Why do taoist meditation

The Water tradition takes a different approach, the way of letting go. The artist places the big piece of marble in the studio, looks at it and observes it while letting go of any idea of what the rock should become. The rock then tells the artist what has to be let go of and chiseled away. The statue thus emerges from the nature of the combined energy of the rock and the artist. The artist becomes the agent through which the flow of manifestation moves. In the end, the artist is delighted and surprised at the content of the art that emerges.

The outcome required that the artist get out of the way and let go of any need to control the process. He or she just had to choose to be a part of it. The Inner and Outer Dissolving meditation methods are the primary methods by which letting go is accomplished within the Taoist Water tradition. You recognize what is tense or dysfunctional inside and then let it go. Two commonly used Chinese phrases central to the Taoist approach to morality are wu so hui and you so hui.

These two phrases lie at the core of how Taoists decide to implement any moral or philosophical principle in life. You so hui considers what is critically important, essential to living. This is the big stuff that really matters. On the level of ordinary sex between consenting adults, the choices generally can be called wu so hui. From the Taoist spiritual perspective generally, that which positively or negatively affects the events of your life on this earth, but will not create karma nor follow and potentially control you in future lives, is spiritually wu so hui.

This is important to address with care, but it is not critical. It is wise to look at all you hold in your mind to sort between what matters and what does not. Then you can consciously direct your attention to the things that matter and that you can influence. Whatever your culture or religion, looking at your choices in life from the perspective of these two phrases is an interesting and practical method for consciously examining them, particularly in terms of sexuality.

As you make your body more conscious, you become more able to see what is inside. Dissolving blockages will enable you to let go of layer after layer of falsehoods. By ridding yourself of all that is false, you will arrive at your true nature and the Tao.

Likewise, if you arrive at your nature there can be nothing that is false. These eight principles have no hierarchy. All Taoist practices and principles each flow into the other. Like life itself, each principle or qi practice in Taoism should seamlessly flow into and integrate with the others. There are many different methods of meditation. The Taoist meditation path from the Water tradition of Laozi is one of feeling, using energy, letting go and openness.

Although the words ring true, the practical meditation methods behind the words in these books may seem vague and hidden. The first emphasis is to become conscious in your body and the energies inside you and, most importantly, to become present to the awareness of awareness itself which can enable you to recognize the subtleties of your deeper levels of energy.

Most people are unaware of the deeper levels within, but these energies are always simultaneously very alive and active inside you, whether you recognize them or not. Taoist breathing, qigong and tai chi are meant to bring your consciousness fully into your body so you can then work with what you discover inside yourself during meditation. These practices also naturally make your body healthy and strong so you develop the stamina required to practice Taoist meditation.

The second area of practice is to understand your conditioning and morality. Without understanding morality, virtually everyone will be controlled by his or her karma. Taoism holds that every meditator needs to delve inside and personally discover the roots of the morality he or she is willing to live life by.

You do this by looking at aspects of any conceivable kind of moral and ethical issue that could happen to you or to anyone else, in terms of how to pursue a course of action, the potential ways the issue can affect your deepest unconscious mechanisms, how it will color the experience of all that transpires in life and how it might affect others.

Most importantly, truly understanding morality and ethics means you can observe how all the little moral pieces join and interconnect—including you, others and various situations taking into account both content and context. In Taoist meditation, developing your own authentic moral and ethical bedrock can spring only from heightened awareness.

Central to all this is the guiding principle that there are no absolutes, because what seems simple on the surface may or may not be extremely complex underneath. Thus, what may initially seem to be kind or cruel may, when seen from a larger, free and uncontracted space, be quite different.

To truly engage with this significant task of investigating morality requires developing a larger amount of awareness and clarity. To do this and embody enough of both, the meditator first ponders and looks at a wide variety of moral issues from multiple levels. Then you sit, meditate and release some or all of your personal conflicts and conditioning that prevent you from recognizing and releasing your internal numbness. The goal is that in the end you can be truly morally present in whatever situation life gives you.

The third emphasis of practice is to recognize where you are currently stuck or blocked, then let go of those blockages and become free. You let what is closed, paralyzed and contracted become internally open and spacious. This is the road of emptiness, resolving your own personal blockages at every level of your being and in all your energy bodies. You engage with it on all levels, both in quiet meditation and during all the active roles played in life in all its infinite variations.

How much meditation you need to relax is related to how much pressure must you release from your nervous system. When stress is low-grade, letting go and forgiveness is significantly easier to do. However, as stress increases, people get heavier and they find dealing with others and what is inside much more difficult.

They have the tendency to be offended, harbor resentment and grudges grow exponentially. From a practical point of view, you can save yourself a lot of grief by spending just minutes a day letting go through meditation rather than allowing stress to accumulate.

The truth is that although people can help you, it usually only lasts for a very short period of time. Only you live inside your body and mind. You can affect others, but you have to live with yourself 24 hours a day. So the question is: In what sort of an environment do you wish to live? So you need a method to deal with the stress you feel. This point has been recognized for thousands of years, which is why meditation has been practiced in the poorest and most wealthy societies on the face of the planet.

Sit with your spine as close to being straight as possible while remaining comfortable. The nerves of your body can let go dramatically easier if you sit up straight rather than crumpling into a little ball slouching is an early sign of depression.

As you sit, notice your breath going in and out of your nose. Feel the air contact your nose hairs, so it absorbs most of your attention. Keep on noticing your nose and the hairs of your nose.

Your attention will eventually shift from an external to an internal orientation as your nose hairs are a part of you. Try to relax your breath so that the movement of air going in and out of your nose relaxes your body. The erratic energy of anxiety in your body will naturally slow down as your breath slows down. Paying attention to your nose hairs and breath requires that your nerves wake up; stress tends to deaden the nerves. A laborer that works 12 hours in a day can have a healthier libido than an office worker because their nerves remain fairly relaxed.

Breathe in and out of your nose, relax your breath, feel the hairs of your nose, and let your nerves rest and regenerate. Now this is a very short meditation, but it may give you a sense of how important it is to calm down your nervous system. Finding stability is the foundation upon which genuine meditation is practiced on the path to enlightenment. So in this sense, getting rid of your stress might be immensely valuable to your life, but it takes much more commitment to meditation to truly find and maintain peace of mind.

But you must still do the same kind of work that people who live in monasteries, on peaks of mountains or in caves do to arrive at peace of mind. In the ancient Greek world, there were people who walked around for years.

They were the equivalent of wandering monks, looking to find the nature of their mind. Likewise, today there are many business people that, while conducting ordinary business, look at how to bring meditation practices into their daily life. During this time going to a monastery was punishable by death. I personally knew many people in the Far East who learned meditation through different activities in which they were interested.

You can use meditation to create works of art, run a grocery store, collect garbage—or any job of which you could possibly conceive. At this level, meditation is about what happens in your body, mind or spirit. Reading holy books or practicing rituals in themselves cannot take you to the depths of your being. You must practice. To gain peace of mind, you must make a significant commitment in your life—probably as much as an hour or two each day for meditating.

Monks spend at least this much time in monasteries. Others may go to meditation retreats and spend several hours a day looking for that which allows them peace of mind. Now, if you can integrate a meditative practice into what you do in your life, then anything is possible.

We are not talking about meditation as an antidote for dealing with the stresses of the world, but using meditation as a way to overcome the instability of the mind that is intrinsic to the human condition. Socrates proclaimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. So it follows that to arrive at peace of mind, you must gain the ability to examine that which prevents you from having peace of mind from within. If you wish to refurbish a table, you start by taking off all the varnish until you get right down to the wood.

You must remove all of the nubs, knots and paint and clean the wood. Internal Alchemy is the practice of developing and moving the inner energies of the body: Jing essence of bodily fluids , Qi vitality of breath , and Shen the spirit and will of the mind. At first the movement of energy is the Qi Fire and later when cultivating correctly it is the movement of the Elixir Water. Preparing to Meditate.

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