Xin ~ HeartMind

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 :)