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The World of Taoist Meditation
The Taoist Meditation tradition is relevant to the needs of the computer age. It helps people resolve and come to terms with many of the human condition’s basic spiritual questions:
- Why am I here?
- What is the nature of spirituality?
- How can I overcome the conditionings of childhood and become emotionally and spiritually mature?
- How can I resolve my spiritual, psychic and emotional pain?
- How can I come to terms with death and dying?
The aim at the beginning states of Taoist meditation is to develop an awareness of subtle energy in your body and to maintain that awareness. Foundational skills include proper alignments, breathing, concentration and staying present to what is inside you.
This meditation retreat will focus on helping you cultivate all of these skills so that you can develop a lifetime practice. By spending necessary time at this important stage you will make your meditation practice productive and fruitful into the future.
As your practice progresses, you begin to attain deeper layers of inner stillness and to become aware of Universal Consciousnessi. The core practice at this stage is Taoist inner dissolving which you can practice in five modalities: sitting, standing, moving, lying down or in partner exercises. You learn to let go and develop more spontaneity in your life. The benefits at this stage include gaining emotional harmony and releasing structural blockages, traumas, and fixations in your emotional, mental and psychic bodies.
What You’ll Learn at this Meditation Retreat
Take a journey into your inner world with an authentic Taoist Water Method Meditation tradition.
During this course you learn specific inner tools that are necessary to unleash the potential transformative qualities of meditation. Each day you'll be given new Taoist Presence Practices so you can be more conscious and present.
This course will train you to embody the basics which underpin all major methods of meditation such as awareness and presence with relaxed, smooth and open continuous inner focus. This course is also the foundation for all practices within the Taoist Water Tradition including the Inner Dissolving meditation methods which build on and extend the Presence Practices.
You will be shown how to:
- Recognize what’s subliminally happening inside you. This helps you become better able to consciously understand and navigate many of the glitch points normally found during most practitioners’ meditative experience.
- Acquire necessary meditation skills including proper breathing and sitting alignments.
- Stay
present by reducing and overcoming the involuntary tendency toward both
distraction and spacing out. This involves three phases.
- Recognizing if and how you become distracted.
- Pulling back from the brink of becoming either fully distracted or spacing out.
- After you tip over into distraction or dissociation, how in the shortest time you can again return to being present while meditating rather than remaining lost or disorientated.
- Use meditative presence to supercharge the benefits of your tai chi, qigong or yoga practice.
- Gain the ability when encountering subtle inner blockages to recognize, rather than ignore them. This is the necessary precursor to actual Taoist Inner Dissolving itself.
- Explore deeper possibilities within the practice of Taoist Inner Dissolving.
This retreats starts with a one-week Presence Practices Intensive and then moves into more advanced subjects for those who have been invited to attend for all three weeks. A very small group of Bruce’s more experienced instructors will be training to teach the presence practices.
The Flow between Presence and Inner Dissolving
Presence Practices enable you to continuously feel the energies within you, including those that have become blocked, cloudy, or unbalanced in your body, mind and spirit. The Inner Dissolving Practices in turn then enable you to clear and resolve those energies so that you can become more free, clear, natural and balanced.
Generally within the tradition, one initially learns Presence Practices through Outer Dissolving Methods either moving or sitting before progressing onto Inner Dissolving. You cannot dissolve what you can’t feel and be present to. You can also learn presence through sitting meditation.
Yet, as with everything in the Taoist Water Method Tradition, these two phases of study (Presence and Dissolving) are not a linear progression but an ever-evolving circle of practice. The more you can become present or aware of the blocks within your body, emotions, mind and spirit, the more you can clear them. The more you can clear, the more that you can become further aware of what is deeper inside you.
During this meditation retreat Bruce will guide the group back and forth between the Presence and Inner Dissolving Practices, weaving them together as will best benefit the group.
Taoist Moving Meditation Practices
The meditation retreat will also increase your capacity to do Outer Dissolving Meditation (as explained in Relaxing into Your Being and The Great Stillness). You will learn how to integrate these outer dissolving techniques into other energy practices including:
Integrating presense practices and dissolving in other energy arts transforms them into moving meditations. During the retreat, there will be self-lead sessions and groups in the morning and nights for you to practice your other energy arts. Attendance at these sessions is encouraged and will help you improve your sitting meditation.
Playing the Master Game
Before you can engage in any authentic meditation you first must learn how to use your mind and consciousness. The majority of the people in the world are easily distracted, unable to focus for an extended time period and unable to stay present to what is either outside or inside of them. This is a by-product of our modern consumer and technological age and few people ever go beyond their existing cultural programming.
Presence practices a effective and important. They enable you to move toward stress reduction and peace of mind. Rather than be controlled by outside forces, you make the decision to turn inward to become a master of your inner world. In the short term it leads to very practical applications such as:
- Achieving goals
- Being present in your relationships
- Determining what is important and what is not
- Seeing what is inside you
- Finding your center and core
- Bringing in more love, compassion and joy for yourself and others
Regardless if you have high spiritual aims, as you make the presence practices part of who you are, your life can start to change in a direction you desire.
In the long-term, once you develop these foundation presence skills you now have the base knowledge to engage in even deeper meditations. For some this will mean a inner drive to understand the great questions of life, to look at and resolve karma, to discover our true essence and to explore the universe and Tao.
Who knows how long the spiritual process takes. It could be one lifetime or thousands, but once on this path it becomes a prime directive in your being. You are now part of 'The Master Game' or "The Way" that mystics, yogis and meditators have played through time to realize what many have called enlightment, becoming conscious or simply knowing the Tao.
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