New Year Reflections from Chungliang
(March 2024)
Dear Living Tao Friends:
Happy Green/Wood Dragon Year 青木龍年.
We are just concluding the first series of Zoom sessions of the year on the day before the official “Spring Forward” to celebrate longer daylight and brightening from the darker winter gloom. Wishing fervently for a New Beginning with hope for a return to peace and harmony everywhere around the world.
Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, our lives have been suspended with many changes. The alternative of continuing my teaching through Zoom was not initially to my liking, but gradually I found ease and am able to re-create the immediacy and intimacy of previous LIVE sessions. In many aspects, even better and more inclusive for many old friends from afar to re-connect, who due to age and distance, had to stop traveling to our main seminars in Oregon, the Midwest, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and for decades in Switzerland during Easter Week for European friends.
Happily we are resurrecting our Easter Week gathering in Switzerland, and at the same time regrettably, for the last time this coming Easter. Our Swiss organizers have requested to retire into their other focuses in their lives. It also offers me a personal insight to stop traveling long distances from home, to preserve my energy and gradually trim down my usual over-worked teaching schedules. A few focused in-person seminars at home in America with monthly Zoom sessions for my worldwide Living Tao students/friends will be my sensible near future offerings.
Another major benefit of teaching monthly Zooms with recorded sessions and study materials accumulated through the last few years has been the clear contribution to a “Wei-Wu-Wei” effort to begin assembling the archival legacy of our nearly half a century of work/study of the EAST/WEST Cultural Arts Synthesis in Comparative Philosophies.
It has been my life’s work, inherited from my classical Chinese heritage and guided by mentors Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, John Blofeld, Joseph Needham, Huston Smith, Han Suyin, Aldous and Laura Huxley, Jane Goodall, Gregory Bateson, Robert Bly and Brother David Steindl-Rast and many other kindred collaborators. Those mentors together with icons such as Yehudi Menuhin, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Lotte Goslar, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bruce Lee; musicians Joan Baez, John Denver, Paul Horn, Paul Winter, David Darling, Alexander Murray, Andreas Vollenweider, Lorin Hollander, and more, have been my good fortune in the performing arts.
This has been my life of good fortune to be often at the right place at the right time, to have encountered all these teachers and mentor/guides along the way. I owe my learning with humble achievement and expertise to be who I am and do what I do from my Chinese cultural heritage and parentage; and to all these remarkable individuals who have enriched and influenced my life’s journey. I am blessed and most grateful.
Somehow, this traditional, initial annual newsletter has become a self-reflection of my life so far, as I approach my 87th birthday in August. I wish to thank you ALL, my Tai Ji dancing friends in our international Living Tao Family. Again, I feel blessed and very grateful.
HAPPY SPRING! 愛, Chungliang 忠良
Our Tai Ji dancing frogs celebrate spring in front of elegant 蘭花 orchids and delicate daffodils fresh from our garden.
