How Taoist Meditation And Qigong Turn Stress Into Flow

Speaker 1 · 0:00Hi everyone, welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. Today I'm very happy to be joined by Solala Tawler, a longtime teacher of Qigong, Taoist Meditation, tea ceremony, and the author of many books on Taoist wisdom and practice. Solala's new book is called Returning to the Source: Taoist Meditations for Rediscovering the Sacred in Everyday Life. I'd like to begin with your own path. When you first came into Taoist practice and Qigong tea ceremony, and what has kept you so devoted to this path for so many years?

Speaker 1 · 0:45Oh, great question.

Speaker 2 · 0:47I got involved with Eastern philosophy in 1968. I think it was my last year in high school, and I lived in a little town called Mathewan, Massachusetts, a little north of Boston. And in my local library, I found a book by a guy from the next town over, Lowell, named Jack Karouac, who had a very similar background of French-Canadian, Roman Catholic, working class family as I had. And he wrote a book called The Dharma Bums, which was a fairly thinly autobiography of himself, especially his relationship with Gary Snyder, who he had a different name for. I can't remember the name he used. I was raised in Roman Catholic, and those were the days when the Mass was all done in Latin, and none of us knew in the audience and the views knew what was going on. And it definitely didn't feed me in any kind of spiritual, emotional way. And then I discovered Buddhism. So I started studying up on Buddhism, and then it was the 1960s, and that was an amazing time. For those of you who were there in your youth in the 60s, there was so much going on. And I lived between Boston and Berkeley. Got involved with doing yoga and meditation. There really wasn't any tai chi or Taoist stuff going on in Boston, at least at that time, and sort of just kept that up over the years. And was sitting fairly regularly with Zazen. I had a Zen teacher here in Eugene. And then I moved to Portland. And one day I was at another metaphysical bookstore. And in the very small used book section, I found a book by a Taoist master, a contemporary Taoist master named Watching Me. And I bought it, took it home, and it just made so much sense to me on so many different levels. And I really felt like I was coming home to something that I knew from possibly a past life. So that was in 1991. So I've been studying with him over the years. He's 103 now and he doesn't really teach in public anymore. I have the good fortune to study with many great Qigong teachers and meditation teachers in China. For years I took groups to China. We went to the Sacred Mountains and Wudong Mountains, Jingchen Mountains, worked with Taoist people there. For 25 years, I published a Taoist magazine called The Empty Vessel, the Journal of Taoist Philosophy and Practice, the only Taoist magazine in the West. I passed that on a little before COVID, because I had done 25 years and felt like I wanted to do something

Speaker 2 · 3:12else. So I had some serious health issues. I also came to this stuff through health, which is how a lot of people get introduced to Qigong, for instance. I had an incurable disease called chronic fatigue syndrome to the point where I was totally bedridden and had three children. Fortunately, had a wife. She ended up doing a lot with the kids, and Chinese herbs got me out of bed, and Qigong is what cured me. So I'm a big believer in all that stuff. My Taoist studies and training at Qigong meditation, Feng Shui, Cha Dao, the Way of Tea have impacted every single aspect of my entire life.

Speaker 1 · 3:50Sounds like it saved your life in some aspects too.

Speaker 2 · 3:53Definitely, definitely. Yeah, I was in pretty bad shape when we started. Wow. And then once I got cured or whatever, healed from using Chinese medicine, then I was like, what's the philosophy behind Chinese medicine? Because those of you who might know a little bit about Chinese medicine, it views how the body works in a totally different way than Western medicine. And then I discovered, oh, this Taoism, which is like at least 5,000 years old, is where Chinese medicine comes from.

Speaker 1 · 4:21I'm glad that it healed you physically and probably in many other ways

Speaker 1 · 4:26too. I know this is a big question, but can you talk about maybe some of the essence of Taoism that you find so healing for people?

Speaker 2 · 4:34Well, Taoism is very earthy. There's sort of two branches of Taoism. The oldest branch of Taoism, sometimes called Dao Zha, is sometimes called classical or philosophical Taoism. It goes back to Dao Zhe Jing, which many people know about in the West and Jongzi and some of those kind of teachers. And then there's also the religious side called Dao Zhou with temples and priests and nuns and ritual. I lean more towards the first. I have friends who are ordained priests in the Taoist religion, and I have a lot of respect for it. But the teachings go back thousands of years. Lao Tzu wrote his book Tao Zhu Jing 2,500 years ago. And it's the second most highly translated book in the world after the Bible. So it talks a lot about these principles. Like I appreciate what you were saying earlier about being flexible, because that is a major Taoist principle. Flexibility, adaptability. We're giving these ideas, these metaphors like water. Water is eminently adaptable. If you put it in a round container, it becomes round. You put it in a square container, it becomes square. The idea is can we be that adaptable? So that when we find ourselves in situations that we may not feel comfortable with, we find a way to adapt. For me, the most important principle is called uwei, W-U-W-E-I. Directly translating means not doing. But what it means is not overdoing, not overextending, not forcing, not pushing the river, as we said in the 60s. And so these principles all come together: flexibility, uwei, the watercourse way, going slowly, being natural, being spontaneous, being real, being authentic. These are all the principles we use. And then we have practices like meditation. We have a lot of different kinds of meditation, and qigong, which means basically working with qi. And what makes Taoist meditation kind of unique among Eastern practices is that all the practices in Taoism use this principle of qi. So even when we're sitting with eyes closed, breathing, we're also moving qi around in our body in different ways, bringing in qi, clean qi from outside, letting out toxic qi, qi gong. We're moving, we have moving forms of qi gong, we have just standing still forms, we have lying down forms, we have sitting forms. In other words, no matter what your situation, what your health issues are, there is a form of qigong, of Taoist meditation that will work for you. Things like that.

Speaker 1 · 7:08Sounds very accessible. You're talking about Taoism as being quite earthy, you're talking about water.

Speaker 1 · 7:18Can you talk about the importance of nature in the practice itself? And does it help to practice in nature or reflect on nature as a part of our Taoist practice?

Speaker 2 · 7:33Yes, definitely. In Taoism, nature is considered the highest teacher. More important than any book that anyone wrote or any book you read, nature is the greatest teacher. And doing Qigong, for instance, or even meditation, or even walking in nature, is so important to us. You know, a lot of this stuff comes out of ancient Chinese culture, Chinese civilization, which was an agrarian culture. So they had a few big cities. Some of the back in like Tang Dynasty, they had some of the biggest cities in the world, but three-quarters of the population lived in the country, and people were farming. There was no like farmer's almanac. Most farmers didn't know how to read, but they could read the sky, they could read the earth, they can tell this is the time to plant, this is the time to hold back, this is the time we need to put certain things into the fields, when is the time where we reap the harvest? They had to know all that stuff. And so the people who became the mystics, the Daoist mystics, they were paying attention to nature. They were paying attention to the changing of the seasons, the cycles of the seasons, and tracking the cycles of the seasons within their own body, and then paying attention when an animal gets sick or injured, what plant are they going to eat? And then thinking, why don't we try some of that one? 2000 years ago, some of these books of Chinese medicine are still used today. In the beginning of the Tao De Ching, the most famous book of Taoism, it says, the Tao that can be written or defined or put into a box is not the real Tao. And many times in that book he says, get out of your head and into your belly. Give up intellectual learning and you will have no more problems. It's really not an intellectual understanding, it's more of a gut understanding. If that answers your question in any way.

Speaker 1 · 9:29Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 · 9:31And please feel free to keep expanding. I find this fascinating. I do have some background with Taoism, but I find it very helpful to hear you articulate all this.