Here Be More Dragons
The energetic arts of ancient China have become so popular in recent years that there is barely a village hall up and down the country that doesn’t hold a class of some kind of Tai Chi or Qi gong. Clearly many people in the West are seeking something other than this scientific, materialist and reductionist society has to offer. These practices, from their humble beginnings, have managed to spread, in just a few decades, to all corners the Globe, indicating that deep down many of us are still searching for a deeper kind of meaning. However there is another practice, one that is much older than Tai Chi and Qi Gong, that has up until relatively gone largely undiscovered – the enigmatic Dao Yin exercises.
Way before the formation of Taoism as an actual systematised tradition there lived in ancient China the shamanic Wu people. These people, like many of the ancients around the world, were essentially animist in their beliefs. They worshipped the land, the animals, the trees and the spirt of nature that permeates through all things. With a history stretching back in to the mists of time, exact detail of their practices are few and far between. Mythological stories and ancient writings tell of group of people who served as healers, mystics and spiritual guides. Their study was an attempt to discover mankind’s place in the grand scheme of things and ancient practices such as circle walking, star-stepping and ecstatic dance seem to have come from these Wu people. Their energetic focus and view point was to look ‘outwards’, rather than the ‘inward’ looking of later Taoist practices such as Qi Gong and Alchemy.
One of these practices that has survived and has been passed down over the generations is the so called Dao Yin. Ancient Chinese scrolls mention that these exercises go back as far as 4000 years, and it is possible they came from an even more ancient time. The movements can be best described with the terms stretching, expelling, leading and guiding. The idea is to try and rid the body of any stagnant energy that was seen to be caused by an invading ‘evil’ spirits or negative environmental energies. This is done by a kind of physical and energetic wringing, that pushes and drives the pathogens back to the outside world.
My personal favourite of the different types of Dao yin goes by the name of the Four Dragons. This is a set of standing postures, mudras and energetic walking patterns that starts to awaken body’s energy system and attempts to clear out any unwanted negative Qi. Descriptively known as The Awakening Dragon, The Swimming Dragon, The Soaring Dragon and all time classic The Drunken Dragon, these four sequences are designed to get the lower Dan Tian to turn in different directions. This then acts as a kind of pump or water wheel that drives Qi through the meridians and out through the channels, purging any pathogens on the way.
To experience the Dragons is much more shamanic in feeling than that which is experienced through Tai Chi, meditation or Qi Gong. In these practices the awareness is place mostly inside the body, whereas with the Dragon Dao yin, the awareness is moved out in to the environment. This gives them a much more expansive and ‘out-there’ sensation. They also perfectly encapsulate the Taoist notions of Yin and Yang, as during the sequences there a periods of stillness which naturally give rise to periods of intense activity and vice versa.
As we are now fully entered in to the year of the wood dragon, this spring would be an auspicious time to start to learn these powerful sequences and though it is possible to learn them from books, there is no real substitute to learning them in person. I therefore have the great pleasure of announcing that our Oracle-in-Chief, Mike Jones, will be once again starting up a class again in April teaching the Four Dragons. I originally learned them from Mike several years ago and I am looking forward to deepening my understanding of this most ancient of energetic practices.
Check the Oracle for further details.