Tao is about following ‘the Way’ – finding it, losing it, finding it again. The Tao is the way of balance and harmony, between male and female, masculine and feminine, between human kind and the rest of Nature, between life and death, between ancestors and those yet to be, between microcosm and macrocosm, and between the energies of Earth and stars. It is rooted in Nature and universe, and was experienced and perceived by ancient Chinese sages through passive-receptive and active-receptive meditations –  opening to oneness and avoiding the seeming dualities of body and mind.

Tao involves humility, discipline, wanting little, questioning assumptions of human self-importance, being participant – observers in Nature’s cycles, and delighting in the interplay of the Chinese elements – Earth at the centre, air/metal, fire, water and wood to the four cardinal directions. Being close to feminism and to shamanism, Tao has for long periods of time been persecuted and driven underground and then, for the exact same reasons, has bubbled up again.

Indeed, Tao in me has at times been driven underground and then bubbled up again. It has no immediate relevance to my work as a psychoanalyst and intellectual, so keeping alive such an ancient and ‘culturally other’ philosophy has at times been strange, impossible or disorienting – and I’m only a beginner. I ask myself, what is this oriental ‘call’, in languages I cannot understand, with myths more remote than those of the Greeks? After all, there is love of Nature in rich seams and running waters in my occidental roots. My answer is that it is the oriental disciplined use and appreciation of the physical body, as temple for the breath, and as giving ways to access Nature and Spirit in their own terms, with no ideological clothing or aversion, that draws me back, again and again, to Tao.

Ours is an increasingly secular, diverse, plural and slowly more pagan era, and urgent desires are emerging, wanting to connect directly with Nature and to know what that might mean.

Many, vaguely wanting to reduce their carbon and eco footprints, fear how empty their lives would be if they did. In Taoist perspectives, they fear the wrong kind of emptiness, but if they could bear it they would find sufficiency in emptiness beyond their present reach.

As an engaged citizen in a noisy, somewhat implausible ‘normal’ business of market-led social democracies, I do not find this path easy, yet disciplined participation in Taoist meditations helps me to undo the shackles of Western late-industrial intellectual arrogance. This essay is my attempt to delineate a stance by which to survive psychically in these times, which, I believe, are more troubling than collectively ‘we’ yet realize. It is not about the sublime reaches of mystical rapture, but about the rugged struggle to connect where we encounter limitation in the field of desire, and where we need to bow to greater forces.

We need to address the lack of balance where there is a cascade of dominance: male over female, human species over Nature, and the consequent ill effects. Sigmund Freud studying hysteria – a condition designated as being of the feminine – distinguished male-and-female as genders from masculine-and-feminine as psychical qualities. He considered the life force to be sexual in nature, named it the libido, and observed its course from the depths of the bodily unconscious. But he also considered libido to be masculine, in either gender, thus consigning women to a position of passivity.

Although Freud made an enormous contribution to rescuing women from the tyranny of the male gaze (and from being sexually dominated), he generated confusion as to the feminine position, which is not one of passivity but of receptivity. Ancient Tao, by contrast, distinguishes yang/masculine: hot, quick, bright, and expansive, from yin/ feminine: cool, slow, shadowy, and nourishing, and teaches that both are necessary and complementary aspects of chi, the life force.

There are many teachers and traditions of Taoist arts and practices available to us. One well-known is Master Mantak Chia, best known for his work with sexuality and for teaching practices to strengthen and clarify in the interests of enhancing balanced, loving intercourse between yin and yang energies of the body, rooted in Nature, with head in the stars.

Contemporary fast-moving, prurient excitement about all things sexual would misread Chia’s contributions as being confined to rather peculiar ways of achieving greater satisfaction. Instead, perusal of his many books leads to the realization that he is setting sexual experience, in the context of disciplined, detailed, shamanically informed practices to bring alive the relations between yin and yang in and between ourselves, and in Nature too.

The core practice is to generate the “micro-cosmic orbit”, or “small heavenly cycle”, a circling of energy from the perineum up the spine and down the front, round and round. It begins by being imagined, and becomes more and more real. This practice in “micro-ecology” – circling and conserving  energies within the body – encourages self – sufficiency, helping to defeat what Buddhists call craving and psychoanalysts call lack, which otherwise seems to be filled by spurious appetites. Chia himself comes across not as an “expert’ but as ‘master’ of his subject, deeply versed in chi kung and tai chi, a Taoist doctor with many specific techniques and meditations for various ailments which, in keeping with the traditions of Chinese acupunctural medicine, he perceives as due to imbalances in body’s energy systems. Born in Thailand to a family of Chinese origin, he is apparently from a long line of shamans broken only by his father who became a Christian priest.

Kris Deva North is Chia’s UK representative and founder of the London Healing Tao Centre, All Chia’s teachings are taught there, contextualized for Westerners, with links being made to the practices and medicine wheel of the Amerindian peoples, with whom Kris has lived and studied. The practices are energetic dynamic, and intended to open the participant to the inner energy body. They are also very safe, because all Taoist practices and meditations are to do with generating, conserving and deploying chi with love, in wisdom and for healing.

The practice of the inner smile, for example, may seem weird, but it becomes very invigorating and cleansing. Imagine the sun (yang) in your brow, flooding the inner body with warmth and light, and the moon (yin) in your kidneys. When we smile, gratefully, to each of the main internal organs (heart, kidneys, stomach/spleen/pancreas, liver and lungs), we are immediately confronted with what is our normal lack in our awareness in taking these organs for granted.

Tao is ancient China’s gift to the world, and the Tai Te Ching is its classic text – one of subtle nobility opening hearts to wanting less and realizing that less is more. It is said to have been composed 2,500 years ago by a Keeper of the Imperial Archives whose legendary name is Lao Tzu, meaning ‘old philosopher’. His job gave him the opportunity to reconstruct the paths of many sages who preceded him, until, retreating to a cave, he finally composed this luminous text, proposing a way of life in keeping with Nature.

With Confucianism it forms a double helix running through the diversity of Chinese cultures. Whereas Confucius sought an ethical philosophy by which to regulate relations between individual, family and State, Lao Tzu was ambivalent about and reflective upon all such regulations, acknowledging their necessity but also seeing through them to our roots in Nature and her celestial origins. The Tao Te Ching has generated scores of translations and libraries of commentary – yet do we know what it means? Not without our self that reads it being put to the sword.

“In gathering your vital energy to attain suppleness, have you reached the state of a new-born babe? In washing and clearing your inner vision, have you purified it of all dross? In loving your people and governing your state, are you able to dispense with cleverness? In the opening and shutting of heaven’s gate, are you able to play the feminine part?” Lao Tzu calls on us to find again the charmed timelessness of the new-born babe, without regressing from our adult capacities for concern and subtle action.

There is not the slightest hint in Lao Tzu of democracy as a concept or a desirable end in itself – there is the Sage, the Ruler and the people, and the best way of ruling is to keep the people happy, their bellies full and their minds uncluttered and without desire. He taught a way of life somewhat subversive of imperial and religious control, proposing for all – including future generations and their rulers – a walk on the wild side in communion with forces and presences that inspire creation. “See the simple, embrace the primal, diminish the self and curb the desires.”

Thus it links with the interests of the oppressed wand with ethnic diversity. The ‘noble man”, in Lao Tzu’s classic, is not only the nobleman by imperial reward or acquisiotion of power, but one who lives in harmony with the natural order, delighting in physical vitality, and resisting and bypassing the enormously disturbed appetites which has opened up in us between intellectual development and the basic needs of the physical body.

Do not fear, says Lao Tzu, to live quietly, achieving nothing, with your ear to chi, the life force, and your way of life true to basic requirements – because achievements leads to excess and destruction. “When the world is in possession of the Tao, the galloping horses are led to fertilize the fields with their droppings. When the world has become Taoless, war horses breed in the suburbs.”

As we advance and Nature recedes, we turn her into a kind of simulacrum, a simulated likeness, of herself – and end up as simulacra of ourselves. Satish kumar has pointed out that we are caught in the consequences of conflating ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’: ‘ecology’ referring to the interdependency of the whole web of life-systems; and ‘environment’, to the world around us seen from our human point of view. Extending our manicured environments at ecological cost, instead of the wild we will have specimens in parks, simulacra of what they were. Like vanished stars whose light only now reaches us, the film of the tiger reassures us because it seems she’s still there.

The human race has gone absolutely global. We are an incredibly successful species, brilliant in our exuberant creativity, but we have been caught in the shadows of our success. Working psychoanalytically, watching and reading ‘the news’, and listening to friends, I am aware how preoccupied we are with our own immediacies, relating to, with, or against each other, in pursuit of our needs, wants and desires, largely to the exclusion of Nature as a presence in herself. We relate ‘about’ Nature rather than ‘to’ Nature. We have largely lost the natural intelligence of Indigenous peoples who live close to the Earth, flexible in their turning from human-specific activity into communion with Nature, and back again.

This, for me, is where Tao comes in. When I listen to many who say we need to consume less, respect the Earth more, and realize that wanting less is desirable as an end in itself, I wonder how people are to achieve that state of grace. We don’t seem to have the cultural means. In my view, we need to engage with the split between our thinking and the rest of our physicality.

Once you have crossed the threshold into communion with Nature, there is no going back, and it is from there you witness our human condition, wondering at our dangerous absurdities. Listening to Nature whilst in the midst of this, the sixth great extinction of species, and knowing it has been caused by us, it is hard to bear the loss we hear. It is then that we need whatever practices we have found, earthy, invigorating and spiritual, to keep us grounded, informed by the courage of far-reaching breath.

Despite the fact that our best efforts towards sustainability may not make the crucial difference, Lao Tzu, Christ and Spinoza all say the same: once you see something truly, you are obliged to be true to it. That is the underlying ethic. And, in practice, we need to find enjoyment in the ways of the body attuned to and at one with Nature, for then it is easier to embody the low-carbon journey, consume less and establish our earthly integrity as a simple good in itself.

At the dawn of modern science, in the age of Descartes, stood Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England and amateur scientist. “We must put Nature to the rack and extort her secrets,” he wrote. As R.D.Laing subsequently and ironically observed, “That’s no way to treat a lady!” But her being racked and extorted still proceeds at full tilt, including in  our finding ever more ingenious and astounding ways to save us- or rather, our lifestyle – “because we’re worth it”.

It seems to me to be all about subjects and objects. By subjecting Nature to our will, we turn her into a set of malleable objects. Where subject dominates object, there is no balance. If we could make the natural turn from our species-specific self – absorption towards Nature and listen to her beauty, strengths, losses and fears, we would less want to do things to her and would become wiser in the ways of this Earth – and more sufficient precisely where we stand, going nowhere.

A soulless proliferation of wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and other technological fixes will not do the trick because they are all on the yang side of the equation and will merely lead to further implausible demands on natural resources. Whatever else, it is a change of orientation that is called for. Ask Lao Tzu: “The spirit of the fountain dies not. It is called the mysterious feminine. The doorway of the mysterious feminine is called the root of heaven-and-earth. Lingering like gossamer, it has only a hint of existence, and yet when you draw upon it, it is inexhaustible. If we would hold true to sufficiency in the moment, knowing that wanting less is more, and would diligently practise to generate and conserve chi, we would hold the whole world in our hands.

This article is published with permission from Resurgence Magazine, UK.

For Mantak Chia visit www.universal-tao.com, Quotations are from Tao Te Ching, trans. John Wu (1961)

Illustration by Sarah Klockars-Clauser

For every half litre bottle of carbonated soft drink (CSD) purchased, your water footprint on the earth (the amount of water depleted) is up to 300 litres of water.

Today, 50 Indian villages suffer from severe shortage and contamination of groundwater, because of soft drink production.

It takes 442 litres of water to manufacture a one litre plastic CSD bottle.

Up to 50% of the water used in each PepsiCo plant turns into wastewater.

In Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, the coca cola plant has lowered ground water levels by 26 feet in 11 years. Before the plant was set up, the water level had actually risen by 26 feet in eleven years.

A kilogram of plastic that is produced for plastic bottles, releases up to 3 kilograms of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Eight Coca Cola plants across India release toxic sludge containing mercury, cadmium, and chromium.

Lindane is an insecticide that is used in the making of all CSDs. It’s concentration has been found to be more than 42 times the limit stipulated by the European Econmic Commission.

It’s consumption damages the central nervous system, immune system and is a confirmed carcinogen (cancer causing chemical).

When you drink a glass of water, tender coconut or just eat a fresh fruit you are NOT increasing your water footprint

Remember when you are choosing what to drink, you aren't simply looking at calories and sugar. Getting other vitamins and minerals from your drink is important, such as the calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin A or vitamin C

Drinking one soft drink makes a child 60% more likely to be obese, reducing a person’s life expectancy (the number of years they can expect to live) by 12-15 years.

Nearly 91% of all CSDs sold in India are bought by middle and upper class people in urban areas.

Today, India is the Diabetes Capital of the World. 70% of all diabetics in the world are Indian. 1 in every 5 people living in metros  is diabetic. By 2030, 1 in 11 Indians will be diabetic.

A single 12-ounce can of soda has around 13 teaspoons of sugar, usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup.

If you give up half a litre of CSD per day, at the end of the year, you will lose up to 12 kilograms of fat and save 91,000 calories and 7,280 teaspoons of sugar

CSDs are acidic - they contain carbonic and / or phosphoric acid.

Health problems that could result from drinking colas include tooth decay, pancreatic cancer, liver damage, osteoporosis, and heart problems.

The Transition movement is one of those unexpected phenomena in human culture, capturing and mobilizing an energy that rarely emerges but is deeply significant for social, political and economic change. This radical movement is grounded in the stark realization that dramatic transformations are occurring in the Earth’s climate due to humanity’s use of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing global warming, and that the supply of these cheap fuels, particularly oil, has reached or soon will reach its peak and decline ( the ‘peak oil’ phenomenon), potentially creating an economic and social crisis compared with which the present ‘credit crunch’ is a gentle warning.

Awareness of the inevitability of a transition in our culture to alternative, resilient ways of living that are not dependent on the economic growth paradigm led Rob Hopkins to explore ways of facilitating this move when he was living in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2005. His vision was for communities to “go local” in food and energy production and housing and that they should initiate this transformation themselves. It is the positive sense of empowerment this gives to people that overcomes the challenges of such fundamental change. Hopkins then moved to Totnes, South Devon where he started the local initiative called Transition Town Totnes in 2006. This began with public talks on fossil-fuel dependence and how to find alternatives through collective action in the community.

From this modest beginning, the Transition movement has exploded in the most remarkable way, not simply within the UK but worldwide. The seed planted in Kinsale and then in Totnes has produced a plant that has grown like Jack’s beanstalk with a network of Transition initiatives of different types and sizes. The latest count is 150 in fourteen countries and the number increases weekly. This represents a phenomenal rate of growth in less than three years. The Transition movement could indeed make a fundamental difference to the planet.

Co-coordinating these and ensuring some uniformity of process has been the hob of the Transition Network Ltd, a legally constituted charity that oversees with a light touch the different forms of transition that seem appropriate to different scales of action: towns, cities, counties, countries. It’s stated intention is to “inspire, encourage, support, network and train communities as they adopt the Transition model in response to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness”.

In 2008, The Transition Handbook, written by Hopkins, was published by Green Books, and it has become the guide for communities seeking to participate in the transition to sustainability. Because our dependence on cheap, plentiful energy has become not simply a habit but an addiction, the Transition movement recognizes that some deep work has to be done for people to face the difficult choices confronting them. This takes the form of group engagement in a change of consciousness from focus on the individual, a primary characteristic of Western culture, to opening ourselves to interdependent relationships and community. The first stage of transition is for interested people from a community to form an initiating group that will then go through the steps of awareness-raising and laying the foundation with other existing groups in the community.

The recognition of interdependence engendered is not simply with other people but with the natural world, acknowledging that we are all embedded in the creative web of life that has emerged on Earth through 4 billion years of evolution, giving us the miracle of our living planet. Our co-dependence with the other species with whom we share the Earth is the foundation on which the Transition movement is biologically grounded, and it is the source of the basic concepts that shape the vision.

One of the remarkable features of the Transition movement is that, despite the gravity of our situation, there is a sense of empowerment and excitement that results from inviting people to discover their own solution to the problems we face. They are not being told what to do. Threats and blame do not liberate people; invitation to participate in designs for radical transformation does. This is a truly bottom-up movement of deep change which people recognize is increasingly necessary.

At the very core of the Transition message about cultivating new, sustainable lifestyles is the belief that human cultures must develop patterns of relationship in community that have the properties of natural ecosystems: they must become resilient, capable of responding adaptively and creatively to shocks and changes such that flexible responses lead to the emergence of new sustainable patterns of living.

Basic to this vision of resilient communities is the localization of food production, renewable energy, transport and housing. Each community is encouraged to design its own Energy Descent Action Plan whereby it decreases dependence on fossil fuels over a period of fifteen to twenty years. To facilitate this localization process, local currencies and banks can be developed that transform the economic system from debt-dependence and continuous, unsustainable growth to resilient local trading networks that are creative and adaptable. Local currencies already exist and serve community cohesion and stability in countries around the world, including Switzerland, Sweden and the U.S, while Totnes and Lewes in the UK have issued their own currencies to facilitate local trading. Local currencies typically flourish in times of economic hardship – for example in America’s last Great Depression – and, given the state of the world economy, there’s every chance we’ll see their ascendance again.

Accompanying these localization initiatives is the development of local governance, education and health care and the integration of practical skills, arts and crafts into learning process so that children acquire directly the know-how for living a sustainable life in community that is harmonious with the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. Implementing these changes does not depend on instructions from some central authority but on local decision-making that is self-organizing and participatory rather than top-down and hierarchal in its authority structure.

How can such radical change in the organization of contemporary society come about? This is another core component of the Transition movement: developing a bottom-up participatory process for all major decisions in the community. The Transition Network suggests a list of seven principle of transition that enable a diversified response grounded in the local context. These are:

Positive Visioning: Transition initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of community life beyond dependence on fossil fuels.
Trust and Empowerment: Transition initiatives are based on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information available is deeply contradictory and then empowering appropriate responses.
Inclusion and Openness: Successful Transition initiatives depend on the unprecedented coming together of diverse sections of society.
Sharing and Networking: Information sharing and learning are key principles of resilient ecologies that are central to transition.

Building Resilience: How communities respond to shocks is critical to the transitional path beyond fossil-fuel dependency. The movement is explicit in its intention to build resilience across key economic sectors (including food, energy and transport) and across a range of appropriate scales – from local to national.
Inner and Outer Transition: Transition is a catalyst to shifting values and unleashing the energy and creativity of people to do what they are passionate about.
Subsidiarity: Self- organization and decision making at the appropriate scale are key principles dawn from resilient ecological systems.
Many attribute the success of the Transition movement to its emerging holographic structure, which mimics cell growth within living organisms. The network aspires to simultaneously maximize local autonomy and maximize coherence at the macro-level through shared learning and purpose.

It has become clear in recent years that the economic system is intrinsically unsustainable and inequitable. It is destructive of ecosystems and cultures alike in its homogenizing impulse, destroying the diversity that is the foundation of resilient natural and cultural systems. However, the structure and properties of trading and exchange systems are ours to choose. Our recent experience with the toxic properties of unregulated capitalism has made it clear that we need to find other ways of carrying out exchange and trade that are more in line with the properties of natural ecosystems.

A primary source of instability in our current economic system is continuous growth, which uses up the Earth’s resources inefficiently and is driven by the monetary policy of lending with interest. This makes growth necessary to recover debt. However, there is no reason why community banks should not provide loans to savers without interest, which is a principle used by a number of successful banking schemes in Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. An economy that does not enslave people to debt is one in which they retain their freedom and empowerment.

Since natural ecosystems remain in balance with the resources available to them and with one another, we can ask if there is some regulatory principle that is natural to human communities so that they could likewise maintain equitable harmony in their bioregions. It appears that there is indeed such a principle, which could balance quantity of goods traded with quality of life. The basic idea is that as trading activity increases, facilitated by money, people’s basic needs become satisfied and there is an opportunity for them to find lives of meaning in relation to one another in community and with the natural world.

However, if trading activity becomes dominant, people spend more time working than experiencing wellbeing in family and community. Then the quality of their lives decreases and this is experienced as a loss of meaning and quality of lived experience, which people are encouraged to compensate for with more quantity of goods and money. This is the retail therapy that is notorious in our culture: a desperate attempt to fill the quality gap with quantities of consumer items. Because community has been destroyed, people often fail to notice this because of an absence of the relationships required to evaluate quality of life.

This positive feedback loop leads to the disintegration of society as people search desperately for ways of finding meaning, usually through the accumulation of money. This inevitably fails. The first step in restoring the natural balance between freedom and responsibility, people and Nature, is to recover community, which is precisely what the Transition movement focuses on. It is people’s hunger for meaning and quality in relationship that seems to be driving the Transition movement along a path to social, political, economic and ecological transformation.

As we move into the unknown territory of post-peak-oil economies, how can we be sure that transition ideas will create more sustainable and resilient ways of living? The answer is that we can’t, and we need to recognize that Transition is a social exploration somewhat along the lines of Nature’s evolutionary experiments, which continue all around us. Transition’s playful seriousness encapsulates this experiment and lack of certainty with this “cheerful disclaimer” from the Transition Towns website: “We truly don’t know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it will be too little, but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.”

The human spirit goes beyond the violence and meaninglessness of a fight, when the way of fighting also becomes a beautiful expression and a search for self-realisation. Most people think that Martial Arts are only for wartime effort – but apart from helping its practitioners play a functional role in society, they help them stay fit, and can become a path of personal fulfilment.
Martial arts in India, based on the Samkhya Philosophy, was born around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Kalaripayattu in Kerala is called the mother of all martial arts. Ancient martial arts were focused on internal health, which meant the health of the 5 primary organs – the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas and kidneys. There was, therefore, a lot of focus on developing the muscles around the core, with little or no focus on the shoulders and the arms. All the power needed for thrusting and fighting was generated from the core. The movements were modeled on the ‘Big Cats’ with the legs kept well-trained for optimal springiness.
The martial arts give importance to warming up with work on joints, circulation, and most importantly the endocrine system, as this is essential for the experience of wellness. The endocrine system varies according to the environment and the person's mindset – hence meditation also is integrated into the practise of martial arts. Meditation regulates the kind of hormones secreted by a person and keeps them balanced and healthy.

Basic Principles

Alignment: The first thing that a martial arts student develops is “alignment”. The feet were always kept parallel and the shoulders and arms were kept close to the body to be able to engage the ‘lats’ (Latissimus dorsi – the muscle on the lateral posterior part of the back), below the shoulder.
Martial arts gradually became more sophisticated – artists realised that practising a strike with full speed right from the beginning was going to cause some misalignment. So they started training their students in basic locomotion. A concept called ‘antagonistic isotonics’ helps to explain the importance of this. Muscles always exist in pairs and function such that when one is compressed, the other relaxes. However, most people are not aware of this basic physics of locomotion and can quite often be seen tensing both muscles while moving, lifting or even walking. Through martial arts, students realise that a muscle needs to be kept tense only 50% of the time. This even helps the person relax emotionally. Bad posture and locomotion are responsible for compressing the 5 main organs - often enough to impair their proper functioning and not release the correct hormones; they can also make a person overweight which causes the joints to become weak. My teacher used to say, “Age is not how much hair you have on your head – it is how much you can run, jump and play”.
Breathing: The next thing a person learns is “how to breathe” – to spend enough time retaining the breath for it to reach the various parts of the body. A slower breathing pattern enhances health, brings down heart rate/blood pressure, and every part of the brain gets oxygenated, helping the thinking to become clearer. You can see how everything is connected and you start thinking in-depth. Breathing is considered important to see beyond what is apparent and form an an appropriate mature response.
Generation of Power: The next step is “generation of power”. There are normal aerobic or glycolic circuits that people use to generate power. Then, there are anaerobic circuits within the body, which do not need oxygen and that can generate power in a flash (called Fajin in Chinese), in the process producing many toxins, which are washed out by a healthy circulatory system. The anaerobic circuits help because they increase immunity. The body is now constantly able to flush out toxins.

The Journey
Once the student has understood correct muscular alignment and proper movement, the next thing to do is to learn to ‘break out of the illusion’, and to ‘connect with the unchanging or immortal within you’. The changing or evolving part is discarded as unreal by all three schools of thought connected with the martial arts - Daoism, Buddhism and Yoga.
When illusions are destroyed and the martial artist connects with the unchanging reality, he gains strange powers, inspiring students to take up the path, even if their aspirations could take many years to be fulfilled.
Through martial arts, we learn to appreciate life. The most valuable thing that the martial arts can do for a committed student is to eliminate his fear. Fear is replaced with understanding, awareness and compassion. When I understand someone well and I see myself in his shoes, I realise that I would act the same way in that situation. It is not him, it is his conditioning. I don’t hold it against him but if possible try to remove that conditioning.

The Martial arts teach people to align themselves to a wholesome life, get their health back, to learn to breathe properly and invest in inner growth. If they can achieve these things, they can increase their lifespan, have a sense of clarity and self-worth - which will help them make a positive contribution to society.