The Tao of Stress: How to Calm, Balance, and Simplify Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

are chronically stressed.
    The various Taoist practices, techniques, and meditations that you’ll learn throughout this book are all oriented toward restoring a free flow of qi throughout the body. As a result, you will become centered, rooted, and flexible. Mind, body, and environment will be integrated. Yin and yang will be in harmony. You will be free from chronic stress.
    Tao
    When Taoists talk about being in harmony, ultimately they’re referring to being in harmony with Tao. Tao is the creative source of everything, including nature and its rhythmic patterns. Tao is essentially the continually changing, interrelated, harmonious, interactive process of freely circulating qi being shaped, changed, and transformed by yin and yang.
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    Tao is often described as the great passageway— a dynamic empty
    space through which everything comes into being, transforms, and then returns. As dynamic empty space, Tao allows all things to function and doesn’t interfere with or get entangled in the continual process of change and transformation.
    When we interfere with the natural, cyclic process of change and
    transformation through our thoughts, desires, emotions, behaviors, and lifestyle, we fragment mind, body, and environment. We make our world complex, absolute, and inflexible. We are out of balance. As a result, we aren’t centered, rooted, or flexible. We are chronically stressed. We aren’t in harmony with Tao.
    Tian
    Depending on the context, tian is often translated as “nature,” “sky,”
    or “heaven.” Tian is a manifestation of Tao. It is the creative, interrelated, rhythmic pattern of the continual process of change and transformation expressed through the various configurations of qi manifested by yin and yang. For Taoists, nature is a role model on which we should base and model our behavior. When we don’t follow the patterns of nature, we become fragmented and, eventually, chronically stressed.
    Ziran
    Ziran , or naturalness, is being in harmony with the continual process of change and transformation that we call nature. Ziran essentially means not interfering with ourselves, not interfering with others, and not getting entangled in the affairs of the world. Our thoughts, desires, emotions, behaviors, and lifestyle are neither excessive nor deficient. Qi circulates freely throughout the body. Life isn’t complex. We are flexible and able to adapt. We aren’t chronically stressed.
    The Taoist Path
    Across all types of Taoism, the Taoist path for removing chronic
    stress and becoming harmonious with Tao is threefold: simplifying life, reducing desires, and stilling and emptying the mind. All three
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    The Tao of Stress
    components of this interrelated Taoist path focus on removing complex, inflexible, excessive, and deficient thoughts, desires, emotions, behaviors, and lifestyles that create the continual agitation in both body and mind that leads to chronic stress.
    Basic Taoist Techniques
    All of the various Taoist meditative techniques and practices are
    grounded in five key components:
    • Posture
    • Attention
    • Concentration
    • Natural breathing
    • Nonjudgmental, flexibly focused, unbiased, detached
    observation of what is happening to you and around you in the
    present
    The latter is a type of awareness known as guan . You may be more familiar with a similar concept in Buddhism, called mindfulness. All five components are basic to simplifying life, reducing desires, and stilling and emptying the mind. They are fundamental to stopping the continual agitation of both mind and body. I’ll discuss them in greater detail in chapter 2.
    Taoist meditative techniques and practices are essentially of two
    types: sitting and standing. Both the sitting and standing techniques can be either still or moving. In some cases, a technique incorporates both.
    Some of the more common practices are qigong and taijiquan. In appearance, qigong looks a lot like various