Rebirthing the Ancient Tao and Restoring Universal Mother as Leader
Join us in a 5-day, free online summit and discover tools and resources for you to grow a culture around you where life and relationship can thrive
To shift the paradigm from Dominance-and-Separation to Reciprocity-and-Unity, it takes leaders like you and me, ordinary citizens caring about the planet and our community.
- Spring Cheng, Founder of the Living Resonance Leadership Program
Planet Earth is birthing a new era through humanity. Before a baby is born, the baby needs to turn herself upside down. Sometimes, the baby, unable to turn, can get stuck. That can be a dangerous situation for both the mother and the baby.
The current social systems are struggling with this turn, jostling for supreme dominance, locked into unlimited extraction of resources, in subservience to the military-industrial complex. Yet they are being turned upside down against the inertia built up for thousands of years.
One of the signs of this inertia is that people who are supposed to uphold the highest moral standards, our so-called “world leaders”, are exhibiting the lowest moral and ethical traits, leading nations into wars and ecological degradation. (Aside from the two violent geopolitical conflicts we are living with, Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel, politicians are strategically engineering another one: China and US. For more, please watch this program.)
At the same time, the age-old, life-giving way of stewarding the Earth and honoring the reciprocity of life is being reborn again through many traditions and cultures.
Signs of new birth are subtle, only perceptible to those who would stop walking and crouch down to notice.
Have you noticed the first signs of life in a new spring season? The tiniest bud shooting from the branches, or the thinnest blade of grass shining with a glossy green?
Last weekend at Bellingham, the Pacific Northwest town where I live, the Indigenous tribe of Lummi people were welcoming back “Gathering of Eagles”, a traditional ceremony that had been outlawed since the colonizers declared it to be “devil inviting”. The trauma the tribe has endured and is still enduring is so deep that it was not until ten years ago that they re-established this sacred ceremony.
I attended the ceremony with about two hundred people of different races and walks of life. The Bellingham mayor was there. People from four different continents gathered at the waterfront beach blessing the water and celebrating the unity that the water stands for.
Rain poured down through the first part of the morning. Miraculously it stopped right around the time when people started gathering. Native languages and ancient teachings from the Lummi tribe, New Zealand, Africa and Asia were spoken. People sang and chanted together in tears. The air trembled with an electrifying energy.
This was one of the most exciting and inspiring things I have witnessed in years. This remarkable event was led and organized by Lummi leader Freddy Lane, who worked on this project tirelessly for a decade. He pulled out this multi-continent event with shoestring funding, while working gracefully against bureaucratic regulations against such traditional gatherings. Yet there are no reporters or cameras around. Our major news outlets somehow are not attuned to enlivening events like these.
Leaders like Freddy who choose to step into this fresh and generative stream of life are like the new blades of grass, shooting up everywhere. It takes a different way of perceiving, knowing and being to inhabit this leadership. This lies at the core of the leadership paradigm promoted by Resonance Path, the institute my partner Joe Shirley and I co-founded in 2016.
This leadership paradigm is for ordinary citizens, like you and me, and anyone who desires to build a new culture through their relationships! It is not about “doing more things” or “achieving higher goals”, but about living fully into who we are and sharing our being with the community around us.
From Jun 17 to Jun 21, in partnership with Ubiquity University and Humanity Rising, Resonance Path is hosting a 5-day, free online gathering as an intro to the Living Resonance Leadership MA/PhD program. Each day we will offer a 90 min program with Resonance Path faculty members, which will be livestream on YouTube.
All courses offered through this program are open to the public. You are welcome to sample and experience different courses at your own pace. When you are ready for a more committed goal for your study, you may apply for a degree through Ubiquity University.
Living Resonance Leadership and Universal Mother
Many ancient traditions and indigenous cultures see the world as a living being. At the core of this way of being is resonance, the experience of a profound coherence and synchronization between our inner self and the outer social, natural and cosmic environment.
The archetype of Universal Mother mythically embodies resonance, embracing and uniting all life as a continuous presence from which we are never separated, to which we always belong.
Living Resonance Leadership is a pathway to discover how Universal Mother as leader resonates through your being, your body-mind-heart and your life. Every one of us is born in deep connection with Universal Mother. However, the trauma we endure as we grow into adulthood and the unhealthy social conditionings we internalize can cut us off from this connection, replacing it with proxies such as inflated status, wealth, societal approval, prestigious membership or moral superiority. When we re-orient ourselves to our Inner Presence, when we strive to see others across the gap of judgment, when we tend our communities with humility and express ourselves freely and joyfully, we can restore our connection with Universal Mother as our true leader.
This program offers courses that amplify your resonance with Universal Mother through your being, your voice and your work in the world. With this resonance, you can weave a culture of belonging, compassion and reciprocity with people around you, offering your presence, your purpose and your connection with Universal Mother as a resource and a beacon of vision for your family, relationships and workplace. Meanwhile, you will embark on an evolutionary journey where your inner feminine and masculine, rational and intuitive, past and future selves embrace each other in an exhilarating and nourishing interplay.
Samples of modules offered in the program:
All courses are open to general public. You only need to apply for Ubiquity program when you want university credits.
Art of Embodied Cultural Sensitivity: Develop harmonious and mutually beneficial personal and professional relationships across polarizing gaps and cultural boundaries
Songwriting, Creativity and Leadership: Approach songwriting as a way to express the authentic self and connect with ancestors and guidance beyond the ego’s limitation in service of making a positive impact in the world. No prior music experience is required. We believe singing is for everyone.
Life as an Oracle I: Memoir Writing to Weave a Personal-Planetary Narrative. When we develop a perceptual lens to see grace threading through all the stories of our life, including the dark and painful periods, we start to experience our being resonating with the Universal Mother. We start to swim in the river of synchronicities.
Life as an Oracle II: I Ching through the Lens of Resonance Code and Taoist Human Development. A deep study of how the inner being resonates with the outer environment. An investigation of a self-designed evolution journey.
Restoring Feeling as Your Inner Compass: Psychotypology Coaching. A ground-breaking form of one-on-one or self-guided coaching that placed the wisdom of feeling and mystery of being at the center.
What is the origin of this program?
As a young woman living in China, I witnessed and experienced first-hand the onset of modern industrialized development, which involved aggressive, sometimes brutal attacks of pristine ecological systems without considering the harmful impact. I kept hearing the painful cries of rivers and mountains, which haunted me for decades. I didn’t understand why humanity would act this way. I responded by enclosing my inner world in isolation.
Eventually, I understood that my nervous system retained the primordial capacity to resonate with rivers, mountains and other non-human beings. I owe thanks to my father, who took me to learn qigong when I was a teenager. Qigong helped me retain this energetic resonance. Yet this ancient practice has been marginalized and sometimes outlawed in China, its native land, due to its “scientific illegitimacy”, a legacy of colonial influences and suppression of China’s indigenous worldview. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, systematic intellectual campaigns were put in place to lead the public into distrusting traditional healing and energy modalities so that the modern pharmaceutical industry and western medicine can dominate China’s market for profit extraction.
In today’s western world, qigong, Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine have gained increasing popularity. I am a Tai Chi/Qigong teacher as well as a licensed acupuncturist. However, I felt acutely something critical is missing. In ancient China, practices such as Qigong, Tai Chi and traditional medicine were kept alive by vibrant cultural and relational practices that prioritized mutual respect, connection, trust and reciprocity above wealth extraction. This web is being systematically torn down with the economic infrastructure that prioritizes unlimited growth and profit above all.
The philosophy embodied by Qigong, Tai Chi and Chinese medicine was not limited to just physical well-being. It permeated every fiber of culture, influencing every relationship. I believe re-weaving this kind of cultural fabric is crucial to restore the vitality of these ancient practices and revive and strengthen our connection to Universal Mother.
I Ching, the Book of Change, is the source book of the ancient Confucian/Taoist culture. In ancient China, village and community leaders were fundamental pillars in society. Every village had elders embodying moral and ethical principles that cohered the communities. People cared for their communities like caring a living organism. When presented with challenge, both community leaders and medical healers would consult I Ching for guidance.
Today, I Ching is primarily known through texts written two thousand years ago at the onset of China’s long history of patriarchy. However, prior to that, the ancient Tao was primarily led by feminine Spirits and Goddesses.
When I was being guided to study I Ching sixteen years ago, I held this inquiry dear to my heart: after being submerged for two thousand years, how can we welcome back the feminine spirit of the I Ching? An answer came in the early years, as I was trying to crack the code of this ancient mystery, through an unforgettable dream.
It is a dark night. Pitch darkness engulfs me. I am standing on the shore of a raging sea. Storms roar, stirring waves to rise hundreds of feet high. With a flash of thunder, suddenly the ocean parts, revealing thousands of feet of depth. At the bottom of the ocean is a dying whale.
The whale is a giant. Her meat is rotting, revealing the huge rib cage. She pants in agony. Yet she is still conscious. She stares right into my eyes, communicating to me telepathically, “Come here, my child! I am glad that you came to meet me. In my rebirth, I will be living in and through you.”
This dying whale is a symbol for my ancestor’s way of being, the ways of inhabiting one’s body and one’s life as a vibrational being, extending far beyond our skin as waves of energy, reverberating, singing with the environment we are a part of. This dream and many other adventures I have experienced have guided me on a journey to revive the ancient Tao, the return of the feminine spirit, and a rebalance of the masculine and feminine. I wrote the story of my journey in my Chinese memoir Earth Song, which will be published in 2025. (You may sample some of its chapters here.)
Guided by the Spirit of this dying whale, I realized that to welcome the Universal Mother back, I needed to penetrate the existing texts of I Ching which were under the influence of China’s long and powerful patriarchal history. After a decade of effort, with the help of many collaborators (some of which have become faculty members such as Joseph Friedman, Joe Shirley and Tong Schraa-Liu), I designed the Resonance Code using the I Ching hexagrams as a “meta-language”, a system akin to musical notation. I used the Resonance Code to capture the different vibrational states of our being in resonance with Universal Mother. In this way, the Resonance Code enables each person to generate their own “oracle dictionary” to observe, notate and interpret their unique, personal frequencies of resonance with Universal Mother.
Along this journey, my connection with Universal Mother has guided me to form alliances with faculty members who are accomplished practitioners in fields such as healing, women’s studies, leadership development, organizational consulting and music. For this program, we created a diverse palette of modules such as Memoir-Writing, Songwriting and Creativity, Restoring Feeling as Our inner Compass, and Embodied Cultural Sensitivity. All of these modules are designed to restore the many parts of us to their natural-born resonance with Universal Mother
In 2024, vote ourselves into natural leadership and allow Universal Mother to guide us in caring for our community like caring for a living organism. Grow a culture where our family and future generations can thrive!
June 17-21, 8:00 - 9:30 am Pacific, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm Eastern
YouTube livestream for replay
Register at ResonancePath.com/Launch
Greetings. You asked me to share my reason for subscribing to your substack. I saw your presentations for five days on the Humanity Rising program a couple months ago. I resonated strongly with you and your Wisdom, manner of presenting, and your journey. I sensed that you might be a teacher for me, going forward, so I wish to explore your ideas and various materials more. Most likely I will participate in your memoir class next year, but I will also attend the two free songwriting masterclasses in September. Thank you! You may use this note of mine in any way you wish.