The Four Entries into Existence and Practice
Nèi Gōng 內功 is an inward path of cultivating your embodied and energetic awareness, while releasing obstacles, and developing a deeper connection with Dao and Existence.
There are many systems of Nei Gong practice, each focusing on different practices and different potential outcomes.
Inner Cultivation is a gradual and skillful art and process of generating inner harmony, restoring your inborn life potential, and opening to your own innate spiritual nature.
In practice, that means cultivating your Spirit (Shen), your Essence (Jing) and your Qì, your state of aliveness until deeper systems restores their natural potential.
This is why opening your tissue meridians and energy centers Dān Tián 丹田 is such an important beginning.
Who is Learning Nei Gong??
Some come to this practice because their body is not aging well, they often have a chronic and limiting illness, their energy has lost its spark, and they want a practice that includes movement, release, expression, and restoration. As well as a tradition with enough history, credibility, and resources to hold a lifelong journey.
Many martial artists who have reached the limits of what raw strength, speed, and blind fury can give them, are naturally called to enhancing internal and subtle connections and capabilities. Developing internal power requires transforming your entire tissue body, as well as training your mind, your instincts, and your will, to a high level of coherence. As your efficiency improves, so will every normal attribute of strength and speed, without the wasted energy of a preening ego.
Some people explore Nei Gong after meditating in silent stillness for years, and sense that their practice has stayed in their head while dissociating from their body. An embodied approach to meditation and spiritual cultivation demands almost constant tangible somatic and energetic interactions, including nuanced breathwork. Meditation can place itself beyond the self and meaning, leaving those of us yearning to encounter the Sacred, missing an innate need.
The mind seeks emptiness, while the heart seeks reunion, reverence, belonging, Spiritual purpose – and a dose of wild courage!
Often, highly experienced clinicians and body workers, as well as Qi Gong and Yoga teachers learn Nei Gong to have a deeper relationship with an embodied life. Understanding your Sacred Self and coming home to your embodied existence are your birthright – and they are just the beginning of an inward journey described as ‘beyond a profound undoing.’
Everyone who learns and practices Huan Yuan Nei Gong (the system presented here), including everyone mentioned above, is often also carrying some grief, burnout, loss of connection, loss of meaning, or the pain of old wounds. The process of the first year is devoted to ensuring that you are cultivating as much personal awareness and authenticity as you are cultivating your Jing, Qi, and Shen.
If you relate to those experiences, needs, and journeys, the beautiful thing about Nèi Gōng is that it meets everyone where they are, and then gently guides them home to a complete and authentic way of experiencing life and Existence.
“One who knows others is discerning; one who knows oneself is luminous.”
~ Dao De Jing – Verse 33
There is only one way to begin, and that is through practice.
Practice asks the same thing from us all – to become embodied, connected, aware, open, willing, expressive, immersed, fully present, and playful enough to dance with Dao!.
The Four Entries into Existence and Practice
In the way I teach Nèi Gōng, there are Four Entries into a complete practice.
Each classic Entry is a unique experiential and interactive relationship. Each has their own embodied ecology.
Each of the four entries, are like different times of day and night. Each needs a different kind of attention and intention, and a specific group of practices, skills, and challenges – or opportunities for transformation.
Together, they describe how to meet the world around you with your autonomy, how you arrive in your body and discover the landscape within, how inner turmoil, spiritual grudges, and ancestral wounds can be released, and how, from a stable internal observatory, you can turn your gaze to the infinite inward journey through the mystery gate.
Outside Outward is how we sense, relate to, and adapt to our environment, and how our protective patterns have formed. Although a necessary aspect of Being, unconscious boundaries can limit your energetic connection to the Land, Sky, Seasons and Weather – the Qi of Nature.
Outside Inward is how we listen to and enter our embodied state. Becoming your breath, your meridians, and your Dān Tián, all while rediscovering the innate patterns of your Heart and Mind, provide a necessary homecoming to the inner landscape and ecology of your life-long practice.
Inside Outward is how old, latent, and erosive states and wounds are expressed and released, so that your Spirit (Shén 神), can be purified and realigned. An aspect of Nei Gong that is often left unspoken, is the necessity of deconstructing your social and cultural conditioning enough to rediscover your autonomy and your Innate Nature (Xing)
Inside Inward is how practice moves into the alchemical, trans-personal, and symbolic terrain of cultivation. Similar to sailing on the ocean, it is easy to be distracted or compelled by the wind and waves of your experience. This inner journey asks you to be the keel of your sailboat (still and anchored Qi), and to flow with the deepest and slowest currents of the ocean (a calm Mind held by the shore of True Soil or immersive embodied dissolution and absorption).
These are not rigid stages, and you only move from one to the next, the first time through a complete practice. Over the years they become simultaneous guests and guides, and most practitioners pass through all four many times, at many depths, over a lifetime.
Taken together, they offer a practical way to organize any complete system of inner work, and to understand Nèi Gōng as both the healing of a human Soul and the gentle transcending of a separate self.
A Puppy Coming in from the Rain
Before we go further, let me give you the simplest and most playful image of all four entries into existence and cultivation.
Imagine a puppy coming inside after playing in the rain.
First, she adapts to the outside. She shakes off the rain and finds her way to a blanket. Ensuring there is external harmony.
Then she comes home to her body. She curls up, licks up some raindrops, while settling her fur and clearing her whiskers and muzzle. Then she quivers, and yawns, settling into the tranquillity only known by innocence.
Next, she falls asleep, and you see her legs kick and run in a dream. Bound energy is being released, the day’s lessons shaken loose in their own Sacred way.
And finally, she drops into complete floppy-puppy stillness, utterly at peace. And then your puppy wakes, looking up at you with the clear, wild eyes of the Universe itself.
Returning from infinity, with a gleam of infinity still shining through.
The Four Entries Explored
Outside Outward
Protection, Projection and Relating to Your Environment
Each of us is the result of how we have adapted to our environment. Every guarded shoulder, every habit of bracing, and the way we scan a room before we can relax into it, was learned for a reason.
The first entry meets that adaptation directly: the protective exterior we carry, the patterns of guarding and projection we have built, and the ways we sense and relate to the world, the seasons, and other beings. To shift out of survival mode, we need truths and tools for navigating everything on the outside of our experience skillfully, lowering our guard consciously and slowly, the way you would soothe a wild animal.
This entry begins before practice even begins.
Take a moment and notice the space around you. Does it need adjusting, cleansing, simplifying, an expressed intention, or a tangible sense of support?
Does it feel conducive to what you hold as Sacred?
How much of the natural world can you see from where you are? What is happening in the season, the lunar cycle, and the weather? To arrive completely is to remember that Qì surrounds you all of the time, and in every way. There are countless ways to connect with nature, with the Land and Sky, and to be imbued with Dào 道.
Outside Inward
Entering Your Embodied State
Once you feel free to respond, to learn and to play, practice begins to move from the outside inward. Attention turns to your felt sense, your posture and breathing, your embodied memories, your unfinished instincts, and your present state of being.
Much of the first year supports this entry, as you learn how to interact with your inner terrain. This reconnects you with your alignment, your joints and balance, your connective tissue length and tone, your circulation of blood, fluids, and feelings, and the complete system of membranes involved in breathing. Then there are your meridians, internal organs, energy centres (Dan Tian) and your extraordinary channels that hold and maintain your Dan Tian as they become a Mystic Womb for a Sacred Embryo.
And, as your sensitivity grows, your connection to the many larger cosmological layers of energy and consciousness that the old masters mapped so carefully.
The foundation of all of this is becoming the Land. In our lineage we speak of becoming Zhēn Tǔ 真土, or True Soil, a pre-alchemical state developed during the first year of practice. Think of what a good gardener knows: before anything can grow, the soil itself must become completely alive, rich and balanced.
As your Three Treasures, Jīng 精, Qì 氣 and Shén 神, Essence, aliveness and Spirit, become full and balanced, the refinement of Essence can begin in earnest. That refinement happens through a practice of tranquility we call Qīng Jìng 清靜, which can mean Tranquil Purification or Coherent Tranquility.
There is a lovely clue hidden in the name of the practice itself. The character Nèi 內, inward, shows someone entering through an enclosure. Arriving inward, from any relative outside, through some tangible boundary – over and over again.
This is the essential meaning and experience of Nèi. Each time you cross another boundary with awareness, you are becoming Nèi Gōng. There are countless boundaries to meet, embrace, transcend along the way.
Inside Outward
Expression, Purification and Realignment
Once you have come home to your inner landscape, and you have opened your Dān Tián, then Qì begins to move from the inside out. This is the domain of purification through release, and through accepting Existence as itself. This entry is about how you have learned to respond and react, how you allow old states and wounds to be expressed and released, so that your Shén can be purified and realigned. For some of us, this happens quickly and returns our sense of autonomy, for others it is a lifelong journey.
This is the path of finding your centre within the centre, and of truly and completely letting go through the final boundary.
Release takes many forms. It can come through stillness and waiting, through movement, sound and breath, through art, emotional work, ceremony, intimate relationship, and conscious expression. Sometimes purification is gradual, the slow wearing away of distraction and compulsion through tranquillity. And sometimes, simply observing your own experience with honesty, patience, compassion, often reveals inner yearnings, truths about existence, and a deeper conversation with your meridians and Dān Tián that could not have been found any other way.
China’s oldest meditation text, the Nèi Yè, describes this as cleansing your lodge (as embodiment)
敬除其舍，精將自來
Jìng chú qí shè, jīng jiāng zì lái
Reverently cleanse your inner dwelling place, and the vital essence will come of itself.
Inside Inward
Entering the Mystery Gate as a Sacred Embryo
The fourth and deepest entry into practice is from the inside inward.
This is an un-plannable journey.
This is the realm of apophatic realization, or existence beyond possible comprehension, during a reunion with Existence itself.
This is the hardest to speak about, because it unfolds beyond the reach of ordinary language.
And yet, we are the recipients of traditions that have always found ways to approach it: through recognizable methods, classic texts, contemporary metaphors, and memorable stories. The Nèi Yè describes a practice of embodied awareness, breathwork and energy cultivation that opens onto cycles of spontaneous illumination. The Dào Dé Jīng 道德經 points toward the same horizon with the phrase xuán zhī yòu xuán 玄之又玄: infinite beyond infinite, a Mystery that cannot be named. Here are a few of the doorways we use.
Xiǎng 想, visualization, invocation and actualization. Working with images, sounds and qualities so vividly and sincerely that they stop being imagined and begin to be lived.
Guān 觀, observation. It begins as simple attention, being a witness without commentary.
Zì Rán 自然, coming into being as itself. Another entry into stillness is what I call innate animistic coherence: the present arising of Nature as itself, honoring every phenomenon for what it is, until there is no separation.
Wú Wéi 無為, the gentle wearing away of the opportunistic self. Wú Wéi is often translated as non-doing, but in deep practice it doesn’t mean passivity. It means the attrition of the strategic mind, the setting down of constant self-ing, the dividing and grasping that the ego does all day long.
Beyond these doorways lie the territories the old texts describe in the language of the Sacred: the womb and the embryo, rebirth, and reunion with Dào. The Dào Dé Jīng calls the source of all things Xuán Pìn 玄牝, the Infinite Feminine or, more true to the characters Infinite Birth Canal, the gateway from which Heaven and Earth come forth.
Nèi Gōng, at its deepest, is a way of coming home through that gateway, and returning to ordinary Life with something of the infinite still shining through. Just like the puppy.
An Invitation
The Four Entries; Engaging with the world, arriving in your body, releasing what has been held within, and, when the ground is ready, opening into dimension beyond names and forms.
A year is just long enough for True Soil to guide back to the Source (Huan Yuan), for your body to remember what it already knows, and for your practice to become a reunion with Dao and the Infinite Birthing of Reality (Xuan Pin).
Whether you come for your health, your art, your Heart, your work, or that quiet pull toward the Sacred, the path begins in exactly the same place.
With a complete practice.
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