Daoism 101 (Part 3)

Swans look calm and graceful as they glide across the water. But look below the surface and it's a whole different story.

These days, many of us who are keen to live a healthy, balanced, spiritually-connected lifestyle can easily become like swans. 

We eat healthy, we meditate, we practice yoga, tai chi, or qigong. We try to live a life that is sustainable. We’re considerate at all times - to ourselves, other living beings and the planet as a whole.

Heck, we even look the part - wearing the right outfit and saying all the right things.

But underneath the same old stuff is still playing out - the anxiety, fear, frustration, shame, guilt and all manner of learned complexes and reactive emotions. 

We’re ‘doing’ all the healthy and spiritual practices. We’re ticking all the boxes. But there’s still a fundamental disconnect. Why?

Well here’s a few suggestions. Perhaps we’re too rigid in our initial approach -  thinking that there’s some definitive way to eat healthier, be happier etc. 

Perhaps after the initial novelty wears off we start to find the practice of yoga, qigong and meditation rather boring and tedious. 

Perhaps we start to practice less and less, until eventually we’re not practicing them at all. 

And perhaps on top of all that, we then beat ourselves up for not making progress and soon feel worse than we did to begin with!

As we all well know - self-sabotage like this can lead to further unhelpful patterns of behavior. And underpinning it all is a pervasive sense of separation - of being fundamentally cut off from happiness and wellbeing. 

We feel a gnawing sense of lack - of not being ‘good enough’ - and we’re always trying to make up ground. It's a way of being that is painful, unsatisfying, destructive, and ultimately unsustainable. 

While this sense of separation is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness, the reality is that we are not separate, and we never have been. That sense of disconnection is just a persistent belief with which we’re very familiar - and which we assent to unquestioningly as the truth.

But beliefs are powerful things. They can disrupt our mental peace at any time. And they can turn our world upside down at will. 

This is why Daoism places a lot of emphasis on ‘self-cultivation’ - which essentially means healing the split between body and mind, and between distortion and reality.

Within the Daoist framework it is asserted that each of us has an intrinsic authentic nature called ‘xing’ (性) which is obscured by conditioned limiting beliefs. We can come to know xing (性) through the ‘cultivation’ of body and mind. 

The body is cultivated or transformed through exercises called daoyin (or more commonly Qigong) and the mind is transformed through meditation. 

For Daoists, self-cultivation is really an act of self-healing. By merging with the way things really are - the Dao - that painful sense of separation is lessened and finally relinquished.

Self-cultivation is therefore about reclaiming a lost part of ourselves - our lost authentic nature which is deep, vast, and all-pervasive.

It is about dwelling in our original wholeness. And rather than gaining something it's more about  relinquishing ideas and beliefs that keep us separate from the immediate and marvelous experience of Being. 

Through self-cultivation we come to know, experientially, that contrary to our basic assumption, we are not a bundle of physical matter and chemicals from which consciousness arises. But rather, we are consciousness (which is boundless and formless) having an embodied human experience. 

Practices such as Qigong and meditation directly challenge and confront this sense of separation. And the result is a corrective integration that ensures we don’t fall into the trap of becoming ‘spiritual swans.’

The mind and body, the inner and outer, the ‘above’ and the ‘below’ are all brought into a state of harmony. Or, to state it more precisely, are all returned to their natural harmonious state.

In this way, the rupture between the self and all things is healed, and with it, our incessant seeking and craving is healed as well.

This foundational sense of integration is a key aspect of the Dao. And in further articles we shall explore the many important aspects of Daoist self-cultivation.