Tao or Dao is a Chinese word signifying ‘way’, ‘path’, ‘route’, ‘road’ or sometimes more loosely ‘doctrine’, ‘principle’ or ‘holistic beliefs’. In this episode, we interview guest Andrew McCart, author of the Alchemists Tao Ching, a book describing practical meditation practices using Tao philosophy or Taoism. In a conversation that spans eastern medicine, philosophy, and guided meditation, Andrew takes us through how implementing Tao in your life can have a profound impact on your happiness and health.
To learn more you can buy ‘The Alchemists Tao Ching’ on Amazon here.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Steven: [0:01:10] Hey, Andrew, thanks for joining us today.
Andrew: [0:01:15] Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for asking me. I’m really glad to be here.
Steven: [0:01:17] You’re on the other side of the world, we’re in different time zones, but we’re joined together today to talk about your practice of Taoism. And it’s a pleasure having you here today. It’s been really interesting the last few months, we’ve been working on understanding more about your practice and how you apply Taoism in modern meditational methods and how people are really seeing benefits with your practice. So thank you very much for joining us, and we’re looking forward to diving into this today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your general training and upbringing, and how you got into understanding and studying Taoism?
Andrew: [0:2:06] I’ll be happy to tell you about that, and looking back on it, it was a series of lucky events. But yeah, I’ll be happy to tell you about that.
I got into this about around the age of 20 and I’m 39 now, so I’ve been learning about this or unlearning, depending on how you want to look at it, for a little while in this area. One of the lucky things that happened is I was in college and got into some Tai Chi and Reiki and started understanding a little more about energetics. I had this kind of a surface level with the Tai Chi in an elective class in our university, and as I was starting to graduate, I got into some harder styles of martial arts – so some of the Korean arts like Taekwondo and Hapkido to start out. That was really helpful for me because it got me back into my body.
And I think, like a lot of people, at least in my culture here in the United States, our mental energy is not in our body; like we’re thinking about what we’ve got to do, or we’re pouring our energy into a computer screen. We didn’t have smartphones back then, but for me, my energy was floating around outside of my body, and the martial arts helped me to get that energy back into my body. At the martial arts school I just happened into, there was a teacher in there, he was about my age but he’d been at martial arts for maybe 10 years. And he said, “hey, I’d like to teach you the inner smile and the six healing sounds, the microcosmic orbit, which are the three best practices”. So that’s kind of where it started.
Does that make sense, to give you a reference point as far as like the energy not being in my body and kind of like floating around outside my physical body? Can you relate to that with what you’ve seen?
Steven: [0:04:06] Absolutely. It’s really interesting how you went through that process, through the martial arts. And this really kind of delves through a few different modalities of eastern medicine and Tai Chi, for instance, that talk about how this idea of looking within. That’s what I find so interesting about Daoism, is that it has these very similar principles of understanding within that goes across many different philosophies, but it’s very unique in the way it’s applied. So you took this road from martial arts, what was it that struck your interest in Taoism or Daoism?
Andrew: [0:05:03] Well, it was that the people that were into it seemed to have a level of centeredness that I didn’t have. Actually, one thing, now that I’m retelling the story, around the same time was I was kind of getting into the Tai Chi, I was with a friend and we got robbed in Venezuela, and as I looked back on my experience, and I thought about my awareness – if I’d been more aware, if I’d been more present, I would have seen the warning signs. And I thought, this is kind of a wakeup call, I can go back and learn awareness, and martial arts seemed like a good way to do that.
One thing about this that I’ve learned over time is, bringing our energy back to our body, not only does it awaken the awareness of our organs, and the capacity that they have, it almost borders on a sixth sense, because our organs, in the classical Chinese medicine, and Daoist philosophy, the organs tune into the larger environment in a way that our mental faculties just don’t seem to. So awakening that intelligence did give me some more awareness and allow me to be able to perceive situations in a way that I wasn’t before. But at the same time, when my energy was staying closer to my body, closer to those organs, I was able to have more health and vitality, instead of the energy pouring into mental exercises, or the nightly news or worry. I talk a lot about mental exercises, but also emotional issues of worrying and fear, and anger was a big one for me. So reclaiming some of that energy and using it in a more productive way for our health and our vitality instead of for stress, or worry was something that, very early on, I saw as a benefit, in just a month of studying these Daoist practices.
And so, when I first learned those, I’ll take it back to those basic exercises, the inner smile, the six healing sounds, microcosmic orbit, basic Qigong and moving the body, made me aware of my body and having my energy closer to my body. I think those are some of the benefits and the reasons why I stuck around and kept with the practice all this time.
Stefan: [0:7:29] I feel like, especially for me in my life, I’ve had a lot of times where I’ve been stressed or angry, and you do tend to pin that on to external forces – blaming it on other people or blaming it on the circumstance. And we don’t really have a way, especially where I’m from in Sydney in Australia, of expressing that or getting to know the reasons behind why you’re reacting in a certain way. And I found it really fascinating reading, and hearing your story, that you’ve found a way that you can look within and learn from your body, learn from the energy that you have, and how to pass that in and out of your life to other people.
I just wanted to know what you would recommend to people starting from scratch, maybe they live in the city, maybe they’re very far away from what they consider to be Daoism. I was just wondering if you could shed some light on what you would recommend?
Andrew: [0:08:32] Well, that’s a great question. If we were going to start with just one thing, it would be to put your hands on your navel and breathe, and kind of watch the hands go up and down, feel your abdomen expand. That would be just a wonderful place to start. It’s probably too simple that I would have ignored it before I got into this. I would have said it’s too simple, that’ll never work, I’d rather pay thousands of dollars for something else, or search for many more decades. But it could really be that simple as just bringing your awareness back to your breath.
Medical science will tell us that the vagus nerve can calm down and it goes through the entire abdomen and affects all of the organs, and when the vagal tone relaxes, you’re able to relax your entire being, and you could control that through your breath and slowing that down. So we know those things intuitively, as well, if taking my word for doesn’t work. So start with the breathing, and slow it down. If you can’t meditate for an hour a day, meditate for 2-3 minutes a day. That’s a great place to start. And as you find that stillness in your body, it will start to sort of bleed over into the rest of your life. You don’t meditate to get good at meditation you meditate to get good at life. And if you can find stillness for a few minutes in the morning and/or the evening, for me, I was able to slow down my perspective and make better choices.
As you said earlier, we blame it on circumstances and we tend to be reactive. I think we would all make a good choice if we were actually choosing. But so much of what we do is an unconscious reaction, we’re not responding. We don’t have the ability to respond. Often it’s usually just a reaction. And slowing down a little bit between the stimulus you have and the response that you give causes you to be able to make a better choice. So breathing and slowing down can really help with that. So that’s why I recommend breathing.
I’d like to you to kind of interject your thoughts on that. I have another step after breathing that we could talk about in just a moment, but what do you think? Do you find that slowing down your breathing, noticing that would be a good place to start?
Steven: [0:11:08] One thing I find with breathing in particular, it’s become very much involved in terms of the idea of calming the anxious state, or people that suffer from depression and these states where the neurological system doesn’t calm down. I see it in dental practice where when you look at patients, no one’s been told how to breathe, and that simple exercise that you do is one thing that I have with patients just as a very baseline way to kind of help them feel their breath. It’s amazing how confused some people are in terms of being told to breathe in a certain way and how it’s just so foreign to them.
We now know, like you said, the science is showing how important that is for calming and pushing your autonomic nervous system into parasympathetic. And when we don’t breathe, there are many physiological effects as a result. So the feeling of anxiety seems to be the body telling us that we’re not doing something right. There’s obviously a lot of things to that, but it makes complete sense. It’s such a simple application, but breathing and teaching people to get back to their breath is just such a powerful practice that you’re bringing to people. I don’t see many healthcare practitioners doing this, but I think it’s something that’s really needed. So it’s amazing.
Daoism guides us to understand the body in a very specific way, and it talks about the energies inside our body, and then planet earth, the solar system. So how does it start to help us to understand how the energies inside our body fit into the broader kind of environment? Obviously planet earth is a much bigger organism, but how does that all start to fit in, and how’s that explained?
Andrew: [0:13:23] Well, that’s a great question. And a lot of times trying to define Daoism is not as easy, even the Tao Te Ching, the first verse says if you could explain the Dao it’s not the real Dao because words can’t explain it. But I’ll get my humble attempt here to do so. Back to what you said about the breathing, something that should be so natural is foreign to a lot of people. It’s the same thing as moving our bowels or even drinking enough water, squatting, sitting, standing, these basic things we used to do naturally, we now have to be taught and hire coaches and relearn all of those things that show our society and body have gone from a natural state. So part of the process of Taoism is relearning things that we knew and things we did naturally as a baby.
But I want to touch on what you said, and then answer your question directly. You asked about understanding the body in a specific way, and that was one of the appeals that drew me to Daoism early on and continues to. The Daoist paths or methods that I’ve learned seem to have a very specific way of explaining the way energy moves in the body, a whole map of meditation and movement for health and vitality. Before, when I was just wondering what meditation was or trying to learn, there were things like, “maybe try watching the candle, or sitting and stilling your mind”, and I could never still my mind. But meditation like the inner smile, which says, “okay, go through a bit of a checklist of your heart, your lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, go to those and thank them for the things that they do for you”. That gave my mind something to do, while I was moving energy around my body, which, in a way, it’s kind of like pacifying the mind, like giving a baby a pacifier. You give your mind and your brain something to do so it’s not just trying to escape the whole time, while your body’s coming alive.
And just to follow up on what you said about understanding the body in a specific way, the Daoist path has a way of understanding energy from your physical body all the way to the planet, to the solar system, the stars, and I’ll talk about that a little bit.
So how does the body fit into the larger environment? A simple way to look at it is that we have the five elements in Daoism – so we have the earth, water, wood, fire, and metal. You may call them elements, but it’s really five phases of energy. So fire energy, if you have a fire personality, for instance, then you want to kind of go out in all directions at the time, you’re very joyful, very happy, loving, hugging people when you see them. Your personality is a bit like fire, and it goes in all directions. Now, if it’s dysfunctional, you might be cruel, impatient, angry. I can touch on that a little bit.
So thinking about those five elements expands out to the larger environment. My liver, for instance, the wood phase of my body can relate to the forest. It’s the same map, but it’s now out into the planets instead of just in my body. I can breathe between those – so connecting and hardwiring the aspects of myself into the larger part of nature along that map. So what does that sound like to you? What did that not explain that [inaudible 0:17:26]?
Stefan: [0:17:27] No, I think that metaphor you used is a really nice way of painting that picture. You said something before and it reminded me – I listened to an Alan Watts podcast the other day and he said, talking about Daoism, “those who say do not know and those who know do not say”. So asking what it is, it’s really difficult to define because it’s not a knowing, it’s kind of a feeling and understanding. And I find that such a powerful message. I’m quite new to the philosophy of Daoism, but I really resonate with what you’re talking about.
Me and Steven were talking about this before, how it’s so important to focus intention and energy on yourself, and once you can understand yourself, then you can start expanding out. But if you haven’t got yourself if you can’t focus on those energies, those simple things like breathing and quieting the mind, they sound so simple, but they’re so fundamental in growing and expanding. Did you find that when you started practicing, things within yourself started to fall into place, and then you started getting an understanding of how that related to how you moved through the world and how you interacted with other people?
Andrew: [0:18:54] Yes, I did see that, and I’ll try and tell you a few different ways that helped. So the Daoist approach would be, just as you said, to really start with yourself, and try to help yourself to be strong, and healthy, and clear-minded, and grounded, so that when I go out and help other people, I’m doing it from the right place. The Daoist mindset is that I want to grow positive virtues of kindness and neighborliness. I want to have those inside my being at a very tangible level/a tangible way that I can feel that my liver, for instance, is functioning properly, and the emotions and virtues of kindness are present, instead of like snappiness or anger. So when I have kindness, or love, or stability, gentleness, courage in my life, then I can have a chance to share those with others. It’s like a tuning fork metaphor in music that if my tuning fork is vibrating at a certain frequency that is of love, then I’m much more easily able to share that out in my community. So that’s one part of it.
Another part of it would be that, as we’re out there giving (and I’m a teacher, so this is important to me), if I’m giving to students and putting my energy out there and pouring it into someone else or 20 people in a class, I have to have a lot of energy, to begin with, or I’ll drain my vitality and it can wear me out. So to be able to share in the world, we want to be strong ourselves. And that’s a big part of it, that it is focused on the physical body. I keep coming back to that, but that’s just the way I experienced it.
And another aspect, and I’ll get into that in a minute, but often, our spiritual paths – so not just beginners, but veterans at spiritual paths – they want to go out to the stars and the planets, because that’s where the juice is. It feels very good to have a trip meditating on the Big Dipper all night or something like that, but if we’re not grounded, it can kind of blow our circuits. So I can’t put a 10-watt light bulb to bring in 100 watts of electricity, it may just blow our circuits out.
So, a lot of times, people want to go out to the edge of the cosmos or deal with the stars and the planets, but we can only absorb what we’re able to handle by being grounded, so that connection to the physical body, connection to the earth. Sometimes we hear about like a Kundalini blowout, or a healing crisis, where people’s circuits all open up and your body will handle the amount of energy that’s pouring into. And so I think a very grounded physical body’s slow and steady, gradual approach can do that. And I found that in the Daoist path. I don’t know if you all see that in the circles you run in, or maybe people try to move a little too fast. Does that sound familiar? Any examples you’ve seen?
Stefan: [0:22:44] Yes, it certainly does. The way that the Daoist path categorizes personalities, but also then understanding how the different organs and different energies and the alchemy of how our energies all work together, it does start to make you see how people are. So the water, wood, fire, metal, earth, how that different parts of it are resonating in certain terms, and how people, maybe they do have too much fire or certain people, maybe they can’t find the action in order to change a situation in their lives. So it does make a lot of sense.
You talk about describing how these elements move in a sequence, and I found that quite interesting in the article you wrote. How would you describe that sequence and how people understand the alchemic elements and how they work in the body?
Andrew: [0:24:00] I’m glad you asked that because that was one of the things that really helped me, and it was a big challenge. So if I were to go through my Chinese astrology chart, you’ve got five elements, so 100% divided by five would mean you might have 20% of your energy in each element represented. But we very rarely come into this world that balanced. So in my case, I had a very high percentage of the wood element. I say elements, but again, there are more like phases of energy. So if you think about the wood element or wood type energy in nature, it’s the energy of spring, it’s trees that grow up, it’s grasses, flowers that bloom, that kind of energy. And so in a human being’s activities, it looks like planning and goal setting, and a general that wants to go get things done, or arrows that are shooting toward a target. So I had a lot of that energy. And when it’s going good, it’s kindness and forgiveness, being friendly, which I had. But when all that wood energy is not moving well, then it can be anger, frustration, feeling stuck. The energy of planning and organizing your life and what you’re actually doing, they don’t match up and your decision making is off.
So having all the wood energy or any kind – I have friends that had 70% of their astrology was for the earth element – so whenever you’ve got that much of an abundance of something, then other things are lacking. So wood, in the cycle of creation, feeds fire. And what I needed to learn was to take all that planning and goal setting and actually take it into action, like the fire element, where I’m then going out in the world, instead of sitting down with my vision board, for instance, refining and refining the vision board but didn’t take action in the world. And from the fire phase, it goes into the earth phase where you might think of this as like, the harvest time in the earth. And so you’re actually able to harvest the results of all the work that you’ve done the other parts of the cycle.
You can’t stop there, though, because we’ve got the metal phase, or you can think of it in terms of autumn, where the leaves fall to the ground so that the cycle can begin again. You rest and recover in the metal phase. And then the water phase, you get ready again for that first part of spring, which you all are about to, heading into the winter solstice there in Australia. So you’re just about to start this phase of the new cycle. We’re in the summer solstice here in Kentucky, in the United States. So we can kind of see how that answers your earlier question on how nature relates to the human body and the humans’ activities.
Hopefully, that provides the audience a little bit of insight from my own experience of too much wood element and trying to transform that to move through the cycle. Does that seem to sum it up in some way?
Stefan: [0:27:19] That definitely resonates with me, for sure. I am a very good planner, I’m very good at talking about ideas, but the actual manifestation of those ideas is probably the main thing lacking in my life, I’d say. So yeah, everything you’re saying there, it really struck a nerve. And it’s such a nice way of explaining things. It’s such a flip on perspectives from what we’re used to over here. It’s very linear thinking – everything’s happening, and you’re going in one direction. But I love the way that you’re describing things as being more of an essence, more of a flow. Things start and things end and it’s all part of it, we can’t be stuck, if that makes sense.
Steven: [0:28:12] The principles of Taoism, they feel like they resonate across so many different fields. Alchemy, for instance, they use these ideas of the elements. Where do you see the crossover? Because you use a number of different practices within your overall teaching, so how do you see all these principles kind of crossing over? Like, for instance, with Chinese medicine, and alchemy, all these things kind of meld in, because I feel like they’re coming from a similar source.
Andrew: [0:28:55] That is a great question. One of the neatest things about Daoism, I think, is that it’s kind of big enough to hold different traditions and different ideas, at least the way I approach it. Now, you will meet Daoists out there that have a lineage and have been handed down from one master to another for even centuries and generations. Although I’ve had it with a lot of different teachers and continue to do so, I didn’t come from such a lineage like that, and I can be happy to tell you my information about my trainings on my website, but I’ve had some of my teachers being accused of being a fake Daoist or whatever that is, because they didn’t have the lineage. But they did learn from those people, and their practices work and they help people.
So I think that the broader and the more interesting results come from being open to new things. And I think that’s what Daoism, for the most part over time, that’s how it evolved – it was borrowing from Buddhism and sharing with Shintoism, and taking the shamanic roots of the nomadic folks that were living very close to nature. So that’s why, to me, it seems to cross over into a lot of different realms, and it seems like a universal spiritual science because it can encompass a lot of those things.
And looking at how it relates to Western alchemy, I went on a trip one time with a Daoist teacher, we spent a month in France looking at the different cathedrals that were all built on ancient [inaudible 0:30:45] cathedral and other places in France. And we hiked our way down ancient pilgrimage routes, looking at the Paleolithic worship sites, and medieval science, and the great cathedrals of those ages, and practicing Daoist alchemy in those areas and awakening the chakras, as you might call them, awakening those energy centers that correspond to the glands of the body, and learning about [inaudible 0:31:13] and it seemed to go hand in hand, the way I viewed it.
There’s really just one body and one life force, and I think it’s all about understanding the common language, and the Daoist path just seemed to resonate with me. It can be farming, it can be Western magic, or whatever a person’s path is, I think that’s great. They can find happiness and health and the ability to help others. The Daoist thing just works for me, but it’s certainly not the only game in town, and I would encourage your audience or anyone that comes to me with these questions to find one that works for them because they’re a lot more similar. I believe in spiritual paths and they are different as long as you don’t get too dogmatic about it.
Stefan: [0:32:06] As you were talking about that, physically seeing the cathedrals and physically moving through and having a higher sort of perspective on things, taking it a step further to the solar system and the alchemy of the planets and their motions, how has your practice moved you in that direction into sort of a more cosmic conscious experience?
Andrew: [0:32:37] That’s a great question, and it’s getting into the juicy stuff, I think. So back to the issue of astrology, thinking about my Western chart/Western astrology, it may be that the sun is going through a Saturn return, which is a phenomenon around the age of 28-32, or something like that, where it said that when Saturn comes back around, every 28-30 years, that it is going to test the individual on the things that they should have learned over the last 30 years. And so at those periods in the first Saturn returns, second Saturn returns, third, if you’re [inaudible 0:33:26] depending on how you make it, but it’s going to be a challenging time, potentially, if you haven’t done your work over the last cycle, or even if you have. It will depend on how strong Saturn is in your charts, and what else is going on in the heavens at that time. And I subscribe to these philosophies.
When I was going through that, my world did turn upside down. And the things that really helped me from the Daoist toolbox of practices were to focus on meditating with all of the planets. So if you’ve got one planet that’s causing you some challenges, just like I said, kind of moving the wood phase through my body, inviting in those other energies of the other planets help balance that out. So whether it’s too much fire, or you’ve got a Mercury retrograde, you want to slow that down by inviting other aspects of the solar system in, then you’ll just have a more balanced approach. Perhaps if I’m starting a new job, now it’s the summer solstice, we’re getting ready to move, I’ve found that, first of all, being grounded – so at any level, you want to have your feet on the earth, and you want to have that connection to the earth. Beyond that, you can think about that energy of Jupiter, it’s the wood element or wood phase equivalent in the solar system, but what I was seeing was the liver and the planning, strategizing in the body. So it might be that I would even get a picture of Jupiter and stare at it or tune in to the frequency of Jupiter. And over time, maybe you can learn that relationship with those organs. That’s one way that helps.
And thinking about the quadrants in the stars [inaudible 0:35:15] cave paintings in ancient China, different animals in the stars that related to the energies of the north, south, east, west. It was really quite a different time before we had Primetime TV and the internet and 24-hour banking and things like that, and we were in a lot closer relationship with nature, they would watch the stars. That was their primetime. They would watch the stars and the different movements in the heavens and understand how those impacted their daily life and their farming. Fortunately, some of that knowledge has been passed down to us even now and it’s making a resurgence, as far as I can see. I think it’s a wonderful time to be alive as far as all the information that’s available and what’s been lying dormant and hiding from the time when this knowledge was passed down in secret.
Speaking of the ancient Daoists, the government was afraid of them. They were kind of scared of what they could do and what they knew. A lot of times it was dangerous to be a Daoist, and fortunately, it’s not now. So we can practice these things and talk about them on podcasts and use them in our lives to feel a little healthier. And, at least in the United States, healthcare is in a crisis, and chronic diseases are running wild, and here’s an inexpensive way to live more of a natural and healthier life. I kind of took it all the way to the end. It was a great question you asked, going to the stars, and then back down to what kind of water you’re drinking. But it is all connected, and hopefully, that’s becoming apparent as we’re having this conversation.
Steven: [0:37:11] Yeah, it’s amazing, actually, and it has kind of dawned on me as well. And even through you telling your story, you bring up a lot of different philosophies and an open mind [inaudible 0:37:21] yet being very respectful to the traditions. It’s amazing that Daoism really seems to be a movement of people that have embodied a lot of different knowledges and studies and brought it into practice. It’s amazing to see that. And you’re right, it is coming to life. You hear many people talking about these kinds of concepts in different contexts now, but they come from different areas now. We are talking about higher consciousness, and alchemy, and the Zodiac, and the astronomy of the solar system. We know scientifically that these things affect us, and it’s all coming to life in this way. It’s beautiful how its melding this ancient story, and then coming to life in people like yourself. It’s interesting. I can tell that you [inaudible 0:38:27] the Dao story very well.
Stefan: [0:38:28] I wanted to add into that. I really liked the way that you go about it, having a very practical approach to things. Because I find that a lot of, I don’t know what you call them, but a lot of teachers of ancient practices, there’s kind of this new age sort of mindset, where it’s not really practical. There’s a lot of talking and a lot of throwing these words around, but it’s the practical aspect of it, and how to actually relate that to your life, to the people around you. I find that so powerful. It’s a really nice way to integrate it into your day to day life.
Steven: [0:39:12] There’s so much data on this topic and we could really dive in for forever. But I think probably, the best way to finish up is to maybe lead us quickly through one meditation technique, explain some of the techniques that people can start to see how they can apply this in their every day. You do have videos on this on your website, and we’ve got them all linked in. We’d love to hear your explanation on some steps to get started.
Andrew: [0:39:54] Yeah, I’d be happy to do that. And thank you, I take that as a compliment that it was a practical way because they say the proof is in the pudding. And it is. I really like love and light, I want life to be easy and to flow, but sometimes you don’t get a good night’s sleep for whatever reason, or you eat something that disagrees with you and your stomach’s upset. So it all comes back to the physical body, which you can’t deny. You ignore your body, and it’ll ignore you. That’s a little bit of what can be in the inner smile.
I’ll take us through that meditation, but just thought I’d lead into that. Having this relationship with our body is so important. I talk about this in different ways and videos or articles on the website. But I’m happy to talk about it because it makes so much sense based on the analogy of someone who’s leading a workforce or factory manager, or a boss at the office; imagine the way we treat our organs, if we treated our employees that way, what that would look like. And so a lot of times the way we treat our organs, certainly the way I did when I first started or if I get too busy today, you have to come back to the organs; we will ignore him, we won’t ask them for feedback, we won’t pay attention to the messages they’re trying to give us, and maybe back to the employee analogy, instead of giving them good quality wages in the form of healthy organic food and clean water and deep breaths, we give them shallow breaths and we give them fast food – we have a lot of soda over here in the United States and I know it’s made its way around the world. But that’s the equivalent of giving poor wages to our organs.
And eventually, if we treat employees like that, they’ll walk off the job and quit or something where our organs just aren’t working at all. We’ll go to the doctor and find out that our heart is functioning at 3% capacity, and we have to have emergency surgery. So this inner smile, that I’ll lead into in just a moment, is a way of checking in with the organs, “how are you doing? how are things today? how do you feel?” And maybe it’s not so deliberate as a conversation that way, but it’s just a check-in, kind of a diagnostic check-in. A lot of people spend more time getting their car checked out than they do their own bodies. So we can start to do that ourselves and have some self-care.
Are there any questions you think we could clear up before we into a meditation mode, on that subject?
Steven: [0:42:51] I think that makes sense. I love the idea of checking into organs. They’ve all got their own jobs, and especially the analogy of wages. Everyone knows that you’re not going to sustain good business unless you reward your employees. So it makes a lot of sense. I’m looking forward to your description of how you practice this everyday.
Andrew: [0:43:28] Okay. We’ll do it and we’ll keep it short and simple so it’s something people can walk away from. So we’ll find ourselves sitting down in a chair, you can have your feet flat on the floor so that your circulation of your legs is there. You can do this lying down but sometimes we fall asleep when we’re first learning. But just imagine that we’re sitting in the chair, take some deep breaths, and tune into your breathing. Our lungs can have a tremendous surface area and could be as big as a football field surface area whenever we’re breathing fully. So we’re going to just expand those lungs 360 degrees with some deep breaths, just to begin, kind of calm our physical body down and our nervous system. Sitting with your eyes closed, just take a few deep breaths. And if you can experience the feeling of letting go or relaxing, or releasing on the exhale, that’d be even more helpful.
So moving from the deep breaths into a bit of a check-in with the organs. I like to use my hands to help guide the energy. So let’s put hands on our heart (you can use both hands). With our hands on our heart, just take some deep breaths and tune into that area, and think about what our heart does for us – that’s pumping the blood around the body. And you can think about the virtues that I mentioned earlier of love, joy, happiness, and you see the color red, as relates to the heart and the fire phase of energy. So taking some deep breaths there, we can even see like a flower blooming, red flowers, a lotus or rose, blooming near to your heart. So just a simple ‘thank you’. Even if you don’t know what they do, a simple ‘thank you’ to these organs will go a long way, and that breathing and that focusing on the positive virtue.
And from the heart, we can expand the awareness and the hands out to the lungs. So the lungs just to the left and right there of the heart, continuing our deep breathing. We see the color white, it really resonates with the lungs. And here we can see as if they’re expanding like flowers blooming as well. Whenever the sun comes up in the morning, flowers will turn toward it an open up, and we can imagine that the cells of our organs are doing that. So with the lungs here, we’re paying attention, saying ‘thank you’ for dealing with the outside environment and taking in that air and transforming it into oxygen that we can use, and they expel the carbon dioxide and other things. With the virtues, think about the virtue of courage, self-confidence, and self-love. These things are qualities of the planet Venus, which relates to this [inaudible 0:46:55] associated. A couple of deep breaths there to the lungs and saying ‘thank you’.
Then we’ll move to the liver, move our hands over to the right side there at the bottom of the rib cage, the liver, smiling, seeing the color green like the spring, seeing what I mentioned earlier with the grass growing and the leaves on the trees and that first burst of spring, or the thunders bringing the rains and cracking open the seeds that are underground as they start to grow up. Think of the virtues of kindness, forgiveness, being a good neighbor, helping the liver to be flexible, and the qualities of good in individuals that can also be flexible. It’s like a tree that moves in a storm. So one that survives is the person that can be flexible in the storms of life. Just thanking the liver for what it does for us, smiling there.
And we’ll move over to the left side at the bottom of the rib cage where the spleen is and the pancreas goes across the solar plexus, so you can put both of your hands on the spleen and pancreas area. And again, saying ‘thank you’ in gratitude. The color yellow, like the earth element and think about the soil of the earth that you see and the stability that the earth provides for us. And the qualities of trust, and being grounded, and stability in your routines and your habits, and being predictable. Those are good qualities that help the spleen and pancreas to feel supported and they feel comfortable there. So just tuning in, thank you, and these deep breaths that we’re continuing to take and help bring energy to the area where our hands are, where our awareness is.
We’re moving to the last of the five phases that we’ll touch on now. We can move our hands back to our kidneys. And if it’s uncomfortable to sit with your hands at your lower back, then you can rest with your hands at your navel. Taking some deep breaths there to the kidneys, and thinking of the qualities of gentleness and stillness, like water on a calm day. Thinking of the color blue with the kidneys. And as we take those deep breaths, our diaphragm moves up and down and really gives a gentle massage to the organs and torso. So take a couple of more deep breaths here. If you can, smile to not only just the kidneys but the other organs that we’ve tuned into. And just thanking this entire team, how it all works together so well for your overall benefit and enables you to reach out and help others by growing that virtue, being a functioning giving member of the human population.
And at the very end here, to close this up, you can do a brief massage around your navel. We want to store the energy here in our lower centers, rather than in our hands or in our heart. It’s safe and it can nourish us. So massage a little bit clockwise, a little bit counterclockwise, maybe about 10 times in each direction just to direct the energy to stay there. And that’s it!
The whole thing is maybe seven minutes or so, but it’s a meditation that everyone can do on their own. I like to do it before I start my workday. Maybe at home before I go, or in the shower, or when I first get to my desk, I can sit down and do that with a smile so that then activities that flow throughout the day or at least I had a chance to start from a place of a smiling idea. So what questions do you have or feedback? I’d love to see if I can elaborate on that practice.
Stefan: [0:51:47] I just want to say thanks for running us through that. That was really nice. I’ve found that that type of meditation is so powerful in grounding you, in letting everything, all the stresses and all the day to day thoughts sort of sit down and just have a bit of acceptance that you don’t have to let those outside forces dictate the way you feel. I don’t know how to describe it. I was going through it as you were explaining it, so I’m feeling pretty peaceful right now.
Steven: [0:52:25] I really like the idea of thanking individual organs because we know they have such crucial individual roles that have overall benefits, like you say, as a team. I love that concept and it really does make a lot of sense, especially to the people that suffer some problems, they can really focus the energy to kind of get the team helping pick up one that may be struggling. I think that can be really beneficial for people. So it was effective. To me, I felt the relaxation, but also, I think that would be such a simple technique for people to focus in on certain health problems.
Stefan: [0:53:05] Yeah, I think that’s why I really love this philosophy as a whole. I’m not sure if you call it a philosophy or a way of life, but just the way that it enables you to be. And there’s no goal, in a way. You’re not striving to get somewhere, which is kind of the way that our minds have been geared to think. It’s nice to let all those ideas sort of dissolve away and just be aware, be more aware of yourself and the energies.
Steven: [0:53:45] Andrew, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you and hear about your work. Thank you very much for bringing this to life. We’d love to dive in in the future as well. You’ve written two books, and you’re a practitioner, where can people find you?
Andrew: [0:54:05] Thank you for having me on. The old Daoist masters would hide in mountains and just collect herbs and practice. They just had one student in their lifetime, or one person that was interested in learning, and maybe their life could be a success. So any opportunity I get just to talk to somebody about this, I feel like it’s a real treat and an honor. Again, I’ve spent a lot of time, and money, and energy learning these things, because I enjoy it and it’s fun. So I love to share it with other people. It was great to be here talking to you gentlemen, too.
To find out more about this, I’ve got a website, thetaoblog.com and I’m also on social media – Instagram, and Facebook, Twitter – under The Tao Blog. I try to just put a little something out there that maybe helps people think in a different way, or maybe it’s instructional, or maybe it’s a quote, or it’s just writing.
Then you mentioned the two books, one of them is called The Alchemist’s Tao Te Ching: Transforming Your Lead Into Gold, and it has just my thoughts on the classic Tao Te Ching, which there’s two to 2-300 versions of it. It has been interpreted so many times, hopefully, I’ll bring something new there. But it also has practices. Along with the 81 verses, there’s 81 practices and [inaudible 0:55:41] meditations that a person can think about and maybe practice. So that’s the book that’s most relevant to the things we’re talking.
And then the other book is Growing a Healthy Workforce: Leading in the Eight Dimensions of Workplace Wellness. So, if someone’s an organizational leader out there, whether they’re in the business world and they want people to be a little healthier, then I think they would find a few things in that book that could get practical low-cost, grounded down to earth things that can show your employees that care about them. And it is also kind of an undercover Daoist book in a way. Thank you for giving me a chance to talk about that, you’re very kind.
Steven: [0:56:21] I love how you dress it like that, but it’s great that you give people the opportunity to learn about these things without actually thinking that they’re going into ancient philosophy. That’s wonderful. Alright, Andrew, thank you very much for joining us, it’s an absolute pleasure. We hope to learn more and hear more about your work, and we’d love to experience your practice in person. It’s fascinating the way you’re bringing this all to life.
Andrew: [0:56:51] Well, thank you, and this was a lot of fun. If you ever want to do it again, I’d be happy to come on, and there’s more we can talk about. So, thanks again.
Stefan: [0:56:59] Thanks, Andrew. Thanks so much for your time. Looking forward to hopefully meeting you in America one day.
Andrew: [0:57:05] Oh, that’d be great! For now, the borders are still open and we’d love to have you.
Stefan: [0:57:12] [laughs] Thanks, Andrew.
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