“Those who wish to cultivate the Tao must tame the wayward mind.”[1]
Introduction
In Daoist practice we talk about two sides of cultivation: Ming and Xing Cultivation. You can consider that when you meditate, there are two areas of distraction that may make it more challenging to maintain stillness.
The first is discomfort in the body. Perhaps our legs ache, back is sore, knees hurt, fingers go numb, belly growls, nose itches, we are too weak or stiff to sit, etc., etc. These fall in the realm of Ming cultivation.
The second area of distraction is activity of the mind. We drift off into stray memories, worries, and thoughts, old emotions well up, we resist our meditation practice, we make excuses not to sit, we allow ourselves to be distracted by the environment, and when we do attain stillness, we can’t maintain it. Xing cultivation addresses these issues.
As Tai Chi and Qigong practitioners, we’re all familiar with aspects of Ming cultivation even if we’ve never heard the term cultivation of eternal life. It could also be called the cultivation of healthy longevity and when combined with alchemical practices, may result in the attainment of immortality, hence the name Cultivation of Eternal Life. Ming cultivation includes Tai Chi, Qigong, meditation, healthy diet, the use of Chinese medical practices such as acupuncture, bone setting, and herbalism. All of these practices have as their highest purpose the creation of a healthy vehicle (body) for us to do our meditation and alchemical practices until such time as we achieve immortality. While immortality may not be everyone’s goal, the side effects of healthy longevity are a fairly universal desire.
The oft-overlooked aspect of cultivation, Xing Cultivation, is the cultivation of original nature. But what is original nature?
You could think of original nature as who we are, personality or spirit wise, before the dross of ordinary human life begins to change us. Have you ever seen the beautiful smile of a young baby? Their curiosity, their openness, their non-judgment? Those are all reflections of original nature. My teacher says that our original nature is kindness. Original nature is the quality of our spirit before we learn language, are socialized, hurt, educated, or even traumatized by our experience in life.
The original nature is the Yuan Shen or Primordial Spirit as opposed to Shi Shen or Intelligent Spirit or wayward mind. The Yuan Shen stays with us through lifetimes and is that which persists beyond death. The Yuan Shen is our intuitive mind and has the capacity to connect with the universal field of existence, the Tao. The Shi Shen manifests at birth. It holds our ego, our emotions, our masks as well as the logical, reasoning part of our thinking process. It is a very important and necessary tool for us to navigate our human existence, but it does not persist beyond death. The Shi Shen is meant to be a tool for the Yuan Shen during the human life. Because of our conditioning from birth and the promotion of logic and reason, the Intelligent Spirit has gained much power in Western culture. Although some paths advocate “killing the ego,” in truth, we don’t want to kill it, we want to relegate it back to its proper place as the servant of the Yuan Shen rather than as than the master. We want to return to our original nature with the added wisdom developed through its cultivation.
The Complete Reality School of Taoism
The Complete Reality School of Taoism, founded by Wang Chong-yang (c. 960-1279 C.E.) advocated the dual cultivation of body and mind, of Xing and Ming. After Wang’s death, the Complete Reality School split into Northern and Southern branches. Qiu Chuji (c. 1148-1227,) one of Wang’s students, founded the Dragon Gate sect of Taoism, the best known of the Northern branches. Chang Po-Tuan (c. 983-1082 C.E.,) an internal alchemist, established the Southern branch.
The Northern branch taught that mind should be cultivated before the body and advocated celibacy. The Southern branch taught that the body should be cultivated first, then the mind and approved the use of sexual yoga techniques. The Northern branch tended to attract younger, more monastic practitioners while the Southern branch tended to have older lay persons with more life experience and responsibilities.[2] Northern and Southern branches both advocate BOTH Xing and Ming cultivation.
Interconnection of Xing and Ming Cultivation
Long before the Complete Reality School of Taoism took form, Lao Zi said,
“To realize the Tao within practitioners need to cultivate spirit and body simultaneously. To cultivate the spirit, which is the original nature of emptiness, you need to journey through five stages. To cultivate the body, which is the container for the life force, you need to go through seven steps. […] If you progress too fast in cultivating the spirit, the foundations of each stage will not be stable, and you will fall back to the initial stage easily. If you progress too slowly, your discipline must be strengthened.”[3]
More recently, (1794,) Liu Hua-yang published the Hui-Ming Ching as part of the Wu-Liu Hsien Tsung (Techniques of Immortality by Wu and Liu.) Hui-Ming means uniting wisdom-mind (or original nature) with the energy of life.[4]
The cultivation of the body smooths, opens and balances the energy body. Emotional trauma, that has not been fully processed and has hidden away in the body, may rise up to the surface to be transmuted. If we don’t do the Xing cultivation to transmute the trauma, it will find a new home elsewhere in the body.
When we do our Xing cultivation and transmute suppressed trauma, the energy body releases the associated blockage and becomes smoother, more balanced, more harmonious resulting in a more supple, healthier body.
In these ways Xing and Ming cultivation complement and support each other and so, ideally, progress in tandem. Avoidance of either one will slow progress of the other and may even block it.
Xing Cultivation Across Spiritual Paths
Xing cultivation shows up in many spiritual paths and has a variety of components. For example, Buddhists teach mindfulness practices, Vedanta (yoga) practitioners speak of activating the Observer or Self (original nature,) and Yaqui Indian shamanic practices include a process called recapitulation to clear the spirit.
What all of these techniques and practices have in common is that they require us to observe, own and transform our emotional wounds, our fragmented thinking habits, our ego, our desires, and any excessive reliance on the logical mind, so that we can move into and maintain present, direct awareness.
They are about returning power and “control” to the Yuan Shen or primordial mind. This doesn’t mean we become less intelligent (in fact we have the capacity to become far more intelligent,) but that the intellectual, logical and reasoning capabilities of the mind and the ego are relegated to their proper place as tools of the Primordial mind. When we return to our original nature, we can gain access to a much broader array of information and knowledge.
“The spirit (Shen) has the ability to moderate thoughts and actions. When it is allowed to rule properly, it can regulate mental, physical, and energetic activities and prevent thoughts and behavior from going awry.” (Lao Zi)[5]
The ability to moderate our thoughts and actions supports our ability to stay on our path, to embrace a disciplined approach to our practice, and to achieve and stay in stillness. This skill provides us with the discipline to become masters of our own bodies, and further empowers our ability to be in our Qi body and direct our Qi for healing self and others.
How Do we Cultivate the Spirit?
If you go to the Taoist texts, and read about Xing cultivation, spirit cultivation, often you’ll find very short discourses that say “let go of desire” to still the mind, or “purify the spirit.” These seemingly simple, but truthfully, obtuse instructions give us very little direction about what we can actually do when we are trying to be still. Very little is said about the myriad ways that desire manifests and few techniques are given to help us get better at finding stillness.
In order to delve into the how of cultivation and stilling of the mind and emotions, it is important that we start with a working definition of desire.
What is Desire?
The range of desire is vast. We can want the basics of food, shelter, sleep, and more, in the moment, to keep ourselves alive and healthy AND we can want to be loved, to have a big house, to have more money, to be fit or beautiful. These are all fairly obvious and understood aspects of desire.
What about curiosity? Curiosity is a desire to acquire knowledge. When we are sitting to meditate, curiosity pulls us out of stillness – What is that sensation? Is that normal? Are my legs supposed to be asleep? What are those sounds I hear? Why am I smelling flowers? What are these phenomena? These are all questions that can show up and pull us out of stillness during meditation. These are all distraction of the mind.
There is a famous story about curiosity in which the Jade Emperor (the administrator of heaven) observed colorful lights at the far reaches of heaven. The lights were the colors emitted by the five Elementals who lived in an ancient tree at the edge of heaven. He became curious about them. As soon as curiosity arose in the Jade Emperor’s heart, his spirit splintered and the piece that broke off went back onto the wheel of incarnation in order to satisfy his curiosity. When his spirit splintered, the Jade Emperor fell into a coma-like state which he stayed in until the shards of his spirit were reunified. (The story of the reunification of his spirit is the story of Zhen Wu.)
We can continue to expand our definition of desire to include the desire to avoid those things that we don’t want or like. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Buddhist mindfulness teacher, calls this aversion and the flip side of desire. He includes in the definition of aversion a desire for things to not be as they are.[6] Some ways that this may manifest include: not wanting to be the age we are, not wanting to be in a broken body, wanting to be in a different job, not wanting to sit for meditation, denying or rebelling against the truth of our circumstances. Even more powerfully, aversion can manifest as response to traumatic circumstances, where we avoid thinking about, reengaging, feeling the trauma, so it stays unresolved in the body. This can show up as post-traumatic stress disorder or, at worst, multiple personality disorder.
Desire might be about us wanting things to be as they were when we were fifteen, or wishing for things to manifest in a future that doesn’t exist. Both of these desires push us out of presence and as long as we aren’t present we can’t be still.
The consistent aspect of all of these manifestations of desire, is that they represent a non-acceptance of things just as they are. When we are desireless we have no need to name, analyze, change, avoid, think about, catastrophize, aggrandize, internalize, or otherwise respond emotionally to circumstances.
Releasing Desire
“Ever desireless, once can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.”[7]
Beginning with the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, we are instructed that only if we are desireless can we see the mystery, the Tao. So how do we become desireless? When we look across traditions we can find many techniques intended to help us release desire. There are two distinct types of practices: those we apply as we are trying to be still; and those we use as separate practices to transform the undigested trauma and deeper disharmonies of spirit.
The other distinction it is important to recognize is the releasing of desire as we sit to meditate versus other times in our lives. While it may seem counterintuitive to let go of the desire for the basic components of survival, when we sit to meditate, our goal, as we are sitting, is to do just that. For the 20 or 90 minutes that we are sitting, we release all thought of fulfilling our needs. We release our need to know, our projections, our hurts, our emotions, all of our desires. In order to achieve stillness, we want to be fully present with what is in this moment. The only desire we hold onto is the desire to achieve stillness in meditation to “return home” or achieve immortality. Eventually that desire falls away as well.
Some desires and aversions are healthy – in the moment. For example, if I’m in a potentially dangerous circumstance, then it is healthy to stay alert, to consider possible risks, to have a degree of fear or wariness, to consider possible avenues of escape. When I’m not in a risky situation, it’s not healthy for me to keep planning my escape, projecting myriad dangers and stresses onto my life. If I’m hungry, I need to find food. When I’m not hungry it’s not healthy for me to eat “just in case”.
If we can’t release the protective behaviors when they’re not needed, that may be a sign that there are deeper issues at stake to be addressed.
Now let’s take a look at the two types of techniques to help us return to our original nature.
Type I. In the Moment Practices
The first type of practice is largely about choosing not to think about anything other than what we are doing in the moment. We train the mind to become single focused and present, by applying some simple techniques with determination and discipline. Mindfulness practices are all about training the mind to release any thoughts that are not related to our current activities, whether that is meditation, washing the dishes, writing an article, speaking with a friend, or any other endeavor.
When we do this, we may discover bad thought habits like negativity, judgment, taking things personally and worrying about events future or past. The first, most critical step in changing these is to admit that we have them. Once we do that, we open the door for change. Some of the techniques that we can use to retrain the mind include:
- Rewiring the brain through gratitude practices
- Developing the ability to discern without judgment
- Accepting what is as it is
- Recognizing that other people’s behavior is about them and not about you
- Releasing attachment to drama and other addictions
- Letting go of expectations
These and many other techniques can powerfully support our goal to be present and still. They may appear deceptively simple, inviting us to dismiss them as silly or woo-woo. However, some are founded in hard science like neuro-plasticity and all have demonstrated their effectiveness.
Type II. Techniques to Address Deeper Disharmonies
While the in the moment practices are very powerful, they may not serve to effectively address deeper issues that keep us out of stillness. The deeper issues can keep us locked into repetitive patterns of behavior. They may be based in early childhood or later trauma or training and be so unconscious that we are unaware of either the pattern or its source. When we continue to hold this “unprocessed” emotional trauma, it continues to resurface until such time as we have processed it and released it from the body, the heart, the spirit.
In order to transform and release unconscious behaviors, we need to address the original unprocessed trauma. Suppressing and avoiding it only works for so long. Suppressing our emotional response in the moment of a traumatic event may have protected us and served as a survival mechanism, but eventually that mechanism outlives its usefulness. For our health and longevity, it is better to accept, feel, transmute and release the residue of the original traumatic event that is binding our body and spirit. Where past events have stayed etched upon our heart, locking us in place and time, the unbinding of the coils of emotion allow them to be transformed and released out of the body. The energy that had been used to suppress the event is than also freed up for our use in whatever way the body or spirit need.
How do we know if our heart is bound? There are many possible signs, but just a few include: responding disproportionately to current circumstances, perhaps raging at a driver for cutting us off on the freeway; or bursting into tears because a friend said an unkind word; or repeatedly falling back into addiction; or when we tell the story of the event, we still have an emotional response to the old experience – we become angry or cry or become fearful. These responses let us know there is something still locked within us, that we are carrying on our heart. If we want to transmute our old wounds, we need look no further than our hearts.
Looking into the Heart
Looking into the heart is a technique that is beneficial to help us identify and process our stored, undigested emotional experiences.
The practice of observing the heart is deceptively simple. It involves literally turning our awareness and our sensory perception to our heart, on the left side of our chest. It can be thought of as a meditation or Qigong practice in which we connect with our heart. Once we do this, we can ask ourselves, our heart, the question “what is beneath my pain?”, the underlying, unresolved emotions, perhaps sadness, anger, fear, worry begin to come into focus, and we can gain insight and understanding of what we are carrying.
Once we dig a little deeper, we can also ask “is this the root of my pain?” If our heart-mind responds no, then we continue the inquiry. We dig down through the layers of emotion as if we were peeling an onion. Eventually we will dig down to the root of our disharmony and find the original source of dissonance. All this time we are simply feeling into our physical heart.
It is important to not judge yourself for your emotional response. It is equally important not to take action based on that emotional response. The most important, and most challenging aspect of this method is to own and allow our emotional response. For example, our trauma may have been about a parent passing when we were quite young. It is generally acceptable to feel sadness when someone dies, but it may be harder to admit that you are angry with them for leaving you and that you are afraid of what life will be like without them. As a result, you may have suppressed the anger and fear.
Sometimes the “origin story” is from a time we can’t remember. In this case our answers may come from unexpected sources. A relative may be telling a story about your childhood that shocks you awake, or you watch a film that resonates so strongly you decide to investigate the possibility that it is your story. I find that when we are ready to face a particular issue, the universe finds a way to shed light on it.
Our heart holds both our pain and our joy. Once we clear the pain away, we can reduce the guard around our heart, literally open our chest, and breathe with renewed life, love, and energy. We can then meet the world with renewed innocence, joy, and love. We can begin the journey to embody our original nature.
Other Techniques
There are other techniques that can help us with peeling back the stinky layers that have surrounded our heart. Some come from western psychological practices, others Buddhist mindfulness and psychology practices. Some of the most effective techniques include:
- Telling the story – this may mean speaking directly to another person, or it may mean writing the story. The key is to articulate, not just what happened, but how you felt when it happened.
- Finding our buttons is a technique that helps us figure out the nature of our patterns and unconscious behavior. What things set you off disproportionately? What about the event is actually triggering you?
- Meditation – yes, we do this work to be able to meditate, but, if we look at the stories that are interrupting our meditation, they may point us in the direction of the issue to be processed.
- Reclaiming trust in the body after illness or injury – if we feel our body let us down, we may need to do the work to regain trust in our vehicle.
- Paying attention to the details – in this way we can begin to re-engage with both our intuition and our body. This practice informs our other practices.
Not least, continuing our Ming cultivation helps to build our Qi foundation which in turn gives us the intuition, discipline and fortitude to stay with the Xing cultivation despite the challenges that it presents.
This is not easy work. It may at times feel overwhelming and we may need help to do this. Just as we need a teacher to help us learn Tai Chi and Qigong, we may need help with Xing cultivation.
What Does it Feel Like to be Still?
One of my most powerful and direct experiences of stillness outside of meditation came early one morning while at the beach. I love dawn beside the ocean, before any other people are out and about. This early morning, I was walking on the shoreline at low tide. It was very quiet and still, the wave motion barely more than a gentle lapping at the sand. I was standing there listening to the wavelets, recognizing in the rhythm of the water that the tide was ebbing. I listened closely, mesmerized by the stillness of the vast body of water before me. Suddenly, it was as if the entire ocean were holding its breath, teetering on the apex of a fulcrum, just there, with no time and no mind, and in that instant that lasted forever, and took no time at all, the tide turned, and with the next wavelet it changed from ebbing to rising. That complete pause between the inhale and the exhale, between ebb and flow, in that pause, in that space, was absolute and complete stillness.
Most of the time the chaos of the water crashing on the shore, or the hubbub of people on the beach, or the sound of boats across the water and cars from the land interfere with our ability to be aware of the turning of the tide. They are like the chaos of thoughts and emotions on our internal landscape. Xing cultivation helps us move from the state of internal chaos and attention to external tumult into Stillness. Only when we quiet the inner tumult can we be completely still.
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
T.S. Elliot, Burnt Norton
Summary
The ancient masters recognized the need for cultivation of Ming (eternal life) and Xing (original nature) in order to be able to attain stillness in meditation and thereby enter the Void and eventually achieve union with the Dao. Unfortunately, we don’t know what they transmitted verbally to their students, but the written instructions that have persisted into the present are often vague and/or obtuse.
Fortunately, we can look to other traditions to get insight into some effective techniques, and as modern western and Buddhist psychological practices are further developed, more specific techniques than “release desire” are making themselves known. Even though some of the techniques are very simple, the work of healing trauma and processing the emotional detritus left behind can be some of the most difficult work we can do. It requires us to hold up a mirror to our own psyche and to be completely honest about what we find, to own our feelings, even when that makes us uncomfortable.
The work of Xing cultivation is worth the effort. Without it our Ming cultivation will eventually plateau. Xing cultivation opens the gate for achieving true stillness and union with the Dao.
[1] Wong, Eva, Being Taoist, Wisdom for Living a Balanced Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder, CO, 2015, page 101
[2] Wong, Eva, Cultivating the Energy of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA, 1998. page 6
[3] Wong, Eva, Being Taoist, Wisdom for Living a Balanced Life, Shambhala Publications, Boulder, CO, 2015, page 103
[4] Wong, Eva, Cultivating the Energy of Life, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA, 1998. Page 5
[5] Ibid, page 94
[6] Kabat-Zinn, Jon, Mindfulness for Beginners, sounds True, Inc. Boulder, CO 80306, 2012, page 110
[7] Lao Zi, Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, Vintage Books, New York, 1989, page 3