In The Healing Promise Of Qi, Roger Jahnke writes:

The middle Elixir Field, sometimes called the heart Dan Tian, is the residence of the mind and spirit according to Chinese medicine and philosophy. In Chinese, there is no discrete concept for mind, nor is there a discrete concept for heart. One single concept, Xin (pronounced “shin”), embraces both. Confused Western translators have struggled with this, often translating Xin only as “heart” or only as “mind.” There is no heart and there is no mind, there is only Xin – HeartMind.

This is one of the most important keys for deepening your Qigong practice; it could be the master key. The conditioning of life and all its traumas causes us to believe that the brain and mind are the directors of life, but when the thinking self is allowed to be integrated with the feeling self in the HeartMind, everything changes …

What Xin points to, then, for Taoist Yogis, is akin to a marriage of what in the Hindu tradition are known as Bhakti and Jnana Yoga: the devotional and intellectual approaches to Yoga practice. How wonderful! to have a theoretical framework, along with numerous practices, that supports a peaceful commingling, a mutual enhancement of these two facets of our being - and the intuitive realization of their essential not-two-ness :)

For those of you in the Boulder/Denver, Colorado area, I wanted to let you know that an Atlasprofilax practitioner -- Darce Brighthorse -- is in town through July 14th, offering sessions.

There are no magic bullets, but in relation to short-term structural bodywork, this is - in my experience - about as close as you're likely to get. The Atlasprofilax "installation" requires just one (or in rare cases two) sessions, plus a follow-up.

The general experience of people receiving this work is that, with their first cervical vertebrae returned to its true home, they feel better immediately -- and the effects of this foundational shift ripple out in all kinds of beneficial ways.

This is no replacement for a qigong and/or meditation practice; for an ongoing relationship with a Chinese medical practitioner; or for intelligent daily habits -- but is, nevertheless, a potential source of great support!

In an earlier essay – Tying Up Loose Ends: Topology Swallows Quantum Computing – I posed the question:

How might we, as Taoist, Buddhist or Hindu yogis and yoginis, transform ourselves - in particular the way that we process information, i.e. relate with the intelligence/energy of the manifest world - from something like Newtonian/classical computers, to something like topological quantum computers?

At the time of writing this, I was thinking largely in terms of the human nervous system. As it turns out, it may be the case that, at the level of our DNA, we already are functioning as something like quantum computers.

According to research conducted by Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev: "Living chromosomes function just like a holographic computer using endogenous DNA laser radiation." In other words, DNA is a quantum mechanical biowave computer!

By way of an exploration of Taoist notions of Life, Liberty & Happiness, Sam Crane offers us something like a Taoist 4th of July. Beginning with "Life":

As for Life, the "Te" (or "De" in the Pinyin transliteration) of the Tao Te Ching, denotes the integrity of each thing in the larger context of Way (Tao). As such, I take it to imply a recognition of the value of each thing in itself, each life in itself ...

For "Liberty," he draws from Burton Watson's introduction to the Chuang Tzu, which emphasizes the theme of freedom in this classic Taoist text:

"Freedom" here means, for Watson, "free yourself from the world," but it is not incompatible with other notions of political liberty that might be celebrated in the US today. For Chuang Tzu, governments should not interfere in our pursuits of freeing ourselves from the world.

For "Happiness" he points to the humor of Chuang Tzu, and the happiness of a life lived via the principles of wu wei:

... we might find happiness precisely in that process of detaching ourselves from worldly worries and desires and embracing "nothing's own doing" (wu wei).

I love this translation of wu wei as "nothing's own doing"!

Almost As Good As Fireworks

Booster Engines & Causeless Happiness
Aimless Wandering
Space Travel

~ * ~