A Taoist Way to Heaven is Through Hell

Part Two of For Soul to Soar Again, foreword for Frontiers of Psychotopology, Volume One

[This article is Part Two of the foreword I wrote for my partner Joe Shirley’s new book, Frontiers of Psychotopology, Volume One. For Part One of this article, please read here.]

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.

Map of Devastated

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.

Map of Abundant Sacred Objects

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