Happy New Year 2022
(January 2022)
Dear Living Tao Friends,
Happy 2022—with hope and wishes, during this troubling time that we all share, for a return to near normal soon. We will continue to count our blessings and be grateful for our relative safety and well being, especially for the opportunity to continue sharing our learning via Zoom, to stay in contact and in tune with our CHI-eers. During this January transition time, I have been able to meditate and reflect quietly at home in Illinois, reminiscing about decades of good fortune in charting my journey in the “Tao of Living”—from my transition from academia and the performing arts to that “Turning Point” of meeting Alan Watts, which began our collaboration at Esalen Institute. Through more than 50 years of my teaching there, I have also benefited from mentors/colleagues, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Huston Smith, Robert Bly, and many others. Feeling very much gratitude with such good fortune and blessings. Alan Watts also encouraged me to trust my personal East/West cultural arts synthesis, to be willing to allow my early teaching experiences to be recorded and transcribed into book forms, first with the Real People Press by Barry and John Stevens, the mother/son publisher from Moab, Utah to tape recording my seminars to become my first book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain in 1973. The rest, and many books later with this reluctant author, is history. To reflect on and refresh our decades of learning and practice of the “Living Tao”, we shall begin our upcoming Winter Zoom Series with the metaphors of the 抱虎歸山 “Embrace Tiger” and “Return to Mountain” and to study again what was written in the Foreword of the book Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts, about 無為 Wu Wei and the “Watercourse Way” 道法流水。 I have also been contemplating how to refresh and renew these philosophical concepts with practices from the Empty Circle, Wu Ji to become Tai Ji Yin/Yang Symbol—無極生太極. Also, Qi Gong related learning, teaching and practice by re-visiting the essential concept of “Heaven-Human-Earth are One” 天人合一, and “Body-Heart(Xin) are One” 身心合一。Of course more detailed Qi Gong studies of the Five Moving Forces (Wu Jing) 五行 (火Fire, 水Water, 木Wind/
