Protection, Projection, and Relating to Your Environment

We are all the result of how we have adapted to our environment.

Your adaptive capacity and style are your ‘vibe,’ and also an expression of your Shen and Qi, and how you consciously and unconsciously use your Jing.

To shift out of survival mode, you must meet your protective exterior, and find the truths and tools to navigate all that is outwards – skillfully.

Skillfully enough to drop your guard consciously and slowly - the way you would soothe a wild animal. This can be especially gradual for Martial artists, those living with addiction or trauma, and other Warriors like neurodivergent humans navigating a neurotypical world.

In practice, acknowledge that your environment, and your adaptive responses are free to change.

Is your adaptive state of distress able to shift into a soft and open curiosity?

Once more, is your adaptive state of distress able to shift into a soft and open curiosity?

Wait there…

Before beginning practice, notice the space around you.

Do you need to adjust it—cleanse it, simplify it, state an intention, or create a better sense of support?

If you are indoors, how much of the natural world is visible when you look out a window?

Does the space feel conducive to what you consider Sacred?

As we enter into this ‘outside outward’ relationship, we need to separate the clear and turbid, enter the felt sense moment, move attention away from the stories about the past and future, and come into a state of calm and open curiosity.

A part of Nei Gong practice is creating is a liminal state of Being, which is becoming open to imminent transformation and insight.

Sometimes, a person new to Nei Gong finds that their inner resolve (called Zheng Qi) and external hackles (called Wei Qi) can be stuck, tired, or frustrated. If the ways we protect ourselves and solve problems loses agility and spontaneity, then the journey of becoming a whole self loses agility and spontaneity. This is why standing movements and playing with dynamic states of alertness, reaction, and release change us from the outside inwards.

As we begin to relate to our response patterns more authentically, we can lower our proverbial periscope of vigilance, and we can lower our guard from immanent threat. An often-imagined threat that is held in a Mind experiencing adaptive overwhelm.

Imagine yourself as an animal.

Let’s try some embodied alertness with an animal’s Inner Cultivation.

Be playful if you are willing.

These questions help orient attention to your External World.

• What has your survival hackles up?
• What has your social hackles and antennas worried about belonging or fitting in?
• What makes you guarded, burdened, defensive, overwhelmed, or tense?
• If you had claws, what would you be scratching at, keeping at bay, or clutching too tightly?
• If you had insect-like antennae, what would they be sensing for?
• What needs still need to be met?

These images help us feel our instinctive patterning. They reveal how your nervous system meets the world before thought and skillfulness have had time to get organized.

Acknowledge that your responses are free to change.

What helps you feel focused, safe, and connected in a healthy way?

As you become centered and calm, your ‘outside out’ entry is almost complete.

What is happening in the environment, season, lunar cycle, weather around you?

Arriving completely included remembering that Qi is surrounding you at all times, and there are many ways to connect with nature, the Land and Sky, and ways to be imbued with Dao.

Below are several examples of Qi Gong, Dao Yin, Nei Gong, and Meditation (Nei Ye).

Outside Out Practices

Clearing boundaries and restoring your innate connection

Fang Song – is a series of principles for unravelling your default embodied state of being, while learning the innate pattern of the Relaxation Response.

Five Elements Qi Gong Forms – All phenomena Come into Being on the spectrum of the Five Phases. This encourages both self-regulation and self-expression).

Tree Qi Gong is a very old Daoist practice called Gathering Transmuted Essence of the Sun and Moon 採日月精華 (cǎi rì yuè jīng huá) which holds a unique junction between contemporary Nei Gong and Shang Qing animistic embodied meditation. Another translation would be ‘harvest essence through imitating or becoming any living thing between Yin and Yang.’

Imitating the aliveness (Qi) of a tree through a night and day cycle, or through the rhythm of the seasons is a very effective entry into Nei Gong awareness.

The Big Regulation Form – (Tai Li Fa 太利法) – animisticaly explore and express a reunion with the cycles of nature, and with all of the Beings, Influences, and Spirits in Nature.

Restoring Harmony between the Land and Sky Form – (Tian Di He Yi Fa 天地合一法) energetically become the Qi of the Sky/Heaven and the Land/Earth. This generates a lot of Qi and helps bring balance to Yin and Yang, Jing and Shen.

Speaking of Nature, and remembering the wisdom of ‘As above, so below,’ it is good to have a knowledge base about the universe around you. As a part of this tradition, you will also learn, Daoist Cosmology, Ontology, and Divination ~ (Yu Zhuo Ling Zhi 宇宙靈棋) as well as Seasonal Naturalism and Environmental Harmony ~ Ri Yue Feng Shui 日月風水.

Reading the Daoist classics will help you enter into the Inner Cultivation worldview.

Translations of the Nei Ye (Inner Liminal Endeavor) and the Nei Jing Tu (Inner Landscape Scroll) are a part of this training.

Entering your Embodied State

Once you are free to respond, learn, and play, you begin moving from the outside inward.

Arriving inward, listen to your felt sense, your posture and breath, your embodied memories, your unfinished instincts, and your present state.

In stillness, you will experience a lot of sensations. Some days you may notice a knot in your stomach, a tension in your throat, a flutter of anxiety, the softness of calm, the dissolution of tranquility, the ecstasy of reunion, the ups and downs of caffeine, grief, anticipation, and countless other internally generated states.

In many ways, this movement from outside in is an initiation. It requires authenticity, willingness, patience, and discernment. It often brings us into contact with what I call speed bumps and off-ramps.

Speed Bumps

A speed bump is a place where we encounter something we do not want to feel. A sensation may trigger anger, shame, grief, fear, or a latent memory. Often, when we hit a speedbump we dissociate into fantasy. Until acceptance replaces control, it feels necessary to stop, turn away, or brace. I use the term speed bumps because at every new internal encounter, it is important to slow down, feel into all aspects of the experience, and wait long enough to understand as completely as possible.

Many early healing and cultivation systems are deeply concerned with clearing this inner landscape. Before cultivating this landscape, we must prepare the Soil of the Mind and Body.

Off-Ramps

An off-ramp is more dangerous. It happens when sensation, memory, or meaning begins to pull us away from grounded practice into distortion, inflation, or life consuming delusion. As buried energies become free, some practitioners may become identified with power, or begin constructing special identities around money, sex, and power. This can lead to profound Qi deviations, which are experienced as psychological, emotional, and spiritual disorientations.

Every meditation tradition includes warnings about this

Some never fully return from those detours…

Moving from the outside in requires maturity and patience, and a bit of healthy skepticism. It asks us to allow for unexpected states of distress or bliss to arise within one’s field of awareness - without becoming consumed by them.

Off-ramps feel like opportunities for release, learning, and growth, but are most often pathways to delusion.

Cultivating Your Inner Landscape

An important part of moving from outside in is learning the inner terrain. Depending on the tradition, this may include posture, alignment, joint balance, tissue length and tone, circulation, breathing membranes, meridians, organs, energy centers, extraordinary channels, and larger cosmological layers of energy and consciousness.

In the first year, it is wise to engage in a process called Bu Que 補闕 which means to repair and restore a fracture or rupture that created a Qi wound or a disorientation of adaptability and Spirit.

There are some powerful Dao Yin practices that move people through this process consistently, that are also used to learn other inner cultivation principles. To arrive on the inside, simply drop your guard, hold Sacred Space, and begin the restoration and purification process. Most of these practices are expressive, immersive, fulfilling in a way that brings a regenerative state of satisfaction and meaning.

In this Daoist medicine tradition, this often means learning how meridians feel in your body, how they relate to your organs, how tissues are systems and ‘Spirits,’ and how centers such as the Dan Tian determine the consistency of practice and progress. As well, becoming your Microcosmic Orbit (which takes a year), changes the foundation of how you practice.

In allowing the outside inward, it is inevitable to experience a wider universe in which body, nature, and spirit are not separate.

Eventually, the boundary between Self and World becomes more permeable. If you practice in a meadow, among trees, beside a large rock, under the Sky, something in you remembers that inner cultivation includes a profound sensitivity to shifts in the natural world.

Becoming the Land and becoming True Soil are necessary for the foundation to begin. True Soil (Zhēn Tǔ 真土) is a pre alchemic state.

As the animistic teachers remind us, ‘As above, so below.’

This is one of the great aspirations of practice: to experience the reunion of one’s inward authentic nature, coming home to the nature of existence.

As I mentioned earlier, at first, it is best to experience your whole body and every quality of your embodied state as your Dan Tian.

If your Nei Gong approach is complete, you will transform your stagnant energies, tissues, fluids, and meridians, into a living and intelligent antenna connected to the fields around you. Your meridians are connected through a kind of liquid crystal internet made of every tissue in your body. It is referred to as an antenna because all forms of plasma have the capacity to interact with bio-magnetic and electrical frequencies.

All antennas need to be tuned, and all batteries need to be charged.

As your Three Treasures (Jing, Qi, Shen) become fulfilled and balanced, the process of refining your Jing/Essence can begin in earnest.

This purification happens through a tranquility practice called Qing Jing – or Tranquil Purification, or Coherent Tranquility.

In the second year, the aspiration shifts from Bu Que – (Healing Wound and Restoring your Inner Landscape), to Fàng Qì 放氣, which means, ‘release, free, liberate through Spiritual reunion, dissolution, and absorption.’

Arriving inward from any relative outside, through some tangible boundary, is the essential meaning of Nei 內.

Practices for Entering Your Embodied State

Exploring and Refining Attention and Perception (Gan Qi, C’an Qi and, De Qi) is at the root of Nei Gong practice. With some perceptual training you will cultivate Tīng Jìn 聽勁 (the skill of listening with your whole body and being), and Yì Niàn 意念 (the skill of Coherent Interactive Awareness).

On the journey from the outside inward, embodied awareness and subtle interaction practices like Dao Yin 導引 are essential. Joint opening exercises and traditional forms keep your inner landscape and energy systems open, free of stagnation, and full of vitality.

This initial training in the principles of embodied practice, structure, alignment, coordination, breathing, aligned stillness, and tensegrity are good for your longevity, and to ensure efficient Qi circulation, and harmonious tissue systems.

All tissues (skin, flesh, vessels, tendons, bones,) are necessary for abundant Jing.

Standing Meditation (Zhan Zhuang 站樁) is one the most transformational forms of Nei Gong, in the short term and the long term. For learning inner principles, this practice is best described as the attrition of bad habits. Efficiency is found through investigating (or enduring) inefficiency.

Your embodied state, your progress, and your efficiency in standing completely still, while also melting like wax, generates and recovers a lot of Qi – as present aliveness and for a long life.

The Yi Jin Jing – 易筋經 system of Shaolin Nei Gong is by far the most demanding and the most powerfully beneficial series of interactive principles and exercises. The refinement of pandiculation, tensegrity, and the profound transformation of your muscles, tendons, membranes fascia, and gel-like fluids, is unlike any other practice in the world. We touch on the Yi Jin Jing in this course, for more on comprehensive Shaolin training, see this website.

Your embodied state takes on another dimension of existence through the Willow Dance, a Dao Yin form for cultivating Meridian awareness. This beautiful and flowing practice has many applications and benefits – externally and internally.

Breathwork and Qi Cultivation ~ Tu Na Hu Xi 吐納呼吸. How you receive every breath is an opportunity receive the Qi of the day and release any noxious qualities of existence. Breathwork is a guide through your inner membrane system, many layers of unconscious reflexes, and rhythms that allow your practice to deepen.

Breath Circulation Inscription ~ Xing Qi Yu Pei Ming 行氣玉佩铭. The first teaching on guided breathwork was found on a jade pendant that was made at the same time, and possibly in the same place, as the Inner Liminal Endeavor (Nei Ye). This 45-character rhymed explanation entitled Xíng Qì行氣 or "circulating the (vital) breath" is one of the clearest descriptions of applying breathwork towards inducing a profoundly coherent and interactive embodied state.

Primordial Qi Gong is a modern expression of a much older Daoist Inner Nourishing form that focuses on activating your Three Dan Tian and your Three Basins of movement and dynamic physical power (Fā Jìn 發勁). The journey from the embodied play of your Three Basins to the subtle and elusive experience of your Dan Tian is a perfect mirror and guide for your inward journey.

There are many Seated Nei Gong practices that help you settle your existence inward. Then you will gradually reinhabit your Three Dan Tian.

Sometimes allowing external energies to move into and through your body awakens a protective reflex. Being gentle and slow is more beneficial. Allowing energetic exchanges to happen, one meridian system at a time, feels more like co-regulation than being ‘pulled apart’ or ‘blown open.’

Everyone is unique, and what is needed to restore inner harmony asks each of us to develop an individual practice.

There are also seated and lying practices for opening your spine, and cleansing and restoring your physical body, and energy body, and your many tissue bodies. Energetic awareness develops and improves as you become more at ease from the outside outward and more self aware from the outside inward.

Once at home within, you may need to move some wounds and ghosts from the inside out.

Expression, Purification, and Realignment

Once you have entered your inner landscape and embodied state, and once you have become your Dan Tian, the next entry into Nei Gong is moving Qi from the inside out. This is the domain of purification through release, and through acceptance of Existence as itself.

For some, this happens quickly and only lasts for a short time. For others, it can be a lifelong journey.

This is the path of finding the center within the center (Nei 內) and truly and completely letting go through the final boundary…

This shift of energy happens through stillness, waiting, movement, sound, breath, art, emotional work, ceremony, relational practice, and conscious expression.

Sometimes purification comes through tranquility and the slow attrition of distraction and compulsion.

Sometimes, observing your experience with authenticity and autonomy can show your inner yearnings, truths about Existence, and deeper interactions with your meridians and Dan Tian, that may not have been found any other way. The purification of releasing happens through a combination of Coherent Interaction (You Wei), Tranquility (Qing Jing), and Non-Being (Wu Wei).

In Nei Ye practice, this process is referred to as Cleansing your lodge.

“Reverently cleanse one’s dwelling, the vital essence will come of itself.

Jìng chú qí shè, jīng jiāng zì lái.

敬除其舍，精將自來。

Practices for Expression, Purification, and Realignment

Dao Yin - Dissolving through Progressive Release and Conscious Breathwork. This is a skillful approach to unravelling constraint and the ‘keep it together of life,’ while also expressing and restoring your innate aliveness.

Instead of constraint, sometimes we find areas of ‘emptiness’ or collapse that need to be restored through rest and through ritual like practices with your meridians, internal organs, the Sun, Moon, Seasons, the Land, powerful places, and time itself.

Breathwork - Many inner cultivation traditions also include periods of Purification and Release through State Shift Breathwork. This sacred practice can induce laughter, crying, a trance state or even hallucinations. Dissolving existential boundaries releases internal blockages. Daoism has a long history of ecstatic release and reunion practices.

Other forms of Breathwork, like Nei Qiang Breathing focus on the reunification of every diaphragm, muscle, and membrane involved in whole body breathing.

Seated Inner Nourishing Skills (Nei Yang Gong) practices retrain your diaphragm, your perineal floor muscles, and your tongue to restore internal integrity. This practice also involves restoring the Spiritual Virtue (De) of each of the five primary organs, as well as a gateway in your chest called the Yellow Court (Huáng Tíng 黃庭).

The Four Seas of TCM and the Four Oceans of Dao.

For many people, it is hard to let things out because they do not want to harm or impose on others. These practices help you build a potent and trusting relationship with your environment and also feel into your sense of resourcefulness and availability.

Three Dan Tian Meditation helps you clear energy, thought forms, and some would say ‘ghost like’ remnants of ancestors and painful relationships from your Soul(s) and potentially your genes.

The third entry into practice, allowing your inner experience to expel agitation and express its needs is the gateway to a non-constrained Mind. There comes a time when training your Mind needs to move beyond Coherent Interactive Awareness (Yi Nian) into Guarding Attention/Intent (Shǒu Yì 守意).This practice is developed through a series of practices called Inner and Outer Listening and Seeing.

One of unique aspects of this tradition is the Six Innate Minds (Yuan Xin 原心). This is an understanding that recognizes each Dan Tian has innate conscious and unconscious capacities and drives, some drives are existential, some instinctual, and some relational.

Reuniting these often-unconscious and compelling ‘Minds’ opens your attention to a unique capacity for coherence in meditation – and to develop a sense of humor with the voices in your head. The ‘Innate Minds’ are not literally thought of as structures but as essential relationships, sources of meaning, and qualities of life.

Zhōng Xīn 忠心 – Wholeheartedly Always Centered in Your Heart/Mind - When your Mind(s) can attend to all of your senses, and all of your ‘Innate Minds,’ without distraction, contemplation, or evaluation, you will cultivate the advanced meditation skill called Guarding the One Shǒu Yī  守一.

Lying Dao Yin and Breathwork.  Imagine lying at peace, residing in restful ease, restored, and ready to leap wholeheartedly into a profound undoing. It is now possible to enter through the mystery gate that is waiting at the source of Being and Becoming.

Nei Ye ~ 內業

The Infinite Liminal Endeavor

The fourth and deepest entry into practice and reunion with existence is a journey from the inside inward.

This experience is harder to speak about directly, because it occurs beyond the bounds of ordinary language. Yet, traditions have always approached this layer of practice through recognizable methods, classic historical texts, contemporary metaphors, and memorable stories. Once the practitioner has developed sufficient grounding, embodiment, purification, and coherence, deeper work becomes possible.

This transition occurs in the alchemic state called True Soil (Zhēn Tǔ 真土).

On the Inward Journey Several Pathways Appear

內業

Nei Ye 內業 – Inner/Infinite Liminal Endeavor

Nei Ye describes the experience of moving from the outside to the inside of a bounded space - while always moving towards inward openings (Nei), and a practice, , or a watchtower from which you can look out (Ye), or reach out energetically to encounter vaster truths and realities through cycles of spontaneous illumination and reunion with an Un-nameable Mystery Beyond Infinite Emptiness (Xuan Xuan).

想

Xiang 想 - Visualization /Invocation/Actualization

Visualization is natural. It is simply the mind imagining a process, a memory, an artistic image, a better mousetrap, or a pattern through association. But in deeper cultivation, visualization is not about forcing an outcome. It is about coherent orientation.

How the mind approaches practice matters immensely. Training your Mind is like training your body. In Daoist cultivation, especially in the more animistic traditions, Cun Xiang 存想 means to ‘generate an image with the mind by coming into being as that quality, attribute, animal, energy, or state of being’. The image is not a picture in the imagination; it is a complete embodied coherent expression of a state and of a relationship.

An example would be coming into being in the state of each of the Five Phases, or the Four Seasons, Five Animals, or the Three Deities/Purifications (San Qing 三清).

觀

Guan 觀 – Observation

Observation begins as attention, just being a witness without commentary. Very quickly you will discover that observation is not pure. The observer carries opinions, biases, conditioning, memories, and an instinctual orienting reflex. Your nervous system is always evaluating safe or unsafe, good or bad, food or danger, gain or loss.

Observation therefore becomes a subtle training. You begin to see the observer itself. Eventually, practice may lead toward long pauses of any reference point,, and eventually periods of the cessation of a separate observer.

自然

Zi Ran 自然- Coming into Being As

(Zi Ran – the Fickle Nature of Nature meets Sacred Sacrifice and State Shift)

Another entry into stillness is what might be called innate Animistic Coherence. Or, the present arising of Nature as itself, honoring every phenomenon for itself, becoming Non-Separation.

One may work with animal forms, deities, ancestors, instincts, emotional states, or archetypal qualities, not as fantasy or roleplay, but as coherent states of being. It is a way of aligning consciousness with a form in order to refine a specific aspect of self.

無為

Wu Wei 無為 – The Imminent Attrition of the Opportunistic Self

Then there is Wu Wei – No-effort, Non-Attainment, Non-Interference, Non-Being

In the context of immersive states of inner cultivation, Non-doing does not mean a passivity in the casual sense. It is the attrition of the opportunistic mind. It is the abandonment of strategic Self-ing, or of the constant dividing and grasping activity of the ego.

In the context of Nei Gong, Wu Wei (Non-Doing) is a mirror and anchor for the more interactive practices (You Wei). Most of skill development process is You Wei in nature, an active focus on a perceived outcome. There is a hidden efficiency in refining the subtler aspects of embodiment while training the Mind and cultivating (relearning) some innate aspects of awareness and embodiment. You Wei makes and immersive Wu Wei states more probable and longer lasting.

This is the Purification of Jing/Essence through coherence of Shen/Spirit.

Wu Wei does not ask us to abandon effort, or the feeling of liminal transcendence, Wu Wei recognizes the apophatic truth that there is no answer, there is no question, there is no separate Self or Mind.

Practices for Your Infinite Liminal Endeavor

After a few months of navigating your experience through the Four Entries, your Inner Capacity and Skillfulness (Nei Gong) will be more available to immersive tranquil stillness. It is in the stillness that you develop sufficient Interactive Awareness (Yi Nian) and Guarding Attent/Intent (Shou Yi) that you can begin going completely and fearlessly inward – and beyond.

Below are the primary practices for moving from the inside inwards, or from your sense of being-ness to the Source of Beingness, and eventually a state Beyond-Being.

Three Dan Tian Meditation changes your Nei Qiang Breathing into Tortoise Breathing, which then becomes Embryonic Breathing.

Inner Observation (Nèi Guān 內觀) is a skillful response for an alert Mind. In meditation, making observation itself a practice, develops a balance of complete equanimity and objectivity with your thoughts and feelings. Being an attuned witness, Nei Gong meditation meets the inherent need for Spiritual Recapitulation through Inner Reflection and Contemplative Visualization - Guan Xiang 觀想.

• With time and Inner Cultivation this practice becomes Zhèn Guān 真觀 — one’s unwavering Honest and Authentic Observation of Self and Being.
• At first rarely, and gradually more often, this practice includes moments of Zhǐ Guān 止觀 — Cessation of Observation.

Active Inner Visualization — Cún Xiǎng 存想 is a deliberate embodied invocation and evocative practice. Depending on the specific practice, you may call up and embody (like and actor, but also in stillness) Nature Spirits/Winds, Seasons, Ages, Virtues, Organs, Mind states, and many other possibilities.

Coherent Tranquility/Tranquil Purification (Qīng Jìng 清靜), is the initial crucible of meditation and cultivating purified Jing/Essence. This state sometimes described as the Howling Silence of Now (Zuo Wang – Sitting in Oblivion), or the Smelling of Rainbows (Xin Zhai – Mind Fasting).

Micro Cosmic Orbit – Xiao Zhou Tian- 小周天 Moving from Interaction (You Wei) to Non-Being (Wu Wei) - or moving from Post-Heaven to Pre-Heaven. In Year Two, the focus turns to opening your Da Zhou Tian or Macrocosmic or Celestial Orbit.

Cultivating your Sacred/Immortal Embryo (Sheng Tai 聖胎) through cultivating a Sacred Womb (Ling Bao Gong) which begins when you complete the Lesser and Larger Celestial Orbit together and the pre-alchemic state called True Soil (Zhēn Tǔ 真土).

Shaolin Wall Staring Chan (Zuo Chan 坐禪 Seated Meditation). This practice comes from the Northern Shaolin approach to Chan/Zen mediation. It follows eight passes of combined gazes and breathing methods to develop a consistent entry into Chan.

Lying and Sleeping Qi Gong (Shui Gong 睡功). This system of Nei Gong is deeply connected to the seasons, the moon, and the weather.  Each Season has its own Sleeping Gong.

Daoist Cultivation methods for Women (Yin Beings) (Nu Dan – 女丹). Male and Female bodies have different sources of Jing, different tissue make-up, different tendencies of circulation, and different sources of Becoming, and different balance of Dan Tian Cultivation. It is important for men and all genders to explore this approach – some people are innately connected to the Infinite Feminine (Xuan Pin)

Translating the Nei Ye and the Nei Jing Tu. This combination of the first book of inner cultivation combined with a popular modern scroll that lays out the necessities of your inner landscape for cultivation will give you a comprehensive understanding of the world and landscape that we encounter going from the inside inward.