2022 Holiday Letter
(December 2022)
Dear Living Tao friends:
Wishing all of you much joy and peace as we approach the holidays and the end of another year with much to reflect on and look forward to…
Something new to announce is the redesign of the Living Tao website. The focus of this new online resource has been to provide you with more content to sustain your Living Tao Tai Ji practice. Please Visit the site Here.
After a year of not traveling, I made my journey back to Esalen Institute to resume the annual Thanksgiving Week teaching and was most gratified and encouraged to begin thinking about ways to resume LIVE gatherings.
We are fortunate to have had the success in these past years of Zoom sessions to sustain our practice and learning. Of course, many of us are missing the Live environment, the shared community of old and new friends as we always treasured before the pandemic. And yet, Zoom has made our Living Tao network remain lively and connected.
At Esalen, the week went smoothly for everyone with mutually agreed upon safety measures including negative testing, updated booster shots and masks when needed. We were delighted to return there and be together again sharing our learning.
Although it is disappointing that due to the uncertainty of continued Covid, RSV, and flu infections, and considering the required pre-planning needed, our annual Winterthur Easter week will be suspended for 2023. However, I am hopefully optimistic that we may be able to resume gathering during Memorial Weekend in Urbana, or perhaps this summer at the River House in Gold Beach, tentatively the first two weeks of August 2023. The place is waiting for us to return.
As always, I continue to be inspired when I do my daily “forest bathing” walk in the woods, conjuring up new ways to look at our perennial Living TAO with expanded and deeper insights to explore. Again and again, we “return to where we first started”, only to begin to “know the place for the first time.” It continues to open new horizons for us to follow. Every day becomes NEW for me to be the perennial Living Tao “beginner” student of Life. I rejoice with all the resources I have been gifted, to be refreshed and regenerated over and over, eager to share this renewed excitement and joy with you ALL.
For our Winter Zoom Series, Gateway to Open Visions beginning on January 14, 2023, we will delve into the Living Tao philosophical teachings to be able to practice wholistically with combined Body, HeartMind and Spirit. To begin with, a newly re-discovered inspiration of mine. Recently, I observed the symbolic names of the Five generation of my Huang Family fathers and see them as a ready-made sacred Talisman:
My great-great grandfather’s name was 黃學易”Huang, who studies the “YI” as in Yi Jing (I Ching)”, Great-grandfather was 黃德明 “Huang, who’s virtue (as in Te of “Tao Te Ching”) is bright as sun and moon”, Grandfather was 黃大紀 “Huang, the Great Epoch or the Nature’s Eternal Law; and my father’s given name was, 黃寶循 “Huang, who treasures the order of things”, and my name 黃忠良 “Huang, who is center-heart/minded to strive for clarity and balance”.
WOW! A lot to take in. As I have often reminded myself, the name I was given has not been easy to deserve without constantly being measured by what and how we are able to keep on learning and improving in our personal cultivation. We need to look no further than to use these as guidelines in our lifelong perennial studies of Living Tao Forms, Chinese Classics, and the many potent Chinese Symbols we have already learned and have yet to meet.
As we journey forward to the New Year, 2023 will unfold in ways that will open the gates to new possibilities, and we can be optimistically hopeful about what is to come.
Be well, stay safe, and Happy Holidays!
CHI-eers!
Chungliang