Reframing Neidan teaching for a modern world

having fun and experimenting together.

I had a bit of a eureka moment this morning,

let me explain.

My approach to Neidan is pretty didactic in nature.

This is simply the nature of Daoist studies and a feature of the idea of a shifu passing knowledge to students. I am the shifu of some of the people who read this page, but not most of you, although that can always change depending on our mutual preferences, but the key point is that most of us haven’t spoken in depth and you may read this page simply because you find it interesting rather than having any feeling either way about our relationship.

Nevertheless, I want to help you improve your meditation practice whether or not we engage in a student teacher relationship and I’m open to using novel approaches to achieve this goal.

My reasoning for wanting to be helpful in this regard is because I love Daoism (at least the version of it I learned from my Shifu) and want to promote a real, practical view that can help solve some of the problems in Daoism (unsubstantiated practices, story telling instead of substance, unrealistic goals with no way to achieve them etc).

It is difficult to learn Daoist meditation practices well without a teacher, but I assume many of you already practice something within Daoism or related to Daoism, so it makes it a bit easier to have this discussion.

As a result of preaching to the choir but changing the sermon a little, my main practice writing this page has been to identify key points in classical documents. I’m going to keep doing this, but today I came to the observation that we should also investigate some other ways to obtain knowledge from direct experience.

Direct experience comes in many ways, but I think the best way is to engineer an experience, then use rational thought, comparison and analysis to decipher the information obtained as a result of the experience.

Today I want us to try a little experiment where I give you a central idea in Daoist meditation that is universal to the whole tradition regardless of school and you try it out, make some observations and write your experience in the comments.

Usually the comments are for members only, but today I’ll turn them off so more of us can have a discussion.

After collecting your responses, I’ll make my own analysis and follow up with a post in a few days to see if we can find some collective observations and pedagogical tools.

Here is my contribution to get things started:

Daosim mainly concerns itself with two big ideas:

1: stillness,

2: clarity.

Stillness and clarity are the core mental characteristic of Daoism which are meant to be maintained whether you are sitting in meditation or out doing your thing.

Unfortunately you can’t just click a button and achieve this state immediately unless you have decades of experience, but you can learn some simple theory in techniques to help you get there.

Theory:

initial entry into stillness is done by sitting in forgetting. This does not immediately lead to clarity, actually it leads to a turbid internal state which is quite, obscure, deep, and without predominant thoughts.

This is because in our regular lives Yin and Yang are in a mixed state in which Yin and Yang pollute each other in disharmonious ways, so by leaning in to stillness you can cut out the Yang and emphasize the Yin. This concept is in the Dao De Jing and can be simply paraphrased as stillness is the mother of movement.

The clarity part comes later as a byproduct of stillness.

Practice:

now that we have some basic ideas out of the way we can do a simple practice that will make sense and fit with Daoist theory.

You only need to know one more thing:

The breath anchors the mind and makes it still.

Ok, here is the practice:

• sit comfortably anywhere, feet flat on the ground or legs crossed are both acceptable, but you may prefer to have back support.

• Lightly close your eyes and mouth,

• rest your hands in your lap,

• breathe gently through your nostrils,

• observe the sound of the breath, if you can hear it simply make your breath more gentle until you can’t hear it,

• gently place your attention on your entire body and simply feel the natural expanding quality of inhalation and relaxing quality of exhalation,

• enact a simple rhythm of breath in which one inhalation slowly and silently enters the body and one exhalation slowly and silently releases,

• keep following this rhythm and if any distracting thoughts come up, just let them happen and disappear without either following up on them or suppressing them,

• do this for as long as you like, but try to do it long enough that your mind becomes a little bit peaceful.

What to look out for:

• did you feel more calm? How long did it take?

• Did your mind become quiet compared to the non meditation state? What was it like?

• Did your body feel comfortable? What was the response of your body to practice?

Please try the exercise a few times and make some notes if you are interested.

Then once you have a basic idea of what happened, please share your observations in the chat.

I promise to read every comment and put them into my consideration for a follow up post in a few days. Then after that post we can think about some ways to go forward according to your feedback so you can get into the door with Daoist practice.

If you have already been doing something like this, please share your wisdom since we can also factor this into our analysis. Everyone’s experience is meaningful and everyone has something good to share so I’m looking forward to seeing what you make of this practice and format!!