Full Moon Christmas
Christmas Full Moon. This will not happen again for 19 years.
Magic is in the air. It’s Christmas and the full
Enjoy the double energy rush. The moon is assigned
the number 9. This year, when we add up the
numbers 12.25.2015, we also end in the number 9;
(18 – 1+8 = 9). Nine is the culmination of all the
numbers before it, representing the Enneagram in
sacred geometry, a threshold between the material
world and that of spirit. Nine is the
peacemaker because it is more devoted to the quest
for internal and external peace. Nine is the
number of “spiritual seekers” who connect with the
cosmos as well as with other people. Nine is
mystery itself, and this moon is full with the
promise of all that has been brewing during 2015.
In Taoist system, the number 9 is the luckiest
and, according to the Taoist teacher, Michel Winn,
there are 9 essential principles of Tao
self-cultivation:
1. Surrender: If we trust and surrender to the Life
Force (Chi or Qi Field), the Life Force will flow
into our body-mind. The Life Force supports us to
effortlessly unfold who we truly are. Surrender is
the prerequisite to expressing the highest level
of our individual freewill and creativity. The
central challenge our ordinary ego-personality
(heart-mind or “xin” in Chinese) faces is the
separation, fragmentation, and dispersion of our
underlying soul essence. Cloudy and reactive
emotions, poor sexual habits, bad diet, shallow
breathing, self-judgments, negative thinking, and
rejection of the spiritual nature of our physical
body results in struggle, disease, suffering, and
unhappy feeling of incompletion in life. Our
resistance to life is what kills us.
Self-cultivation teaches us to let go of our
resistance to the Life Force.
2. Harmony: The Life Force is about process. It is
made of three streams of vast, flowing
consciousness or chi that harmonizes all life:
negative-receptive-female (Yin),
positive-creative-male (Yang), and
neutral-stabilizing-primordial (Yuan). This chi
field is all-penetrating, yet remains neutral or
paradoxically still even as it moves. Likewise,
our soul rests in stillness while the Life Force
moves in Yin-Yang and Five Phase (element) cycles
through our essence. These flowing cycles/seasons
offer a simple and perfect mirroring between our
changing inner thoughts, feelings, perceptions,
and the outer action of Nature. Taoist qigong is
the process of communicating with the Life Force.
Qigong trains us to speak the language of subtle
energy or chi. We learn practical ways to
harmonize the three currents of chi flowing
amongst our self, our community, and nature.
3. Simplicity: On the outside, life is very complex.
On the inside, it is very simple. The Inner Smile
is the Tao path of simplicity. It’s simple when
you open the heart of your soul to unconditionally
accept first your own body-mind. Second phase is
to accept everything “Other” as part of a unified,
flowing essence of the Life Force. The Inner Smile
is the simplest way to keep your path
heart-centered. This simple, continuous act of
acceptance ends all separation and loneliness,
causing a soul peace to arise within our
personality. Our path in each moment is to allow
our smiling presence to embrace life’s wonderful
complexity. It is this simple foundation of
smiling, unconditional acceptance that allows all
spiritual qualities such as love, kindness,
compassion and forgiveness to unfold
spontaneously.
4. Grounding: Taoist qigong & meditation fuse our ego
into a strong, grounded, integrated whole. Qigong
allows our heart-mind and physical body to achieve
optimum health. Meditation merges our personality
and body with our soul or “ling”. This “whole-body
enlightenment” can be achieved while living an
ordinary life in a physical body. Being centered
in life means being grounded, physically and
spiritually.
5. Integrity: Qigong (chi kung) movement exercises
and meditation (neigong or nei kung) are two main
pillars of Tao self-cultivation. They empower a
third pillar – the expression of personal
integrity or innate spiritual virtue (“de”) in
daily life. Study of the I Ching (Book of
Unchanging Changes), feng shui, Chinese astrology,
the outer elixirs of Chinese medicine (massage,
nutrition, herbology), sexual energy cultivation,
and self-expression through creative arts complete
the eight pillars of our personal Tao or “Way”.
Together, these eight offer us practical skills to
grow the central ninth pillar, and realize our
soul’s highest destiny, our integration with the
Great Tao.
6. Sexual Sagehood: Our volatile male-female
sexuality is reflected in the polar split between
the two halves of our soul, the Heaven-formless
spirit and Earth-form sexually embodied aspect.
But sex is our soul’s secret alchemical elixir. If
we know how to tap our sexual volatility, we can
quickly transform spiritually. Taoist sexual
practice with a partner and solo meditative inner
sexual alchemy both use our tangible sexual
essence to “capture” and crystallize the invisible
essence of our spirit. This union of our sexual
and spiritual selves births a “third self” – an
androgynous, bi-sexual Inner Sage that manifests
our immortal, non-dual Original Nature. Our Inner
Sage is able to embody non-dual energy (yuan chi)
while present in a sexually polarized male or
female body, and simultaneously express our unique
individual will.
7. Transformation: The core Taoist spiritual practice
is Internal Alchemy (neidan gong). Alchemy is
transformation, the process of speeding up
internal change. Both science and art, this
meditative process offers a heart-centered
systematic method to transform the apparent
spirit-matter split within a single lifetime.
Inside every human being lives a mystical trinity.
In the West, this trinity might be called
body-mind-spirit, but their meaning is vague. In
Taoism, the trinity is jing-chii-shen, with very
precise meaning. Alchemical meditation speeds up
the transformations between sexual essence
(“jing”), subtle breath (“chi”), and
intelligence-spirit (“shen”). The three are really
the same, but vibrating at different speeds to
give our soul greater freedom of expression.
8. Immortality: Tao inner alchemy offers Seven
Alchemy Formulas for Eternal Life. These seven
stages are a practical map to spiritually rebirth
the mortal self into an immortal consciousness
that continues functioning after death. This is
not a quest for physical immortality. Ordinary
souls dissolve after death. Enlightened souls hold
enough integrity to reincarnate consciously, a
kind of soul immortality. Spiritual immortality is
the stage beyond enlightenment. It allows us to
complete the natural process of soul individuation
that is happening in both our Lesser
Self/personality as well as our cosmic Greater
Self. Spiritual Immortality is nature’s way to
allow the most worthy individual beings to
participate in the ongoing creation of the divine
multi-verse.
9. Spontaneity: Every soul seeks two things. One, to
complete its unique worldly destiny. Two, to
achieve a high spiritual destiny of consciously
merging back into its Original Spirit. But destiny
is not a fixed or pre-determined path. There is
only the effortless, spontaneous unfolding of each
moment (“wuwei”). The Supreme Mystery (Wuji) that
births the Life Force will always remain
unknowable and unpredictable, even as we gradually
merge with the vastness of the Tao. This central
Mystery lives in the core of our inner self and
keeps all life eternally fresh, joyful, and
spontaneous.
I wish you the best in your Health, Wealth, and
Happiness.
Dr. Wu Dhi
P.S. A very Merry Christmas to you. Thank you for
all your love and support.
