Social Alchemy: Taiji for Collective Healing and Social Change

Engaging polarities as source for infinite potentials

[In this collection of essays, I will share thoughts and stories from an experiment of engaging Tai Ji principles to alchemize collective and racial trauma into fuels for self and system transformation.]

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]