Taoist Meditation Practices For Stillness And Vitality, with Solala Towler

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 Tauler, a longtime teacher of Qigong, Taoist Meditation, Tea Ceremony, and the author of many books on Taoist wisdom and practice. Solila's new book is called Returning to the Source: Taoist Meditations for Rediscovering the Sacred in Everyday Life. And it offers a beautiful collection of Taoist practices for cultivating stillness, emotional balance, vitality, groundedness, and a deeper relationship with what Taoists might call the source. The book includes practices such as stillness meditation, grounding and rooting meditation, organ balancing, the six healing sounds, tea meditation, the small heavenly orbit, and internal alchemy, among many others. 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. And I think it's especially helpful right now when so many of us are trying to find some steadiness in a world that seems to keep speeding up, while our nervous systems are quietly asking if we might please stop pretending we are machines. In this conversation, we're going to explore what Taoist meditation can offer us, how Qigong and stillness support each other, why slowing down is not laziness, how practices like grounding, breath, and inner alchemy can help us to return to ourselves, and what it means to rediscover the sacred in everyday life. So Lila, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you with us here.

Speaker 2 · 2:26It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 1 · 2:27I'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 · 2:42Oh, great question.

Speaker 2 · 2:44I 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 Mathu in 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 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 it 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 Wutong Mountains, Qingchen 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 else. 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 and Qigong meditation, Feng Shui, Cha Dao, the Way of Tea, have impacted every single aspect of my entire life.

Speaker 1 · 5:47Sounds like it saved your life in some aspects too. Definitely.

Speaker 2 · 5:51Definitely. 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 · 6:18I'm glad that it healed you physically and probably in many other ways too.

Speaker 1 · 6:23I 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 · 6:31Well, Taoism is very earthy. There's sort of two branches of Taoism. The oldest branch of Taoism, sometimes called Tao Zha, is sometimes called classical or philosophical Taoism. It goes back to Tao Zhu Jing, which many people know about in the West and Drong Tzi 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 Zu 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 · 9:05Sounds very accessible. You're talking about Taoism as being quite earthy, you're talking about water.

Speaker 1 · 9:15Can 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 · 9:30Yes, 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, that was 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 · 11:26Oh, yeah, absolutely. And 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. I just want to talk about that last thing you said around 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 · 12:02Well, 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 how 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 Tse, 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.

Speaker 2 · 13:57And 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 Da 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 glass 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 that 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 Lao Tsa 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 Lotsa 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 till like eight or nine hundred years later.

Speaker 1 · 17:00I 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. Thank you for sharing that story.

Speaker 1 · 17:15Your 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 · 17:31Yes, but we humans have figured out lots of ways to do.

Speaker 1 · 17:34Yeah. Can 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 · 17:48Yeah, all of the above. It is very sacred. Source is also a word for Tao. When Laozer 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 called 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, we're 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. 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, Guan Yin, for instance, the goddess of mercy and compassion representing the compassionate nature of Tao or compassionate, loving nature of the universe. Beautiful.

Speaker 1 · 21:51I'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 · 23:10Let me just say something about this mother connection cord thing first. 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 · 24:23Yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 · 24:24Yeah. 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?

Speaker 2 · 24:57So 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 into 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 outzo, 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 company.

Speaker 1 · 26:07Yeah. 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

Speaker 1 · 27:16and more. One 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 · 27:36If I may just take one moment to address what you were just talking about, this going slow.

Speaker 1 · 27:41Yeah.

Speaker 2 · 27:42People looking at you in a funny way. There's a chapter, one of my favorite chapters, Tao Tajing, 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 · 28:13I 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 green a little bit.

Speaker 2 · 28:25Yes, 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 zang 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 · 29:20Wow, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 · 29:21Yeah. 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 chi 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, Lautze 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 heal 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 2000 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 rundown 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 going to 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 in 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 · 35:59Yeah, it's highly detailed. I didn't know it went into those different kinds of categories, and you're just kind of scratching the surface.

Speaker 1 · 36:07I 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 · 36:25Oh, 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 Chuan 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 a 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 the stuff like magic and astrology and feng shui and all those kind of 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.

Speaker 1 · 39:32You mentioned earlier about how a lot of us breathe from, say, the throat or the middle of our lungs. And I just want to invite people to check out some of our podcast episodes, our guided meditations on breathing with the whole body and through the whole body. And I loved that phrase that you mentioned around breathing from the bottoms of our feet. Just inviting people to be aware of like where they're breathing from and can we breathe with more of our body over

Speaker 1 · 40:05time. One of the parts of your book is about tea meditation. I used to live in Beijing and found an old Taoist master who was also a tea expert, and he would take me around to the different tea markets. And when we would practice together, I didn't really know it as religious, but in hindsight, I realized he was teaching me different Taoist practices. And one of the pillars of our time together was drinking and preparing tea. And one of the magical moments of my life was when as a very deep Taoist practitioner slash hermit, he would prepare tea and I would smell it, I would taste it, I would drink it, and it was lovely. And then he would ask me to basically do the same thing physically. Wonderful. And I was carrying a bit of a different energy as a stressed, burned-out, white-collar worker who was coming to him for help because I was not very balanced at the time. And when I prepared the tea, it would feel and smell and taste very differently than his. Even though it was the same tea, the energy with which we connected with it was different in a very subtle but perceptible level. And it's hard to describe it to people or not sound like I'm woo-woo myself, but there was something qualitatively different. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about how we can sense into the sacred with tea, what tea meditation can be, and what it can teach us about presents.

Speaker 2 · 42:09Well, as you mentioned, there is a chapter on tea in my book. This cup I've been drinking water, this is the characters for Cha Dao. And Cha Dao means the Tao or way of tea. And using tea as a form of meditation, as cultivation, we do these gungfu tea ceremonies. Tea's a big part of my life. I have a tea room in my house. We sit down, my partner and I do tea. I do public teas. I was at a Qigong conference a few years ago. I served tea to 50 people with little paper cups and led them to the meditation. And I always tell, like most of the people in the West, tea thing is becoming very popular in the West, you may have noticed. Even I go to like music festivals out here on the West Coast, and there are people sitting on the side of the path doing offering gung fu tea to people. Gung fu, which is a term meaning something you practice and get good at. And gung fu can mean tea, flower arranging, you know, anything. It doesn't mean martial arts. It can be martial arts. Martial arts, we know you were in Beijing, you know, Wu Xu is what the name for martial arts. So a lot of the times we use a tea called Pu'ar tea. It's a magical tea. It's grown way in the southwest corner of China in Yunnan province, where tribal people live, the Bulang people, the Yi people, and they're still very connected to their animistic kind of leaps through there.

Speaker 1 · 43:27Yeah, like Dali and Old Dali and Kunming and beautiful area in the mountains.

Speaker 2 · 43:33Yeah. So this poor tea is grown as a tree. Originally all tea came from trees, but later on they started cutting it down and making it to bushes much easier to pick. Some of these trees' roots go down 100, 150 feet, so pulling up huge amounts of nutrition from the living, breathing earth. And the people climb the trees, pick big leaves, and they process it and it's fermented. It's either naturally fermented, which takes a really long time. Costs a lot more money or kind of fast track fermented and piled and wetted down and fermented that way, but it has a different feeling and experience and does things for our digestive system. Working with that tea master, he may have used very small teapots and very tiny cups. There's a kind of clay called I Shing clay. It's very porous, it holds the heap very well. It is said that if you use the same pot after a number of years, it becomes so impregnated with tea that you can pour hot water and pour out tea. And it's been used for hundreds of years. I don't know if you're familiar with the Japanese Zen tea ceremony, which is very formal, very rigid, very serious, not a lot of joking around. And the Taoist tea ceremony, which is more Taoist, the Chinese tea ceremony, even if they're not Taoist, has roots in it in Taoism. But we're serving people, we're pouring the water, we are trying to bring a sense of presence. Like what you're talking between the tea you served and the tea your master served, because they're bringing their tea in their presence. I've written a few books on tea, and one of them, a tea master friend of mine, a Caucasian guy up in Portland, Oregon, said, I would rather be served tea, lipt in tea in an old tin can by somebody who is bringing their presence and their love and respect than be served the most expensive tea in the world with someone who is not present. You can use expensive tea. When I'm doing things online, especially, I say, you don't have to use Chinese tea. You don't have to use tiny cups, whatever tea you like, constant comment, you know, whatever it is, whatever bowl you use, but we're gonna do something where we're gonna bring a sense of presence. We're gonna pour the tea in a cup and we're gonna hold it in front of our heart, connect what we call the cha chi, the qi of the tea into our own heart. We're gonna give thanks for the trees, from the trees that grew in the earth that were watered by the rain and blessed by the sun and then picked by these people and processed. People who have learned how to do this over many generations, and they may not be meditating while they're doing it, but they are putting their knowledge from many generations of families. And then it comes to me here, and I just want to give us some respect and use it to really go within. We sip the first sip with the front of our tongue, the second with the middle of our tongue, the last with the back of our tongue, and we're coming to it with a sense of gratitude and grace. And then the tea becomes kind of a meditation, and we can still talk to our friends. You know, I have this big calligraphy in my wall in my tea room that says pinming lun Dao that a Qigong master friend of mine did for me. Pinming means savor tea. Lun Dao means discuss Tao, which doesn't necessarily mean you have to talk about Taoism. Poetry story, what's going on in your life, but savor the tea and this character Min is three squares, like three mouths. So it means just like, oh, I got some tea, you know, and then I'm gonna guzzle it down. No, I'm gonna savor. And even you can drink coffee this way. It's that idea of manza. We're doing it slowly, we're really experiencing what is this brew doing to my system, my energetic system, my digestive system, what's going on in my head while I'm doing this. So it's an entire school of Taoism. Everything from Taoism is all part of that tea ceremony, in my view.

Speaker 1 · 47:26You mean the movement of preparing, bringing it, definitely.

Speaker 2 · 47:31Yeah, the way you're holding the teapot and you're giving the cup to someone and you're receiving the cup from someone. We do a little thing. If we had a I usually use much smaller cups, but we're holding it thumb and finger and ring finger underneath it to support it. You've been to Beijing, you know what this tea thing is. It's a whole culture. And they're not all Taoist people or they're not all meditating while they're doing it, but they have a feeling, they have a respect, right? A feeling for the tea, even though they may not call it the qi, but that's why his tea was different than yours. But anyone who cultivates this kind of thing, then you can pour tea for people and give them a whole experience that they will enjoy and benefit from.

Speaker 1 · 48:14Yeah, even like walking through the tea markets, these almost like a shopping mall, you know, three stories high.

Speaker 2 · 48:22Yeah, I've been to that market.

Speaker 1 · 48:24Yeah.

Speaker 2 · 48:24Beijing, yeah.

Speaker 1 · 48:26And everyone selling tea from different regions and different vendors, and sometimes there would be like interspersed with mala shops or bead shops where you could, yeah. Briefly, if you could just talk about the puer as being a special tea, you talked about used to be growing on a tree, but like, is there something about that tea that's a little bit different?

Speaker 2 · 48:49Definitely. Traditionally, they would process it and then put it on a shelf and not even think about drinking it for at least 15, 20, 30 years. And this beneficial bacteria would grow through the tea and then it would be naturally fermented, and it's like a medicine. But that kind of tea now is very expensive. You can buy a brick like that big for three thousand dollars up. Oh wow. Because it's so expensive, and because modern people, even in China, you know, the whole system is getting faster, they figured out in the 1960s a way to fast track it. They pick the tea, they steam it, they process it, and then they pile it in huge piles on the floor in these warehouses, wet it down, and then put a thermal blanket over it, and then allow the bacteria to work its way through in like one and a half months it's ready. It's a different feeling, it's a different vibration. And that tea is very affordable. It brews very dark, it's very earthy. When you smell it, when you taste it, it's not like drinking mint tea or something. It's a very earthy tea, and some people don't like it. It has much less caffeine than, say, black tea or coffee. And so a lot of us that are into the gung fu thing, gung fu, started cult with oolong tea, but you mentioned that tea market in Beijing is like for someone like me, it's like heaven. Three floors of little, tiny little shops. And the thing in China is you go to a tea shop, you don't go, oh, I'll take that one and that one. It's like, oh, what is this one like? Well, sit down, I'll make some for you. And you sit and you drink tea with them, and sometimes they have little snacks and things. It's a little different culture. I've been going to Taiwan. I've been to China nine times, but I've been going to Taiwan lately, and it's a lot of tea culture. And I went in a little shop, he says, sit down, we're drinking tea, and he suddenly it's a very dark tea I'm drinking, and it's like, wow, what is this? A tea I wasn't familiar with, and it is called Liu Bao Tea. The tea that he was serving me was 40 years old, so aged, but not very expensive, especially with this guy. He's very affordable. It's like a fine wine. I'm not a wine drinker, but I understand you can buy cheap wine at the grocery store. Or if you really want to have something really good that was produced correctly and aged correctly, it gives you a whole different feeling, and that's what these aged wines are like. It's very fermented, it's green tea, white tea, red tea, black tea, poor tea, you know, a lot of different kinds of teas in China. And poor is kind of like in a zone on its own, and a lot of people like on the West Coast, probably the East Coast, the kind of young people, the hip people that are into the tea thing, they're serving either oolong or poor tea, which is spelled P-U-E-R. Sometimes there's an H on the end, and it's pronounced Pu'ar. A lot of people in the U.S. call it Pu'er, but one of my tea teachers said, Pu'er is a fart. So we don't want to use that. It's Pu' Beijing, they're big on the Rs, they would call Puar. They have that Beijing accent. Well, our sure for the future.

Speaker 1 · 51:53My wife is fluent in Mandarin, even though she's not Chinese, and she's teaching our daughter, our seven-year-old daughter, how to speak some words and they're practicing their R.

Speaker 2 · 52:05Yeah. Mandarin to me is very beautiful language. It's just very flowing. It's got the foretone, so it's kind of going up and down, but like Cantonese is like going way up and way down and way up and way down. I love the sound of Mandarin. I only speak the little one. I people have said I have a Beijing accent. Chinese people are so nice. You speak a little Chinese. Oh, you speak Chinese so well. And then they go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 · 52:34Yeah. Yeah, I would go back and forth between Beijing and Thailand. And Thailand has five different tones, and it was always a trick to try to go back up like that.

Speaker 1 · 52:46So Lola, thank you so much for sharing. I feel like I could listen to you for hours and maybe I'll come up to Eugene, Oregon sometime to visit and have some tea. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our community?

Speaker 2 · 53:00There's a term in Chinese called Junren. Z-H-E-N-R-E-N. Sometimes a G on the S-H E. Anyway, often translated as the perfect man. Well, first the call the character zhen means person. As you know, it doesn't mean man or woman. Junren means authentic person, someone who's authentically themselves, in touch with who they are authentically, and is able to share that with the world in a very authentic way. And many people in the modern world have no idea who they are authentically, or how to express themselves into the world in that way. And that's part of this cultivation practice of study, practice, applying all these principles to your real life. When you get that diagnosis that you've been scared of, you get in an accident, you lose a loved one, all these kinds of things that, oh wait, I have some tools I can use for this. And then I can get in touch with who I am really authentically? How do I express myself that way? To me, that's one of the most important points of all this cultivation stuff. And my book, I want to mention again, plug my book here, is practices. They are practices I've been teaching in my classes for sometimes for years. So I've developed them and a lot of them are fairly short. You can do it longer if you want. And the audiobook will be coming out also, and uh very excited to be part of that Shambhala world.

Speaker 1 · 54:26Join all of our elders and these masters who've been published through there. I feel like the emphasis on the meditations, the practices themselves is an important thing to emphasize. That this isn't just a bunch of concepts for us to think about in our head. These are actual practices that we can put into practice in an authentic way, that we don't have to be Chinese or tea lovers. We can just be ourselves and that these practices help us to rediscover our authentic selves more and more. And so I encourage everyone to check out the book. We'll put the link in the show notes. It's called Returning to the Source: Taoist Meditations for Rediscovering the Sacred in Everyday Life. Solala Tauler, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a inspiration is an overused word, but it's inspiring me to put this into practice and get outside and feel my feet on the ground and allow my chi to flow. So just on a personal level, thank you very much for that. And thank you for your good work in the world. Speaking of you're talking about the aging of the Pu'ar T, like for those of you who may be seeing Solola on video, you talk about being 18 in 1968. Well, you don't look like you were around in 1968. So these practices are 75 and a half, actually. Important. So it's cool to see the brightness in you at your age. So thank you so much for joining us today. See you next time.