museum gave me a visceral sense of these 19th-century fishermen who genuinely believed in the inexhaustibility of ocean resources and lived their lives testing that belief. Touching the tools they made and the ships they built, I was struck by the workmanship and devotion they poured into their craft. Imagining the hardship they faced on the unforgiving sea and the ingenuity they harnessed dissolved some of the judgment and "othering" I have carried in my heart for forty years.

As a young girl in China, the grief and pain of feeling ecological collapse were immense and devastating. Judging “others” became a way to protect my heart so I can survive. This judgment and "othering" were heavy burdens I carried for much of my life, directed against the modern, extractive social enterprise initiated primarily by Europeans.

I don’t regret carrying that judgment as it propelled me to fight against the oppression so I can discover my own voice. Nevertheless, fighting-against, by itself, does not lead to unity and healing I desire. Moreover, it is not a sustainable practice for the fighter herself.

It was when I stood in the museum, I heard a new, gentle voice in my heart whispering, “We are all human, each with an imperfect understanding of life and the universe. So is Chinese ancestry knowledge and my current understanding of life and the world.” With that voice, I felt the wall of judgment melting.

Since industrialization, we have built our civilization and social infrastructure on unsustainable practices that have damaged ecological systems and exhausted natural resources. Yet, as humans, we intrinsically harbor a spirit that taps into the infinite abundance of the universe. My heart told me that Earth and the cosmos wants this spirit to be seen, embodied and embraced too.

To my surprise, being in the museum, I found myself appreciating the Norwegian fishermen’s spirit of exploration and their trust in the infinite. I began to wonder a different question, “how do we honor and embody this spirit that trusts and explores infinite abundance while upholding ethical responsibility for sustainable practices?”

This question released a powerful wave of healing in my body, as it guided me toward integration, unity and creativity, instead of focusing solely on resistance or “fighting against”.

In the museum of Norwegian Fishermen, I was surprised to see part of myself reflected in these fishermen. I, too, have this explorer spirit that believes in infinite possibilities. This spirit has taken me on a cross-continental journey from China to the U.S., embarking on expeditions to the high mountains of the Himalayas, scaling rock walls in remote alpine countries, and navigating diverse professional fields such as science, healing, music, philosophy, leadership development and organizational consultancy. Before I arrived at Norway, I just published my first English book The Resonance Code - Empowering Leaders to Evolve Toward Wholeness and attended a conference on Climate Change and Consciousness in Scotland.

These fishermen and myself are both explorers of the unknown territory, except in different dimensions. The fisherman explores the ocean. I am an explorer of the “ocean” of consciousness and “islands” of cultural paradigms.

The Tao: Navigational System for the Unknown

Throughout my “cultural expedition”, the navigational system I rely on is the wisdom traditions rooted in my cultural heritage: Chinese medicine and the philosophy and practices of the Tao. As a Taoist practitioner, my purpose is to nurture harmony and balances between different forces and to alchemize the tensions between polarities into creativity and regenerative power.

Practices like Qigong and Tai Chi teach me what harmony and balance feel like in an embodied sense. With this honed sensibility, I can begin to harmonize the Yang—the expansive, adventure-seeking spirit of explorers—with the Yin—the heart and soul that perceives the world through cycles of reciprocity.

If we take from the ocean, we also need to give back by nurturing its regeneration with care. By tending to this relationship of reciprocity, we can re-learn how to become ethical stewards of nature’s infinite abundance.

Tending the relationship of reciprocity is not just about treating the ocean, forests, and rivers as inanimate objects, measurable quantities and data, or passive resources to "manage." It is also about relating to them as animated beings with their own will, desires, feelings and evolutionary purposes.

Without this perspective, even our best efforts at “environmental management” can unconsciously project human desires, needs and metrics of measurement onto nature.

Many indigenous teachings around the world emphasize awakening the felt-sense memory that we are an integral part of the ecological system, just as ants, mushrooms, grass, and spiders are part of the ecology. Our bodies are not merely an aggregation of bones, muscles, tendons, and neurons; they are the physical anchor of subtler energetic system that extends beyond the physical mass. This energy system of our body resonates with the ocean, the forest, the lava, the mountains, and the rocks. When we tend to this part of our being, we may reclaim our membership as an element of the ecological system.

One Chinese saying said, if you want to understand leopard, you need to become a leopard. 想要了解豹子，需要成为豹子. If we want to understand how the ocean regenerates herself and sustains her infinite abundances, we need to become the ocean.

Become the Ocean We Love

Qigong and Tai Chi have taught me how to become the ocean I love. Through these practices, I tend this part of my being that naturally resonates with natural elements. These practices slow down my awareness, synchronize my breath with movement, and nurture the reciprocal relationship between parts of my body and the whole. They teach me to fully inhabit my physical body and respect its autonomy.

In Qigong, we do not force or will our bodies to produce specific results, like becoming faster or stronger. In my Tai Chi practice, it’s also not even about “performing the right forms”. Instead, we practice the forms to allow our body to restore its alignment and awaken its own autonomy. We cultivate an awareness of gravity, which is being experienced as a spiritual force that connects us to Earth Mother. We also cultivate an awareness of "levity," a subtle energetic force that can be felt through dedicated practice. Each gesture and movement, simple as they may seem, carries meaning. These acts of embodied communication bridge our energy with the subtle, energetic web that surrounds us.

During my time visiting Norway, I felt the ocean and the Norwegian ancestors speaking to me. One year later, I moved to Bellingham during COVID. Since then, I met many people of Norwegian ancestry who have since become close friends and collaborators. My collaborator Daelinar is one of them. Together, we co-founded the Dancing Tao Tai Chi school. I like to think that our ancestors are guiding us to come together and collaborate, forging a new pathway to bring our respective ancestry knowledge into an integrated whole.

Below are videos Daelinar and I co-produced for the Dancing Tao workshop we will lead on Jan 4 in Bellingham Washington.

Hidden Maps of the Tao

Dear Substack Friends, I have been quiet for a long time here. Meanwhile, creativity has been bubbling like a hot spring in my local community of Bellingham, Washington.

In the last two months, the community around me is experiencing a lot of pain, fracture, and uncertainty as well as grounded responsiveness to what ‘s happening in the political realm. More than ever I felt the urgency to offer the Taoist knowledge of sense-making to regenerate unity, interconnection, and harmony.

During last two months, I have been offering a course to a local community of folks who are interested in the Tao. This course is called the Hidden Maps of the Tao in Chinese Characters. No, it is not a language class, but it is about language.

Language Shapes Perception of Reality

Language shapes our perception of reality. Modern language, with English as a primary example, tends to be pragmatic and straightforward, aimed at “arriving at the point”, extracting meanings from the felt-sense and lived experiences sometime in a brutal way. With this language as the primary lens, we may experience the world as fragmented, transactional and alienating to the felt-sense of aliveness.

In contrast, ancient languages with an indigenous root, with Chinese as an example, works in an opposite way. It tends to enfold layers of meaning into simple phrases, enriching the felt-sense and feelings through poetic expressions. It also arranges many shades and nuances of felt senses into imagery and metaphors, through which one experiences more of an inter-connected, living world.

Chinese characters often consist of multiple parts, each carrying meanings, relations to history, rituals, and myths from time immemorial. When each character is translated directly into an English word, the deeper meanings, and the wisdom embedded in the profound experience of interconnection with all living being, are often lost.

When we peak into the kaleidoscope of each Chinese character, and contemplate on the meanings it transmits, we activate our feeling heart and intuitive mind, where the essence of the Tao already resides. This course I am teaching revives a poetic sensibility that sees the world an interconnected whole. In this essay below, you will get a taste of what I mean by that.

At Resonance Path, we are working on bringing this ground-breaking work to the wider world. We are planning to launch a virtual course based on this material in 2025. Please stay tuned to our newsletter.

This work has been a co-creation between this group of pioneers in Bellingham. I can’t take full credit for this, as the inspiration, frameworks and materials for this work has emerged out of a series of synchronicities, delightful surprises, and ongoing dialogue and interactions exchanged among a very lively community.

With that, in celebration of the darkest time of the year in the norther hemisphere, I present you 暗, Chinese character for dark or darkness, which in its poetic sense means the Music of the Sun.

暗，Darkness is the Music of the Sun

When we encounter something or someone that we don’t like, we often attribute darkness to it. We might also call a difficult period a “dark time”.

From the eyes of the Tao, darkness is just as integral to life as light. When we are presented with a situation or adversary that feels dark, one way to respond is to ask, What part of myself have I overlooked, rejected and ignored in the preceding phase of “light” that has just ended? How can I deepen the integration of these parts into who I am?

To live in the dark, to intentionally walk the path of darkness with integrity is an ancient art of the Tao.

The Chinese character for darkness is 暗, pronounced as “ahn”. It is composed of two parts. The left part means the sun, the right part means a rhythmic tone or sound. When we put these two components together, the poetic meaning of 暗 becomes the Music of the Sun.

Everything has a dark side. In Taoist philosophy, we believe that the ultimate Truth of the universe is hidden from the explicit meaning-making of the cognitive mind. That is why the first line of Tao Te Ching says the Tao that can be uttered into words are not the true Tao. However, the Tao is not inaccessible through words. It is through the implicit, the enfolded, the gentle caress of the words that the essence of the Tao shines.

Perhaps the most difficult lesson to learn from darkness is about ourselves. Our personality has a “shadow” side, which is different from, or even opposite to who we think we are. As our culture today is often fractured, polarized and disconnected, our identity, who we think we are, is what we rely on to get a sense of safety and belonging. Paradoxically, since safety and belonging often feels scarce, our identity can turn into a rigid, defensive insulation that further isolates us from life.

However, when darkness comes, we can choose to shed the layer of the old identity and be exposed to the reality with our raw, inner vulnerability. We can choose to dredge the deeper layer of the ocean bed of unconscious self, so we can rebirth a more robust, adaptable and enlivened identity that is connected with larger life forces.

After the election, many people in my immediate community are experiencing a lot of pain, despair and darkness. At Bellingham, Resonance Path has been offering a local gathering called Social Alchemy Lab as a space for people to listen to each other, feel our emotions, and transmute them into creativity. Together, we are exploring who we are in our deepest being beyond our visible identity. We choose to sing with the music of the sun.

In darkness, seek not light with our eyes. Instead, let’s tune our ears to listen to the music of the sun. I look forward to further exploring the mystery of who we are together with this substack community in the coming year!

Language shapes our perception of reality. Modern language, with English as a primary example, tends to be pragmatic and straightforward, aimed at “arriving at the point”, extracting meanings from the felt-sense and lived experiences, sometimes in a brutal way. With this language as the primary lens, we may experience the world as fragmented, transactional and alienating to the felt-sense of aliveness.

In contrast, ancient languages with indigenous roots, with Chinese as an example, work in an opposite way. Ancient Chinese tends to enfold layers of meaning into simple phrases, enriching the felt-sense and feeling through poetic expression. It also arranges many shades and nuances of felt senses into imagery and metaphors, through which one experiences more of an inter-connected, living world.

Chinese characters carry maps pointing to the mysterious territory of the Tao, which cannot be comprehended through an approach dominated by the rational left brain. Nor can it be fully translated into modern English language. Learning to speak and draw Chinese characters, and contemplating on the meanings they transmit, will activate our feeling heart and intuitive mind, where the essence of the Tao already resides.

This fall, I will be leading a study group in Bellingham, where my home is, to explore the hidden meanings in the Chinese language, as a contemplative way to dive deeper into the cultural context of the Tao. My vision is that this pilot group will generate materials for an online course that can reach a broader audience. If you are interested in such offering in the future, please sign up for our newsletter at ResonancePath.com. You may take a peek at what this course looks like here.

Sadness is the Heart of Autumn and Self is Part of the Ecology

Here is a taste of the hidden meaning in a Chinese character.

The Chinese character for sadness 愁 (pronounced as Chou), has two components. The top component 秋 means autumn. The bottom component 心 means heart. Together this means that sadness is the heart of autumn.

If autumn has a heart, it will feel sad as the leaves wither and blossoms of summer die out. In Chinese poetic culture, thousands and thousands of poems have been dedicated to the exquisite flavors of sadness and the beauty of the heart of autumn.

This character alone implies two things about the philosophy of ancient Chinese culture regarding emotions, selfhood and nature. First, Chinese culture seeks balance and harmony of the multitude of emotions. Without feeling sadness, we can’t feel joy. Life is a dance between polarities, a weave of both/and. Second, emotions do not just belong to individuals. Emotions are part of the energy of the ongoing cycles of seasonal and ecological change. We humans, as part of nature, participate in these cycles of change through feeling our emotions.

Modern culture prioritizes and emphasizes a selfhood that asserts itself onto nature, a self that dominates and controls. In ancient cultures that see human being and nature more as a whole, selfhood is an ecological self, an ongoing dialogue, an interactive process of giving and receiving, influencing and being influenced. Feeling emotions is a critical process to allow the influences of the environment, natural or social, to shape ourselves so we can be part of the ecology.

Recommending Fieldwork, where Feeling is a Pathway towards an Ecological Self

The degradation of mental health is very palpable in our time. Conditioned by the modern culture’s paradigm to assert control, many of us often avoid feeling emotions and interpret our emotions as negative. When we redefine what these emotions are, we may start to develop a more wholesome relationship with emotions where they become a pathway for self-awareness.

Developing a relationship with emotions is a practice and a science. I recommend my partner Joe Shirley’s fieldwork. Joe is the founder of psychotopology, a new science of the feelingmind. This work resonates with the deeper mystery of Taoism, which brought us together as creative and intimate partners.

I have been using fieldwork on myself as well as in my professional work for the last twelve years. I see Joe’s work as an essential piece in shifting the cultural paradigm and re-orienting our self-hood towards a more fluid, flexible and changing part of nature. Joe just published this quick guide that leads you through a mindfulness practice with feelings as a portal.

Fieldwork: a mindfulness process to engage feelings a pathway to the ecological self

Autumn is a season for feeling the the loss of summer, and settling down to prepare for the winter. It is also a time for harvest and celebration. May your heart expand to feel both and dance with the polarities of the season!

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Listen to: DOWN THE WELL on Spotify or Apple, a podcast interview with Spring Cheng on THE RADIO.

A Response to a Call from the Naked Heart

Synchronicity is the language of the inter-connected, living world. When we step off the highway of the fast-speed, hyper-digital, hyper-transactional life, we will notice the choir of synchronicities sung by all beings. We may even join in. We may even hitch a ride on the hyper-digital internet highway to amplify the synchronous waves. Here is a story from my recent experience.

A month ago, I published a song and a short writing called Naked Heart. Naked Heart is a translation of a Chinese phrase 赤子之心. It means a level of authenticity and boldness that a small child has, free of any disguise, defense or pretense. It is where the original wisdom of the heart resides.

The day after that, I received a message from Randall, someone local who took a songwriting/song-catching workshop I held about a year ago. He has started a podcast called The Radio. With excitement, he told me that he had been immersed in the exploration of living from the heart. Intrigued by the song and the essay, he asked me if I wanted to be a guest to his podcast.

I agreed.

A week later, Randall came and we had a heart-felt conversation around what it means to live from the heart in the modern world and what the wisdom of the Tao may offer. You may listen to this interview on Spotify or Apple.

Some highlights:

• Taking in the world through the heart, with its darkness and glory, grief and joy

• Cultivating a collective container to process our deepest feelings in community through embodiment

• Receiving and listening to each other

• Recognizing heart, both as a physical organ and a psychological faculty, as a “master information synthesizer”

• Each human is a living tree, exchanging information with the world at a level beyond what can be extracted as digital information

• Song-catching as a new “technology” to build the resilience, strength and volume of the heart

• Honoring songs as beings that want to be living through us, nourishing us or helping us to shed and transform

A “Thank You” Note from the Earth

That afternoon after Randall left, my partner Joe and I decided to finish a yard project. We were making a mandala stone sculpture to honor our connection with the land that we called home as well as our connection with Kairo, our beloved puppy who passed away eight months ago. We were at the last stage of the project — we just needed to pick some nice stones to put at the center of the sculpture.

Before we arrived at the rockery courtyard, my heart felt a surge of joyful currents. I told Joe, “I love to be around big rocks. They make my heart happy.”

There were dozens of huge bins of rock, all with various sizes, colors and shapes. We already knew which kind of rocks we would like. I walked towards the bin and randomly picked out a few without looking.

“Look at what’s in your hand.” Joe said to me.

I looked down. It’s a beautiful, heart-shaped rock. Beside it is another one in the shape of a cradle. Kairo, our puppy, had spent much of his life enjoying being cradled by Joe and me.

So these two rocks went home with us.

Inside the stone circle we made, when I placed the cradle back to back with the big heart stone, I thought to myself, “I needed something to put inside the cradle.”

Suddenly I felt something in my left hands. I looked down, it’s another smaller, rock in a heart shape. It felt as if it leapt into my hands when I was thinking those thoughts. So there it is, a baby heart, sleeping in the cradle, in the presence of the big heart.

This is a day of the echoes of the heart. The frequency of heart, expressed through music, conversations, as well as stones resonated with each other into a beautiful choir.

Life is a constant stream of resonance, harmony and reciprocity. When our heart is closed, we become deaf to it. When we are open to the stream of resonance, we know we belong to a larger sphere of life. I give thanks to all who joined in this resonance — A Chinese woman living in Amsterdam who shared her story which led to the song of Naked Heart, Randall the podcast host, the Spirit or Kairo, and the Spirit of Earth and Rock.

This resonance is what I turn to for insights, hope and guidance living through the chaos, violence and uncertainty of the world. This ever present resonance speaks through stones, songs, patterns of clouds, trickling streams, as well as heart-warming conversations and exchanges between friends, community and family. I trust that it contains powers our ancestors always knew. And it contains powers that connects us to the future generations who will inhabit the Earth we will leave behind. This is the lifeline I hold onto to at a time like this when the Old World we know of is dying and a new world of the unknown is being born.

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Do you have a response to this post? Do you have a similar story? Please feel free to post them here. Let’s continue the echoes of the heart!

Spring Cheng offers Living Song Mentorship where she guides you to reunite with the core essence of your being through the portal of voice and song. For a free trial session and more information, please click here.

If you value the writing I shared, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. May your contribution be amplified through resonance and come back to you in a hundred fold!

You are also welcome to subscribe for free. Free and paid-subscribers get the same contents.

As much as I wanted to be reunited with the lost songs, they also have been searching for me, or searching for someone to be their voice and instruments.

In the past nine years, I spent thousands of hours playing my songs by myself. Now I know. I was never alone. Inter-Being, the Mystery Weaver, has always been listening and watching me. One day, she tapped on my shoulder and said, “I heard you.”

My First Music Teachers: Nature and the Lost Songs of the Ancestors

I have had a secret longing to sing since I was a young girl, yet I never had a chance to until I was 41 years old.

I grew up in the 70s in China during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time when the traditional culture was dying. My parents were among the first generation of scientists of the new China. Their entire life was occupied by their work.

There was almost no music in the environment I grew up in. This was a time before TV became a household item. Going to movies was a luxury my family seldom indulged. The only popular media was radio. My favorite radio program was a thousand-year-old storytelling tradition called Ping Shu, which usually featured historical drama stories. A story can last several hundred hours long, which was broadcast as 30-min long episodes spanning months or even years. Thankfully, that was my education in traditional culture. 

My family lived in a dorm close to my parents’ work unit. My parents, my sister and I lived in a 250 sq ft room with two beds, a desk, a wardrobe and a dinner table. A coal-burning stove and a shelf in the hallway were our kitchen.

I spent a lot of my childhood time outside. My parents’ work unit was situated on a beautiful campus on the edge of Shanghai, where the city meets the countryside. The campus had lovely meadows dotted with wild berries and violets, enchanted groves of forests and whimsical playgrounds constructed by children’s imagination.

Back then in Shanghai, a five-story building was the “high rise”. The streets, lined with beautiful sycamore trees, were filled with constant streams of bicycles. No personal cars. Electrical buses filled with people ran up and down streets.

Our material life was primitive. No electronics. No telephones. We got water from a public water closet shared by five families, who also shared a public toilet. We washed ourselves in a public bathhouse. There was hardly any entertainment such as concerts or theatre plays.

In this primitive environment, I was able to preserve the wild part of me that has not been tamed by civilization. I did not mind the simple material life. I roamed free in the city streets and countryside that has not seen industrialization yet. I would bike to the nearby villages with my friends and get lost in trees and fields. Bugs and butterflies were our playmates. In hindsight, the wilderness I immersed myself in was my first music teacher.  I just was not aware of that.

When I was a teenager, I encountered ancient Chinese poetry. I was smitten. Many of these poetry is about feeling, sensing and attuning with the natural world as living, breathing beings. Not primitive beings to be used and exploited, but beings as wise teacher to be revered and listened to. Through these poetry, I felt as if I instantly levitated out of the modern era and traveled back in time to meet with poets whose names were etched in Chinese history, such as Li Bai, Xin Qi Ji, Du Fu, Qu Yuan, Li Qingzhao …  These poets had shaped Chinese language and Chinese Spirit with words flowing out of their heart. They are my ancestors. I could feel their soul’s vibration transmitted through their words in my blood, flesh and bones.

In Chinese language, poetry is 诗歌, Shi Ge. It means poetry-song. In ancient times, people sang poems instead of reading them. The majority of poets were men as very few women had the opportunity to receive education. Yet, it was the women musicians who turned the poetry into songs. Most of these women musicians played a role equivalent to Geisha, a status slightly more elevated than prostitute.

In modern days, the song part of the poetry-songs was lost. Only silent words are left on the paper, with an empty void around them. Staring at the void, I could almost hear the music, yet my voice was muffled, coarse and crackly. I did not know how to sing.

What was lost was not just the songs, but the identification with our own culture. Most adults around me had no awareness of the most luminous gems of the ancient culture, such as Zen Buddhism, the Tao or the original teachings of Confucius.

Conditioned by the mentality that the scientific and technological achievements of the west were the “standard” for development and progress, the Chinese collective psyche at the time was enshrouded in painful shame and denigration of our own culture. Underneath the shame was a choking blanket of grief, the pain of losing the connection with our ancestors. (Read this for more of this part of the story.)

Rebirthing the Lost Songs

Growing up, I always thought my voice was terrible. I grew up with the mentality that a lofty pursuit such as music had to start at an early age. Otherwise, it was a lost cause. Whenever I heard a piece of music or a song I loved, I felt a pang of grief inside. I wished I could sing, but it was “too late” for me. I mourned.

What I did not know was that the universe had a different plan for me.

Fast-forward twenty years. In 2000, I was in my 30s and I settled down in Seattle, where I gradually grew into my fuller self.

One of the blessings in my life was that I would encounter mentors who took me under their wings. One such mentor was an astrologer and Tarot reader named Monica. She introduced me to the metaphysical studies of astrology, numerology, and the Chinese oracle I Ching. These studies awakened the “witch”, or Wu-Witch (巫, Chinese word for shaman) inside of me.

At that time, I was working as a research scientist in the pharmaceutical company Merck, fully immersed in the hypermasculine, hyper-rational side of the world. Encountering Monica and reviving the Wu-Witch inside of me was exhilarating and life-changing.

The hypermasculine, hyper-techno-rational world felt dry and devoid of feelings. I felt trapped by it and did not how to extricate myself. My heart was thirsty for a more enlivened world. I related with the story told by the movie Matrix. In the movie Matrix, the lead character Neo was a computer programmer living inside a “matrix”, a virtual world constructed by technology. Meanwhile his body, along with millions or even billions of other humans’ bodies were entrapped inside bio-capsules, used as battery cells to fuel the “super-computer”.

This movie plot rang true with my intuition. I knew that the hyperrational world that my job identity centered around was only a sliver of a much deeper, more enlivened reality. Yet, my eyes, ears, and senses were blinded, deafened and muffled by the super-techno, hyper-consumerist, hyper-rational cultural conditioning. It felt like as if this cultural conditioning had “grafted” VR goggles into my consciousness. I longed for a deep transformation that would allow me to take off these clunky VR goggles, so that I can feel, touch and inhabit the deeper layer of reality that was blocked from my senses.

I don’t believed that one has to retreat into remote mountains or island to feel this Deep Reality. This Deep Reality is not dependent on geographic coordinates but is a function of the state of our own consciousness. I vowed to dive into a transformational journey so that I could experience this Deep Reality with my own senses right here and now in our daily, mundane life, amidst the hustle and bustle of the city.

Initiation into this journey of transformation involved many mini deaths. In 2011, five years after I met Monica, she passed away from a rare disease, leaving behind a gaping hole in my life. I lost my best friend and mentor. That was just one out of a series of losses. One by one, I let go of my scientist job, then marriage to my ex-husband, then the hard-won status, identity and wealth accumulated through decades of disciplined work. This “VR goggle” had been programmed into my nervous system for the past twenty years. Prying it off from my face was a bloody process.

In 2014, I turned 41. I was trying to establish my acupuncture clinic in a Seattle suburb. But I felt extremely frustrated by how the ancient spirit of Chinese medicine was watered down, appropriated and commodified by the hyper-rational, materialistic-oriented regulatory agencies. I sensed inside of me, a bigger leap into the unknown was beckoning. I started the initial phase of my work that eventually led to the founding of the Resonance Path Institute and the publication of the Resonance Code.

But I was also gripped by fear. At least being an acupuncturist would offer me some sense of security, a guard rail on a steep, unstable path into the unknown. Without this guard rail, I did not know who I would become or how I would survive in the world! Plus, it was a token of the legacy left by my ancestors.

I was torn by the inner conflict. I was desperate for guidance. One day, I found myself wandering back into the East West bookstore in Seattle, a new age bookstore where Monica used to work as an astrologer. When she was alive, I often went there to look for her. I would wait for her to get off work and we would have a tea, lunch or a walk in the neighborhood. After she passed away, I avoided that bookstore as it reminded me of the pain of losing Monica. But that day, driven by a strong intuition that, instead of avoiding the pain, I went head on into the pain. I was almost thirsty to taste it, as the pain of losing Monica was the only connection I had to reach her again.

I had not been in this bookstore for years. I roamed around looking for a vestige of Monica’s presence. I could feel her warm smiles and the bell-like tone of her voice. My eyes were filled with tears.

By the back room where she used to do astrological readings, there was a bulletin board, displaying a wide variety of business cards, flyers and posters, offering healing and metaphysical services and workshops. On the very bottom of the board was a simple card with a name on it: Kaija, music teacher. Voice, ukulele, piano and more.

I had tried a few music teachers in the previous few years. None of them worked out. Most of these teachers focused on teaching musical skills. Such skills are complex, requiring refined and sophisticated repatterning of motor control, hard to learn as an adult. The mechanical repetition of skills quickly bored me or triggered the conditioned reaction that "I-am-not-good-enough". I would lose steam and give up.

But a small voice in me encouraged me to keep searching. I picked up the card and called Kaija. It turned out that I just recently moved to the same neighborhood she lived in, and our houses were only a mile and a half away from each other! We even shared the same qigong teacher. Not only that, on the phone Kaija told me that when she was a young girl living in Michigan, she always tried to dig a hole to China. And she likes congee, the staple Chinese breakfast food.

I booked a session.

Immediately, I realized that Kaija was a different teacher. She did not try to “teach me a song.”  We did qigong together. Through simple guided exercises and attunement, she guided me to open an “inner ear”, attuning to music within my heart and improvising on the spot.

Conventional music training usually started with scales, techniques and playing simple tunes. Improvisation is either not taught or reserved for only those who have become skillful. Kaija turned that process upside down.

Within fifteen minutes of simple exercise, a dam broke inside of my heart. Tears poured out like the Great Flood. I didn’t know what happened. I cried, and cried, and cried. I couldn’t stop. Kaija held me in her arms. Her purple shirt became damp with my tears.

That was pretty much how the first session went. I was so embarrassed and confused that I didn’t call her for another month!

Kaija was a classically trained pianist. After a decade into her career, her arms and fingers got into a severe cramp that she was not able to play classical music as she used to. Out of this crisis, she completely changed her approach to music. She started to study world music and developed a way to play piano and music that was much more organic, intuitive, and flowing, centered more on feelings than techniques.

The music room where she taught me music was filled with musical instruments from all over the world, many of which I did not know the name for. Kaija likes to wear colorful skirts and big hats. She and her partner Willow, also a music teacher, live like two hermits in the city. They do not own a car. They love Chinese tea and cook Indian food. They teach students in their house. Kaija hardly ever did advertisement of her teaching service. She told me that the card I picked up was the first advertisement she did in ten years.

One month after my first session with Kaija, I mustered courage to go back and had another lesson. Then another. And another. For the next six years, I studied with Kaija on a weekly or biweekly basis until I moved away from Seattle.

Kaija’s philosophy is that music is a universal language native to humans, and everyone is born to sing! Her way of teaching is not centered around learning pre-made pieces of music, but around listening to the river of music that was always flowing through our very being.

This is the first time I engaged in a learning process that was not geared towards exterior performance, outcome and objective, but focused on the quality of my inner experience. I knew that is the path to liberate my being from the “VR goggles”!

Learning music was like learning to speak another language. Kaija taught me to be patient and gentle with myself just like how a mother would be with a baby first learning to speak.

The music that flowed out first was poetry-song. I turned towards the poetry that nurtured my soul when I was young. Miraculously, I was able to hear the songs. And this time, I was able to sing them. With Kaija’s help, I started to learn how to compose a song, and play it on piano or ukulele. The more I listened to it, the clearer it became.

At the beginning, the music I made was raw and primitive. I would be confronted by my inner critics. It said nasty things.

“Forget about it. You will never be able to do it!”

“You are just daydreaming! Only people starting young can be musicians.”

 “You don’t deserve it!”

This voice was the imprint of living inside the hyper-controlled, hyper-judgmental world. It was my internalized tyrant and colonizer, the voice that dominated and imposed hard, external standards on my inner “wilderness”. I recognized my 6-year-old self, 4-year-old self, and even younger selves being shut down by this inner critic. I heard the voiceless cry out of pain frozen in the past. So many times, my tears would wet Kaija’s shirt. For a long time, Kaija would prepare a tissue box during my music sessions.  

At those times, Kaija would sit in silence, or sing gentle songs. “Let the tears flow.” She would say to me. “The tears will melt the critics.”  And she would hold my hands and look into my eyes, telling me that she trusted that I could do it.

Gradually I learnt not to judge myself for not being good enough. Instead, I allowed myself to be completely immersed in the joy of making music, no matter how “good” or “bad” the music was. As long as I was enjoying it and expressing my feelings through it, it was satisfying.

Since I met Kaija, music has become a daily companion. Ninety percent of the time I improvise my own music. Improvising music has become my mindful practice, turning my attention to how I feel and sense my being and the world in the present moment.

I did not think too much of playing music to perform. Instead, music was an inner river, a good friend to have a visit and sit with, enjoying a conversation and a mindful reflection. I allowed the melodies frozen in ancient memories to gently melt like a glacier. When I was tired, sad, or feeling lost, I would also go to the river to release, renew and regenerate. Throughout these years, hundreds of songs and tunes have passed through me, comforting me, connecting me to my ancestral lineage as well as lifting me up to live from my most authentic self.

With this river of music lapping by my side, I allowed the process of learning musical skills and techniques to unfold naturally. What Kaija has taught me was how to open my heart to listen to the river of inner music. Still, I would need skills to translate that river into music I could hear. That’s when I realized that when my heart was open, the experience of skill-learning could be completely different from the experience of learning skills for the sake of performative objectives or external goals.  

Learning musical skills by following the opening of my heart did not feel boring, repetitive or repressive. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this process, completely absorbed with never a moment of dullness. Even the simplest repetition of skills can be filled with deep feelings.

The only “downside” of this way of learning is that I kept the music as a private endeavor for myself for a long time. “This is just for my own healing.” I thought to myself. Again, I did not know that the universe had a different plan for me.

The Unseen Hand of a Mystery Weaver

In the summer of 2023, nine years after I met Kaija and started my musical journey, my partner Joe and I arrived at the contact improvisation dance retreat on Orcas Island.

Contact Improvisation is a form of improvised partner dance, a hybrid between modern dance and Aikido. Two or more than two people move spontaneously with one another, sliding with and bouncing off from each other, sharing weight, or sometime even taking flight over one another.

Improvisation is a theme that threads through my life, through forms of dance, music and theatre. It is a practice of letting go of what you know and diving into the edge of the unknown with your whole body. If I have a religious practice, it is improvisation. For me, improvisation is the embodiment of the Tao – as the Taoist proverb says, the Tao lives in spontaneity. Improvisation helps me to take off the “VR goggles” installed by the hyper-techno-materialistic-rational cultural conditioning.  

As I give myself to the mystery, the mystery also comes to meet me in these spontaneous moments. Many important events in my life happened through the spontaneity of the universe, like the meeting of Monica, Kaija, and meeting my partner Joe on a contact improv retreat in 2012 in Port Townsend.

In this Orcas Island retreat, I gave myself permission to completely relax into the joy of dance and connect with a community of dancer friends, most of whom I have known for more than a decade. It was a time like returning to the Garden of Eden – dance, natural beauty, connections, naked swims in the deep blue of a mountain lake, laughter and sleep under the fruit trees in a fragrant orchard.

In the middle of the retreat, there was an open mic session one evening. This retreat had been happening every summer for more than a decade. But the open mic was a new thing.

In 2023, after the pandemic, I met with a group of artists that I enjoyed hanging out with in Bellingham where I now live. I started to go to the open mic they host. The Bellingham open mic hosted by my friends is a very warm, welcoming space, held by people who are open-hearted, sensitive to the feelings behind the music, and not so much into jostling for status. I started to get the hang of performing for others and enjoyed it.

However, that night on Orcas I didn’t have much desire to perform. This was my vacation time. I just wanted to relax.

Right before the open mic began, people were lounging on the lawn, laughing and chatting. It was a lovely evening on a paradise island in the middle of summer. Everything was being painted orange and red at sunset. Someone played a handpan. A delicate female voice sang a gentle song.

Suddenly, my chest filled with a sweet sense of nostalgia and grief. I started to weep. I missed the country and land I left behind. I cried for the long, arduous trans-cultural journey I travelled and the many broken pieces that I have not healed inside. More than anything, my heart seared with an aching longing for what humanity could be when the web of belonging is re-woven by humans placing arts, beauty, poetry and music at the center of our culture again.

Then the open mic began. One of my close friends, a skilled family constellation facilitator, gracefully asked us to honor a piece of ancestral lineage that brought us to where we were and enabled us such privilege to receive and experience all these beautiful blessings. I was amazed how her invitation matched my inner currents.

The next thing I knew, I was standing up in front of scores of my dancer friends. I told them that I was going to sing a song in Chinese that I composed over a poem written by Li Bai, the eighth century poet, considered the greatest of all time, my childhood hero. This was one of the first songs I composed when I started studying with Kaija. I didn’t provide the translation, instead, I asked people in the room to just listen, and allow images to arise as I sang.

Then the river flowed through me. I saw people’s eyes light up. I knew they were in my river now. We were together in a boat floating through time, history, and the vast span of our human hearts. This is a song that I have sung to myself countless times. I have given life to it. In this setting, it assumed a power that took over the room. It brought sunlight and a rainbow. It transported clouds and mountains from China into the space around us. Musical notes and Chinese words slid through my throat like white caps flowing through a roaring river.

People were transfixed by the spell cast by the song. They reported images that matched well with what the poet expressed in ancient Chinese. However, the real surprise came afterwards.

After my song, a dancer named Ward Serill approached me. I only met him once at a previous dance retreat in Port Townsend. He is tall and walks in an elegant stance. With a stunned expression on his face, he asked me,

“Do you know a person named Red Pine, the world-famous translator for classic Chinese poetry?”

“Yes, I know Red Pine. I have his translation of Tao Te Ching.” I replied.

“I have been making a documentary movie about him for the last three years. I have been looking for music like yours for the movie … ”

Bill Porter, pen name Red Pine, local to Port Townsend, is a world-renowned translator and writer specializing in Chinese classic poetry and spiritual sutras. He is famous for translating Taoist classics Tao Te Ching and the Buddhist Heart Sutra. He introduced ancient masters such as Cold Mountain, Stonehouse, Wei Yingwu and Tao Yuanming to English-speaking readers.

Ward Serill, an award-winning documentary film director, also a Port Townsend local, had spent the last three years crafting a movie called Dancing with the Dead, telling the story of how Bill’s life, starting from wealth and privilege earned by a father with a criminal history, meandered through a lonely childhood, domestic abuse, army services, and arrived at a life-long love affair with Chinese classic literature. Red Pine also brought to daylight the Chinese modern hermit culture, a legacy thousands of years old, which has heroically survived capitalism and industrialization. It is carried on by men and women who choose to live mostly solitary, meditating in caves of the Zhongnan Mountain in West China.

Throughout the production of the movie, Ward felt what was missing for the movie was a feminine voice that would give the audience a taste of the musicality and resonance held within the original poem’s sound. Yet he did not know where to find such a singer.

As if directed by the unseen hand of a mystery weaver, Ward’s artistry of movie making, Red Pine’s life strewn together also through a series of spontaneous impulses, and my musical expression cultivated through improvisation, converged with each other in an embrace. After the retreat, I received an invitation from the movie production that commissioned me to compose nine songs for the poetry in the movie. They also purchased Reed, the song I composed over a three-thousand years old love poem, probably one of the oldest ones in Chinese history, as the ending score. My performance became the ending scene of the movie.

The movie was released in Oct of 2023. In Port Townsend, the premiere show tickets were sold out within five minutes. In fact, the eager viewers crashed the theatre’s website server. The theatre had to add another show the day after. Since then, I have been touring with the movie crew up and down cities of Puget Sound, as well as the Bay Area, performing live music in the after-show program. By the end of August 2024, I will have toured with the movie in nine live shows. On those programs, I tell my stories and share my cultural journey. I become an ambassador for a voice of ancient China, through the rebirth of the lost poetry-songs.

And the web continues to weave itself. Several months ago, I met a music professor from Western Washington University at an open mic (Yes! open mic is where magic happens.) She is inviting me to do a concert based on these poetry-songs at the university’s concert hall in Nov 2024.

My own concert!? Imagine someone telling me this at the beginning of my journey, or to the lonely girl who was reading poetry all by herself? Life is so full of wonder and surprises!

There could have been a million reasons that this would not have happened. Ward injured his finger at the beginning of the dance retreat. He could have chosen to leave, yet he stayed. I could have chosen not to perform anything and just relax. My facilitator friend could have chosen not to ask us to reflect on our ancestors. I could have sung one of the dozens of English songs I composed. The evening could have not been so gorgeous to moved me to tears … Yet everything happened as if being orchestrated by an invisible hand weaving threads of mystery …

Afterthoughts

My journey of rebirthing the lost songs gave me a sliver of the taste of the Deeper Reality outside of the matrix. Through my music, I have opened my senses to “listen” to the calling of this Deeper Reality.

In one of the after-show programs of this movie, one young woman commented on how modern technology herds the attention of younger generation to social media and get “connected” through devices. Through the movie and the story of how Ward and I connected, she realized that there were other ways of communication that were not dependent on devices and social media, probably not even dependent on spoken or written language.

The universe is more than just a cold, programmed, hyperrational matrix.

Planet Earth is an organism, an Inter-Being, in which we are her cells. Our nervous system and her nervous system are intimately attuned with one another.

For me, these are no longer abstract ideas but a lived experience. This Inter-Being has a heartbeat. Her heart is connected to our heart. I kept listening to the deepest longing of my own heart, and followed the thread being shown to me at each present moment. In many dark moments, there appeared as if there was no way forward. That is when I would improvise, create and hack my way through. Eventually, this interconnected being tapped on my shoulder and said - “I have heard you.”

As much as I wanted to be reunited with the lost songs, they also have been searching for me, or searching for someone to be their voice and instruments. It has been more than nine years from the moment I met Kaija to the moment when Ward and I met on Orcas Island. During these years, I spent thousands of hours playing my songs by myself.

Now I know. I was never alone. Inter-Being, the Mystery Weaver, has always been listening and watching me, or anyone who dares to take off the VR goggles and follows their heart’s calling.

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Growing out of putrid mud, lotus flower maintains her purity.  
- Dun Yin Zhou, Song Dynasty China

We-Culture and I-Culture

“In the East, a person’s life belongs to the larger whole.”

– “The Farewell”, a 2019 movie directed by Lu Lu Wang.

In 2018, my uncle in China was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, with a prognosis of three more months to live. The doctor revealed the news to the family members first before telling my uncle, a practice quite common in China.

My uncle is the only brother among three of my mother’s siblings. Except my mother, all the siblings have lived their whole life in their hometown and shared much of their lives together. They have been in each other’s lives even after they got married. Their kids grew up together. The extended family of about a dozen people is a cohesive family network.

My uncle was in significant suffering and stress over his health. After much deliberation, the extended family made a difficult choice: they withheld this information from my uncle because they knew that this news would instantaneously destroy his psychological stability. It was a painful decision. No one wanted to lie to him. Collaborating with the doctors, they forfeited a fake, much more benign diagnosis to show to my uncle.

When I told the story in western context, at this point of the story most people will take a sharp gasp of air. This practice is so counter the ethics and professional code of western culture. It is downright illegal! Knowing that my family would be judged, for many years, I only told the story to my close friends who I sense have an open mind to diverse ways of being.

After the initial reactions of shock, usually my friends would soften and open up a space of curiosity for a cultural landscape that is so far different from the ones they inhabit. There is a deepening respect for the vast gap between the eastern and western cultures that extends into territories such as life and death.

Now let’s continue with my story. 

The family came together, pooling resources, labor and collectively cared for my uncle in the most loving and intimate way. Beating the odds, my uncle lived for two more years, with a relatively good quality of life given the circumstances, surrounded daily by visits and care from the network of family members, who continued to forge false hospital paperwork. In the last six months, he gradually figured out the truth by observing the medical regimen he was given. He accepted the truth and was grateful for the decision the family made. He died in peace.

This practice is common in China, although certainly not a norm. Every patient’s and every family’s situation is unique. Every situation is navigated differently. In the case of my family, everyone around my uncle carried the discomfort of grappling with the ethical dilemma every day: is it the right thing not to tell him the truth? Will he be angry that he was not told the truth? If that were the case, everyone would be devastated. They lived with that moral uncertainty for more than a year.

The Farewell, a 2019 movie directed by Lu Lu Wang, a Chinese woman film maker, portrayed a similar story about a Chinese family who withheld the information of terminal cancer from a grandma. In that movie, the protagonist is named Billi, who was born in China and moved to the US at six years old with her parents. She maintained a loving bond with her grandma.

Billi was distraught with the family’s decision. She didn’t understand it, especially knowing that this practice is illegal in the west. She questioned and criticized the rest of the family. In one of the dialogues, her uncle said to Billi,

“In the East, a person's life is part of a larger whole. Family. Society. [Our life] belongs to them. In the West, a person's life is their own."

This statement highlights a cardinal cultural difference between the two major cultural systems, the We-Culture of the East and the I-Culture of the West. The lack of appreciation and nuanced understanding of this difference from both sides is contributing to a mounting tension between China and US, which is steadily escalating into war. In fact, some say that the war has already entered the first stage, as both governments are pouring significant effort into propaganda to enemy-fy the other. While US has for decades published Human Rights reports criticizing Chinese government, recently for the first time, Chinese government also released a human rights report criticizing the US government, listing issues such as racial prejudice, gun control and women’s birthing rights.

It is a deeply wired in our nervous system that when we encounter something entirely foreign, we “other” it as dangerous. In Chinese, the word “crisis” 危机, means dangerous opportunity. While the impending war between China and US can be disastrous to the entire planet and all beings on Earth, there is also tremendous opportunity here if we can harvest the tension and alchemize the generational and collective wounds into fuel for the evolution of human consciousness.

As a first-generation Chinese immigrant living in the US, I have been guided by a force greater than myself on an experiment to alchemize the difference between We- and I-Culture. This force has attracted me as well as many westerners including my life partner Joe Shirley. The insights and framework I share here, which I call Social Alchemy, is distilled from the collective experience of many people from east and west over decades. I believe this force that guides me emanates from the greater unity that can harmonize the difference. My life belongs to this force in more than just a metaphoric sense. I could have perished many times. The fact that I am still alive, walking and breathing on Earth is because I continue surrendering to what this force asks of me. (More of my stories about this later.)

At a time when we live among intensifying divides and oppositions, I offer these insights for any people who wish to unite and harmonize, look for common ground beyond differences, and alchemize collective and ancestral wounds into fuel for transformation.

Belonging

Belonging is the keyword in this statement, a person’s life belongs to a larger whole. In the east or many traditional and indigenous cultures, a family or a tribe is seen as a living being, an Inter-Being. Just like how multiple cells come together forming a multicellular organism, or a beehive is a being consisting of thousands of individual bee. My mother’s extended family is a tightly knit Inter-Being.

Belonging refers to a sacred, reciprocal relationship between each individual and the Inter-Being that they are a part of, like the relationship between a single cell and a multicellular organism. Their well-being relies on one another.

In my interactions with many modern western people, I discovered that the statement that “my life belongs to the larger whole” can evoke a visceral fear and aversion, as the western culture and way of being is shaped by a contrasting sentiment. This sentiment, using Billlie’s Uncle’s words in the movie, can be expressed as “my life is my own”.

Because a positive, nourishing experience of belonging is relatively rare in the west, belonging can be misinterpreted as ownership and control, such as “my life is owned, or even controlled, by the larger whole”. This statement can bring up the traumatic experience of being manipulated, coerced, exploited, abused or enslaved.

Along with the visceral emotional reactions of fear and aversion, the western attitude towards “my life belongs to the larger whole” can also be accompanied by a judgement coming from a place of superiority, as western culture, including popular psychology and popular spirituality often prioritizes values such as freedom and independence over belonging.

My-life-belongs-to-the-larger-whole is a crucial cultural DNA cohering the Chinese culture for thousands of years, withstanding rounds and rounds of destruction from natural disasters, wars and political chaos. For many Chinese people, their primary identity is We, we as a family or a tribe woven together by intimate bonds that sustain life. They may not agree with each other intellectually, but they can feel and honor this bond. It is important to differentiate this familial-tribal-we from the “we-as-a-collective” consisting of many separated I’s organized by laws, rules and rational agreements.

In the movie The Farewell, the uncle who told Billi this statement that our life belongs to the larger whole said that with a sense of dignity and self-respect, a sign of a felt-sense of this life-sustaining bond. Of course, not every Chinese person shares this. With westernization and industrial development, the I-Culture ideology has a growing influence, especially in younger generations.

We-Culture, when dissociated from its indigenous streams of living traditions and practices, can also harden into a dogmatic ideology with its own pitfalls and dark side. These shadows, when unconscious, can degrade into subtle manipulation, power corruption, aggrandization of charismatic leaders and erasure of individual sovereignty.

Despite its tendency to be corrupted, the spiritual essence and heritage contained by We- Culture DNA always sustains itself even through the shadows. Today, the We-Culture practice is a still a vibrant, undercurrent of life stream in modern China, despite the westernization and advanced stage of industrialization and capitalism.

While the I-Culture ideology and superiority often influences our perceptions and denigrates We-Culture values, I believe it is also a danger to elevate We-Culture as a superior system above I-Culture, which turns We-Culture into dogma rather than a living practice. The Taiji between the two is a practices of constant reflection and inquiry, staying on the frothy edge of unknown, within the container of lived relationships or contexts. This reflection and inquiry will bring our awareness back to the ever-emerging present moment, which holds a unique signature of how I and We, or any other polarities of the system, interact, counteract, balance or dance with one another. The Resonance Code that I published in 2019, derived as a meta-language from I-Ching, is a system that facilitates this reflection and inquiry process.

In the movie The Farewell, the second statement of the uncle is, in the west, a person’s life is their own. Hence, in the west, a person’s medical information foremost belongs to the person. Legal structures are put into place to protect this right. From this perspective, what my family as well as probably tens of millions of other Chinese family’s choices are “illegal”. I’d like to ask you, my dear reader, to pause and ponder the immensity of this cultural gap.

In the west, people tend to elevate ideological beliefs and ethical values such as “human rights” as universal truths and use them as a moral foundation to judge other cultures or even wage wars against them. That, in itself, is a way of thinking shaped by an unquestioned dominance of I-Culture ideology.  

Appreciating the Difference from a Holistic View

I want to highlight that both We-Culture and I-Culture practices and ways of being exist in both the West and China. When I teach this distinction, many Westerners recognize the We-Self in them easily. Their eyes would light up and have a visible sign of relief, because they often have to carry some stigma for their We-Self. In the dominant narratives, and even in western psychology, the We-Self has often been deemed less-than, brushed aside, or even pathologized. It seems like for many people, they only know this We-Self in its pathological form such as co-dependency, conformative or lack of self-agency.

Likewise, Chinese people have I-Self in them too. Just like the We-Self in I-Culture, this I-Self is often suppressed in China. That is the focal point of western media’s criticism of Chinese government’s violation of human rights. However, western media often overlooks that, despite the cases of human rights violation, Chinese government has been well supported by the people, whose primary concern is to keep the integrity of the We-Culture. Therefore, the Chinese are willing to tolerate the government at the cost of sacrificing their rights as defined by the I-Culture. It has been their destiny to be the carrier of one of the most influential and resilient We-Cultural systems on the planet. To Chinese, this destiny weights more than individual human rights.

If we were to think in a holistic sense how to improve China’s human rights situation, the most important thing is to raise the awareness of We-Culture, learn to strengthen We-Cultural practice everywhere on the planet, and also heal the wound and cleanse the stigma projected from the dominance of I-Culture ideology.

When I use the I-Culture and We-Culture distinction in this writing, what this distinction refers to is that in a western context, the I-Self tends to take precedence over We-Self. Legal constructs, social norms and customs tend to prioritize the values of I-Culture ideology. Vice versa. In the eastern context, the We-Self tends to take precedence over I-Self. The legal constructs, social norms and customs tend to prioritize the values of We-Self.

This distinction is not absolute. One can point to cases where We-Culture value takes priority in the west, and I-Culture values takes priority in the east. In order to appreciate the nuances, one will need to dissociate oneself from particular cases and stand at a place where one can have a broader perspective of the whole picture.

Look at the following two images. Both images have blue and pink colors. Yet the ratios between these two are different, one with pink as dominant, the other, blue. If we only focus on one specific region, we can get stuck there without appreciating the whole. This requires one to tap into more of the right-brain circuitry to see and feel the whole, like taking in an impressionist art piece, rather than focusing on analyzing specific regions through left-brain activities.   

Symphony of Coregulation: We-Culture as an Embodied Experience

Human culture extends much beyond the political systems and ideological beliefs shaped by the particular time, space and linguistic norms we live in. Human cultures are flowing streams of traditions, history, lives and lineages. In the Chinese view, human cultures are another layer of the ecosystem, participating in the cycles of life, death and evolution. As cultures are living entities, they are not just out there held by laws, knowledge, customs, what-to-do, and what-not-to-do. The roots of culture are held in the lived experience as an embodied being. 

How to relate to We-Culture as an embodied experience? When I am around people in whom the We-Culture DNA is enlivened (nowadays many of these people are my western friends and collaborators), my body experiences a natural process of co-regulation with their body.

We keep pet animals as companions, because their body provides a source of co-regulation for our body. Many of us love being in nature. Sitting by a lake, walking through the forest, or lying under a star-lit night sky, our bodies experience a co-regulation with nature as a larger whole. We feel refreshed, relaxed and replenished. Mother Nature offers her body as a manifestation of the universal Inter-Being. She is our teacher.

[Shown here is Daelinar, Amali Morning Song, and Ellen McCord doing Tai Ji dance in a park in Bellingham.]

This co-regulation can happen between human bodies too. In each cell of my body, the DNA genetic code stores the information of billions of years of evolution on Earth. My body’s memory of being part of a larger whole gets synced up with other bodies’ memory. I feel replenished by “plugging in” into the larger network of life.

Co-regulation happens like two sound waves synchronizing their vibrational profiles. Our body naturally feels drawn towards certain places, as we are drawn towards certain frequencies of vibration. Likewise, our body instinctively can feel drawn towards or away from certain people, based on their distinctive profile of frequencies.

I would venture to suggest that this kind of co-regulation is a constant process that takes place with or without the participation of a person’s conscious awareness. It is like a cosmic symphony that plays constantly. Many shamanic, contemplative and healing traditions from indigenous and aboriginal cultures contain training and practices to attune the human awareness to be part of this symphony of co-regulation. 

In modern life, as our awareness and attention are primarily occupied by rational thought, social media, and information generated by intellectual processes or commercial purposes, the attunement with this somatic sense of co-regulation is often blocked. I believe this contributes to the proliferation of many nervous system and immune system diseases. Moreover, because the English language today is often used as a weapon to judge or attack people, and because American culture is so fractured with many versions of narratives that are contradictory to each other, we not only don’t feel co-regulation, we feel unsafe, guarded and cautious around people we don’t know well.

My-life-belongs-to-a-larger-whole is the core We-Culture DNA. It points to the experience of a sacred dance, a beautiful symbiotic relationship between me, and the Inter-Being that I am part of. For me, this Inter-Being at first is my mother’s-side family of about a dozen people. As I journeyed into the west, I have been longing for this experience I had as a child. I am guided by a faith that although the dominant paradigm in the west is I-Culture, We-Culture must also be present, probably more as an undercurrent, somewhere on the margin. I was driven by a quest: how can I find the We-Culture DNA in the western world?

This quest has led me to experiment with recreating We-Culture relationships with many western friends, colleagues, and communities. This experiment at first was unconscious, purely propelled by an instinctual impulse and the guiding force of my life’s purpose.

As I grew and learnt with my various partners and collaborators, I gradually was able to transform this instinctual impulse into conscious choice. I have discovered hidden communities and pockets of consciousness in the Pacific Northwest where We-Culture DNA of the west are flourishing, including some local communities in Bellingham where my partner Joe and I live. Another striking example is a small community on a remote island tucked deep in the intricate waterways and archipelago in British Columbia of Canada. I will write more about my experience of this community later.

Unique Spark of Creativity in Each Individual: The Embodied Experience of I-Culture

As we map the We-Culture DNA to the embodied experience of co-regulation, what will be the embodied experience of I-Culture?

Let’s come back to the metaphor of a multicellular organism. In the discussions above, I talked about belonging, the integrating aspect of the multi-cellular organism. Another, equally important aspect of the multicellular organism is the specific functions each cell has developed. Some cells are specialized in communication. Some are specialized in motorizing. Some, in digesting. Some, in providing structural support. Each of these cells will need each other to sustain life.

The transition from single celled to multicellular life forms was a giant step in the process of evolution. A single-celled life form is a self-sustaining, self-contained world of its own. The transition from single-celled to multicellular forms has allowed much more diversity and adaptability to evolve on Earth.

If we use the metaphor of multicellular organism to see our society, we can see that the modernized culture championed by the American and western European countries has powerfully propelled the differentiation of the individual and propagate this wave of differentiation worldwide through the force of colonization and capitalism. Societal functions of modern times have become exponentially specialized compared to pre-industrialized society.

My grandfather was a Chinese medicine doctor practicing in a remote mountain village in Sichuan province. He treated every medical issue the villagers presented, from toothache, to broken bones, from childbirth to internal medicine. This is unimaginable for a modern physician trained in specialization. This is because modern medicine training focuses on studying the anatomical structures and specific functions of differentiated tissues and organs, whereas the system of Chinese medicine focuses on qi, yin and yang, patterns of primordial life energy, the contextual background from which the myriads of differentiation processes take place. Even though both are medicine, they are really addressing different dimensions of life processes.

It is in modern society after industrialization that the notion that each person can harbor a unique spark of creativity has become widely planted in people’s minds. This unique spark of creativity is endowed to us at birth. My colleague Dr. Stephanie Mines calls it the Original Brilliance. It is not something to be acquired or learned, although we do need education and knowledge to develop this creativity, this Original Brilliance into a gift to share with society. For me, this notion that everyone can harbor a unique Spark of Creativity, and Original Brilliance, is the most important contribution of I-Culture.

On an embodied level, we can all feel a distinct “me-ness”, like the unique resonance profile of a musical instrument. Like in a choir, each choir member has her unique voice, which contributes to the rich, diverse quality of the collective sound of the choir.

The human body consists of an ecosystem of human cells, and the microbiome which makes up more than half of the cell population. The body continuously replaces and regenerates cells. Every few years, we have a completely new body. Despite the complexities and the ever-changing nature, there is a stable “tone” to our body, a unique “song” that our body remembers. Our immune system keeps the integrity of the unique resonance profile of our body. When we have infection, allergy, certain types of inflammation, or autoimmune diseases, that is when our immune system is sorting through what is my song, and what is not.

From the lens of the embodied experience, We-Culture and I-Culture need to complement each other to sustain the well-being of the whole. When in harmony with one another, not only are they not antagonistic, they are indeed mutually generative for each other. A robust source of co-regulation is a prime condition to strengthen one’s immunity and develop one’s spark of creativity into a gift. When we honor our unique spark of creativity and develop it as a gift to share with others, it sets up conditions for us to have nourishing co-regulatory experience.

However, our social field is far from harmony. The We-Self and I-Self in us are often siloed in different compartments of psyche or entangled in inner battles. Both We-Culture and I-Cultural systems pathologize or illegitimize the other. Our world is full of misunderstanding, animosity and oppositions between We-Culture and I-Culture. US and Chinese government are each drumming up propagandas that plant mindset of war in the mass.

How do we harvest the opportunities in danger to fuel the consciousness transformation, as suggested by these characters 危机？

Respecting Question a Living Being

In 2017, I started to have premonition dreams in which I saw war between US and China. At that time, this prospect was on few people’s radars. I knew I was one of the few people on the planet to be alerted to this prospect. It felt like a heavy lead on my heart. I knew that receiving this premonition meant I was being ushered into a transformational process larger than my life.

Following the calling of my life prayer, I formed the first Resonance Code Lab with a group of accomplished leadership and organizational coaches from US, Estonia, Switzerland, including Tong Liu, a Chinese woman who ran a coaching company in Europe. Out of that experience, I wrote and published The Resonance Code in 2019 as my response to harvest the opportunities in danger. Social Alchemy will be a sequel to The Resonance Code.

I don’t mean to present a “recipe” to stop the war. A question as giant as this one:

Living with the imminent war between US and China, how do we harvest the opportunities in danger, as suggested by these characters 危机？

is a living being in itself that deserves to be respected. Nigerian Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe often quotes this African proverb: the times are urgent, let us slow down. Let there not to be a definitive answer too soon! As a definitive answer kills the liveliness of a question.

What this African proverb invites us to feel into is that time is not linear, time is a multi-dimensional space. Only when we slow down, can we find the “exit” to enter the current dimension and enter a new dimension, where what is experienced as danger is waiting for us as opportunities.

In this series of writings, I will make an earnest attempt to share my journey, experiment and insights as I interact with this larger-than-life question. I hope through reading my stories and reflections, you, my dear reader, can see that the “war” between I- and We-Culture is not out there, but inside each one of us. When we see that, we can find a path to transmute the war into opportunities for new life!

Latency as an Evolutionary Strategy

To fully appreciate the nuances of We- and I-Culture, let’s look more into how the We- and I-Self interact in the two cultural systems.

Although Belonging and Spark of Creativity, integration and differentiation, are both important and essential to life, at each given moment, like light and shadow, Yin and Yang (in Chinese, we always put Yin ahead of Yang), they constantly weave themselves into different hues, temperatures and colors of experience.

In the I-Culture paradigm, the right for an individual to claim the unique spark of creativity is given at birth and ensured. The laws protecting individual freedom, independence and rights are all conditions that maximize the potential for this unique spark of creativity to be developed into innovative gifts and specialized functions.

In I-Culture paradigm, belonging is a “latent reward”. When you demonstrate that you are special, develop unique contributions, and become specialized in certain areas of expertise, you will be recognized and rewarded, an experience that feels like “belonging”. The key word here is “feels-like”.

This reward is a substitute of the original sense of belonging that our being truly longs for. No matter how much fame, wealth and recognition we receive externally, it can only placate but cannot fill the black hole of hunger inside. However, as seeking belonging is a powerful force in the human psyche, this force can be channeled into the proliferation of achievements. Without a practice of self-reflection, many people in the I-Culture are thus caught in the game of high achievements, lured by the external rewards.

Receiving the external rewards is reminiscent of the original sense of belonging that has been severed in early childhood. Unless we do the work to heal the original trauma of early childhood, it is very difficult to untangle ourselves from this game of high achievement. 

I’d like to note that even though in I-Culture, by law, everyone has freedom, independence and human rights, in reality, freedom and independence is a privilege more available to elite groups. Not recognizing this often contributes to the I-Culture dominance, unwarranted superiority, and the reactive need to judge other cultures with disrespect. No one can be truly free or sovereign, until everyone is. We are that inter-connected.

In We-Culture paradigm, the sense of belonging is given at birth and ensured. This sense of belonging is sustained by traditions, life practices and emotional ties. Within the small tribe of my mother’s family, even though we do not connect at intellectual level, I always feel the emotional bond with them. In We-culture paradigm, not everyone can or even wants to claim their unique spark of creativity. The self-worth in the We-Culture is not so much tightly coupled by the unique spark of creativity, but with who one is to their tribe.  Those who do develop their unique spark of creativity often recognize that it is a privilege and is ethically bound to share this privilege with others.

The sense of self developed on the foundation of belonging in We-Culture is experienced as a nodal point connecting a unique relational web. Therefore, this self is not a private self, but a public self. As one develops oneself, one automatically extends her being as an instrument of service to larger circle of people, all the way extending to 天下，all beings under the sky.

In Chinese, there are two different characters of self. The self that serves as a nodal point of the relational web is called Wu, 吾. This character is made of two parts. The upper part is five, a cardinal number central to Chinese cosmology. The lower part is mouth. This pictogram is also part of another character 语, yu, which means language. Together this means that the Wu-Self is the representative, the spokesperson for five mouths, as not everyone has the resources, privilege or willingness to develop learning and writing skills.

The character for the I-self is我, wo. The pictograph for this character shows a person with a weapon. This “I” is more concerned with setting boundaries and protecting territory for oneself.

In the tradition of China, self-development is always oriented towards public service. When I first encountered the New Age spirituality in the west, I was shocked to discover that many self-development books are oriented towards maximizing individual wealth or gain. In my We-cultural paradigm, that seemed like a huge contradiction.

The sense of a private self that needs to be guarded and protected at all cost is a feature of the I-Culture. Bayo Akomolafe in a talk at 2023 Resnic Aspen Action Forum said this, “I know that's a scandalous thing to say. Most of us are habituated into thinking that we are isolated individual cells. I can think I have private thoughts. Most of the time I have an identity that is mine. I have a face … I have control and agency. These things are mine… But we're learning today that things may be a lot more awkward than what we think. This whole idea that we are isolated independent selves is what I call white stability.”

In We-Culture, an individual can also rise to fame and gain, enjoying abundant personal glory. However, there is always a sense that this person has a good fortune, or 运气. In Chinese, fortune, 运气, is the energetic connection between one’s individual fortune with the larger patterns of life. The first word 运 , yun, is a concept that doesn’t exist in English. It refers to certain cosmic patterns that are being enacted through the human realms. The second word 气, qi, means energy.

I once talked with a Chinese woman immigrant living in America who has a successful career and an abundant life. She told me that when she talked about her “good fortune” to her American friends, people advise her not to talk about her success that way, as it degrades the values of her own efforts and achievements, and she would be looked down upon.

“But I truly feel my good fortune!” This Chinese woman felt frustrated. Her humble acknowledgement of her connection with the larger life she is connected to is being misinterpreted as a sign of “weakness”, a cultural blind spot prevalent in daily life. It brings much sadness when I think of this story.

As a Chinese woman living in America, for a long time, I felt the burden that my natural tendency and cultural programming to be humble, collaborative and generous is often being undervalued or taken for granted without reciprocity. I used to judge westerners as inconsiderate. It took me a long time to accept that I needed to adapt to I-Culture. In order to adapt to I-Culture, I need to develop the skills to ask for what I want, a capacity that I only started learning when I was 22 after arriving in the US!

【Space holder for another story: “The First Time I Chose”】

Principles of Social Alchemy

As it is easier to see how the experience of We-Culture and I-Culture DNA can harmonize as embodied experience, how do we amplify this on a collective level? How do we bring these insights into social life when we hold narratives that are in conflict and opposition? Can we activate the We-Culture DNA as a conscious choice in the I-Culture context?

Social alchemy emerged out of my trans-cultural journey from pre-industrialized China to the modern west. From the very beginning, I was motivated to integrate and harmonize the We-Culture and I-Culture DNA inside of me. I knew that this cannot just be an intellectual exercise. This harmonization needs to happen through actual lived experience and experimentation. I was primarily guided by the principle of Tai Ji, a soma-spiritual practice from the Taoist tradition. I named this experimentation as “social alchemy”.  Below are six principles I distilled from my experience with my partners, which I will explore more fully in further writing.

1.      “I” as a unique embodiment of cultures

Each one of us is a unique embodiment of many cross-sections of cultural and historic contexts. Our feelings, choices and actions, especially unconscious, reactive or habitual ones, are often shaped by our familial influences or cultural conditions. Thus, they are the features of the culture we internalize and embody.

2.      Committed to ongoing evolution.

Seen through the lens of embodied culture, each one of us is a vast sea of unknown. We can never assume that we know ourselves or others as a fixed identity or play a fixed role in a narrative that prescribes moral judgement of right or wrong. We are committed to learning about ourselves and each other through our relationships, and continuing to evolve who we are to ourselves and to the larger whole.

3.      Committed to co-regulatory practice.

To strengthen the foundation of the Inter-Being, people practicing Social Alchemy need to prioritize their chosen practices for co-regulation, which are communal, embodied and life-nourishing.

This practice can be as simple as sharing meals, songs, poetry or dances. It can be contemplative practices such as breathing, qigong or Tai Ji. It can also be games and improvisation. The importance of this practice is akin to the importance of cultivating the quality of soil in gardening.

4.      Truth is relative and emerging.

What each of us holds as “true” or “right” is never the whole truth. Through our relationship, we are committed to allowing the emergence of a bigger truth that integrates diverse perspectives.

5.      Committed to being fully present with one’s experience.

(This part is written from the perspective of “I”. I recommend the reader to read the following paragraph aloud several times to feel the weight of these statements.)

In situations when frictions arise due to differences, I take full responsibility for my own experience. I commit to being fully present with my feelings without hiding or suppressing them.

I recognize that feelings connect us to the extended cultural and historical contexts we are immersed in. Through metabolizing our feelings, we participate in evolving the social field.

In moments when I feel hurt by your perspectives or words, I will own those feelings as my responsibility to heal instead of blaming you for it. When we are ready, I will inquire with you towards a shared truth with self-love and mutual respect. Before that shared truth is reached, I commit to being in a state of inquiry even though it might be uncomfortable.

6.      Taking responsibility

As I am living and immersed within a system that carries many historic and ancestral trauma, despite our best intention, at times, my actions or words may land as impactful, or trigger historic/cultural pain.

When that happens, I invite you to let me know. I welcome you to help me understand how I might communicate or act differently. I will engage in a deeper inquiry into myself and the kind of transformation needed in order to become more mindful and aware. I will do more of my own learning of the historic/cultural background and apply what I learned in future interactions.

In order for 5 and 6 to work, it takes both parties to be committed to practicing all of these principles. More about the subtlety of this relational practice later.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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Do you recognize yourself in this puppy, surfing on the edge between excitement and fear? Do you find yourself walking through that knife edge between joy and grief, hope and hopelessness, control and letting go in everyday life?

As we navigate through this knife edge, we are cultivating a fluid state of being, an active participation of life while maintaining one’s center and integrity. That’s when we ride the wave of change like a surfer.

Have you felt a tension between being and doing, between who you are innately and what the society pressures you to do to make a living or make an impression?

I always feel a bit of block when people ask: Spring, what do you for work?

In the dominant culture, work is often a label that we fit ourselves into to facilitate monetary exchange. I juggled with many labels in my career: leadership coach, singer and songwriter, voice mentor, trainer in cultural sensitivity, improvisational artist, acupuncturist, Tai Chi teacher, scientist, author …

While all these labels allow me to participate in the economical exchange, none of these labels can really define the work I do.

The truth is I am a surfer of the Tao.  At the core of the Tao is a state of being, an essence of who we are that is connected with the web of life, and a pulse that is in sync with the Great Flow around us.

Everyone is born connected with this essence and pulse. Yet the story we tell about who we are, the labels we make from a mindset stuck in the industrial-capitalistic complex can alienate us from this essence and pulse.

Being is a state in the flow, not just passive, or pure bliss in the isolation of retreat center or meditation cushion, although that is certainly part of it. I find the mainstream western interpretation of eastern spiritual practices often misses something more essential and alive than meditation retreats catered to rich people with disposable incomes.

In its native context, the eastern spiritual practices are very much embedded with the flow of everyday life, from mundane things such as purchasing and selling houses, cleaning the yard, drinking the tea, to serious things such as business transactions and even politics …

In Chinese, we have a saying. “Beginner hermits live in the mountain. Intermediate hermit are active in the market places. Advanced hermits advise the king.” 小隐隐于山，中隐隐于市，大隐隐于朝。

This saying implies that when someone is so grounded in the center of their being, they can go out into the world and become an influence of integrity and wisdom even in places that tend to be subjected to greed or corruptive power, such as marketplace or “king’s court”.

The fluid state of being is synchronized actions in response to the changing social tides. Someone in this state of being is more like a surfer navigating waves. A surfer maintains her center of stillness, while being in exquisite relationship with the changing tides around her.

What would a culture look like when we center our lives from this fluid place of Being, rather than excessive doing, consuming and performative actions? What would a culture look like when people widen the practice of being into conversations, This is a cutting edge of our human evolution. I want to find out. I know in my bones that it is the purpose of my life as this incarnation.

On this journey, I have met many people in all walks of life who are propelled to weave a new culture that foregrounds relationship, harmony, wellness and diversity. This is not easy, as we often need to swim against the inertia of the old system that focuses on competition, extraction of resources and maximization of profits while sacrificing relationship.

Sometime I am wondering how long I can last paddling against the tides. But then most of the days, I feel like this puppy on the surf board, paws glued to my board, eyes fixed in the distance, with a wide grin and water splashing all around, I am surfing the wave of changes!

The Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity course will start in three days on May 17. We have two more spots left! Join us in a diverse cohort with cultural backgrounds from four continents!

Would you like to become anchored in a sense of belonging beyond socio-cultural identity? Would you like to become a leader in healing and evolving the social field?

This course will empower you with knowledge and community to cultivate cultural sensitivity as an embodied response, actively engage with differences and transform them into learnings, and foster collaboration across cultural gaps!

You will also begin to explore how to become a healer of historical trauma so that you are more free to respond to challenging interpersonal, cross-cultural situations with kindness, firmness and efficacy.

Please join us! Check out details and register here

Read essays and watch video dialogues on various themes related with embodied cultural sensitivity:

Transforming Rage into Sacred Song

Facing Justifiable Anger with Spaciousness

Beyond Blame and Shame

Universal Belonging

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We don’t believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrator can get us to where we want to go. What we feel compelled to do, instead, is to conduct experiments with the principles of holistic medicine, where we make small, gentle interventions to the system, and create a “micro-dose” of wholeness at the local level. This is the same principle of energy medicine employed by modalities such as acupuncture and homeopathy. - Spring Cheng

In this video, Dr. Stephanie Mines and I talk about the importance of going beyond blame and shame in cultivating embodied cultural sensitivity. This is the third installment of our series on this topic. (For the first two, please view Facing Justifiable Anger with Spaciousness and Transforming Rage into Sacred Songs.)

I talked about a social experiment I did in 2008 during a conflict between Chinese and Tibetans. The Chinese psyche is influenced by a painful collective trauma in the early 20^th century, when the colonizing forces from the West, Russia and Japan pillaged and raped the Chinese land, brutalized people’s lives and destroyed Chinese pride in their ancestral lineage. Without a path to process these wounds, China re-enacted its trauma by acting violently towards Tibet, the next link on the chain of colonization. “Hurt people hurt people.” This conflict echoes with many geopolitical conflicts around the world such as the conflict happening in Gaza right now.

In 2008, this conflict heightened into the Chinese government’s violent clamp-down of a protest held by Tibetan monks in Sichuan Province. The major media of the west, ignorant of the collective wounding of the Chinese and blind to the larger context of colonization, launched a heavy attack blaming the Chinese, as a whole, as despicable villains. While the world grieved the tragic loss of lives, the arrogance of the western power and its hypocritical tendency to play judge while being unwilling to examine its own oppressive conduct, further polarized the situation, making things even worse. This is a typical role that western politics has played in the geopolitical conflicts around the world.

The Chinese and Tibetan communities living in Seattle, both feeling hurt and claiming roles of victims, held mounting animosities towards each other. At that time, I had strong connections with both communities and felt their pain at a personal level. In response to this crisis, I led a project called “Seattle Listens” to foster dialogue between these two communities. With a team of people, mostly third-party westerners, who are trained in Compassionate Listening, we held a series of “listening meetings,” where we gathered the Chinese and Tibetans separately to listen to their stories and empathize with their feelings.

Over the course of six months, trust was established between the listeners and each community. In the next two months, we were able to bring these two sides who were at war with each other together into the same room. They listened to each other’s stories, and for the first time, heard the other side of the story as a first-person account. They were able to empathize with the other side’s experience and viewpoints and see each other as human beings making best choices given the circumstances, just like they themselves do.   

Blaming and shaming the perpetrator tends to be the first line of response when we see injustice. Our sense of morality, shaped by millions of years of evolution, exerts pressure onto the perpetrator’s psyche, urging them to stop the act of hurting.

However, moral force based on concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, is no longer enough to dismantle oppressive and unjust social structures such as colonization, patriarchy or socio-economic constructs that extract resources in unsustainable ways. That is because this kind of moral force tends to set up a polarity between good and evil, right and wrong, victim and perpetrator. It does not probe into a much deeper underlying cause where good-and-evil, right-and-wrong can also be entangled and intertwined.

In this video, Stephanie and I, as holistic medicine practitioners, explore social change through a metaphor of healing. When a hurt happens, it is like the system is bleeding. Blaming and shaming function like coagulants that can stop bleeding right away. Blaming and shaming the perpetrator, in some instances, can exert moral forces to stop a perpetrator from continuing doing harm.

However, nowadays, the forces that exert harm are far greater than any individual’s conscious agency and will. Especially, politicians who hold visible power and status are subject to a complex web of political and economic factors, as well as psychological forces due to unexamined, unhealed ancestral and collective trauma. Furthermore, with the globalized economy, most of us, just by virtue of living a modern lifestyle, participate in the system of injustice. Many of us are becoming multi-racial, multi-cultural or simultaneously hold identities of privileged and marginalized. It’s no longer easy to make distinctions between perpetrator and victim.

We are not here to say we have a solution for this. Not at all. However, we don’t believe that blaming and shaming the perpetrator can get us to where we want to go. What both Stephanie and I feel compelled to do, instead, is to conduct experiments with the principles of holistic medicine, where we make small, gentle interventions to the system, and create a “micro-dose” of wholeness at the local level. This is the same principle of energy medicine employed by modalities such as acupuncture and homeopathy.

My “Seattle Listens” project was just a small experiment. One may argue that this kind of action will never change anything. I would even agree with that. One small instance of peace-making is not enough to counterbalance the gigantic forces of violence and eye-for-an-eye paradigms shaped by thousands of years of history.

However, I wonder what happens if the skills of peace-making, compassionate listening and generative dialogue become widely available to many more people – to households, at workplaces, in boardrooms and bedrooms? What if these skills are being taught to children at school and inmates in prisons? What if conflicts at many scales, from personal, to familial, to communal, are being met with compassion, listening, and facilitating of dialogue and collaboration between both sides? Will we begin to weave a new culture that moves towards peace, thriving and enlivened creativity, rather than nuclear war and genocide?

We will not know until we try, will we?

Will you join us? Please check out our new course launching in May: The Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity

Join us in the free, pre-course at noon - 1pm, Pacific time on Apr 19

I feel honored to interview Stephanie on this issue. In my own journey of transforming my rage due to systemic injustice, I owe gratitude to many people from privileged groups who have humbly received my anger, affirmed me and helped me heal and transform rage into creativity. (For my story, please read Transforming Rage into Sacred Songs)

At the same time, I also had many not-so-productive experiences. When facing my anger, sometime people from privileged groups got confused, collapsed into guilt, became defensive, turned their back or even shouted back at me. Those situations were painful for both sides. These experiences furthered alienation and separation.

I would like to highlight several things I observed in Stephanie’s story.

First, Stephanie’s response to justifiable anger is spacious and wholesome, and it invites unity rather than being dictated by trauma.

Facing anger from anyone in any circumstance can trigger our own insecurity or defensiveness. Usually, the trigger inside of us is a doorway to our unhealed trauma. In this video, Stephanie acknowledged that part of her was triggered by the person’s remarks. However, she had been extensively investigating and healing her trauma for decades. As a result, her response to this person was no longer dictated by her history of trauma.

Second, it is crucial to do trauma healing through a mind-body integrated approach.

Stephanie is a skilled healer and neuroscientist. She specialized in the TARA approach, a synthesis between modern science and Jin Shin, an ancient Japanese healing art. Because of the holistic and integrated nature of the work Stephanie does, she was able to respond to the person SOFTLY, without the need to defend or even protect herself. Nor did she collapse under overwhelming guilt. She was secure in her own self. Therefore, she affirmed that person’s strong assertions, and expressed with integrity that instead of “take, take, take like what white people always do,” she would honor reciprocity in this relationship.

I want to emphasize that in the interview, Stephanie said that this had to be a whole-bodied, somatic response. It would have been no use if she simply said these things without feeling it and meaning it. This is an attunement between two nervous systems. Like Stephanie said, if she harbored any defensiveness, the person she interacted with would detect it.

Third, Stephanie made a clear distinction between what is personal and what is collective.

Stephanie acknowledged that the collective group that she was part of has committed something unjust and imbalanced, while staying true to who she is and what she stands for. This is a refined skill on a subtle, energetic level, a result of persistent practice and somatic tracking.

In moments like this, our individual selves are called to witness or even interact with big currents in the collective space as a result of historic events such as war and genocide. It is important we do not put up a blinder and turn away from them. At the same time, it’s also important that we are not subsumed by these currents.

Many people living in individualistic cultures are not practiced in making this distinction. My experience is that often when a member from a marginalized group expresses justifiable anger due to systemic injustice, often people from privileged group take it as a personal attack, which can lead to defensiveness, isolation or counterattack.

My native Chinese culture actively weaves into the cultural fabric a contextually sensitive switching back and forth between speaking as an individual I or as a collective “Zan,” different from “we” or “us”, rather a temporary spokesperson for a family, group or village. It requires cultivated awareness to differentiate and respond accordingly.

The collective sometimes needs to speak through an individual person, especially the part of collective experience that has not been brought into public awareness yet. Of course, in these cases, that part of the collective experience will be interpreted through the lens shaped by the individual’s worldview, life experience and disposition. It takes communication skills, somatic tracking and self-awareness to both speak and listen effectively in conversations where systemic imbalance is a key component.

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Fourth, living our own purpose with joy and commitment leads to a personal integrity that can hold the anger.

The fourth point of Stephanie’s story more came from my observation of Stephanie as one of my closest colleagues. Stephanie has an unwavering commitment to her life’s purpose, working towards and advocating for a regenerative health paradigm, and embodying the kind of leadership that she believes in to respond to climate change, war and the many other crises we are facing.

Stephanie is living her purpose with feisty joy. She is the most energetic 80-year-old lady I have ever met, teaching courses and seeing clients while being active every day swimming, biking and doing yoga. She is also a prolific writer and poet, active in publishing her work. Stephanie’s example illustrates how thriving and keeping the flow of our own life energy strong is a critical component to maintain our personal integrity when engaging in difficult conversations like this.

Successes and Failures

In this video, Stephanie tells the story of one example where she was able to gracefully respond to a difficult situation with spaciousness. In talking with her, I don’t get the sense that Stephanie meant to say that she was above-and-beyond trauma response. We are simply here to tell a story of a success that is worthy of celebration.

Even between Stephanie and I, we constantly experience small frictions as a result of the clashes between the cultural systems that we inherited from our lineages. We fail, rub each other in the wrong way, or get caught in our own trauma responses all the time.

However, we have made a pact with each other that we will support, hold and stand by each other, even when we are failing, or falling short of our own standard, or hurting each other, as long as we are willing to look back and reflect on ourselves with honesty and authenticity. When we do that, we find more and more spaciousness to hold the clashes we have had, sometimes with even a smile.

In the upcoming course Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity, we are not only sharing with you our stories of success but also stories of our “failures”, which are equally valuable. In fact, to hold our own “failures” with compassion is another critical skill we will practice together.

Through our own trials and errors, we have carve out a path and we want to invite you to come with us. You don’t have to practice for twenty years to get to where Stephanie has illustrated in the video. There are small steps to be taken in this direction, each of which yields tangible differences in one’s ability to hold spaciousness in difficult conversations.

Coming next: A sense of belonging anchored in the universal field of consciousness or life energy.

For both Stephanie and I, we source our work from lineages of East Asian medicine, which sees the human body as an embodied vehicle of qi, the universal field of consciousness or life energy, which animates all living beings. Stephanie’s source is from Jin Shin, a Japanese healing art. Mine is from Chinese medicine. We also both infuse the ancient arts with our individual innovations. This universal field of energy is where we anchor our sense of belonging and receive nourishment.

Anchoring our being in this universal field of energy provides the foundation to our resilience and creativity when we are facing complex and challenging situations.

For more on this topic, please stay tuned for the next video: Sense of belonging anchored in the universal field of consciousness.

All the things covered in this post will be elements we will share and practice in the upcoming course: The Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity.

Join us in the free pre-course at noon pacific time on Apr 19!

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As a member of an oppressed group, it is natural to feel a deep surge of rage.

About fifteen years ago, I became aware of the oppression I experienced as I lived within the social system stamped with patriarchy and white dominance. I saw the part of me that was devalued and deprived by the system gasping desperately for air like a dying fish caught by a fisherman’s net.

The rage I felt was immense. For years, I had this recurring dream. In this dream, I was standing at a beach. A tsunami of grey sea water, several hundred feet high, was rushing toward me at the speed of a train. There was no escape.

“I am going to die.” That’s the only thought I had in my mind. My entire body was charged with high-voltage, white-hot electricity. I could feel every cell in my body screaming.

This tsunami was the rage, not just mine, but also collective rage. The collective component is strong, especially since the western world I live in knew very little about the colonization history in China and its psychological impact. (For how colonization and oppression impacted my personal life and family, please read my piece Earth Rise Up and Sings Through Me.) As I attuned to the trauma, I felt I was being swallowed by a black hole.

Fortunately, I have the awareness to honor this collective rage that I feel. I see it as a gift endowed by Mother Earth, an instinct to protect the cultural lineage inside of me. Our instinct is the result of billions of years of evolution. It is our direct connection to the primordial source. One way the colonial mindset works is to make us feel shame about our primal instinct. This shame disempowers us.

This white-hot, burning rage helped me break free from the “fisherman’s net”, and cut through the bondage that tied me to the social structure.

At the same time, I noticed a few times when I was expressing this rage in an uncontrollable way towards a specific person, I caused harm on a personal level. That did not make me feel good, even though my rage was quite justifiable  – the person I interacted with clearly demonstrated their blindness as a member of the oppressor group. However, my highest guiding purpose is to heal, harmonize and unite the divide.

For a long time, this put me in an excruciating dilemma. The rage I felt needed to be expressed. At the same time, I strived not to cause harm to people I interacted with, no matter how justifiable my actions were.

It’s not that I thought myself as a “bad” person if I caused harm to others. The desire not to cause harm is rooted in an awareness of the universal Law of Interconnectivity, the Law of Ubuntu, and the Tao. The harm my action causes to others inevitably comes back to myself, even when my action is a righteous response to injustice. This is not a “punishment” imparted by some higher judge. It is a natural law by which the universe keeps everything in balance. It is not even a morality but rather, a felt sense of the energetic web that connects us all.

This awareness is very much contrary to the dominant narrative. We are so used to using violence to deal with violence. We feel justified in blaming and shaming the perpetrator and seeing them as evil. Numbed by overstimulation of sensory input, we don’t see how whenever harm is done, no matter how subtle it is, it hurts both ways. Again, it is another mechanism to perpetuate the unjust system.

Do-no-harm is not self-denial. Instead, it is rooted in self-love. This awareness is what gives rise to the movements of non-violent resistance, the only way to end war and violence.

Eventually I arrived at a different phase of my life where the energy I harnessed from rage helped me break away from the oppressive social structure. I felt rooted enough in my native cultural heritage. Today my urge to express rage has become much more titrated. It can still arise but more like a wavelet than a tsunami. Instead, my main motivation is to seek collaboration and co-creation. I want to be able to “dance” with whoever comes across my way, no matter who they are.

It was through many trials and errors, I learned to channel my rage into creative expression as sacred songs, dances, rituals and most importantly my work in the world. I offer that creative expression as a beacon to call for unity and harmony. I learned to harness the rage, this precious gift coming from Mother Earth, as a power to amplify my voice in the system.

To be honest, this has been a very difficult journey, and I am still stumbling on it. At many times, I didn’t think I would make it. After all, the tsunami is much bigger than me. However, with prayers and my unwavering commitment, I was blessed with a grace that is also bigger than me.

To transform this rage into creativity required many skills and persistent cultivation. The most central of all, for me, is the consistent practice of Qi Gong and Tai Chi, a legacy I inherited from ancient Chinese culture. These practices attune my nervous system to be in harmony with my environment, no matter where I am. They connect me to the universal field of consciousness which allows me to rest and get nourishment in the womb of belonging even when I am alone by myself.

Eventually, rewards come my way. One of the pinnacle expressions of this transformation was a music video, Children of the Earth, which I co-created with two talented and good-hearted colleagues. This music video became an international effort where people from 14 countries participated.

Another expression of this transformation is my music included in the documentary movie, Dancing with the Dead, a movie about Red Pine, a translator who devoted his life to translating Chinese classic poetry and honoring the hermit culture. For both projects, people with privilege have generously offered support, resources and expertise, as we work together to serve the call of unity.

Many of us carry deep trauma due to some kind of oppression, along the lines of race, gender, faith or other social parameters. Our body stores the anger and rage resulting from injustice. If you feel called to open yourself to the immense power of rage, if you feel called to embark on a journey to transform that rage into creative expression, please check out our course, The Art of Embodied Sensitivity.

At the same time, you might also find yourself on the other side of the dynamic. What if you are on the side of the privileged, and you are facing the strong energy of rage targeted at you? Have you ever felt you are being blamed for an offence you did not commit yourself?

Read this sequel post where I will interview my colleague Dr. Stephanie Mines, on Facing Justifiable Anger with Spaciousness.

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The hallmark of our modern life is a faster and faster tempo, leaving no room for the body to digest and integrate our experience.  The simplest way to step off the hamster wheel of a modern pace is to practice slow movements.

Slow movement is a radical act in our modern era.

S L O W

D   O   W   N.

Slow down like clouds unfurling lazily across the valley, flirting with the wind.

Slow down like sea grass swaying in the water, dancing with dappled light.

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Slow movement is an alchemy between the Yang of movement and Yin of stillness. It requires a delicate balance between control and release. As the Yin and Yang interact and alchemize Qi, life energy, starts to generate within the meridians and revitalize the physical body. That is why the hallmarks of Qigong and Taiji practices are slow, deliberate movements that undulate with breath.

(Here is a video of me practicing three forms from the Yang style 24 form Tai Chi. For more videos, please check out my channel on YouTube.)

You will be amazed how much your body can remember its natural intelligence by simply slowing down the movement tempo so your awareness can find its way back into the finer resolution of the body.

When I was five, I lived with my grandpa in Tianjin, eighty miles away from Beijing. At that time, life started to speed up in China as large-scale industrialization and consumerism started to spread. My grandpa, however, refused to speed up. He is a man with a heavy frame. He did slow movements of Tai Chi in the morning, despite young boys running by him and laughing at him. At that time, Tai Chi, among other traditional cultural practices carried a shameful stigma due to the westernization and colonization mentality.

My grandpa always walked at a slow, deliberate pace his whole life, with a mountain-like dignity. He even walked that way when crossing the road, causing cars to stop and wait for him. This was during a time when there weren’t too many cars on the road yet, and no one even dreamt about owning private vehicles.

I remember feeling protective of Grandpa and wanting to shield him from other’s disparaging looks. I also didn’t understand what my grandpa was doing. Everyone else is running. People are concerned about being stronger and faster. Yet my grandpa waved his hands mysteriously like clouds floating in the mountain, quietly rising, and falling.

Years later, when I turned 18, I followed my grandpa’s path and started doing Tai Chi, which has accompanied my entire life. These slow, gentle, and water-like movements become a clear pool of water, providing nourishment and regeneration when I feel burnt by the hamster wheel of modern life. My practice became a sanctuary where I can nestle next to my grandpa’s mountain-like body.

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[For most of us who are watching from afar], the intensity of the war and violence in Gaza happens within our nervous system. Notice how we react to external events and become aware of our internal reactive emotions. These emotions will lead to the inner chambers of our psyche, where we may discover the part of ourselves who is the soldier, and the part of ourselves who is a wounded child.

Our internal psyche is just as fragmented as the outer world. One part of us is insulated from another, or even attacking another part, without us being conscious of it. By doing our inner work to heal ourselves, through paying attention to the “micro-conflicts” arising in relationships around us, we are also affecting the outer world, because the world is that much inter-connected. One butterfly’s wing flap is connected with the hurricane a thousand miles away.

We can have our most well-meaning intention, and still cause harm onto another person, because we all carry different value systems and internal cultures. It takes tremendous patience, deep listening and openness to really attune to each other in a truly mutual relationship. It also means that we need to accept that we will make mistakes, and strive to develop skills to repair the harm.

We have to transform the toxicities stored in our liver, kidney and other organs, so we can open our internal territory to the power of compassion. Only then can we have true compassion for ourselves and for others. Inner transformation must happen on such a ‘flesh’ level in order to be ‘real’. (This nugget is distilled from the discussions of the AfterChat.)

I-Culture, the more individual-oriented culture, and We-Culture, the more collective-oriented cultures, they are just like different “trees” in the larger ecosystems. One is not better than another. When we can accept the gifts and responsibilities of carrying each, choose where to put our emphasis based on what’s being presented to us, we are evolving toward wholeness.

There will be two more programs on Mar 14 and Mar 15. You may register here to log in through Zoom webinar and participate in the live chat. When you register, you will also receive a link to attend AfterChat, where there are lively discussions.

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As a writer, receiving a reader’s earnest feedback is one of the most satisfying gifts. Here is feedback I recently received from a native Chinese woman reader. Her words reflected the Spirit that has been guiding my writing: a deep bow to the primordial intelligence.

[Her original words were written in Chinese. Below is my translation. I added in additional information in parentheses to provide context to better understand her original words.]

Reading Earth Song, my heart bleeds and hurts. It is a deep pain [associated with our collective trauma] that I have always been familiar with but do not know how to describe. This pain is engraved in my DNA. Rocked by the waves of your words, the ancient, intuitive memories [of Chinese culture and history] surfaced to the horizon, like a newly arising sun.

For the first time in my life, I saw the place where I was born. I was born in rural Shandong province in 1974. My entire family has been farmers and illiterate for generations. I dropped out of junior high school before graduating. But still, I was the most highly educated person in the family. When I became an adult, I wanted to understand more about myself, so I read some psychology and New Age books. Apart from that, I was not interested in reading anything else. In other words, I still am "illiterate" because I know little about Chinese history, culture and religion.

Spring’s writing presents a perspective of Chinese culture that is unique and fresh. After reading her writing, I had a flash of insight. All along, I have been carefully protecting my "ignorance" and "illiteracy". I did not want to be educated [in ways that are incongruent with my core being]. Experiencing "I", and my relationship with the world through this innocent state of not-knowing, is exactly what I want!

In this flash of insight, my lack of education is no longer a “defect”. It protected my innocence, which is my most important attribute. This innocence is my ally.

At this moment, a picture of a person with two faces appeared in my mind. One face is me, representing the simplicity and innocence of not-knowing; the other face is Spring, representing profound knowledge ... And we are ONE! We are two different facets of a shared destiny.”

Reading her comments, tears streamed down my face. I felt my work being validated in ways beyond my wishes.

I want to provide my English readers with some cultural background to understand her words. This Chinese woman is in fact quite knowledgeable. You can tell from the words she wrote. But she calls herself “illiterate” or “ignorant” for two reasons.

One it is customary in Eastern Asian people to be humble about one’s knowledge. Second, in Chinese traditional culture, knowledge is not just about reading words and absorbing what’s in the books. It is also about an embodied, intuitive intelligence coming from a deep respect for one’s naked, direct experience of life, something akin to the primordial intelligence a wild animal has.

From the little I knew about this woman, she is attuned to this kind of powerful primordial intelligence. Each one of us is born with primordial intelligence, the illusory superiority of our civilization’s progress often conditions us to turn away or to suppress this kind of intelligence. The crises in health care, environment and climate change are all manifestations of this disconnection.

The Tao Te Ching opens with this sentence, “What can be uttered in words is not the true Tao.” Lao Tzu, the ancient Taoist sage intuited a larger-than-human life, a pure presence beyond the grasp of intellectual knowledge. Not that intellectual knowledge is not important. Intellectual knowledge provides important and necessary ladders and scaffolds through which we can embrace the Tao. With 5000 words, the Tao Te Ching has served as a ladder, a scaffold for people to experience the Tao for more than two thousand years!

But too often, our human consciousness attaches to these intellectual constructs, becoming obsessed with the ladders, scaffolds and skyscrapers. We are burdened by too much “junk-food” information, while lacking true, nourishing wisdom. Obsessed by the ladders and scaffolds, we often forget to gaze beyond the man-made structures, to breathe  in the fresh air and take in the beauty of the mountains and the clouds moving in the valleys.

I deeply bow to this Chinese woman who holds a profound wisdom that protects her primordial intelligence. She may not know as much as many educated people, but she possesses the exact, right amount of knowledge to stay true to herself.

With Earth Song and my memoir, I bow to this primordial intelligence. Of course, it is just another ladder, a scaffold, born out of my life journey. However, it is much more than my personal story. Through this story, I am exploring where the personal and collective narratives meet and alchemize each other.

In the Resonance Path’s Chinese community, my colleagues and I ran a course where we used my memoir as a seed and invited people to share their own life stories with one another. Earth Song provides a safe and welcoming container where people feel safe to share the vulnerable, the painful, the dark, or even the “crazy” part of themselves, as well as sharing the joyful, ecstatic, and the wild…

When people feel safe and trust one another, that raw, powerful primordial intelligence is welcomed back into the shared space. In the presence of that intelligence, miraculous transformation takes place on its own accord! People became enlivened and less afraid. They are lit by a passion for life that empowers them to embrace the most difficult challenges and support each other. This is something my Chinese community has taught me again and again. 

I hope one day Earth Song in its English version may also serve as a catalyst for such individual and collective transformation. Stay tuned!

On hearing my friend’s singing in a film debut about ancient Chinese poetry: For Spring

by Amanda Blaine

Friend, I have sung with you before, and it was not like this. I was sitting behind you in the theater, and 25 minutes into the film, when a voice sounded out from the images, it was not the voice I remembered. 

Still, I felt a rush inside me, and the impulse to rub your back, say, “hey, that’s you!” 

But I did not. Too profane an act for the sounds I was hearing. 

I heard your voice as I have never heard it before, more deeply you than anything that has had space in our shared life. I felt your voice in the bodies around me, too, and beyond them in all the bodies in the packed theater, a hundred or more. I thought, that is my friend. And also, I have not heard this friend until now. 

I heard the mountains and the centuries of China, not as a geopolitical place, but as a myth, a people, a heart made of many hearts over millennia. I heard a power, not the power that makes borders or amasses bombs or enforces rules. Not the power that trades stocks or builds factories for microchips. I heard the power that comes from countless moments of choosing, over countless lifetimes, to pay attention to right now. 

I was going to say, “I had never been curious to go to China until now” but I remember: I have been to China. Not this one, your China. The China I visited was not the China of your voice, of the poems you let move through your body and be animated with your breath. The China you sang awakened in me the knowing that beauty is never dead. 

Even if the melodies are silenced in the throats, even if the throats are cut, even when the paintings are faced into the wall, beauty keeps going. Even when you move across an ocean, even when your mouth busies itself with words your grandparents would not have recognized, beauty is still there. Beauty can survive without a place in time or a country. Even when your mother’s fingers, blackened by coal, teach you to worship at the only altar she can, the altar of Science, beauty is still there.

Even when you have to dig through refuse bins, even when your belly rumbles from the lunches you skipped, beauty is still there.

Beauty just like this, just like your voice ringing out in a dark theater, a voice we recognize as yours but new to us fills us. This voice surrounding us now, new to us and as familiar as the shadows of leaves

dancing on my carpet in this autumn afternoon sun.

Spring’s Reply to Amanda

My friend, upon reading your words, I dropped to the floor, weeping. I wept for the ninety-nine percent of my waking life when I didn’t believe being seen this way by someone was possible. I wept for the one percent of me, hanging on to a thin thread who sings songs I thought no one would care to listen to but me …

I wept for those hearts who have given up being seen and touched deeply by another human being. I wept for the loneliness that has infected all of us and imprisoned us inside an illusion of separation. But tears also gushed for countless souls who choose to believe; choose to sing songs flowing from the heart; choose to embrace the self found in stillness; choose to resonate with the vibration of now.

China is how English-speakers call my homeland. Zhong Guo, or Zhong Yuan, is how we call our homeland. These words means the Land for the Center. Being at the center and walking the Middle Way is what my native culture values the most. Thanks for discovering that “Land for the Center” in your own heart, where beauty, truth and kindness resides.

Shown above is the Chinese character Qi. This character is unique for ancient Taoism and no longer used in modern culture. In fact, a lot of Chinese educated only through modern education do not understand this character. 

Common English translation for qi is breath or air, which is the translation of 气，another character similar to this one. Energy is a more fitting translation. However, this character refers to a very unique kind of energy, the primordial energy before there is a differentiation between Yin and Yang, light and dark, feminine and masculine. It is the source out of which duality arises.  

As a fetus or an infant, we are naturally immersed in primordial qi. And, we are not aware of it. The development of self-hood broke our connection with the primordial qi. This self can be trapped by the duality, believing that we are one of the poles that the mind creates, be it as gender, or social identity or political opinions. Going through duality is important for soul's developmental journey. However, being trapped by duality blocks us from a larger truth, and the constant grinding and tension between polarities can deplete our vitality. 

This character reminds us of the part of us that exists before duality. It is the womb that gives rise to duality, and also what "composts" duality when duality turns into a rigid pattern and starts to block the flow of life. Having access to qi through qigong allows us to go in and out of duality, to fulfill the purpose of being a better servant, a faithful steward to life inside the duality.

Chinese medicine and acupuncture is an example of how people apply the knowledge and access to qi, the primordial energy in service of life. This possibly sets the Taoist practice apart from the common interpretations of Eastern spiritual traditions, which emphasizes more on transcending the duality. 

The upper section of this character bears similarity to the character 无, Wu, which means nothingness. It also bears the same origin with 元，yuan, which means origin or primordial. The bottom, the four dots, refers to "fire" or “heat”. Fire and heat is used for cooking raw food. Together, this means that when qi is a refined essence from the primordial energy, which is the source out of which duality emerges. 

In ancient Tao, Wu, or nothing-ness, is the mother source of everything. In modern culture, our society conditions us to be someone, or something, which is a great experience for its own right. However, this character often reminds me that it is also a blessing and privilege when I CHOOSE to be a nobody and nothing. 

When we practice qigong, we are cultivating the quality within that's beyond duality. In Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu said that the goal of the practice is to return to the state of being as a infant, when one is in full and intimate contact with the primordial qi. 

In the qigong practice I teach, we constantly weave our awareness between polarities of up and down, slow and fast, soft and hard, leading and following. Through these weaving, the pathways for this primordial qi become open. We develop this vivid sense that we are a cell within a much larger life.