Return To The Belly

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. One of the things I appreciate about Solala's work is that it does not present meditation as something rigid or painful or overly serious or really cut off from ordinary life. In the Taoist way, meditation can happen anytime. Sitting, standing, walking, breathing, drinking tea, moving slowly, listening inwardly, and learning again how to live in rhythm with the body, the earth, and the changing seasons. So Lila, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you with us here.

Speaker 2 · 0:58It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 1 · 0:59I just want to talk about getting out of your head and into your belly. This is more like sensing into your gut. I assume you mean that literally, like bring awareness to the belly, to the gut. Is that a core practice, or how does that look for someone who wants to practice this? Can you talk about that? Practice.

Speaker 2 · 1:20Well, we have in Taoist practice we have three main energy centers in our body, sometimes called elixir fields or dance. The first one is in our lower abdomen, directly behind our navel, which is a pretty large area. And then the middle Dantian is in the heart center, the upper Dantian in the third eye center. So correlating somewhat with yoga. But the foundation of most of these qigong, neiditation practices is working with the lower Dantian, putting our attention in our lower Dantian, which is also where our reproductive organs, beginning of life, when we're in our mama's belly and the womb, all our nutrition is coming through our navel, right? Through the umbilical cord. And so when we are born into this world, that gets cut. So our deep energetic connection to our mother gets cut. And so we do a lot of work with, especially in the beginning, but even in many advanced Qigong practices, we're focusing on that lower Dantian. Like if you're building a house, first you build the foundation, then you build the walls, and then you build the roof. It's the idea of not being in our head, in our intellectual, understanding all these principles, not just intellectually. To really understand Taoism, you need to understand it by doing the practices, the Qigong, the meditation, the breathing practices, the moving practices that we do, the stillness practices that we do. That's

Speaker 2 · 2:50how you really understand it, which I think is different, especially in Western culture. A lot of it is about understanding it intellectually, going to college, studying ink textbooks. And Lao Tzu, 2,500 years ago, was noticing that people were getting caught up in that kind of thing. And he wrote towards the end of the Zhou dynasty, which had been in power for hundreds of years and was starting to really unravel and fall apart. And he actually had this really cushy job. He worked for the government in the capital, and he was in charge of the Imperial Archives, which is all the written books and records from the whole government. And he was also an Yijing master. He would do Yijing readings, divinations for the emperor. But he decided that things were really falling apart and he didn't want any part of it, and so he decided to leave. The story of how, if you don't mind if I go into the story of Dada Jing. This is great. Okay, it's a fascinating story. And of course, a lot of modern scholars say, well, it didn't happen that way. Lao Tzu was not a real guy. No one person wrote the whole book. But for me, the story is so powerful and lovely that I usually teach it as, well, this is a story. This is what I think could very well have happened. And it really doesn't matter if it really happened that way or not, because we have the book. So he gets in a cart, an ox cart. So a lot of times you'll see statues or paintings or pictures of Lao Tzu riding an ox, but really he was going hundreds of miles into the wilderness. So it makes more sense to me that an ox cart pulled by an ox, not that it matters that much. He's out there, he's got one student with him. He's going out to the very vast end of the Chinese Empire. Beyond that is what they consider barbarians, these people that dress in animal skins, eat raw meat, don't even have an intelligible language, they're total barbarians, and that's where he's going. This guy who's very cultivated worked for the government. And just before he leaves China, there's one last gateway. And the guy who was in charge of that, named Yin Shi, also was fairly cultivated spiritually. And the story is that one day he's up on top of the battlements and he sees a purple cloud coming his way. And so he thinks, okay, that means some high-level person is coming this way. So at first he's very surprised if this creaky ox cart comes in to the gate and a kind of a creaky old man gets down from the ox cart and they have tea together. They speak through the night. Yinxi is so excited to learn these teachings that Laoze has. And he's saying, Okay, so do you have any books? Anything you can leave me with, so I can share this with others. And Lao Tzu said, No, I haven't written any books. I really don't like the idea of imprisoning my words and teachings into a book. But the story goes that Yinshi eventually tucked them into it. And in those days they didn't have paper yet, or it wasn't used very much, and they cut slats of bamboo so that they were flat pieces of bamboo, and then they were tied together with string, and they would write, just like today, top to bottom, right to left, and then they would roll the bamboo thing up, and that was a book. So Lassa wrote this 5,000 characters, not very large, and then went off to the wilderness and was never seen from again. So he didn't stay around to start a cult or himself as a cult leader or anything. He just had what he had to say in the simplest way possible and then left. That was religion didn't start to like eight or nine hundred years later.

Speaker 1 · 6:18I really resonate with the essence of things, and then letting silence do the rest, or you know, letting nature continue to teach us and letting ourselves practice what was said.

Speaker 1 · 6:32Thank you for sharing that story. Your new book is called Returning to the Source. I'm wondering what the source means to you? I find that ironic to ask since we're talking about something that can't be named.

Speaker 2 · 6:49Yes, but we humans have figured out lots of waste in Yeah.

Speaker 1 · 6:53Can you talk about what the source is and whether the source is itself sacred and how we can tap into the source or realize we are the source, etc.?

Speaker 2 · 7:07Yeah, all of the above. It is very sacred. Source is also a word for Tao. When Lautze wrote his book, he wanted to explain how cosmologically how the world comes into be, where he talks about being comes from non-being, or the Buddhists would say emptiness. Being comes from non-being, and then it eventually returns back to non-being. And he says, being and non-being, they have two different names, but they come from the same source. And the last lines of the very first chapter, he says, mystery within mystery, the gateway to all marvelous wonders. So the source with the capital S is what Chinese call Tao, what we might call nature. And we have gotten more so every year, it seems like, as human beings, farther away from nature, meaning nature like trees and oceans and rivers and things like that, but also being natural beings ourselves as we're becoming human computers, and computers are becoming more human, and we don't really know where it's all going to end up. And so why don't we take some time, spend some time in the timeless time? Just like Hinduism, Buddhism, many indigenous cultures, as well as Taoism, slowing down the mind, what the Buddhists call the monkey mind, Taoist called the wild horse of the mind, and just do some deep, gentle breathing and exercise our spiritual muscles, what we call self-cultivation, like we're planting this garden with these seeds of wisdom that we've gathered from all our teachers from all religions and all paths, and then we tenderly tend that garden and water it with their tears of joy and grief and mulch it with the bullshit experiences of our life, and then we get to be rewarded when it grows into a tree or a plant or a tomato or a sunflower, or just a deeper understanding of what's most important. Because that's something that people have fallen away from. What's most important? Do I have a good job? You know, do I have the right kind of house? All those kinds of things. What's really important, according to the ancient teachers, and this is true across a lot of places, is do we feel connected to a source of some kind, whether we call it Tao, Wakam Tanka, Allah? And do we feel our life has some kind of meaning? Meaning not just the kind of meaning of how much money we make or anything like that, but true meaning so that when we are on our way out or on our deathbed, we have some feeling like my life has been full. My life has been blessed in so many ways. Yes, there were many painful, painful times, but all in all, I feel like where I'm going is where I came from, and where I'm going is going to be just as good as where I am now. If not more, Jongse, the ancient Taoist sage, said, What makes my life good will also make my death good. So we have a seed of that Tao within us. So when we're doing our meditation, we're returning. The idea is that we came out of our mother, the belko cord was cut, we're suddenly in this world, and there's so many things we have to learn how to do, how to speak, how to breathe, how to feed ourselves, how to crawl and walk and have to get a job and all these things that we forget what it was like when we were in our mama's belly, so intimately connected with her. And then when we come out and the umbilical cord is cut, we still have that urge that we would love to be back in the arms of what Lao Tzu calls the great mother or the primal mother. It's how he describes Tao as the great mother. And then we have this whole idea of, say, Guanyin, for instance, the goddess of mercy and compassion, representing the compassionate nature of Tao or compassionate, loving nature of the universe.

Speaker 2 · 11:08Beautiful.

Speaker 1 · 11:09I'm just thinking out loud about the great mother. You spoke about the umbilical cord earlier in the literal sense, when we're in our physical, biological mother, and how when we are connected to that cord inside our mother, we are relatively still. Sure. There's nowhere to go, but also there's this stillness. You're talking about how a lot of our culture and society for hundreds, thousands of years have been moving away from nature. And there's also this element of going slowly, which is really important. Thinking about how there may be this correlation of speed and also disconnection. How if we're moving more and more quickly, how that may be feeding our disconnection with nature. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on speed or acceleration that we find ourselves in. If you can invite us into the world of going slowly and noticing when we're going really fast and how that correlates with our connection with nature.

Speaker 2 · 12:28Let me just say something about this mother connection cord thing for us. When you read this book, it's not about, well, this is a history of Taoism, these are the ideas of Taoism, but they are guided meditations. So every chapter, past a few introductory chapters, is a practice. So we have a practice where we connect an Qi umbilical cord to the Great Mother. So we feel a real energetic connection to the Great Mother Tao or the Great Mother Goddess, and so that we can tap into being fed by the Tao, by the great mother, so that we can get a little more of that sense of when we were just embraced by our mother inside and this feeling of the great mother, the cosmic mother of total loving, non-critical, not judgmental, totally supportive, loving, that we can tap into ourselves in a very real way. That's just one of the meditations. So they're all meditations that I've been doing for years and years with my classes. I teach a bunch of classes every week. So I'm very excited, by the way, to be doing this with Shambhala because every third book probably in my library has been published by Shambhala.

Speaker 1 · 13:41Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 · 13:43Yeah, all kinds of stuff. So far, they've been really great to work with. And I actually was in a recording studio last week. We did an audio version of the book, which was very interesting because I'm in a booth and I got these headphones on, and there's a guy outside of it doing all the knobs and everything. And then in my headphones is a producer woman from England who's beaming in from the UK through my headphones, who's helping me along with it. So it's almost like that connecting to the mother again. We get some direction, we get some medicine. It's a kind of medicine, right? So this whole slowing down thing is called monzo, M-A-N-Z-O-U. And monzo is taking the time to allow something, not force something, to allow something to happen in a very grounded, rooted, deeply aware and functional way. Nowadays in China, when you say goodbye to someone, you say Zai Jen, which basically means goodbye. But in the old days they would say manzo. Manzo, go away slowly, or sometimes it can be translated as take it easy. And the last time I was in China, I was in a train station and I went to a little shop to get some water, and I'm like dashing out the door to my train. And actually the woman behind the counter called out, monzo, manzo. Because manzo is about acting slowly, listening slowly, speaking slowly, eating slowly, all those kinds of things. When we slow down, we have less accidents, and somehow we're able to tap into something, I think any experience in a deeper way when we're slowing down. So very, very important compliment.

Speaker 1 · 15:26Yeah. I have been accused for maybe my whole life of going too slowly to the point where some people think I'm maybe out of it. And I have always taken almost a sense of pride in moving slowly, listening slowly, speaking on the slower side, because it feels like I'm just able to stay centered easier when I'm slower. And when I move quickly, then I tend not to notice half as much as I do when I'm moving slowly. So I think that it's a bit challenging for us in our culture to slow down. And one of the things that I find really helpful, say in the Buddhist tradition, is their form of walking meditation in which we're sensing the bottom of each foot on the ground as we walk, moving quarter speed or just slower than normal, usually, so that we can notice each sensation more and more.

Speaker 1 · 16:35One of the fascinating parts of your book is about organ balancing. And I'm wondering if you can talk about how different organs are connected with different emotional qualities and talking about the Taoist understanding of the organs and emotions.

Speaker 2 · 16:54If I may just take one moment to address what you were just talking about, this going slow. Yeah. People looking at you in a funny way. There's a chapter, one of my favorite chapters, Daota Jing, chapter 20. He says, most people are like running around in a rat race. They're getting things done, they're building businesses, you know, they're doing all this. And I'm just sitting over here on the side, and people are looking at me, and to them, I seem dull or stupid. But then the last line he says, but I am different from these others because I am nourished by the great mother. I love that image.

Speaker 1 · 17:31I kind of like being misperceived in that way. Like sometimes I'll even kind of feed into it a little bit and pick my nose in public and just kind of go against the grain a little bit.

Speaker 2 · 17:43Yes, the organ thing is real. And this is used, by the way, in modern Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine practitioners. This is how they look at the human body, very different than Western. So in the book, there's this meditation that I take you through, which is going through the five major organs, the liver, the heart, the spleen, the lungs, and the kidneys, called the zung organs. But what's fascinating to me is that their idea of organs, there's the functional thing and what organs do, but there's also an energetic aspect of the organ. And there's a system called the Wu Xing, which is often translated as the five-element system, but what it actually means is the five transformational phases. So often we start with the liver, and there's a color, a season, a direction, a positive and negative emotional quality, as well as things like a power animal, to just name a few.

Speaker 1 · 18:38Wow, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 · 18:39Yeah. So the liver is green, and the direction is east, the sunrise, the direction of new beginnings. The element is wood, wood of green growing things, grass, plants, trees. The liver, of course, helps with detoxifying our system. It also helps with the free flowingness of blood and she and lymph throughout our system. So in that way, it is also associated with the positive, emotional, energetic of flexibility and free-flowingness. There is a negative quality, which is anger, anger, frustration. When people are having anger issues, sometimes it's because of their diet or possibly an alcoholic, their liver is getting very tight. So this idea with our liver as things are moving throughout our system, but we are also moving throughout our life in a very flexible way. In our mind, our body, Laoza says when the plant is young, it's very juicy and bendy. And when it gets old, it becomes brittle and dry and breaks. And that happens with people too. As people age, if they don't stretch, they don't do any kind of physical exercise at all. And then in their mind becomes very inflexible and brittle. We're seeing our mind's eye, the color of the liver here on the right side of our abdomen, right under the rib cage. And we're feeding it with this idea of yes, we want to be connected to the flexibility and the free flowingness of living our life not in a rut, but in a groove, which are two very different things. And the power animal is the green dragon. And then we move up to the heart, the color is red, the season is summer, the element is fire, and associated with the energy of joy, creativity, and expansion. And we know also now that the heart itself is not just a blood pump, but actually sends enormous amounts of electrical messages to the brain and the gut, just to say a very small amount of that. And the power animal is the red phoenix. So it's that animal, that mythical animal that is able to rise from its own ashes, or as we go through our life, sometimes we burn down for various reasons. And then we have to find a way to bring ourselves back alive again up from those ashes, whether we've caused it from various reasons or possible health reasons or things like that. And so we're looking at the redness, the brightness, the joyful attitude of the heart, and that red phoenix. And then we move down to our spleen, the lower part of the abdomen, and the spleen is the earth element. The color is yellow, and the spleen is paired with the stomach, has to do with digesting our food, but also digesting our experiences in life. Since it's the earth element, do we feel grounded or do we not feel grounded? And do we feel empathy and a connection to all other living beings? The two-legged, the four legged, the flying people, the swimming people, the standing still people. Do we not have that connection? And the animal here is the yellow dragon. And anytime we feel an imbalance in one of these, we can do meditation, we can do qigong, we can do dietary things, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, all those kinds of things to help. Peel those areas. And then we move up to the lungs where the color is white. The power animal is the white tiger. So all of these have very different feelings, too. A lot of it goes back to shaman times. Most Taoist teachings and practices go way back to shaman times. So, of course, respiration, bringing oxygen, oxygenating our blood. And Dhuongzi says modern people, he's saying 2,000 years ago, modern people only breathe from their throat, where the ancient sages breathe from the bottom of their feet. And even today you say, well, we have to teach you how to breathe properly. And this thing, I've been breathing all my life. I know how to breathe. You're breathing from like the middle of your lungs up. You're never filling your lungs with oxygen or expanding out the carbon dioxide. And not only that, when you're breathing deeply, it moves the diaphragmatic muscle up and down, which massages our digestive organs. You know, a lot going on in this simple thing. And then the last one is kidneys. When Chinese medicine talks about kidneys, they mean kidneys in adrenals, the little adrenal glands that sit on top of the kidneys. And many people today have run-down adrenal energy. So they drink more coffee or those kinds of things. And they go to a Chinese doctor and they say, Well, your kidneys are really weak. And they go, Oh my God, I'm gonna have to go on dialysis. No, it's the energetic quality of your kidneys and especially your adrenals that's weak. And when that happens, the negative aspects of the kidneys, which is fear and anxiety, comes up, worrying too much, having all this anxiety about life, where the positive is what people used to call backbone. She really has a strong backbone. And the power animal here is the black turtle. And the color is black. It's really like a very deep blue black. And the turtle is very different than the white tiger pouncing around. The black turtle is moving very slowly, very sedately. It's associated with the winter season when, especially in the old days, people would come together around the campfires and the lodges and tell stories and drink wine that they made from their plants that they had grown. And so it's a whole cycle that you go through. And then there's healing sounds, which are actually more vibrations that we say subvocally. And so this idea of these ancient Taoists tracking, first they were looking at the seasons, they're looking at the stars and seeing specific star patterns and watching how they move and change and how that affects us and how the moon affects the tides within our own body and women's menses and all that. What are these organs doing in our body, physically and energetically, and possibly even spiritually? And how can we balance all these and strengthen the parts that need to be strengthened and balance the ones that need to be balanced? Because there were no books of Chinese medicine. They had to figure it all out themselves. And what is this pathway, this point at the bottom of our feet called Yung Shen, the bubbling wells point, the first one in the kidney meridian, and follow how that goes up to our body and to our kidneys. And they mapped out this whole internal world, is what I'm trying to say, on their own. And then they've been sharing that for thousands of years with us, even to today. We're still working with that map.

Speaker 1 · 25:18Yeah, it's highly detailed. I didn't know it went into those different kinds of categories, and you're just kind of scratching the

Speaker 1 · 25:25surface. I have a question around acupuncture. I've done quite a bit of acupuncture, and I hear different people say that it is helpful, it's not helpful, it just depends on who you see. Do you have a take on the effectiveness of acupuncture for certain things?

Speaker 2 · 25:43Oh, yeah, definitely. When they've mapped out all these channels, what we call meridians, sometimes it's just like you're driving down the freeway and suddenly traffic is all stopped for some reason. An injury or an accident, or they're working on the road or something, and suddenly we're moving at like 10 miles an hour, and we're trying to get to this other place to do what we want to do there, but we're moving at 10 miles an hour, or we're totally stopped. And the qi in our body sometimes gets stuck that way. And that can cause pain, disease, tumors, all kinds of things, emotional states. And so what the acupuncturist is putting a needle in a specific juncture on that path to kind of open things up so things start flowing freely. That's one of the very basic that there are specific places, places on our wrist that connects to our heart center, things like that. One's right here to the large intestine. And this brings us into the world of qigong, because we are doing, we are moving most of the time moving pretty slowly, like Tai Ji, Tai Ji Chen in the West called Tai Chi. It is a form of meditation as well as exercise, but we talk about it as stillness within movement. So we're meditating, we're moving very slowly, and we're balancing ourselves and we're moving out, and then we're pulling in, we've got weight on one foot, then another, kind of like what you were talking about, the walking. But the whole time we're moving, we're feeling our deep sense of stillness. And then when we do our stillness meditation, we're moving qi around and doing things. So there's a point of movement within our stillness, even though we're sitting, not moving on the outside at all, other than breathing. So it works both ways. And the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, some people may know when the government tried to destroy all traditional Chinese culture, the communists took over. They were gonna get rid of Chinese medicine, and they decided it's a very inexpensive way to treat people. And they said, we're gonna get rid of all this stuff like magic and astrology and feng shui and all those kind of woo-woo things that they felt was connected to the shaman culture, which they were totally against. We're just gonna do herbs and acupuncture. And that form of medicine, they call it traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, but it's actually communist homogenized medicine. And there are people in the West who are learning some of the old practices, and some people that are become fabulous healers, and of course, depending on some people who are just naturally good at it, or some people keep learning all the time, even though they've been practicing for years, they're still learning. And they are bringing back into, okay, what's your diet like? Do you ever meditate? Do you ever walk? Not just you let it on the table, I stick needles in you, and then you go. There's a lot more to it, and I'm not here just to fix you. The really high level teachers and practitioners I'm talking about. This is something we're gonna do together. And so when you luck into working with someone like that, amazing things can happen.