Huan Yuan Nei Gong – Year Two

Beginning Dec 12, 2026

Build your jing, open the three passes, and walk the seasons from beginning student to experienced practitioner. Begins early December at the Dreaming Elephant Daoist Studies Institute.

Year One restored your embodiment. You opened the meridians, found your breath again, met the three dantian as living relationships rather than locations, and began to sense the sacred womb and embryo at the heart of this tradition.

Year Two is where that restoration becomes a foundation. It is akin to the foundation stage of nei dan, Daoist inner alchemy. Over twelve months we build and purify jing, transform the tissues of the meridians, harmonise jing, qi and shen, seal the three dantian and the san jiao, and open the San Guan, the three narrow passes that Year One only introduced.

What changes for your Inner Landscape

• A formed lower dantian. The year opens with the water wheel, the ox and the well. If you accomplish this at any point, but especially at the start, that experience alone is worth the year’s commitment and tuition.
• A reservoir of jing. Through a committed 100-day practice and qing jing, coherent tranquility, you clear the lodge of your embodied state and mind and begin to fill it.
• Discernment of qi. You learn to feel the difference between the qi that expresses life and the pre-heaven qi that expresses creation itself.
• A steadier heart-mind. Through Qing Zhi Bing, the Chinese medicine approach to emotionally disorienting wounds, you come to understand the voices and forces that move through your attention, and become far less likely to be triggered into unconscious reaction.
• A complete Chan practice. Shaolin wall staring is finished through all nine passes, alongside your moving, seated and lying nei gong.

A Seasonal Journey

Year One followed the four entries into practice. Year Two follows the seasons, guided by a third reading of the Nei Jing Tu, the Inner Landscape Scroll, from the bottom up.

Winter: the lower dantian. We begin in winter on purpose, with our survival instincts and visceral intuition, learning how unconscious tendencies take over consciousness. We purify and build jing with the sun and the moon, open Wei Lu at the tailbone so we can carry and guard jing, and warm the san jiao. In wall staring, we begin to discover what mind is as itself.

Spring: the middle dantian. As everything wakes from hibernation, we work with adaptability, empathy and moving emotion. Shang Qing practice lets us become organ spirits rather than visualise them. A period of fasting, daily xin zhai (mind fasting) and a taste of the Yi Jin Jing support tissue transformation. We open Jia Ji behind the diaphragm, complete the regular and extraordinary meridians, and begin the sacred compact between people and land.

Summer: the upper dantian. When yang is most open, practice rises to where self and an arising non-identity meet. We study Dao, De, Ziran and Wu Wei, complete the magpie bridge safely, and open Yu Zhen, the jade pillow. Morning sunlight practice, a solstice full moon, and for those ready, a 100-day initiation into shou yi and dream practice.

Autumn: where the three meet. The three dantian cohere in the Chong Mai. Here we walk two roads at once: the path beyond self, and the path of becoming a whole, heart-centred human. We make friends with our ancestors honour the body as the cauldron of cultivation, and complete the ninth pass of wall staring.

What we will explore

• Twelve monthly gatherings: two advanced inner cultivation trainings and one open group practice each season.
• Four private sessions, one per season. Inner experience is individual, so transmission has to meet you where you are.
• Hunyuan Qigong and Nei Gong as a complete system, the book that accompanies the primordial form.
• The Shaolin Wall Staring (bi guan) book, one of five in the Shaolin Nei Gong series.
• The Qing Zhi Bing course manual on Chinese medicine psychiatry and psychology.
• Translation manuscripts of the classical texts we work from.
• A guide to the Ling Qi Jing, an oracle quite unlike the Yi Jing, with instruction in using it for your own guidance and, at times, for others.
• Seasonal and animistic practices, including Tree Qigong as a complete system, Tai Yi Fa, and the reciprocity practices between ourselves, the land and the sky.

This is a commitment. Each student chooses at least one 100-day practice, in the season and framing that suits them. The work is gradual and nuanced, and parts of it are only opened when you are ready to open them safely, which is why the private sessions matter.

Year Two is for students who have completed Year One. If you are new to this tradition and feel drawn to it, please reach out and we can talk about where you might begin.

Year Two is not the end of the training; a third year follows. But it is the point where you stop being a beginning student and become an experienced practitioner, with a cosmology, an ontology, an inner landscape, and a felt awareness of meridians, dantian, selves and minds. You will know what remains to heal, and how you want to move, within your own story and gradually beyond the mundane, into a lifetime of inner cultivation and inner alchemy.

We begin with the water wheel, the ox and the well.