Podcasts about master chia

It's time again for our guiding seasonal podcast with Tahnee and Mason, where they tune into the energetics, undertones, and wisdom of the season within Daoism. With 30 days of Jing in full swing, and people easing back off stimulants, this episode couldn't have landed at a better time. In Daoism, the season of Winter is associated with the element of water and the wonderful Kidneys. The Kidneys are the bedrock of our yin/yang energy, a storehouse for our Jing, and govern the regulation of fluids in our body. Of all the seasons, Winter is the most Yin. The beauty to be found in this season comes from allowing space for introspection, reflection, restoration, and the inner alchemy of the kidneys, transforming fear into wisdom. As with all the seasons we move through, Tahnee and Mason translate a fluent foundation of what embodying this season looks like; The warming foods to eat, herbs to have on hand, and practices that best support us, both in this season and in this point in time collectively. Dress for the elements, protect your Qi with layers and woolies, observe Mother Nature; And as the sun sets early and rises late, so should we flow with her motion and allow our bodies to rest, and consolidate our essence into Jing. Tune in~     "I can feel the depth of that Kidney energy and the untapped potential within it. That's where the Jing lives, in the Kidneys. But when it comes down to fear, it's the wisest organ because it's the most practical".  -Mason Taylor   Mase and Tahnee discuss:   The energetics of Winter. Why rest is crucial in Winter. Herbs and foods for Winter. Observing fear-kidney related. Transforming fear into wisdom. Balancing Yin and Yang energy. The esoteric nature of the Kidneys. The Water element and the Kidneys. What menstruation blood says about our Jing essence. Practices and meditations to support us through Winter.   Tahnee and Mason Taylor Tahnee and Mason Taylor are the CEO and founder of SuperFeast (respectively). Their mission with SuperFeast is to improve the health, healing, and happiness of people and the planet, through sharing carefully curated offerings and practices that honour ancient wisdom and elevate the human spirit. Together Tahnee and Mason run their company and host the SuperFeast podcast, weaving their combined experience in herbs, yoga, wellness, Taoist healing arts, and personal development with lucid and compelling interviews from all around the world. They are the proud parents of Aiya and Goji, the dog, and are grateful to call the Byron Shire home.   Tahnee Taylor Tahnee Taylor is the CEO of SuperFeast and has been exploring health and human consciousness since her late teens. From Yoga, which she first practiced at school in 2000, to reiki, herbs, meditation, Taoist and Tantric practices, and human physiology, her journey has taken her all over. This journey continues to expand her understanding and insight into the majesty (that is) the human body and the human experience. Tahnee graduated with a Journalism major and did a stint in non-fiction publishing (working with health and wellness authors and other inspiring creatives), advertising, many jobs in cafes, and eventually found herself as a Yoga teacher. Her first studio, Yoga for All, opened in 2013, and Tahnee continues to study Yoga with her teachers Paul + Suzee Grilley and Rod Stryker. She learned Chi Nei Tsang and Taoist healing practices from Master Mantak Chia. Tahnee continues to study herbalism and Taoist practices, the human body, women's wisdom, ancient healing systems, and is currently enrolled in an acupuncture degree and year-long program with The Shamanic School of Womancraft. Tahnee is the mother of one, a 4-year old named Aiya.   MasonTaylor Mason Taylor is the founder of SuperFeast. Mason was first exposed to the ideas of potentiating the human experience through his mum Janesse (who was a big inspiration for founding SuperFeast and is still an inspiration to Mason and his team due to her ongoing resilience in the face of disability). After traveling South America for a year, Mason found himself struggling with his health - he was worn out, carried fungal infections, and was only 22. He realised that he had the power to take control of his health. Mason redirected his attention from his business degree and night work in a bar to begin what was to become more than a decade of health research, courses, education, and mentorship from some of the leaders in personal development, wellness, and tonic herbalism. Inspired by the own changes to his health and wellbeing through his journey (which also included Yoga teacher training and raw foodism!), he started SuperFeast in 2010. Initially offering a selection of superfoods, herbs, and supplements to support detox, immune function, and general wellbeing. Mason offered education programs around Australia, and it was on one of these trips that he met Tahnee, who is now his wife and CEO of SuperFeast. Mason also offered detox and health transformation retreats in the Byron hinterland (some of which Tahnee also worked on, teaching Yoga and workshops on Taoist healing practices, as well as offering Chi Nei Tsang treatments to participants). After falling in love with the Byron Shire, Mason moved SuperFeast from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Byron Bay in 2015. He lived on a majestic permaculture farm in the Byron hinterland, and after not too long, Tahnee joined him (and their daughter, Aiya was conceived). The rest is history - from a friend's rented garage to a warehouse in the Byron Industrial Estate to SuperFeast's current home in Mullumbimby's beautiful Food Hub, SuperFeast (and Mason) has thrived in the conscious community of the Northern Rivers. Mason continues to evolve his role at SuperFeast, in education, sourcing, training, and creating the formulas based on Taoist principles of tonic herbalism.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Jing Tonic Chaga Deer Antler 30 days of Jing Sleep-Our Top 10 Tips Yoga Nidra    Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Hello, everybody.   Tahnee: (00:01) Hi, everyone.   Mason: (00:02) It's wintertime.   Tahnee: (00:03) Brr.   Mason: (00:03) Ready to jam about the water season.   Tahnee: (00:07) So excited.   Mason: (00:08) Are you?   Tahnee: (00:09) Always.   Mason: (00:11) Excited about winter? That's a transformation now.   Tahnee: (00:13) I like winter. I know it is. I'm from far North Queensland so I don't like winter historically but I have grown to love winter and I think the kidneys are my favourite organ system to talk about if one can have a favourite.   Mason: (00:29) Yeah. My favourite child's Aiya.   Tahnee: (00:31) You only have one child.   Mason: (00:32) Yeah. That's true. You only have five organ systems. Yeah. I definitely feel you. Do you just want to jump straight in and let us know why you love talking about it so much?   Tahnee: (00:43) Sure. Being interviewed on my own podcast. Our podcast.   Mason: (00:48) Yeah. It's still just my picture on the ... No, we're rebranding because that was from a long time ago.   Tahnee: (00:55) I hijacked it. Yeah. Why do I like the kidneys? So I think I like it on an esoteric level because it's all about the karmic blueprint of the organism as it comes in. But on a more practical level, I think the kidney's governed regulation of the fluids in our body and our on a Western lens that hormonal axis of relationship and I've just come to really appreciate how important it is to nurture that system. One thing I'm really conscious of is how esoteric we go on this podcast so I want to try and keep it practical for a little bit at least. I think when we talk about kidneys we're really talking about the ability of the body to be in integrity and to have integrity through the joint systems, through the organ structures as well. So the spleen's really responsible for the meatiness and the integrity of the muscles and their ability to be harmonious and responsive and full of blood and all those things.   Tahnee: (02:02) But the kidneys provide this consolidation and lifting and holding energy so when we talk about things like prolapse or joint issues we really see that as a kidney problem. I'm someone who has had a lot of bad stuff a couple of times in my life and I've really come to appreciate how much working with the kidney meridian has benefited that. On a psycho-emotional level, I really like how it speaks to transforming fear into wisdom which I think it's really difficult but I think it's a really worthwhile thing. When you look at the things in your life that really scare you whether it's death or financial like lack of finances or all of those primal... Yeah. Even your sexuality a lot of people have a lot of fear of sexuality. These are all really deeply connected to the kidney story.   Tahnee: (02:55) If you look at the chakra system as well it's connected to that second chakra and also to the base chakra with the adrenal glands so it's really around all of those foundations of our human existence which is somewhere to live, someone to love us, enough money in the bank to survive, purpose and meaning in our lives. Using the journey of life to become wise. So a running joke in our house that I'm going to be really cool when I'm 60 but I think about instead of being I'll have to achieve something about when I'm 20 or 30 or whatever it's like take the long view and look at life as this opportunity to grow and develop and become wise, become... I guess let life shape you a little bit and that really aligns for me with the kidney essence because you think about what water does, it corrodes through rock to form these beautiful gorges and rivers.   Tahnee: (03:48) If you've ever been in a plane flying over the earth and you see a river meandering through a desert or through a forest it's such a beautiful metaphor I think for life. Because it's not like a straight line to the sea. It twists and turns and bends and that's literally what kidney energy points to. Remember that water finds a way no matter what. There's always a path to the sea and we're meandering through life following the flow of life. So it points very much the Dao to me and I guess especially as I get older I'm really feeling into that new way, effortless effort, that sort of grace that comes through trusting in life. I think the kidney really invites that in. That was a long answer to your question.   Mason: (04:37) Yeah. I'm just interested. I'm always interested to see what you bring up in the beginning because that sets me off. The fee one sets me off. We've talked about journaling as a practise in autumn-   Tahnee: (04:49) It's good for all seasons.   Mason: (04:51) It's good for all seasons. I find at the moment I like the confrontation around fear. I like the awareness and the appreciation and gratitude for fear as a feeling because naturally if everyone just goes in you can feel how much that fear has kept you alive. It's kept you safe. It's kept you... Maybe at times, you've gone to a Tony Robbins conference and he's told you to explode beyond your fear and you've gone out and done something exceptional. It's really great to have that heart energy all the time but if anyone who owns a business or who has their own whatever, just has a job if you constantly explode outside of what your body is telling you is reasonable like 100% of the time eventually you burn out. There's a little bit of reasonableness around some of the fears that you have.   Tahnee: (05:41) Yeah. Well, I just want to jump in because you said courage which is really one of those values of the heart and the lungs. The upper dantian organ systems and again to get a little bit esoteric but if you're constantly draining the kidney essence before its really cultivated and naturally bubbling up-   Mason: (06:02) What's that process?   Tahnee: (06:04) Well, this is inner alchemy so this would be Neigong practise which is probably a little bit out there for the podcast but it's the cultivation practises. So if you're working with the water wheels in the body which are basically like energy currents in the body you're starting to consolidate your essence into jing. You're using chi drawn from the earth so that on the very base of the foot you can't see me I'm touching my hand as if it were afoot but if you go from your middle toes to the little divot underneath the pad of your foot just before the arch of your foot there's a kidney point called the bubbling spring. In QiGong when you place your feet on the earth after a certain amount of practise in the Wu Chi stance a way of leaning forward into the balls of the feet really resting them on the earth and connecting to the earth.   Tahnee: (06:55) You start to feel almost as if bubbles or water bubbles are pressing up against the sole of the foot and it's called the bubbling spring point literally because you can feel the chi of the earth drawing up into the body through this point. A lot of the practises that I've learned through the Daoist arts are really around drawing earth chi up and into the body because that grounds us and it balances and it harmonises us and it reminds us of where we come from which is the earth so we're safe. We're safe here. We're not not here for a reason kind of thing. It gives us that grounding and connection. It's also very healing because earth chi is really healing for us especially those of us in device land all the time getting back to the earth is really important.   Tahnee: (07:41) Then that chi we can draw that into the body and we can use that in the initial stages it's to clear tension and a lot of the stuff Benny does, Benny Fergusson the Movement Monk. His work is around this. It's releasing the superficial stages of tension which is built up through emotional suppression and life. Then as we clear that we start to get into cultivation so that's when we're storing energy instead of spending energy so most of us the moment we get an inch we take a mile and I'm talking about myself as well here. I always start to get enough rest we start to get a good diet. We start to get on the herbs, we start to do the practises, we start to feel really good so then we go and push ourselves really hard and do something crazy. So we haven't reached the stable place where we're actually really grounded and that's what you're talking to. You've got one course and suddenly you're inspired to take on the world but you don't have any foundations to actually tackle it.   Mason: (08:40) Yeah. I think it's all done without a real appreciation and gratitude of that fear. Everyone's like feel the fear and do it anyway. I like to feel the fear and now I do. I think I've burnt myself out quite a lot with that personal development. Hardcore hostile entrepreneurial scene and now talking about the journaling I do it sometimes, I journal. I'll even counterintuitively do it on my phone if it strikes me but the whole reason I like winter as well. I like this kidney energy at all times of life as well as I start to get hopefully a little bit wiser and I'm not just going go, go, go at all times of the day. I'm appreciating that once you get to three to five o'clock in the organ wheel you can move into bladder time. Then five to seven you're moving into the kidney time and you can gauge how well you're able to adjust to a convalescence accumulating yin energy.   Mason: (09:35) I bring this up just because it's a really nice gauge for everyone going forth to know well, am I enjoying this wintertime? What does it actually mean? It's like that time of day when you're winding down how successfully can you do it? How successfully can you go into the blackness of night and the blackness of sleep? It's definitely been a big struggle for me over the years and that's why I'm really with you. I can feel just the depth of that kidney energy, just the untapped potential and that's what the jing lives in the kidneys and that's our potential. But when it comes down to fear it's the wisest organ because it's the most practical. It's like if you're going for that walk, I went for a walk with Benny actually the other day and we were walking pretty close to a cliff and there was a big drop-off. I felt the fear and I felt that part of me judged that fear just being like come on then. Just get closer, you're fine. You can trust yourself. Then I was like all of a sudden that wisdom. It's wisdom. I'm-   Tahnee: (10:35) Don't be stupid.   Mason: (10:36) Yeah, don't be stupid. I was like, okay. I caught just how much my body was like it seized up even though I was in a safe position and I trusted my body and I was like okay, I can ease up here. Then in terms of going that little bit closer like my mind was telling me, no, go closer. Dance right on the edge. I was like I got really grateful for that fear right now probably I don't need to go closer to the edge now. Then from there, I get a cascade of different thoughts and different feelings. That's a very simple example but that sparked a lot of-   Tahnee: (11:07) No, it's a great example. It's ego and all these things playing off in your mind and you're able now to take... This is literally the point of spiritual practise is to step out of the bullshit on that lower level of mind. I'm going to lean into the Ayurvedic text because I think they explain this very beautifully where it's like yeah, you've got ahamkara. You've got the ego itself who's saying I want to look a certain way and be a certain way in the world and that means I can handle this challenge. Then you've got Buddhi the wise mind going, really? Watch the emotions, watch what's playing out right now. Watch... We could get into these are scars which are habits of conditioning that you've got from what does it means to be a man. It means that I challenge myself. I push myself to go to the edge and this is literally the gift of the kidney is to go all of that stuff playing out. How do I rise above that? Be still, notice what's happening and make a wise decision which is important. I think it's a really useful life skill.   Mason: (12:11) Lots of big decisions come about. There's a lot of fear right now. There's fear of people who aren't vaccinated, who are vaccinated. There's fear of never being able to travel again.   Tahnee: (12:20) Governments. I think literally we're in a time of collective base chakra blasting because the systems that people have relied on forever are coming apart and this is where it helps to have a practise that grounds you back to the earth and says we're right here right now in this moment I'm okay. Does that mean I don't take action? Of course, not. But it means that I have a touchpoint or a reminder or a place to come to that's safe within me that's not provided by something external. So when the government collapses or when the economic system falls down or when you can't travel again you're not going to freak out because you know that you're okay right here where you are. You don't need to travel to validate your existence. I think these are the things that lack in our culture at this time.   Mason: (13:09) Well, it's nice when you look down into the pools of water within you. That's why it's nice to rest because if you don't rest you don't accumulate water. If you don't have downtime you don't-   Tahnee: (13:20) You don't accumulate chi. The whole point of this stuff is if we keep going 100% all the time you're never going to a yin state which is what kidney is, it's ultimate yin. Then we age, we lose our chi, we start to degenerate and that's not of service anyway to ourselves, our families, the planet.   Mason: (13:40) We are back on the journal once more. It's just a useful thing if you've got these crippling fears about your children or what's going to happen to your parents or so on and so forth. I sit there sometimes and I go through all the hypotheticals which I don't know if anyone... It's not a common practise in our-   Tahnee: (13:59) Scenario planning.   Mason: (14:00) ...culture. Oh, exactly in business it's scenario planning and it's really scary to go through what are the absolute worst scenarios that could play out in the business. It's like it's better just to keep them there but it's not wise to. So I've been doing that just whether it's in the shower or that's why it's really nice to have that downtime again on the earth and go for a walk. I go for a walk with a mate every week and I talk about them openly all these... You can get trapped in the doomsday ness of it.   Mason: (14:29) But if the intention of the practise is to, I just want to see what's real. I want to feel into that. You're feeling into the water within yourself and that's chi within yourself. So it's got a particular formation. You want to go about perceiving and exploring that chi as it's expressing within you and you'll find the wisdom within okay, that fear, where does that go to? What's the intention? It becomes 3D, 4D, 5D. It's not just I'm scared because I want to stay alive. You can start feeling the story and the metaphor playing out around that if you play that fear out to the end. Okay. At that point, that's good fear. Really like it. Gosh grateful that we have that fear of whatever it is, social anxiety, being judged, losing all your money, never being able to travel, having forced medical stuff upon you, having people not doing medical things.   Mason: (15:14) Whatever it is, whatever your fear is it's all valid. So your experience and you just go. That's really reasonable. Ah, at this point there's a grey zone and murkiness and then you sit in that murky zone because it's not just a fear. You don't allow that fear to give... Don't have an aversion to that area and go and sink into that area. Okay. That's when you rest, you accumulate all this chi, you accumulate those deep waters and those reservoirs of water. If you don't have those you have nothing to explore and you become a shallow person. You can't get that action. You become shallow, you become externally driven, you need identities, you need dogma. Don't think because we're talking about kidneys that people need to be sick or completely tapped out on their kidneys or of their adrenals. It could be a slight dysfunction but people these days, even young people they're not honouring this process and therefore you see there's an extreme amount of people acting in shallow ways and having shallow belief systems.   Mason: (16:16) Therefore they're outside of themselves. There's no wisdom in what they're saying. They're just given a rough document of the ideology that they're following and then they go and just regurgitate that and repeat that and go and gather evidence. So that's all kidney water systems. So it's nicer to be in flow with nature and create those deep reservoirs of water and if you feel the fear then feel that murky zone and then you move towards that experience and wisdom engagement. Then what you'll see is there's a real constant opportunity for transformation and change to occur there.   Tahnee: (16:51) Yeah. I think what you spoke to there I mean it's not even on an individual level. I don't think it's an individual problem, I think it's a collective problem that we aren't... The Neijing which is where a lot of our philosophy comes from really. Which is one of the oldest pre-TCM text classical medicine texts to basically sleep until the sun rises high in the sky basically. You're supposed to sleep a lot in wintertime. I know for me we're both feeling sleepy around seven or eight o'clock at the moment and we're in bed really early at the moment.   Tahnee: (17:54) I'm sleeping until seven most mornings and I'm really feeling this deep nourishment from sleep at the moment. Obviously, we have a business and children so we still end up burning the candle but how many of us push through winter not getting that hibernation time, that deep rest of restoration in the chi and the organs. Then oh, we get sick, and then oh, we're suddenly like I'm crook all the time. It's like it's not because as a culture we keep the momentum going all year round. We don't have this time of acknowledging and even making sacred the rest and the sleep that we require. I think the Neijing they had this foundational text that was an understood part of the culture. I guess I'm making a broad assumption so maybe I'm wrong but we don't grow up with that. I grew up in the tropics where you have wet and dry seasons basically. If it's cold you wear a light jumper and that's it-   Mason: (18:48) Aussies are on. The mittens are on. The [inaudible 00:18:49] are on.   Tahnee: (18:50) But we never had any real... I remember my mum saying keep your kidneys covered but that was about as far as it went. I really was shocked when I moved to a cold climate. I had no idea. I think I'm 35. I've just learned how to layer and how to stay warm, like wearing UGG boots in my house and all these kinds of things. It's really taken me a long time to understand cold and cold invasion. These ideas in Chinese medicine that seem really foreign to us as Westerners because cold isn't something that can invade you but in Chinese medicine, it's literally it can. It's a pathogen and it enters your body. If you think about homeostatic processes, your body is trying to maintain its temperature. If it's constantly being punished by cold air and it's having to push back and try and stay warm enough that's going to drain your resources. It's going to drain your reserves. It's going to drain your chi.   Tahnee: (19:38) You're going to be more susceptible to getting sick. Now is the cold a pathogen or are you now more susceptible to viruses and bacteria? I don't know the answer to that but I would assume that it makes a lot of sense to stay rugged up against the cold to prevent your body from having to be stressed out by this thing. We live in an area where barefoot is common. You see kids running around barefoot all the time. I really make my kid wear shoes and socks with warm things on her feet in winter even though I believe that barefoot is best. It's like at some point we also have to maintain the health of the body. I think it's a really interesting... I'm not saying I have the answers but it's something I find really interesting how little respect our culture has for the elements and respecting the elements and being really conscious and mindful of cold and its effect on us as an organism. Yeah.   Tahnee: (20:34) I think also when we think about the Neijing saying we need this inner time it's very transpersonal in that collectively if we all slow down and we all turn our attention in and we spend this time in reflection and restoration and then we come back collectively. That's a really powerful shift in our culture that we've spent time in this yin state that isn't outward and isn't... I guess that's probably never going to happen but I think it's really interesting because what you're talking about with the depth of water we've all seen the movies, we've all seen Jaws and [inaudible 00:21:13] and deep water is scary. Deepwater brings up our deepest most primal fears around what's lurking underneath the surface. That's why meditation is hard for so many people. That's why being still is hard for so many people because when you stop moving you start to feel all of the things that are hidden beneath the surface that you've been moving to stay away from. So meditation to me is one of the ultimate kidney practises in terms of connecting to that inner world and connecting to the subconscious under the surface narrative that goes in all of us. I feel like the season is a really big invitation to slow down and meditate more and be less active but maybe more internal.   Mason: (21:58) Mm-hmm (affirmative). I've got a little bit of an idea I just want to explore. Hopefully, it lands but you're just triggered by the fact you were saying it's such an introspective time. So we go in and we view what is ourselves and we get really intimate with self-agency, feeling ourselves on more I would say of an infinite nature. I'm feeling our spiritual nature and closing off from the world a little bit. We close off a little bit socially. We're not as socially engaged, we're not taking input outside but it's something I just realised for myself running in spiritual circles so much. It's probably a lot around here in what we do wave as the superior is staying within. Staying yin and not going out and interacting heavily with other people and allowing your personality to form and develop. This is something that happens in the yang. It happens in springtime, it happens in summer. It happens in high activity times in business.   Mason: (23:09) I'm thinking about it because I'm thinking a lot about feedback and it's something I don't... I don't enjoy feedback. I like being a part of a team but I've got this... This is no, I'm in touch with who I am on the inside and the way that I am. I'm introspective and I don't often then go and take that and then run out into my community and allow for there to be feedback that I really take on about the way that I'm interacting with the world. The way my mannerisms, my temperament. I sit in that yin introspective place a lot of the time. I'm just realising, by the way, this is very conceptual everybody but remembering that kidneys are the source of yin and yang. So if you are excessively yin in your life. If you're excessively in that space of I'm just staying inside of myself.   Mason: (24:09) I'm not accepting input. I'm not going out and allowing the daggers to be thrown that occur within an interaction especially in those high summer times. Then what happens is you don't actually allow that yang energy to cultivate within the kidneys as well. So the yin becomes a little bit more shallow as you go along. I'm really in my internal world and being selfish and talking about my own process here but I hope that just talks a little bit to the experience of remembering that this time a lot of people really love the yin when you get to shut off from people and you don't have to be forced to interact and take feedback and really be an interactive force. But remember you're going to be able to go deeper the more you go out and allow the judgement in, the people refining who you are, all that be socially engaged. I bring that up because if you can do that if you can stay within that wheel of cultivating yin and yang within the kidneys and you do that by staying within the circulation of the seasons and the days so you're going between yin and yang, yang and yin.   Mason: (25:13) You're going to have very significantly differently expressed parts of yourself coming out all the time. Then the kidney water can cultivate because kidney water is potential. What happens if you have water? You have life, you have lots of water in an arid land you're always going to be able to have potential to create food and survive. Eventually, you want aquifers. You want aquifers that are pure and able to give you a real solid store of water. Then what happens is the yang comes in, that fire comes in and heats up that water so the water can move around your body. So this is just bringing the significance of why it's so important to go into this cultivation time but also be in and respect the difference between yin and yang and those parts of yourself.   Mason: (25:57) If the yang can really be expressed within yourself as well then you heat up all that potential, you heat up that water. It becomes a vapour, goes up, and allows the germination within the liver to happen and you're basically keeping the body nice and supple. You're circulating the water in. The part of that is if you're constantly introducing water to an ecosystem you never know what's going to germinate at different times as you go along. I think there's a subconscious fear there even of going really I understand myself and I want to stay right here. If you keep going along the wheel of the year between yin and yang as you go along different aspects of your personality, different parts are going to germinate and take seed.   Mason: (26:42) You're going to have to have the wisdom to go cool, this is an identity. I know that there's a part of myself that's really beautifully expressed in that but I'm actually going to go and explore a different part of myself. So kidneys are always so tied in with who am I? If you can look into the deep dark waters you can realise it's a little bit more fluid than you think it is.   Tahnee: (27:05) Well, the deep connection to I am universal really. It's the [inaudible 00:27:12] fire and this whole concept of where we even come from that's kidney essence. It's kind of like Shakti and yogic texts but it's literally how each cell knows on this higher consciousness level what to become. If you're the sperm and the egg uniting you know how to make a human. Well, how does that even happen? How is that information, that data transferred and interpreted? Where does this blueprint come from and this is kidney energy, this is jing, this is that primordial essence? So there's this really deep connection to ancestry to all of creation really through the kidney essence. I think if you think about the archetype of the kidney it's the magician or the wise sage. So it's this person who's connected to more than just... It's the shaman really.   Tahnee: (28:13) It's the person who can bridge worlds. So I think that sense in the kidney what you're speaking to with going up that kind of happens naturally. The Daoist practise is the whole point is you cultivate enough jing that the expression coming up through the shen is pure. You're consistent and you're authentic because it's what you radiate is aligned and so it's not this inner process that happens through. Meditation is the start of that process but at a certain point in meditation, you're not going through your shit anymore. You're accessing that stillness and then in that stillness, you're starting to feel the prana. In the prana, you're starting to understand that you can use your awareness to bring prana into the body or chi into the body.   Tahnee: (29:11) Then you're starting to cultivate that and then you're using your practises to integrate this kind of experience into... It's getting kind of esoteric. sorry. But that's when shen radiates and there's this very strong relationship between the depth of winter and the peak of summer and there has to be to have your full expression out into the world. You have to have the opposite. That's the polarity I suppose of the yin and yang expression of those organ systems and in Daoism, we do meditations where we unite the heart and the kidneys and we bring the cold energy from the kidneys up to the heart and cool the heart because you're always expressing your heart gets hot, it gets overheated. If you're never bringing your shen and your authenticity and your expression and yourself down back to the kidneys to warm them up the kidneys get cold and they start to get exhausted.   Tahnee: (30:05) So that's this unifying function of the heart and the kidney meridians and the meditation's really beautiful. You're imagining the heart is the lotus and the kidneys is the lotus bulbs and then the legs are the roots down to the earth. Then the lotus is opening up to the universal energy above. That's a really nice metaphor I think for how we've got the energy provided for the flowering of our life from the kidneys. Then the heart provides that flowering expression. I think when we think about what happens in wintertime if you're flowing with the seasons you feel you want to cultivate quiet. You want to reflect. You want to be still. You want to stay warm, all of these things. The moment some of us your energy's different. You're up, you're out and by the time peak summer's coming you're on your own fire. So you want to have the reserves that you've cultivated in winter available to you in summer.   Tahnee: (31:01) It's like having resources to draw from so I think that's where we don't take that opportunity to slow down and winter's really about that. It's about closing off and storing and I don't see that as a negative thing. I've come to really enjoy that about winter, that I'm less social and I'm less concerned with the outside world at this time. I just want to be with my family and in my home and we're making soup and we're slowing down and my daughter's taking a thermos to school. It's all very cute. I think that's really what I have learned is to yield to the changes the season brings and that trust that the full expression will come. That's my take on all of that. I don't know if we wanted to talk to herbs and how we would work with them at this time of year.   Mason: (31:57) Yeah. I might just quickly talk about what the kidney's associated with. If you think about its water. If you think about the story within your body of water, bringing the germination its fertility. If you want to stay fertile if you want to maintain potential you need to have that water. Just imagine that water chi. Yes, there's all these hormones and it's like there's a huge association of the sex hormones with the kidney water energy. So if your mind needs that, really go with that and really make that association. Then sometimes it's nice to just fall into the metaphor of the elements as well. So think if you've got water sitting there with reservoirs and you're doing a really good job at sustainably releasing that water up so that it can make the tissue nice and moist and nice and lubricated then you're going to have fertility all over your body.   Mason: (32:47) That means regeneration of cells and that's why quickly touching on herbs like the yang herbs especially which increase the yang within the body which mobilises the water and allows germination that happen. That's why when that happens what do you have when you're fertile when you have fertility? Obviously, you have new life. Obviously, you have regeneration going on. From that yang there's stamina and potential that comes about so therefore it's the deer antlers and eucommia barks and Cordyceps that are associated with that. But just for your own fertility look at the water management and look at sustainability in your own lifestyle. Look at how if you're unsustainable with your energy if you're unsustainable with your money. I really hope that everyone knows that when I say these things I don't have them all sorted out in my life. I'm definitely-   Tahnee: (33:47) Does anyone?   Mason: (33:48) No. Some of these things I talk about like I'm really struggling with myself and just hope everyone's able to just take this as theory basically or something that we can all work within. Work not necessarily towards. But it's really nice to look at even again and go back to that journal. What aspects of your life are really sustainable? Look back on how you partied. Look back on how you didn't party and express that summer because that's another thing for those of you who want to get the most out of this season. Maybe it's knowing harmony. Maybe you didn't go full fire which we always assume it's the other. We always assume that people aren't resisting the winter months but of course, it's going to be the other way around. Look at sustainability within your life. That's going to be that you're actually going to be able to maintain fertility.   Mason: (34:39) That means libido, sexual vigour, sexual capacity, sexual fluids, and the capacity to regenerate sexual fluids. These are all things. So how sustainable have you been with sex? Too much? Not enough? There's no answer here and that's something I think if you see an aversion towards sometimes with Daoism because they're like it seems very rule-heavy. You're allowed to have this much sex. Not this much sex, you can't ejaculate so on and so forth. These are all just really loose suggestions especially from a civilization that really liked things to be really defined. But you just take them and you just work them into your own.   Tahnee: (35:14) Well, the distinction too is Confucian versus Daoistan. The Confucians were quite rigid and the Daoists had a lot of the rules were based on chi so it's about chi cultivation. So I think that's what I've always found really interesting is if you look at what the Confucians contributed which was they were society structure. Then you look at what the Daoists contributed. So I have found in my experience with the teachers of Qi Gong that I've studied with and I've learned from some who are very loose. It's like going with the flow, finding your own form, feel your body's fluid. Others are really strict and really regimented and really rule-based. Master Chia who I have learned the most from when he speaks to sexual cultivation for men especially. He's like younger men go for it, you've got heaps more to spare but as you get older you need to be more mindful.   Tahnee: (36:10) He has some structures and guidance around that but I think it's a really personal thing and one of our big guiding principles at SuperFeast is sovereignty. I think the whole point of this information is not for us to be like we know the best and you guys should do these things it's really about reflecting on our own journeys to this point and hopefully providing some context for what you might want to look at through your own life and then filter that into what's relevant for you. I think this is really important when it comes to any kind of teacher or any kind of education. Especially when it's ancient stuff because we've lost so much. We only got the classics in English in the 80s and that's not very long ago and we don't know what other texts there were that were destroyed.   Tahnee: (36:56) Mao Zedong's team destroyed a whole lot of beautiful literature and writings from earlier times in China and I'm sure other things that were lost. It was oral traditions so I'm sure many things were lost in that way. So we're lucky to have what we have but we're making assumptions from a limited number of sources really at the end of the day. I don't speak Mandarin or read Chinese characters unfortunately so I'm learning through people that have translated it for me and they can make assumptions. If you go and read the [inaudible 00:37:27] I've read five or six different translations and they're all so different. Some are poetic and beautiful, some are really modern, some are really traditional and follow the translations really literally but then they're a little harder to interpret in a modern context.   Tahnee: (37:43) I don't think you can say there's an unequivocal right or wrong way. I think nature is there as a great teacher and she's been there through all of the traditions and kidney time is probably one of those times where we really remember how powerful nature is and especially if you're somewhere... We're in Byron it doesn't even get that cold here but if you're somewhere where it snows like I've been Scandinavia that it shuts down. You're snowed in. Nature is so powerful that she can shut down civilization for a period of time and it's dark and it's a different experience to be in those places and I don't know what it's like to live there through winters.   Tahnee: (38:22) But I can imagine you wouldn't be going out and doing things all the time. You'd want to be staying home and staying warm and staying in bed. I know people get a lot of seasonal effectiveness disorder and these kinds of things but I think part of that's got to be that we're culturally pushing ourselves to not just stay home and rest during these times. We've separated from the family unit so people are alone in apartments when they should be with their families. Again not everyone wants to be with their families all the time. I get all of that but you can see how as we've moved away from collective living and these nature-based cultures you can see how these health problems arise. I'm using inverted commas that you can't see which really come a lot from our social and cultural context. So I think one of the things we love about this is it gives us a language and a story and an explanation for how we have noticed our own lives adapt and change as we've gotten older and smarter and wiser. Yeah. I think hopefully you guys can take some of that and find what works for you and then move on.   Mason: (39:28) Yeah. You definitely hit it and that's how institutionalised do we want these healing systems to be? Where it's like uh-uh-uh this is the system, that's the text that we have to go by therefore follow this rule. It's like hmm, I don't think that's how Daoism works and that's why there's such a split between traditional Chinese medicine which is institutionalised, and classical Chinese medicine which is based on well, what's your experience? What are you perceiving because it's reality versus road learning? So I think you're going to see more and more of that split occurring. I think you're going see more and more that split genetically towards people going on that path of not saying good or bad that's a very murky thing to say but there is a path towards cultivating greater potential, self-cultivated potential versus reliance in order to ensure that potential now I'm using inverted commas is present within the body. So one is reliant, one is self-cultivation. A little bit of both is probably good as well.   Tahnee: (40:36) If we're going to be Daoist... Well, yeah. I think you have to remember that we're a species that thrives in smallish groups so I think that's something we have to take into account is human nature. But then I also think self-cultivation and self-responsibility is really the essence of the Daoist way. I think any time we're getting to guru worship or giving away power to an ideology or some kind of text or anything then we're starting to understand that maybe we've moved away from really our own selves. I guess that's what that reflection time and that kidney... If you're exhausted... I'm a mum. I have a business. I know what it feels like to be really tired sometimes and I don't want to take care of myself. I don't want to take care of anybody else.   Tahnee: (41:25) I just want to get away from the world when I feel like that. That's not a great place to be contributing your best from. So if your kidneys are tapped out then you're not going to be even beginning to radiate shen. You're not going to have the motivation to transform into liver vision and planning and getting things done. Yeah. If you're someone like Master Seng he's on the opposite side of things who can never seem to get out of that yin state then maybe there's this stagnation in your water and you need to clear that out. You might need a different kind of treatment to the people who are like Mase and myself who are go, go, go.   Tahnee: (42:03) So I think it's important to have a look at your own pathology and your own habits. This is a personal observation in my body but if I've had a really kidney deficient month and that would look like for me not getting enough sleep, doing too much work, being a bit too busy outside of my good solid, retainer structure then my menstruation will usually have a brownish tinge which means I've really dried out my water. I'm sort of burning my blood a little bit. I'm dry and it's not good. On the flip side of that if I've had a really stressful and that would typically be more of a livery kind of month where I've been really fast-moving and anxious and stressed and in my head and thinking a lot and maybe even into spleen deficiency my blood's going to be bright red and it's going to be really thin.   Tahnee: (43:04) So that's the structure and the substance of my blood is missing. So I'm looking at my menstruation and I'm using it as this guide to say okay, well, that's moving and kidney deficiency. This is me being in liver or spleen deficiency. Then I will adjust my lifestyle and my diet depending on how that works, what I'm seeing, and what I'm observing. So there are self-reflections that I've been able to develop over the last few years thanks to support from acupuncturists and people who've helped me understand that. But now I can see what I'm doing to myself and I can have more self-awareness and self-reflection on what to adjust in my life. So those are for me things that I'm really conscious of and have to be aware of because that's this idea of your menstruation being a report card.   Tahnee: (43:50) The kidney provides the water for the blood so it's a really important part for women. Important for men too but the spleen provides the nutrition for the blood, it provides from the food the substance that makes the blood healthy. The liver cleans and transports and transforms the blood and the water from the kidneys is provided to help keep the blood fluid and flowing. So that's why I would get that brown more congested blood toward the end of my menstruation if I'm in kidney deficiency. So those are things that you can think about if you're someone who wants to learn more about that. I'd recommend going and getting a close relationship with an acupuncturist and being really open and sharing about your body and about the things you observe and getting that kind of self-awareness because it's going to help you.   Tahnee: (44:33) A lot of other people were shocked with big bags under their eyes with kidney deficiency and things like that. You can look at what your tendencies are: weak lower back, weak knees. I know if my back's going that's when I'm in kidney deficiency. Whereas for other people that could mean liver deficiency. It could mean different things so you need to learn your body signs and what it does. But if you're getting older and your knees are starting to go and your hips are starting to go those things are a pretty good sign that you're burning out your jing and you want to look at slowing down a little bit. Getting into some more restoration and maybe working with some herbs may be working with a practitioner starting to cultivate. Very important I think.   Mason: (45:10) Stillness practise, contemplation time, coming down in that afternoon period and so just remember very quickly the kidney's a regulating bone integrity, bone marrow integrity. So imagine just that life being born from that marrow pure potential for the human body. So you're tapping out your jing, you're tapping out your marrow. You're going to see faster degeneration as you age, you're going to see faster ageing come about. That's why you see, some people grey hair is inevitable but there's been countless people who are in superficial jing deficiency and kidney deficiency and have started developing greys and they go hey, I got into beauty blend and my greys have stopped coming through, what the hell's with that? I mean yeah that's not going to happen for most people who have got greys but for those of you that are really superficial, it's like yeah blood. Blood getting up there. Nourishment getting up into the hair and pigmenting.   Tahnee: (46:13) I miss [inaudible 00:46:14] because it was really good for that too. That is kidney and jing that's what you're talking about. We talked a bit about the yang of kidney but the yin of kidney is more of that substance of the blood, the marrow, the brains. The kidneys are in Daoism when Chinese medicine the brain is called the sea of marrow. So really the integrity and quality of the brain is supported by the kidney energy. So we look at using kidney hubs to support brain function and again if you think about these degenerative diseases that are now showing up especially in Western culture with the brain you can point to a lot of our habits through our society as also being implicated in that degeneration.   Mason: (47:03) Non-sustainable practises. Non-sustainable habits. Really simple. It's so boring hearing myself say it over and over again and talking to myself as well. It's really comforting as well feeling the freedom come through that discipline around okay, it's not going to stop. Sleep, consistent diet. I would love the extremes I don't think we'll get to it today. But cold plunging it's another extreme. Tahnee was talking about how nice it is just to live within the elements and respect them and be like cool I'm just going to flow with you and see what you can tell me and just yield. But we're so addicted to dominating. No, I'm not going to go with the flow. I'm not going to be conventional. I'm going to fly in the face of winter and I'm going to go further into cold plunging. We'll see if we can get to that but it's just that's all well and good in particular times of life and I'm not saying what we're doing is better than anyone else is doing but as a thought maybe we can start looking at sustainability in our lifestyle based on what's happening in the elements around us as a way to go...   Mason: (48:26) It's not a competition to not age as fast either. It's about us personally feeling our own potential and our own cultivation and our own what's possible for ourselves and then that really does come back to gosh, I don't know, I'm just looking behind you at the Daoist in Alchemy chat and I just said intergalactic journey. But it is true. It is your own intergalactic journey. Maybe that for you means there is a degenerative thing coming a little bit earlier than some other people that they didn't live sustainably. I'm not saying get caught up into that competitive way of living and I know that. I've said that because I'm bringing up the cold plunging and I know that's a relative conversation. Some people really do find benefit. At the moment I'm not saying don't do it but anyway. I've gone off task. I think I'm going to bring up the cold plunging conversation in another one because there's lots of little distinctions-   Tahnee: (49:24) Yeah. I want to be really clear that someone like Wimhauf who we've met he's devoted to his practises. He 100% is a young body type, yang like Y-A-N-G-. He's strong, lots of muscle mass. He has done lots of chi cultivation and he's an extreme example of what's possible and I'm 100% for that stuff. I'm really into it. If I didn't have all the shit going on in my life that I had I would totally be experimenting with all of that and I think what I see a lot is people go from their normal Western life to just into these practises which again in Daoism they're really common. In Tibetan Buddhism, in yoga, my teacher tells stories of the monks being buried in snow and having to melt their way out to show how strong their chi is. These are QiGong practises that you are supposed to show as a level of mastery and that's cool just learning a breathing practise and jumping in the cold all the time.   Tahnee: (50:29) It's a start of that but you don't have the context of chi or prana and you don't have that immersion in the system I guess. I don't know if Wim does that if you go on his retreats and things he takes you deeper and I'm sure there are people that are close to him who learn the real deep techniques. I'm 100% for people exploring that stuff. But we hear a lot from people who are like, oh, I got sick after cold plunging again.   Mason: (50:55) I don't have a menstrual cycle anymore.   Tahnee: (50:58) Yeah. Because cold has entered the uterus and you haven't cultivated your dantian enough your lower dantian that it's projecting heat so it's able to prevent you from getting cold penetrating into that space. So there's no talking about that it's just like oh, it's a part of cold plunging or something like that. Well, it's not. It's not a physiologically healthy thing to have happen to a woman in that time of her life. So I guess that's the kind of disclaimer and container to all that stuff. I think there's lots of really interesting conversations to be had about it because I definitely believe in it as a practise. It's really incredible but I think it's in the vortex, out of the vortex we always used to say. You have to have the container in the context and the explanation and the understanding.   Mason: (51:43) Sorry, I'm going to go because there's one little last bit of it. Can you have a yang and a yin approach atmosphere around the way that you're looking at it? I think again it's reliance. In the yang season in summer, it's great to have reliance on things to get heat because you're out there, you're experiencing, and then when you go into yin time it's like maybe I want to be able to cultivate something on my own. Maybe I want that to be a little side dish to what I can do myself.   Tahnee: (52:08) I think quickly with diet. So warming foods. So animal foods are really warming and taste yum so they can be really useful especially if you ask someone who feels the cold and who isn't particularly strong in winter. If you're not into those you can look at things like seaweeds and all of the traditional winter vegetables, your roots, your gourds, those kinds of things, pumpkins. Garlic and onions are really warming if you can tolerate them. Squash, zucchini, all those things you'll see them. I'm going to the farmer's market got all the winter vegetables coming through. Caulis all that kind of stuff. A lot of traditional things for winter weather there's herbal wines and stuff as well because alcohol is warming. Yeah, which is obviously something to do with moderation. With pepper or your Ayurvedic spices anything that warms your digestion. Ginger. Ginger tea is my number one go-to. Boil it up just slice it into fine little chunks, boil it for at least 10 minutes because you want to get it really strong. Then I put a little bit of panela sugar in that and then just drink it.   Mason: (53:17) Get the cinnamon in.   Tahnee: (53:17) It heats you up from the inside out. You just want to avoid the tropical stuff. You want to avoid too much dairy all of those things that are cooling and cold are not super helpful this time of year. Again if you look at Ayurvedic diets and things they always warm up the milk and add spices and ginger something like a chai. That's a better way to consume dairy than having a cold flavoured yoghourt or anything like that. Same with coconut and those kinds of things and a lot of people love coconut but it wouldn't be probably that ideal to have in winter.   Tahnee: (53:50) Winter it's actually one of the reasons you have spicy coconut soup things in Thailand and stuff is because coconut by nature is cold and then you add all the spice to it which helps to make you sweat and cool you down in those hot climates. So if you're looking at more of those broth kinds of things, more of those nourishing homely style meals at this time of year.   Mason: (54:11) You got to mention black foods. Kidney beans. Black sesame seed, black beans-   Tahnee: (54:21) Seaweeds. Yeah. All of those kinds of things. Molasses is really good-   Mason: (54:23) Molasses. Dark leafy greens thrown in there too... We're loving our slow-cooked meals. Soups.   Tahnee: (54:32) I don't have any affiliation with them but I bought an Instant Pot. It's the best thing that's ever happened to me, especially as a mum. It's so good. Okay. Mase is sick of hearing about my Instant Pot.   Mason: (54:45) No, I'm not.   Tahnee: (54:46) You love it too don't you?   Mason: (54:47) Yeah. I've been using it quite a bit. You will absolutely love us and your spleen will love you if you have a glass of warm to hot water first thing in the morning. That's my favourite at this time of year. Some days I forget but in winter I'm five days a week since I was in China and was told by my Daoist, my tonic herb friends that that was their favourite tonic ever. Just guys beanies, socks, long walks in nature.   Tahnee: (55:21) Yeah because cold gets into ears which are related to the kidneys, the back of the head, the neck, the back of the neck around C7, the lower back, and then down really through all the joints in the lower body and the soles of the feet. Also through the arms and the hands so you really want to cover as much as you can but you'll have an area where you have a tendency to be weak so you want to be extra mindful of that. So for me, it's the feet and the back of the neck. I have to keep those areas warm otherwise I can feel the cold getting in. So you'll just have to play around with that and see what you really feel you need to stay warm but that's important.   Mason: (56:00) Having a break from stimulants. Don't have to be strict if you like them you like them. It is like throwing pebbles into the pond so you can't look down into your depths. That's why we do 30 days of jing in Australian winter. Sorry Northern hemisphere folks but it's even in the middle of summer it's a great experience for you guys to all have. Just getting off stimulants for 30 days and you can do it anytime. We've got all the resources there. We've got a Facebook group there for you to go and join and just give you the down low but it's basically adding in the jing herbs or the jing formula which are the kidney, that's the kidney formula. Really great herbs to be having during the winter. You might feel in the beginning there might be three weeks or four weeks in the beginning of the winter season where you're craving the kidney herbs, jing herbs, and then maybe you don't feel like them as much. Don't worry about that. It's like there's no rule that you have to have only kidney herbs when you're in winter but it's maybe just a little bit of a guide. That's what I'm like in spring. At the start I'll go two or three weeks hard on the beauty blend and then it just breaks out and I'm off doing intuitively whatever I want.   Tahnee: (57:14) Well, yeah because as the seasons change and this is in the Neijing as well I'm pretty sure. I think it's the first 18 days of every season as you're transitioning in it when the chi is the most unstable. So you're really wanting to smooth the transition as much as you can. So I often think about that as what can I do to stabilise as much as possible during this time? Yeah, I always feel the same at the first few weeks of the season coming in and I'm really hyper-aware of it, and then it settles in and it's just part of life those next couple of months. But, yeah, I think it's important to remember that's usually when people get sick because they're clinging to old habits or they're not really listening to what their body's asking for as the season changes and that's where the herbs can help to cultivate the organ systems and support them because the seasons demand a lot of the organ systems that they're correlated to. So that's why we can support them with herbs. I'm really lacking Chaga at the moment which is common for me. In winter I'll start to use Chaga again. I don't usually use it through the rest of the year.   Mason: (58:26) Pregnancy in winter for you.   Tahnee: (58:28) Yeah. Funny.   Mason: (58:33) Yeah. Big shout out to Chaga, Chaga has been my go-to winter herb. I forgot to message you yesterday and ask to bring a big bag home but go and do that right now. Thanks, guys. I was just going to give a shout out to the yoga Nidra as a winter practise as well-   Tahnee: (58:53) I love yoga Nidra.   Mason: (58:54) ...and yin yoga if you get on our newsletter list and jump on Instagram as well. Tiny has got some yin yoga sequences coming up.   Tahnee: (59:06) Yeah. I forgot about that but we have shot the photos and what I was thinking is for each season I'd give you a sequence or a couple of sequences to practise during the three or four months of the season just to help cultivate the chi. We've been sharing some Daoist practises. We've been sharing like in autumn we have lung tapping and all of those kind of things. We've got some stuff filmed for kidneys which is coming up and we're just going to keep trying to give you guys some lifestyle stuff as well to support because I think for both of us that's really been a big part of our journeys is not just taking the herbs but also using them with the practises that support the function of the herbs and the health of the chi in the body.   Tahnee: (59:53) So yin is something that I love and I think it's really easy to do at home. You don't need to be good at yoga. You don't need to be flexible. You don't need to be really... I often do it in my UGG boots and my tracksuit on the floor. It's not very attractive but it does the job and it's really quite easy just to be still and feel into your body. It's a very yin kind of kidney practise. So I think hopefully you guys will love that and you can send through any requests if you want sequences for any type of thing. But yeah. I don't think there's much else to say there at this point.   Mason: (01:00:30) No, thanks, everybody. I hope you join us on the 30 days of jing. You can find that over on Facebook. You can look up the group, 30 days of jing and you'll find it there and request to join.   Tahnee: (01:00:43) We'll all be doing it, not all of us at the office, most of us at the office will be doing it and I'm really excit

It's that time of year again, where we descend from the peak of summer months, from the highs of long days and energised bodies, into a coming back to earth and ourselves. This fulcrum between seasons, coming out of summer but not quite in the preparations of Autumn/metal time, corresponds with the earth element. It's a time to anchor yourself in a place of equilibrium and nurture where you are out of balance through solitude, grounding practices, and nourishing foods. From this place of harmony and groundedness allows the bridging of heaven and earth, where dreams and aspirations come into reality. On the podcast today, we have our favourite duo exploring the earth element and how we can support ourselves, our families, and all of humanity in this axis point between seasons. In their natural ebb and flow, Tahnee and Mason discuss the earth element in all its dimensions, foods and practices for grounding energy, and nourishment of the digestive system with a specific focus on the pivotal role of the spleen in this time.   "There's something to me, with coming back to the earth element, that you can nurture, support, and nourish your family through this kind of devotion to feeding and nourishing them in the best possible way. I think there's something so beautiful about that". -Tahnee Taylor     Tahnee and Mason discuss: Late summer, entering into the earth element. Exploring the harmony and groundedness that the earth element brings. Grounding practices for the mind/intellect and body Getting grounded to take specific action and manifest dreams. The spleen/earth relationship The role of the spleen. Signs of spleen and digestive imbalance. Spleen consciousness; The reasoning mind and our ability to make clear judgments. Foods to eat in the late summer/earth season to nourish the spleen and pancreas. Nourishing the digestive system to support clear vision and thinking. Supporting digestion through warming foods. Qi blend to support the spleen and earth element. Mother Earth, the ultimate source of nourishment; how this translates to our relationship with our bodies is this season.   Tahnee and Mason Taylor Tahnee and Mason Taylor are the CEO and founder of SuperFeast (respectively). Their mission with SuperFeast is to improve the health, healing, and happiness of people and the planet, through sharing carefully curated offerings and practices that honour ancient wisdom and elevate the human spirit. Together Tahnee and Mason run their company and host the SuperFeast podcast, weaving their combined experience in herbs, yoga, wellness, Taoist healing arts, and personal development with lucid and compelling interviews from all around the world. They are the proud parents of Aiya and Goji, the dog, and are grateful to call the Byron Shire home.   MasonTaylor Mason Taylor is the founder of SuperFeast. Mason was first exposed to the ideas of potentiating the human experience through his mum Janesse (who was a big inspiration for founding SuperFeast and is still an inspiration to Mason and his team due to her ongoing resilience in the face of disability). After traveling South America for a year, Mason found himself struggling with his health - he was worn out, carried fungal infections, and was only 22. He realised that he had the power to take control of his health. Mason redirected his attention from his business degree and night work in a bar to begin what was to become more than a decade of health research, courses, education, and mentorship from some of the leaders in personal development, wellness, and tonic herbalism. Inspired by the own changes to his health and wellbeing through his journey (which also included Yoga teacher training and raw foodism!), he started SuperFeast in 2010. Initially offering a selection of superfoods, herbs, and supplements to support detox, immune function, and general wellbeing. Mason offered education programs around Australia, and it was on one of these trips that he met Tahnee, who is now his wife and CEO of SuperFeast. Mason also offered detox and health transformation retreats in the Byron hinterland (some of which Tahnee also worked on, teaching Yoga and workshops on Taoist healing practices, as well as offering Chi Nei Tsang treatments to participants). After falling in love with the Byron Shire, Mason moved SuperFeast from Sydney's Northern Beaches to Byron Bay in 2015. He lived on a majestic permaculture farm in the Byron hinterland, and after not too long, Tahnee joined him (and their daughter, Aiya was conceived). The rest is history - from a friend's rented garage to a warehouse in the Byron Industrial Estate to SuperFeast's current home in Mullumbimby's beautiful Food Hub, SuperFeast (and Mason) has thrived in the conscious community of the Northern Rivers. Mason continues to evolve his role at SuperFeast, in education, sourcing, training, and creating the formulas based on Taoist principles of tonic herbalism.   Tahnee Taylor Tahnee Taylor is the CEO of SuperFeast and has been exploring health and human consciousness since her late teens. From Yoga, which she first practiced at school in 2000, to reiki, herbs, meditation, Taoist and Tantric practices, and human physiology, her journey has taken her all over. This journey continues to expand her understanding and insight into the majesty (that is) the human body and the human experience. Tahnee graduated with a Journalism major and did a stint in non-fiction publishing (working with health and wellness authors and other inspiring creatives), advertising, many jobs in cafes, and eventually found herself as a Yoga teacher. Her first studio, Yoga for All, opened in 2013, and Tahnee continues to study Yoga with her teachers Paul + Suzee Grilley and Rod Stryker. She learned Chi Nei Tsang and Taoist healing practices from Master Mantak Chia. Tahnee continues to study herbalism and Taoist practices, the human body, women's wisdom, ancient healing systems, and is currently enrolled in an acupuncture degree and year-long program with The Shamanic School of Womancraft. Tahnee is the mother of one, a 4-year old named Aiya.   Resources: SuperFeast Qi Blend  YingYang Wuxing For Inner Harmony with Rhonda Chang EP#89     Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Hey everybody.   Tahnee: (00:01) Hi, everybody.   Mason: (00:02) Happy late summer.   Tahnee: (00:04) Yeah, that's what we're here to talk about.   Mason: (00:08) So talking about the earth element today, I also like the way Rhonda Chang has been on the podcast. She says, not earth element, soil element. I like that as well. I go both ways though.   Tahnee: (00:23) Swinging around.   Mason: (00:25) It's a bit more tangible for me, because when I'm ... Every time I do one of these podcasts, it's a really good anchor for me, actually, practise. Everyone at each season, go going into a podcast about that season, and it helps you drop in and really ... And I'm walking around and I'm, "Oh, I'm feeling the wood element. And I'm feeling the quality of wood internally." And that's very obvious because that's wood, it's sprouts, it's growth. And fire's very obvious. Earth though, I'm, "Am I feeling the whole earth? Am I feeling Gaia consciousness?" Whereas if I go soil, this is spleen soil season. It's easy for me to get in and meditate on and feel about ... Feel that quality, that energetics of soil internally. And that's why I bring it up.   Tahnee: (01:10) Interesting. Yeah. Because see, for me it's more like a weightedness and I really relate to that centrality and the gravity of earth, as in it's holding us to it, and it's kind of drawing us back down. And so you think about the energy of fire, which is so high and I can feel there's kind of a neutral grounding at this time of year, which I've noticed in my energy that I've gone from being really busy and really social in summer and feeling quite active, to sort of ... I can feel the change. I can feel this kind of almost consolidation that kind of feels like it happens around this time of year. And earth is present in all of those transitions between seasons, so we feel that energy at least four times a year. But especially this one where it's kind of that drop from the peak of summer, but we haven't quite hit the depth of winter, or even the sort of descent of the sort of metal time of autumn time.   Tahnee: (02:25) So yeah, I can feel this sort of equilibrium, I guess, in this time. And I think it really shows you where you're out of balance. I've just been noticing that in me there's this invitation at this time of year to examine where I'm out of balance and out of harmony. And I think earth, of all the elements, invites harmony the most. The others can feel like they slide easily in one direction or another for me, but this one sort of always feels really grounded and then lands. So I hope that made sense.   Mason: (02:58) Yeah, I mean it touches on a bunch of things I was feeling might come up later, but we might as well dive into it. See, I think that's an important one for me, because I know there's a little bit of back and forth about ... This isn't actually ... This isn't a season, this is just another fulcrum between seasons. Which is true, it's important for me to kind of really ... That's been good practise for me to remember there's those few weeks, or however long it's present for me between every season where I come into the transition period. And I come into that ... Well, everything consolidates. I can fall on hard, solid ground and move between a water energy and a wood energy, which are really different.   Mason: (03:40) But here, in the late summer, always feels relevant because it's always ... It's a time when, A, we've had the summer. So we've never needed grounding more in the year than after summer. And I feel like the way the consciousness of each organ system kind of plays out, the G. Here we're going into the E, the YI, I'm not sure what the pronunciations, "Yee," or, "E," of this spleen consciousness. Being the intellect, the reasoning mind, being able to make judgments and have acceptance. And it's the intellect, the capacity to think and have good quality thoughts, or maybe have bad quality thoughts. After summer, we've just been flying on such a high, it's probably the time when we've been the most active. And potentially we've kind of moved away from say, in winter, you're going to see a real coming forth of our meditation and mindfulness, and really going in practise being the real ... Even though we might do it all year, it's really the focus during winter.   Mason: (04:49) Summer, maybe it's not the whole ... It's not coming to the forefront. And so we need to really ground down after that fire time and really check in with the quality of our thoughts, the quality of our intellect, and really ... And I was reading about someone's ... An interpretation, which really ... Because I love the dreaming aspect of the whole Daoist system. And because it's a big bridge between ... It's a major bridge between heaven and earth, that spleen energy, although there's many organs that play a role in that. This is where we get to really consciously wield the sword of how we are bridging between heaven and earth, or mainly our dreaming. What do we aspire for in our life? What do we feel our destiny is? And that's something that people might relate to in kind of visioning and visioning in that spring season, and having the vision kind of just being acted upon and come to life in the summer.   Mason: (05:48) But that spleen system, that spleen consciousness comes forth at this time of year, in those fulcrums between the season to really sit down, ground our thoughts and our mind, and have a look at basically how we're doing in bringing our dreams into manifest and grounding it from the heavens into this world. And I really like that, because it's probably ... I relate to it because it's probably something I skipped past, and that's where one of the biggest pieces are in this season. It's a really beautiful time to go in and have a look at that inner critic, and that ... Whether it's been ... Are we still remaining constructive? Are we still remaining acknowledging of everything that we actually have done? Are we sticking to the plan? Are we executing the plan effectively?   Mason: (06:34) All these things that our intellect can be like. Because the mind and the intellect, I feel sometimes it gets forgotten in the ... I don't know, in the health world that I've run in. Whereas that's something ... It's just so important for us to make sure that ... Not just have mindfulness and go into space, and not just quiet the mind, which obviously is another one that's really beneficial. But to really hone the mind and sharpen the mind so we can come better at bringing our dreams into reality. And we need to ground, and I think that will be really coming to the forefront for me this season.   Tahnee: (07:11) Yeah. I mean, the word that keeps popping into my head is substance. And I think when you think about what the spleen represents in the body, it's the substance, it's the muscles, and the kind of meat or the flesh of your body. And I think when you are kind of, I guess what I'm sort of ... The tangent I'm going on, having heard you just speak then was, yeah, there's this kind of substance that comes from acknowledging this transition and this element that kind of provides this real foundation and kind of bedrock on which the more lofty ideals can kind of manifest, and the spiritual ... I come back to Master Chia's work, we can't go off into the astro realms unless we have a really strong connection to the earth, and we remember her as mother and as the ultimate source of nourishment, and that we've chosen this reality to have this substantial experience so that our soul can ... Or our spirit can feel what it's like to be in this tangible form.   Tahnee: (08:15) And I think that invitation of earth and that kind of association with the mother, and nurturing, and the sweet flavour and all of these things that it has, it's really a lot to do with substance and with building us and who we become. And yeah, I think that idea of the intellect and the mind, I think clear thinking and clear seeing comes through a healthy digestive function, right? And we've got western medicine kind of correlating this idea of enteric brain, which is a very old concept that's kind of been revived recently, and-   Mason: (08:53) Can you go into that?   Tahnee: (08:54) Yeah, yeah. So basically we all kind of know that we have the spinal cord, and the brain, and all of this kind of stuff. And I think it was in the '40s, or it might've been even earlier, a man proposed that there was a gut brain, which was kind of poo-pooed a little bit at the time, there's no neural cells in the gut, it's all happening in the brain and in the nerves, and all that kind of stuff. And anyway, I think recently in the last couple of years, if not decades, there's probably someone who knows more about this than I do.   Tahnee: (09:26) But just from my research, there's basically been now evidence that yeah, the gut is heavily involved in producing neurotransmitters and in actually ... Stress response and all of these kinds of things. And that actually, yes, it's acting as a brain and it's signalling to the body to do certain things and certain functions at certain times. And so I, obviously coming from the Daoist perspective, think each of the organs is a brain, and believe based on my experience and what I've studied that that's what's happening, is they're all controlling our function through their lens, and our job is to harmonise that function and to harmonise their relationship with one another. And you can think of the brain as a mission control or something, but everything is kind of making things happen.   Tahnee: (10:16) But yeah, to take it back to the spleen, if you think about ... It's sort of this organ that in western medicine has again only recently been kind of recognised as being necessary as a part of the immune system, as a part of our defences. And one of our acupuncturist's favourite words is, "Bonds and boundaries," when it comes to the spleen. But if you think about the mother/child relationship, the boundary or the bond, the bond is very strong and the boundary is very small. A mother will do almost anything for her child. And you tend to see that in people who are ... I'm using air quotes here, "Spleeny." People who have a sort of tendency to bring balance in the earth element is ... They have a tendency to have really poor boundaries, to overstate their bonds, and also to have this kind of mind that runs wild on them. And that creates a lot of anxious thoughts and ... Mas and I are both put your hands up. Creates a lot of anxious thoughts and a lot of repetitive thoughts, and can really-   Mason: (11:14) Well the repetitive thoughts, you always use the word just ruminating-   Tahnee: (11:17) Yeah, digesting, right? And that's the thing that the spleen opens to the tongue, to the mouth. So we receive not only nourishment through our mouth, but also emotional nourishment. And if you have a tendency to over-crave sweet foods, or to need to lean on sweet foods emotionally, there's a very good chance that that's a sign of a spleen imbalance in your body. Similarly, anyone who's holding too much weight will probably also have some dysfunction going on with the spleen, because by its very nature, the spleen's not transforming the food into Qi, it's transforming it into mass, right? Into substance.   Tahnee: (11:53) And so this is not to say there's anything wrong with being a bit chubby or whatever, that's totally fine, but it really comes down to, if you're looking at this system as one of personal evolution, and personal understanding, and personal sovereignty, well then you're using all of this stuff as feedback for your own growth and understanding. And I think when you look at what the spleen represents, it's so beautiful and it can also be so detrimental. Because we all need more nourishment, and more love, and more care, and we need to direct that to the earth and we need to be able to receive that from the earth. And it's that giving and receiving, I think that can be a problem in our culture as well.   Mason: (12:34) Yeah. I mean that nourishment, everyone can put their hands just over there, the bottom of their left rib cage now and just send some good Juju into your spleen, which is the in organ. When we talk about the soil earth element, includes the pancreas, and the stomach being the yang organ there. Someone who was saying it's like the Goldilocks organ. It's not too hot, not too cold, not too soft, not too hard. It's fine, we were just playing Goldilocks at the beach yesterday with Aiya. It's very appropriate. It's subconscious. Subconsciously manifesting the organs into our playtime. But that's something when it comes to ... It's kind of like this ... When you get into your 30s, everyone's all of a sudden ... Me partying when I was 25, Friday night out just flogging yourself, and then you get to 30s and your idea of a perfect Friday night is pyjamas a little-   Tahnee: (13:36) Bed.   Mason: (13:36) Yeah, bed basically. I think there's just a time when your intellect does kind of get honed into one that we'd call adult or mature, or where you become ... Hopefully some responsible thoughts and intellect can start coming forth and you start making more responsible nourishing choices about which form within your lifestyle flow you're going to see consistency, maybe some discipline. But basically that's when you say nourishment-   Tahnee: (14:08) It's stabilising.   Mason: (14:09) Stabilising, exactly. And the other way it's put, that spleen, that the earth is the adhesive between all the other organs. It's what gives them ... It's the earth it's-   Tahnee: (14:20) The hub in the wheel. If you visualise that central axis on which everything spins, if you don't have good digestion, if you don't have good thoughts, if you don't have good boundaries and good bonds, relationships and things that nourish and support you, well then really those are sort of the foundations of a healthy life. You know... One quick tangent I wanted to jump on was Mas was just talking about the stages of life. And in, again, the sort of Chinese worldview, or the Eastern Asian worldview, the early ... I can't remember, I think it's the first fourteen years or it might be seven years and eight years ... Yeah, it's seven years for women and eight years for men, I think. So the first seven years are wood, so you're very yang, you're growing really fast-   Mason: (15:03) [inaudible 00:15:03]   Tahnee: (15:03) So you're very young, you're growing really fast.   Mason: (15:03) Like a sprout.   Tahnee: (15:03) No, it must be 14. Because anyway, you might have to Google this. For the first chunk of life you're wood. Yeah, you're this little sprout, you're growing, if you've ever been around a child, we have a four-year-old, never stop moving. Heal really quickly, run really hot, don't need to wear clothes all summer. You've got a picture in your head of that.   Tahnee: (15:23) Then we go into the fire stage, which is our twenties when we're really burning bright, we're really social and really trying to get ourselves out there in the world. Again, we can all probably relate to that, where there's this real drive and real fire and real burning purpose and passion.   Tahnee: (15:40) Thirties is when we hit that earth time. Yeah. And so we've landed and we've learned a few things along the way. We've learned what doesn't work. We've been burned. We've also worked out maybe where we fit in the world a little bit and we've worked out what we need and what we don't need and so we're starting to... The spleen's job is to... or the stomach and the spleen, their job's to separate that what we want to digest and eliminate the rest.   Mason: (16:06) Sorting.   Tahnee: (16:08) Yes. And that's... I can't remember the words right now, but it's sort and something. Anyway. But yeah, they're going through and determining what's necessary. And so that's really what this stage of life is that we're in, is this more grounded stage of life. And then you move through into the metal years where hopefully you've accumulated some wisdom, but you also give less shit. You're starting to cut some stuff out of your life, you might start to think about retiring, you might start to not deal with people that you would have put up with in your thirties or whatever. And then you're into a more spiritual age later on, where you're in those wisdom years, where hopefully you're contributing back your wisdom to the people around you, your society, your culture.   Tahnee: (16:50) So, that's in loose allegory for the human experience and the soul growth over those years. So, I think those of you listening in your thirties, yeah, you may feel like there's a stabilising and a slowing down and a consolidating, but I would invite you to see that as a very natural process, and something that doesn't need to be fought. Despite what I hear from friends who are like, "Oh my God, when I was in my twenties." It's like, no, now we get to reap the harvest of all of that work that we did understanding ourselves, all the things we tried, all the experiments.   Mason: (17:22) And that's, I think, important. We talk about the anxiety that's out there and we're not going to go into diagnosing anxiety or anything like that, but quite often it's related to the heart. But Tahns said it one day, she's like, "A lot of anxiety comes from that spleen earth energy as well, because you're just constantly chewing, chewing, ruminating, ruminating, ruminating." And when you just said, "Oh my God, when I was in my twenties, I was doing everything right", whatever, whether it's health, profession, there's a little bit of comparison. And another thing that comes into this spleen... Emerging from this spleen energy, is accepting. A real grounded accepting. Cool, this is where I'm at in my life, or getting to a physical practise. Cool. This is where my body is at today without going into all that comparison, because when you go into that comparison, you're going to start looking at your intellect, and your inner critic giving you a flogging.   Mason: (18:19) And so it's really important, I think it's really important for us to really accept this stage of life that we're at and with what's naturally and energetically coming with it during this time of life, or even if you're not in this time of life, during at the fulcrums of the season. And just remember the soil is at the centre of that elemental medicine wheel. And so we base a good chunk of your lifestyle around ensuring that this spleen, earth, soil element is going to be healthy because it is the glue that brings everything together.   Mason: (18:54) All the other elements, the reason there's able to be Yin yang adjustment through the body is because all the elements can pass through the soil and basically interchange and connect with these other elements. It's a transporter and a transformer. And so the spleen is able to... So those let's say the kidneys are able to get water received by them to the liver so it can become more pliable through the spleen. So same as like the fire is able to send heat down to the kidneys through the spleen, water is able to go between lung and kidney through the soil of the body as well.   Mason: (19:37) So when Tahn says it's a nourishing energy, it's a grounding energy. It's why all over blogs and Instagram and people's conversations around health when they've been going to these extreme diets, for instance, or you've been searching for what's wrong with you. At some point, if you will go with the process, you get a little bit accepting of the chop wood, carry water, we're in the Year of the Ox. And there's a little bit of Oxen energy to that soil. It's like, "Okay, cool. I accept where I'm at in life. And I accept I'm maybe not going to be able to find, keep on finding answers, it might be unsustainable if I keep on going extreme. I'm going to have to go a little Goldilocks here and get a little bit more consistent with my diet, maybe with when I'm eating with what I'm eating with, what my schedule looks like." So on and so forth.   Mason: (20:27) So that's always... I feel like we've given a good amount of context to what I find myself, which is, in my twenties, I wouldn't be such a spleen-y person, because I was... I remember really rolling my eyes when I was a raw foodist. I was doing all kinds of extremes. I was fasting a lot, so on and so forth. Because that really worked for me back then.   Mason: (20:51) But I remember just rolling my eyes whenever I heard anyone talking Chinese medicine principles around having breakfast, a nice nourishing breakfast, three square meals, and especially a really good breakfast at the start of the day. Ensure you do physical exercise and the same meditation, the same sequences, get really familiar with the way that you move your body, and you cultivate your energy, talking about like, hey, let's not drown the spleen in cold raw foods. And that is something I feel like there needs to be a real bridging, which funnily enough, that's what the spleen is making this connection between those worlds that are nut salads and smoothies.   Mason: (21:37) I get it, especially during these seasons, it's just so easy versus everything always needs to be cooked. Bringing a connection between those two segments of our own psyche, our own health practises, the health scene, the practitioners, like there's bacterial experts, gut bacteria experts that are just like, cool, whatever. You don't worry about... Just get different pigments and different fibres in. Don't worry about the temperature and so on and so forth. And then likewise, you've got the Chinese medicine, which is just as long as it's all really well cooked and energetically and check with the seasons. But there's going to have to be a little bit of crossing paths and conversation between those two worlds to get a little bit more wisdom there.   Mason: (22:23) But I think it's a good one for everyone to be really meditating on and remembering we're out of balance when it comes to the seasons. Most people have some small spleen deficiency, not most people, but a lot of people. And if you're trying to get back in flow with the seasons, you're going to need to be standing on solid ground. And the place to do that is to have a spleen friendly diet and a spleen friendly lifestyle. So yes, we will probably start talking about a few dietary principles during this season, a little bit of sense and why certain sweet... because it is a sweet flavour.   Tahnee: (23:10) Sadly doesn't mean sugar, though. I think there's a few things in there, just to backtrack a little bit. I think if you think of this concept of alchemy, which is really at the heart of these Daoist and the Vedic's other aspect of the tradition that I study, is the Vedic side of things. And at the heart of that is really fire as the element that really transformed humanity. And I think what I've really come to understand and to have a lot of reverence for is the... We just tried to light a fire yesterday with wet wood and it was a shit fight. Our neighbours probably hate us now. There was smoke everywhere. It was a really unpleasant situation for us and for them.   Mason: (24:00) We brought this [inaudible 00:24:01] all over Argentina.   Tahnee: (24:03) We did. I think that's a really nice allegory really for the digestive system because it's not like every meal is not going to digest well, we can light a fire 99% of the time. But I think over time, if you just keep adding damp wood and trying to light that fire, you're going to run out of chi, and you're going to create a lot of soot in the body, right? You're going to end up with a lot of inflammation and all of this stuff because the body is just not coping. And it doesn't necessarily... We've had rain solid for a week to get to the point where the fire won't light, right? So it's I think the conditions have to be against you or you've created an imbalance. And again, this can take time. A lot of people we speak to are like, "Oh, it was fine", and Mason was fine, when you were raw for a while.   Mason: (24:57) Yeah. Four years was good. And then I instinctively went, I'm going to move before something shitty happens.   Tahnee: (25:03) Yeah. And I think I can refer back to my very complicated relationship with food and see how much damage I've done to my spleen and my digestive function, through everything from disordered eating to controlling too much cold and damp and wet foods, to forgetting to eat because I get so in my head. There's lots of different ways in which I've created any sensitivity really that I have in my digestion.   Tahnee: (25:34) So I think there's this really interesting dance there that each person has to dance for themselves around how sensitive they are. I do believe you can rebuild digestive fire, absolutely have seen it, and I know that it's possible, and I've felt it in my own body where I can digest things I couldn't digest 10 years ago, but I do think there's this really interesting personal dialogue we have to learn to have with our body where we drop all of the bullshit from everyone who's throwing ideas at us, and we just come back into, well, what really works for me?   Tahnee: (26:05) And again, if you think as the stomach as a receiver and a warm environment in which food lands, it takes no knowledge of science to know that you're going to have to use energy to warm up cold food. That's just obvious. So if you're tired and weak, and you're using energy to digest, that's not going to be ideal. And so it starts to look at... It depends. If you feel really vital and you have a lot of energy, a lot of space, it's probably fine to eat a lot of cold wet food. If you don't, then maybe it's time to make a change. And it goes all the way through.   Tahnee: (26:41) And again, if you look at the spleen, if you look at it's role as really providing the nourishment for the blood, again, it comes down to, well, what is blood made of? And so again, we're looking at are we providing the foundations for healthy blood? Are we providing enough fluid? Are we providing enough nutrition? And how is that being alchemised by the body? Which is really the important part, because you can eat the best food and you can eat organic, and you can eat this and that. And if your body's just not doing anything with it, it's a waste of time. So really the invitation of this spleen and earth energy is to transform and alchemise everything that we consume, which does include emotions and even the words that we speak.   Tahnee: (27:20) And I think that's a piece that's often missed when we talk about health is it's what... I've got some stuff going on in my family right now. My digestion has been awful basically since it happened, because, and you think about, again, the archetype of family and what all of that means, there's this lack of stability and foundation for me that I'm now having to rebuild on my own. And so I'm seeing that mirrored in my body and I think there's this real need to remember that we don't just digest food, but we digest energy, and we digest emotion.   Mason: (27:54) Thoughts. Beliefs.   Tahnee: (27:54) Yeah, exactly. And so part of what you digest when you eat a certain way is the ideology of that system of eating. And so I think that's something we all have to just really slow down and take stock of and see where we want to align ourselves, but-   Mason: (28:11) Well, because it becomes your flesh.   Tahnee: (28:13) Yeah. It literally becomes what you're made of and it's that you are what you eat cliche, but it's true, right? If you're unable to digest your emotions, they're going to go somewhere in your body and you're going to hold them. And the muscles are really the overflow for what our organs can't digest. So if you've ever had a recurring muscle pain that comes about when you have an emotional experience, you can start to think, okay, well, let's say it's something to do with stress and the liver, and you might get a sore neck and shoulder. It's yeah, my liver is overburdened. It's created this excessive heat or this reaction, which is now being manifested in my muscle. My muscle's taking that energy away from that organ, and yes, doing the organ a favour, but now, I have a sore shoulder, or a sore neck.   Tahnee: (29:04) And so you can start to look back at, okay, well, what do I do now to nourish my liver chi? How do I support myself? How do I avoid recreating this situation? So you start to use yourself as a little science experiment. As a curious little exploration of what I can do. And I think that's one of the big invitations of this earth energy is to start to nourish yourself as you would want to be nourished. To look at yourself as deserving of that level of care and effortless, thankless care that a mother gives to a child, that the earth gives to us.   Tahnee: (29:43) And then in exchange, we're then able maybe to give that to others and it starts to build out this altruism. And the best expression of earth is this altruistic caring non-martyred, loving expression of unity and sharing...   Tahnee: (30:00) ... kind of unity and sharing and sympathy and understanding amongst everyone. And obviously we don't have that in the world, but that's a really great expression of it. And the other side of it, is this kind of narcissistic, controlling, needy, anxious, overthinking, kind of analysing that stuff. So, we're kind of trying to lean a little bit more on the former and a little less on the latter.   Mason: (30:29) Good. Rant.   Tahnee: (30:29) I've been talking for like 20 minutes.   Mason: (30:32) No, so good. I just went to lots of places just in terms of accepting that nourishment coming our way, because I was just thinking about... I'm going to talk a little bit about fasting and intermittent fasting, but I'm not going to go too deep and I'm definitely not poo-pooing you guys. I'm just talking about like, I think it's really clinically used or used with a very specific intention. I think it's great, but I came to my own conclusion that I don't think it's a healthy thing to have like a permanent inclusion in a lifestyle for me anyway.   Mason: (31:03) And definitely from what I can see, and we were talking about quality of flesh and quality of muscle. And I remember feeling really strong and being in a community of people that seemed really strong and had good looking muscles, but I could never shake that using something like that intermittent fasting, again, not poo-pooing, not saying this is fact, just going on a thought, just going up on a bandwagon, the quality wasn't there. I didn't like the quality of the flesh and the quality of muscle that I was seeing in my peers and I was seeing in myself.   Mason: (31:34) And I don't know why that was. I think because, one, I had a fanatical ideology and that's something I don't... I've learned what it feels like to create flesh from more fanatical ideology. And two, I really got caught in the logic and I think this is where the spleen can get the most damage in raw food diets, ancestral kind of intermittent fasting kind of style diets. All these things that kind of disconnect us from being grounded and allowing our pure logic and intellect to just... And accept the nourishment that's coming for us.   Mason: (32:10) In that spleen season, we can go into like, you know what, intellectually, it makes sense that as hunter and gatherers, we wouldn't be going out and we wouldn't have that abundance. And therefore for me, what I'm realising there is, is I felt guilty about the level of abundance that I have access to here, in this day and age and that this civilization for all the awful things and amazing things that it's done, I have a genuine mistrust of it. I don't accept any of the nourishment because there's other people that maybe aren't getting nourishment based on other political... This is me, my spleen mind running off and going.   Mason: (32:51) I don't actually deserve it. And therefore I try and logic my way or reason my way, intellect my way to a place, where I am replicating some kind of other diet under the guise of getting health outcomes or logic verse just getting grounded and not having to fly off and go for some crazy ideology, but just continuously grounding and starting with that point of nourishment, which is like why I was thinking of intermittent fasting. And then for me, it was huge coming to having a three-square meal thing. I felt like a failure going to that. That's like eating way too much, even though then the principal becomes only eat till you're like 80% full.   Mason: (33:33) But I was like, why am I doing this? Why do I have to eat? Because you're hungry and I've been there. I've done lots of fasting. I love that point when you kind of stop getting hungry. But when I became really grounded and I grounded my intellect in my mind, and I started accepting and looking and thinking about nourishment, accepting nourishment coming my forth, I don't think it's an absurd statement. to think the natural tendency that everyone is going to accept from their mother is to eat when you're hungry.   Mason: (34:04) So I think as well, if people don't agree with what I eat at this time because it's breakfast and lunch and dinner, and they're synthetic things. Breakfast time is something that was created by Kellogg's and blah, blah, blah. I get all that. You go through all that programming bullshit. And then you do get to a point in the morning though, when you're just hungry. And that's what the spleen is. It's very grounded. Well, should I eat or should I not? Should I fast, should I not? Are you hungry? Yes. Okay. Is there something like diseased in you that clinically you've seen that intermittent fasting is going to help you get through that and get back into a metabolic balance or perhaps get your pancreas working in alignment? You've got whatever it is.   Mason: (34:43) I could do it and heal, but then you always come back to the centre of the wheel of the earth and accept that nourishment. And yeah, I just really, I guess I just went off and did a little bit of healing then when you were talking about that. The stomach, sitting in there, I think they say it likes to sit at about like a 38 degrees.   Tahnee: (35:09) Yeah. It's slightly warmer than body temperature. I can't remember the exact temperature, but I think that's... I mean, it's interesting, you're talking about even receiving nourishment because that's kind of the archetype of the stomach, is it receives, right? It literally controls the receiving. It's like a compost bin. So if you've ever composted and you know that if you put too much wet stuff in there, it gets stinky. If you don't add enough dry stuff... So this is-   Mason: (35:32) Great analogy.   Tahnee: (35:33) Yeah. And I think people forget like it's soil, right? So to make healthy soil, you need carbon, you need all sorts of various things. I think the older I get, the more I think we should eat most things in a lot of variety all of the time, as in way more diversity than is probably promoted in a lot of the mainstream diet fads. But I really noticed for myself, if I don't eat a lot of high fibre food and well-cooked vegetables and stuff, if I eat too many starchy things, like spelt pancakes or whatever, I don't feel like my digestion flourishes as well. So I can feel that there's this kind of desire for the body to sort of compost these really natural foods, right? And you think about what we would have had access to. They are things like your fruits, your vegetables, your nuts, your meats, your grains and legumes and things that are prepared.   Tahnee: (36:32) And again, I watch YouTube videos of indigenous cultures preparing food. They spent all freaking day doing it. Like they're not ever eating a Twinkie or anything that's in a packet, like to prepare a legume or a grain that's soaking and that's sprouting and they're mashing and they're grinding. It's a process. And I think we've really lost touch with how much labour it takes to get food to a place where it's digestible. We just kind of plonk some stuff in a pan and eat it. And it's like, yeah, there's actually a lot of effort and time and energy. And that's one of the things that the industrial revolution did for us was it took us away from having to prepare our foods possibly to the detriment of our bodies. And I think we would all agree that hasn't been the best for human health.   Mason: (37:20) To an extent. I mean, there's definitely-   Tahnee: (37:20) Well, yes. Sorry. That's not true. Yeah. There's more longevity and stuff. But I guess in terms of those markets of like wellness, like that's-   Mason: (37:25) Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I was just thinking about exactly that, like it's another part where I draw back. I was just thinking about apples and thinking how... You were talking about indigenous preparation. I was thinking, oh yeah, they couldn't just go grab an apple. And I was like, but there's this amazing thing of like seeds going all across the world and us developing crops and biodynamic gardens bringing us these amazing produce, so we can use all this produce. Most of what we're getting locally and seasonally, pretty much none of it is going to be, for most people listening to this, like indigenous foods coming from this land or indigenous meat's. Nonetheless, that's like that can... But then you start bringing in preparation. We've had such a speed up of convenience, which to the extent has kept people fed, which is essentially a good thing, people to be able to be fed. Then you get excess, you get excess of crap, excess of corn, excess of wheat, and you get GMOs, all that kind of stuff coming in.   Tahnee: (38:22) Yeah. Cheap stuff. Yeah.   Mason: (38:22) But if you come back and you accept the nourishment and the abundance, but then, as you said, the spleen is going to like you putting a lot of time and preparation into... And if you can weave that back into your kitchen, if you can have...   Tahnee: (38:36) Well, I think it comes back to nature. I remember, I lived with a Japanese family. I lived with two. One was very modern and one was very traditional. And in the traditional one, the grandma got up every morning at 03:00 or 04:00 in the morning and she would start cooking breakfast and we would have a proper meal with like a soup and rice and sausage and an egg thing and sushi.   Mason: (39:00) Yum.   Tahnee: (39:00) Yeah. A proper meal for breakfast. And then we'd have the same thing for lunch if we were there and we'd have something else for dinner. And that's literally her gig was they grew the green stuff right next to the house. They bought some other stuff from the market. And I remember thinking, at the time being 16, eff that, I'm a feminist and I'm never going to do that. But there's just something to me, coming back to the earth element, that you can nurture and support and nourish your family through this kind of devotion to feeding them and to making sure that they're fed in the best possible way. I think there's something really beautiful about that. And it's taken me a good 20 years to see the beauty in that.   Tahnee: (39:41) But I think there's something in that, around the connection to nature as well. And if we're talking foods for the spleen, they are really a lot to do with those sort of naturally sweet kind of harvest foods, your grains, your nuts... Not so much your nuts, sorry, your grains, your legumes. You have root vegetables, that kind of thing.   Mason: (40:02) Yellowy foods. Yeah.   Tahnee: (40:03) Yeah. Like your pumpkin or squash.   Mason: (40:05) Squash, sweet potato.   Tahnee: (40:06) Yeah. And I think that if you think about how you feel-   Mason: (40:09) White rice is really a good neutral spleen tone applying food alone.   Tahnee: (40:13) Yeah. If you think about how you feel after you eat a big warm bowl of pumpkin soup or soup potato curry or something, you feel really like hugged in this... I interviewed Andrew Sterman recently, if you haven't heard that one go back and listen to it, but he talks about you want to feel like your belly's purring after you've eaten a meal. And I think just that sense that the foundation of your wellbeing is going to come through having that kind of happy feeling of food cooked with love, chosen carefully for what you need to balance your body and to really nourish and support [crosstalk 00:40:49].   Mason: (40:48) Massive diversity of what you're eating and different types of fibres. I think that interview was amazing. I think that combination of his and I interviewed Jason Jason Hawrelak on that. Increasing, he's just studying the microbiome in getting a diversity of bacteria there. And that's a beautiful kind of like... If you can listen to those and not try and put those two philosophies, because one's like naturopathic and the other one's Chinese medicine, don't try and lay them over each other, but just like the soil earth element, just feel that space between them and feel them communicating.   Mason: (41:21) And then from the other side of those two things that you could be interested in for better health outcomes, you can find what could come the other side is more nourishing and tailored. You've got the evidence on your side and tradition on your side of a capacity to make a family culture and have a food culture, which is going to get you through the other end with your spleen chief flowing, therefore, hopefully your other elemental organs flowing with greater ease, yin-yang transformation happening with greater ease. It doesn't mean everything's perfect in the body, but you're in flow. You're in communion. You're grounded enough to be able to take very specific action as well to manifest your dreams.   Mason: (42:08) And that's something I think, I feel it's probably like there's another little bit of a tangent, but it's something that you do see a lot as people go, like lots of dreams when you're in your teens or 20s, and then you kind of grow up. It's like in Hook, I always talk about Hook. Peter Pan, lost boy, and then goes, "I want to get married. I love someone." And so he goes over and he just forgets all his... Forgets Never Never, basically forgets how to dream and Crow and fight and fly, and how to have happy thoughts.   Mason: (42:48) But then the spleen season, if you're alive enough in spring and you have enough trust and confidence in yourself to start dreaming up and thinking, what would I like? What's going to really light me up and make me feel like I've really been able to do what I'm here to do, which is bridge heaven and earth, and bring some magic to me in this world? And that doesn't need to look extravagant or anything, just allow yourself to be in that dreaming.   Mason: (43:14) When it gets to these earth seasons, it's a really good time to... You're mature and start making your decisions and really quiet your mind. And really ensure that you're being critical and judgmental in a way that's really going to take you further towards living your best life, for a better word, and an expressed life verse being judgmental to others and yourself and critical of yourself, because that does eventually turn your flesh into kind of that energy. And you can feel it.   Mason: (43:54) I remember, after I got out of my raw kind of food worlds, I became quite critical of, and people probably hear the hangover of it, I talk about it all the time, critical of myself kind of falling into those ideologies for just how much I externally started to identify, became a bit resentful towards the health scene. I became resentful to the kinds of information that people would put out there with conviction, not knowing the whole of the system, just doing things willy-nilly, which I saw could put people in danger, which is probably because that's what I felt like I was doing, to be honest.   Tahnee: (44:37) Well, it's interesting about the spleen and the intellect aspect of it. If you are in ideology, that's a sign of spleen imbalance, right? If you think about what a lot of these diets do is they disturb the healthy flow of spleen qi in the body. And that affects the ability, the capacity to think. So people get myopic, they get stuck on, this is the only way. They can't digest that there might be two or three or four or five or six or a thousand different ways to eat.   Tahnee: (45:03) .... That there might be two or three or four or five or six or 1000 different ways to eat or to behave. And so it sort of becomes this my way or the highway kind of a thing. And again, it comes down to bonds and boundaries, right? Like a strong boundary against everybody else, and only my tribe is right. And that tribalism is really not what we need. Like our whole world is incredibly tribal right now. And it's not really in service to the growth of humanity, it's not in service to like our collective growth as people of a country or a state. Whatever your thoughts are on what's going on globally, there's a lot of stuff that isn't really that helpful. So I think when we think about this sense of like what the gifts of the spleen are, it's empathy, it's understanding that you may not agree with someone, but you can empathise with their perspective.   Tahnee: (45:48) Well, if your spleen is out of balance, you're not going to have that. You're going to think that they're wrong. You're going to be black and white. You're going to be divisive. Similarly, it's about altruism and about supporting the whole of humanity. Well again, if you're out of balance, you're not going to be feeling like that. It's about stability. If you're not stable, is it really working? And I think that's the, I mean, that's one of the things I believe very strongly with yoga is, if your practise isn't making you more stable, you're doing the wrong practise for you. And I think-   Mason: (46:17) That kind of links into like looking at what's your relationship like? What's your house like? How is your work life? Before you go out and try and save the world, making sure your own house is ... at least you're in the middle of ... at least you've got to practise consistently and you're getting your house in order.   Tahnee: (46:34) Yeah, and I think-   Mason: (46:35) I don't [crosstalk 00:46:35] like lofty ... I don't [inaudible 00:46:38] get it perfect. And then you can go out-   Tahnee: (46:39) No, well that's liver.   Mason: (46:41) Yeah.   Tahnee: (46:41) Perfectionist liver friend. But yeah, I really do think ... like I think that something we talk about a lot is I look to people who are our peers, or even really well known in the scene and they aren't stable. They aren't people that are steady and consistent. And I find there's something about that that I'm a little bit wary of, because I think, "Well, I'm more interested in learning from someone who's been around for a while and who's really spent time diving into their understanding and their experience." And that leads you to teachers that are older and that have been around a while. And they very rarely teach black and white. They very rarely say there's one way. I mean, "It depends," is pretty much the mantra of my life because it's like there is no right way.   Tahnee: (47:33) And all of this stuff is really just someone wrote this down because someone downloaded it probably from wherever you want to believe. I believe from some kind of source, consciousness. And they've been able to put it down in a language that we don't speak anymore, that's been translated through time. There's lots of arguments about what things mean. And then we're here having this conversation on a podcast, this is our understanding and interpretation of someone else's insight. And we all have the capacity to have these insights and these understandings. And I think it just becomes, again, about how we assimilate and digest these ideas. And so just to keep bringing it back to that spleen element, you're creating the soil of your life through composting everything you come across and turning it into your foundation, your stability. And that's, I think, the piece that is really important, is it's not about, "Oh, it's spleen time and I have to eat pumpkin," it's about what do you notice and observe when you lean in to what's abundant in your ...   Tahnee: (48:37) Like in my neighbourhood right now, there are lots of sweet potatoes around. They're at all the farmer's markets and they're everywhere. It's like, well, that would make sense to me to eat them because they're there, they're growing. And hey, oh, by the way, they also worked for spleen. Isn't that interesting? And I think this is this really kind of interesting thing that you start to notice these things, like you were saying, you start to kind of, year on year, develop and cultivate this deeper level of understanding and relationship with these things just through living, not through trying to put on some, "I'm a Daoist and I believe it's spleen time, and I'm going to do this."   Tahnee: (49:10) And I think that's the same with the herbs. Like if you're working with ... Some people might need spleen herbs a lot, all the time. They might just have a tendency to really go out of balance in that area, and they really need that support. I can sort of be like that sometimes. Other people might feel like they want to work with them around the change in season. Other people might just want to work with them when they feel called to. You can work with your practitioner and find out what's going to be appropriate for you at this stage of life. So I think there's so much diversity in how we approach these things, but-   Mason: (49:44) That's probably worth mentioning. Like when we're talking about spleen deficiencies, we're talking in a very general sense, allowing the soil, the earth Chi to flow smoothly through the spleen stomach meridian, which can mean many things for everybody listening to this, but it's just feeling generally in harmony. And especially at this point, your intellect, the good quality thoughts, beliefs, and then your digestion. And so it's like you look at are you getting bloating? Are you holding weight? Is there IBS? Is there a bit of leaky gut going on? Is there a runny stool? Is there, to a lesser extent, constipation, but still there? And remember, where there's spleen, there's dampness in the spleen, you imagine the soil's just sopping wet, soggy, but then there's damp heat and damp cold. And then when we look at the stomach, we're going to see generally it's going to be heat, stomach heat. And so you're going to look at things like indigestion and reflux and those kinds of things.   Mason: (50:52) But we're not trying to diagnose all these things. Make sure you're with ... If there's something in those areas and really digestively something really going wrong, or especially if psychologically, something you can not, you haven't been able to get on top of it, don't try and do the lifestyle changes. Don't try and shoulder the burden. Remember to accept nourishment, and there's going to be people out there, practitioners, they're going to be able to help you kind of hone in on that as well. But in general, yeah. I mean, when you look at the Qi herbs, they're all about supporting the spleen function and quite often the lung function, because that's what delivers us our vitality and our daily Qi, so all the organs can run and thoughts can move and all that kind of good thing.   Mason: (51:34) So yeah, at this time of year, for sure, especially when here it's so muggy and damp, I like having the herbs in the Qi blend. I felt really comfortable when it came out with the Qi blend, because there's so many ... Poria, is the mushroom in there leading the charge, able to transform that water. If there's too much water. And likewise, guys, all the mushrooms are basically known in Chinese medicine as the regulators, water regulators, like the Warren G of the water in your ...   Mason: (52:08) And then the roots, like Astragalus. So like your Homie Nate   Tahnee: (52:16) Stop.   Mason: (52:19) So it's a really good time to get those moving in, especially the mushrooms, moving that water. Because remember, if that water's ... what's going to be able to travel through soggy, sopping water? You can't ... I can't remember what the word is. Friable.   Tahnee: (52:38) Yeah.   Mason: (52:39) Yeah. Like to be able-   Tahnee: (52:40) Soil.   Mason: (52:40) Yeah, soil. So you think you-   Tahnee: (52:41) Can move through it.   Mason: (52:42) Yeah, you think water can move through it, or especially that's what you want to be able to do ... moving in there.   Tahnee: (52:47) [crosstalk 00:52:47] can push through easily.   Mason: (52:49) Yeah. Cheese can move through there. Worms are going to be able to be present there in the soil. Maybe not. Let's stay in the analogy with that one. But yeah, very general. But mushrooms are always ... I mean, the good thing about Qi herbs is they're all so general and you can't really go wrong. But as Tahn's said, some people will notice really big differences. You make all these lifestyle kind of changes that we've spoke about. Remember that it's a time to get grounded and have a look at your inner critic and your beliefs and all these things. Remember, it's a transitional time. So you do have the opportunity at the fulcrums of the season, as you do all the time, you can tune into that earth energy. But really, if you sit down, stop distracting yourself. That's why people go on social media breaks and like little holidays, because when you stop having all that information coming in, you don't have to digest as much and chew on as much. And therefore you can chew on what's present in your body and make little adjustments, transitions.   Mason: (53:45) Remember, to transport you over to another ... You can transport yourself back over into connecting with those dreams you had when we’re 20, and just with this maturity you've got, and start making really intellectually aligned, good quality decisions. And you have a look, "What's my beliefs that I have? Cool. All right, I'm going to have to ... I might actually start working on that belief." And then you go at it like an ox, like a chop wood, carry water. You just plough ahead and plough ahead at it. So really important for you to do that. But yeah, if you get into the Qi herbs, the mushrooms, you might see that you'll physically may notice a little bit more vitality. Your digestion might get a little bit more honed. It's very correlated with immunity. So it's actually the time of year anyway you want to start ... You always want to be taking the mushrooms as far as I'm concerned. There's a black and white statement for you to [crosstalk 00:54:38] say, that's the exception.   Tahnee: (54:39) Yeah. There's an exception to every rule.   Mason: (54:40) Generally, but Qi, I mean at this point Qi kind of starts really making an appearance, and then I go ... And then I start going real hard as I get into March. And then all of autumn it's like the focus, because they had the spleen herbs and the lung herbs, and then they start really fortifying your surface protective Qi, your [inaudible 00:55:03] Chi, going into winter. And it's important, especially with everything that's going on in the world. There's always immunological stuff going on in the world. Everyone would be in such a better position if we took herbs appropriately, lived a little bit more appropriately for the seasons. But people want the easy way out. And so this is the way that is going to bear fruits, and allows ... Ultimately we want the consciousness, from a Daoist perspective, the consciousness of each of our organs to be flourishing and freely expressed. As we are in alignment with the yin and the yang, we're able to go down in the night, up in the morning, go down in winter, come up in summer. Right now we're going to be ... You prepare. You get grounded.   Mason: (55:46) Prepare, we're going to be leaving these warmer months. Really get grounded and sit into that and allow yourself to feel all that, everything there is to feel, still enjoy it. And then you'll be ready to mourn the loss of the warmer months when we get into the lung season. But yeah, just make sure you don't miss these opportunities. Or even just like start touching them a little bit, and start getting into flow a little bit.   Tahnee: (56:11) Yeah. I think that's a nice segue into ... we'll be back for metal soon. And we hope you all are thriving out there. And-   Mason: (56:22) Well this is a nice one because this is relevant for Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere, since it's the Earth season. It may not be to the full extent of late summer.   Tahnee: (56:31) Yeah. You guys are sliding the other way, but yeah.   Mason: (56:34) Yeah. You're sliding the other way, and it's good to get practise in embracing this energy and feeling that these intentions come forth in the kitchen, or in your practise, in your meditation, when we go between the seasons, and especially when we go between summer and autumn. Any other little thing? No, I think I was just going to talk about saliva being the substance.   Tahnee: (56:57) I have so many other things. But I think, I mean, we have a daycare run to get to.   Mason: (57:03) Yeah, I do.   Tahnee: (57:04) Real life.   Mason: (57:06) Just embrace your saliva during these times, guys. That's the substance of the spleen. I was thinking about [Tani's 00:57:15] teacher, [inaudible 00:57:16] practise in the morning. Chew, chew, chew, chew for a few minutes, and collect all that saliva and then swallow it down and send a little hello to the spleen, with its own essence.   Tahnee: (57:27) Well, and I was thinking if any of you with students out there, it's a really disruptive time to the spleen. So any study, any constant reading, any intellectual work over the top, so too much of it. So it doesn't have to be any, but just like anything that's in excess, then you will feel out of balance. So just remember that's a good time of life to work with the chi herbs and to get supported with the kind of spleen aspect of your life. So try and stay grounded and steady in other ways. And if you are really out of whack because of what's going on around the world, again, probably a time to really work on your stability and your groundedness and your connection to the Earth, and remembering that you've got that ability to just sit and feel and connect. And don't let your mind get away with you. Practise whatever you need to practise to stay sane at this point. But yeah, just these are all pretty spleen disturbing times that we're in. So yeah, lo

Master Chia, a true Grand Master of Tao, shares his knowledge about the essential things in life: extended orgasms and sublime sex, health through balancing the energy in the organs and ultimately: love, joy happiness, as he expresses the goal of his work. Discover how our body is able to produce mind altering substances, such as DMT, and how we can balance its effect by developing the balance of a Yin and Yang body. You can listen with subtitles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW1ueiJBQAs&feature=youtu.be or read the spoken text: https://powerofrhythm.com/mantak-chia/

Mantak Chia is a Taoist meditation master who has taught millions of students worldwide for over 45 years. He's authored 57 books and founded the Universal Healing Tao Center in Thailand. Master Chia has also studied Western anatomy and medicine. In this episode, we discuss the ancient tradition of mind training called Taoism and its methods, like meditation and dark rooms. Master Chia explains how to stop wasting mental and sexual energy and start cultivating more of it for a happier and healthier life. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.co

Mason and Tahnee (the dream team) join forces on the podcast today, to introduce us to Shen, the Third Treasure of the Daoist system. Mason and Tahnee reveal our new SuperFeast baby - the SHEN blend, journeying through the herbs present in the formula and the actions and virtues they afford us when we work in harmony with them. We're beyond thrilled to finally have our beloved SHEN blend launching ready for our SuperFeast community to explore, completing our propriety Treasure series, sharing the stage with our darling JING and QI blends. If you're new to the Three Treasures and want to learn more, check out our JING podcast here and QI podcast here. Mason has also written a brilliant article on the Three Treasure so you can read it here. Enjoy!  "Shen.. It's just you, without the bullshit"  - Mason & Tahnee   Mason and Tahnee discuss: The Three Treasures of the Daoist system. The treasure of Shen, what it is, how it is embodied. The East vs West approach to the mind, the Heart vs the brain. The importance of building strong foundations within the body in order to cultivate Shen. The healing profiles of the herbs in the new SuperFeast SHEN blend. When to use the SuperFeast SHEN blend and why. The difference between the Poria in our Masons Mushrooms and the Spirit Poria in our SHEN blend. Harvesting our Poria and why we source all our herbs Di Dao. The beautifying effects of the SHEN blend.   Who Are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? Mason Taylor: Mason’s energy and intent for a long and happy life is infectious. A health educator at heart, he continues to pioneer the way for potent health and a robust personal practice. An avid sharer, connector, inspirer and philosophiser, Mason wakes up with a smile on his face, knowing that tonic herbs are changing lives. Mason is also the SuperFeast founder, daddy to Aiya and partner to Tahnee (General Manager at SuperFeast). Tahnee McCrossin: Tahnee is a self proclaimed nerd, with a love of the human body, it’s language and its stories. A cup of tonic tea and a human interaction with Tahnee is a gift! A beautiful Yin Yoga teacher and Chi Ne Tsang practitioner, Tahnee loves going head first into the realms of tradition, yogic philosophy, the organ systems, herbalism and hard-hitting research. Tahnee is the General Manager at SuperFeast, mumma to reishi-baby Aiya and partner to Mason (founder of SuperFeast).   Resources: The Video Of Mason Harvesting Poria In China   SuperFeast SHEN Blend Product Page Superfeast SHEN Blend Blog  Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:01) Hey, everybody. Here with Tahns.   Tahnee: (00:02) Hi.   Mason: (00:03) So we're going to be talking about Shen today, Third Treasure.   Tahnee: (00:06) Mm-hmm (affirmative). Exciting time.   Mason: (00:08) Yeah. It's finally about the combination of the Three Treasures of blends in the superfoods range, so it's been awhile.   Tahnee: (00:15) Jing, Qi, and Shen.   Mason: (00:18) Very good, Tahns.   Tahnee: (00:18) I've been spending too much time with Aiya.   Mason: (00:21) Yeah, Daoism for kiddies.   Tahnee: (00:29) All right, boys and girls. Yeah, I think it's exciting because we really like this Daoist idea of Jing, Qi, Shen. It's such a great way to kind of view the body and our experience as a human on this earthly plane. The Jing holding our DNA and our kind of, I guess, connection to our ancestry and the strength of our constitution, our bones and our body and the Qi being the animation of that, the metabolism and the fire of our life and then Shen being that which is eliminated by those forces being in harmony, right?   Mason: (01:07) Yeah, exactly. I mean there's so many different ways. It's such a colourful conversation. I've been thinking about Jing, Qi, and Shen a lot lately and how to make them as something that doesn't seem theoretical like you have to remember, but something-   Tahnee: (01:21) Lived?   Mason: (01:22) Yeah, exactly. It's why metaphors are so good. It's why I've been enjoying talking about thinking if you take the human body and it's just a bunch of bones and DNA and hips and marrow. And you just lay it there and it's not moving and it's got all this potential, but in order for it to have potential, you need to put the batteries in and the batteries need to have charge. Batteries being the Kidneys, the Jing is so if you just take that human body and all its potential, it can't do anything yet, it's just pure physical potential, and then you plug the Jing in by putting the batteries in and they're charged batteries. They're not batteries that are Jing deficient, smashing coffees and absolutely flogging yourself. Put the batteries into the Kidneys and then all of the sudden, you have the rising of Qi.   Tahnee: (02:08) The lights go on.   Mason: (02:09) Exactly, the lights go on. Qi moves. That body can get up and animate and move around. Then to really drop into Shen and live and for me to be feeling Shen. Because I used to use analogies about the candle, which I still enjoy. Talking about it like this in the human body, then from there, if you just have potential in the physical body, the Jing, amazing. You've got life.   Tahnee: (02:31) Lights are on but nobody's home, right?   Mason: (02:34) Exactly. You're animating and you're moving, but where's the personality and the soul and the lessons and the enjoyment and all that? That's Shen, and that's why it's important, it's an important distinction that the spirit, because that's one spirit, your spirit can emerge from your heart, come through. Therefore, you have your soul present and you can become wiser and more virtuous. These are all things that are your Shen, and it's an important distinction that Daoism, Classical Chinese medicine before it was modernised and colonised in the 50s, to turn it into what's known as Traditional Chinese Medicine currently.   Mason: (03:11) The Spirit was cut away and definitely in the Western medicine, there's no Spirit that's present. It's just all... Literally a scalpel's gone and cut away the spiritual elements of medicine, but Shen, you can't really talk about health long term from a Daoist perspective or yogic perspective, any of these that will kind of have ancient roots, without acknowledging that the spirit and the spirit of organs and one's own soul and spirit, it's pivotal to understanding how we can become healthy long term.   Tahnee: (03:45) Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's funny you talk about analogies because I've been studying a bit with Nevine Michaan from Katonah Yoga, and she talks about the body as a house. And if you've got the architecture and the structure, which is your Jing effectively. And then you've got the lights on and you start to move in, that's the Qi. And then, if you make it a home, you make it a place where you want to be where it has a comforting essence of pleasure and joy and warmth, then that's the Shen.   Mason: (04:17) You weren't there on our last retreat at Tanya's when I used that exact analogy. I said, "Look at this room. This is the Jing. See how there's nice things and people. Put flowers over here and some incense on. It keeps it moving, the doors are open. That's the Qi. There's life moving through it. But then, only over years can laughter settle in, and oils settle in to the kitchen, that have actually been lived in."   Tahnee: (04:44) Yeah. And that's what makes something beautiful. And that's what the Daoists say. When someone's Shen is harmonised in their body, then they're lit up from within. And they're attractive, and they're expressed. They're just full of purpose and intention and presence, but it's not seeking or striving. It's just like a nice home where you go in and you're just... It's nice to be in their presence.   Tahnee: (05:12) I think that's such a beautiful way to think about it.   Mason: (05:15) You can't fake Shen. You definitely can't. You might be able to on Instagram, but not in real life.   Tahnee: (05:21) Well, I think when we look at what Shen even does, if you have a Shen disturbance manifesting as a symptom of anxiety, well that's the opposite of a comforting, safe environment. You don't feel safe. You feel unsettled and unhinged and stressed and out of alignment. Well that's a Shen disturbance. And so yeah, absolutely. We want to support this in ourselves and in others. And when we see it, when we recognise it in ourselves and in others, it's a nice thing to cultivate and build.   Tahnee: (05:56) And that's what all these practises are about. Meditation and even the Qi Gong and the cultivation exercises are about stabilising the Shen so that energy, that soul lives in the body and is expressed through this life. And then, we move on to whatever, higher points of consciousness, whatever you want to do. After that, it's up to you, guys. We're here for the Shen.   Mason: (06:17) Yeah, I've been talking about the fact that it comes when Shen is in harmony and able to consistently express itself. Obviously guys, at the end of this, you'll see Shen isn't something to be developed overnight. It's certainly not something you get. Everyone's just got their Shen, and it's highly correlated. It is literally like emerging from the Heart organ system, so the Heart Fire. So the Heart is the emperor organ. And all the other organs are essentially serving the emperor.   Mason: (06:51) When the Heart Fire Qi is flowing harmoniously... That's the idea behind the Shen herbs and all these practises, to ensure that we've got enough Blood so that the Shen can travel through the Blood. The Blood's Shen's home-away-from-home.   Tahnee: (07:07) Envoy.   Mason: (07:08) Heavy envoy.   Tahnee: (07:09) Take it around.   Mason: (07:10) To take it around to ensure that we're enlivening and bringing light and soulfulness and consciousness to every little area of our body. Tahns is just getting some water because water is needed to build Blood. These herbs and practises are also ensuring that we've got Qi tonics to support the movement of blood; therefore, the movement of Shen through the body because life requires movement. If the waters get stagnant, Blood gets stagnant, then we're not able to bring in life to ensure that there is a harmonious flow of the surrounding organs, which is all of them, but especially the Liver. We really want a smooth Liver flow, the Liver being the mother.   Mason: (07:51) The Liver-Wood, being the mother to the Heart Fire to ensure that... The Liver is ensuring that we've got strong strength through the capillaries and ensuring that we've got that uprightness so that Blood can move through and get through as well as Qi can get through and move through the body, as well as creating that suppleness, especially through those Blood vessels which means that we can bring curvature to the way that the Blood is moving, and therefore, cool the Blood down.   Mason: (08:19) And so, if you don't have those things, if you're stagnant, which is something I'm prone to, as you know, Tahns, if you're stagnant through your Liver Qi and especially if you lack that Yin and that suppleness through your Liver, Liver-Wood, then you're going to get a downstream effect where there's going to be a lot of Heat through the Blood, therefore, a lot of potential excess Fire.   Tahnee: (08:43) Yeah, when you think about friction, right? If you're rigid, so this is a thing. The Blood moves in spirals or vortexes. When you go and check out Gil Hedley's work, he talks about the heart not being a pump but being a valley where the vortex water layer... It's just spring water does in nature.   Mason: (09:00) Creating more of an implosion suction.   Tahnee: (09:03) Yeah. Exactly. More like your circulatory organ than a pumping organ. And if you think about rigidity, if you think about the vessels becoming really rigid and you think about a movement along that, rigidity creates this friction which creates Heat in the body. And so, that's not idea. That's going to burn up your Fluids. It's going to create all sorts of implications down the track.   Tahnee: (09:26) And yeah, the Hun as well. There's a spirit in the Liver called the Hun which can invade the Heart, can invade the Shen and cause mental disturbances and the psychological aspects of that. So when we're looking at a Shen, harmonised Shen in a human is like a person who's healthy mentally and not got a lot of psychological disturbances. But when we do have these imbalances, we can end up with the Liver invading the Heart. We can end up with all sorts of troubles.   Mason: (09:58) So the Hun is the part of our... It's more of our infinite Spirit guys, that travels after this lifetime, the Spirit that goes on.   Tahnee: (10:07) Yeah. Well I always think of the Shen as my universal consciousness, the part of me that came down to be, to animate the form. My Shen is that. My Hun is my astral self, so the part of me that can travel the realms. And it's one thing to take it to a really advanced, philosophical level. But the way it works in the body is why we're here. We want a clear path for consciousness, a clear channel for consciousness to come through. And it shines out of us. That's the idea.   Tahnee: (10:44) And then, this Hun is meant to keep connecting us to this astral self that can live beyond the physical realms, I suppose. So it's the creative. It's the vision. It's the future seeing. It's time doesn't exist because I live in all time.   Mason: (11:03) Yeah. Part of our intention here is to bring our higher consciousness, our Shen, and bring it through and crack it through into this reality that we're at now. What I was talking about, all the things that these practises and Shen herbs do in bringing a smooth flow of that hot Fire Qi, ensuring that we've got a smooth flow of the Liver cooling the Blood, so and so forth, stabilising the Heart.   Mason: (11:26) What happens then, the Heart as the emperor that all the other organs serve, that is when you get a smooth flow of Qi through that organ system, that's when the spirit of that organ system may express itself. So it's the same when we have a smooth flow of Qi through the Liver, then the Hun may express itself.   Mason: (11:47) If you have disturbance, if you have Heart Fire disturbance, what happens is it's like frustration that's going to get expressed from the Liver, but I just use that term. It's frustrating for the Qi. And then Shen's going to... The spirit of that organ system is not going to be able to express clearly. And therefore, we're going to see that expressed in anxiousness, mental disturbance, depression, insomnia. And then, going down the line, psychosis, so and so forth.   Mason: (12:23) As you know, you can see the Shen is the window... The eyes are the window to the Shen or to higher consciousness or to the soul, as we say. This is what our Daoist herbs are doing. This when you need to be working with someone clinically if you have this level of psychosis or mental disturbance. But you can see as someone moves down that line of having extreme anxiety, extreme depression, mental disturbance, and psychosis, you see the eyes starting to glaze over or to grey or to dull, and that's where Daoist would immediately go, right there's a direct Shen disturbance.   Mason: (13:06) And then, you'd need appropriate diagnosis at those points.   Tahnee: (13:10) Well that's when you lose your grip with reality. Right? And that's the Hun because the Liver's also the outward expression of... I would say they eyes are the outward expression of the Liver. I don't understand the psychology of TCM as well as I would like to, but from what I understand, the Hun... Because the Liver does invade and overtake the Shen, we sort of lose touch with reality. Because that sort of sense of schizophrenia and a lot of those... Because Chinese medicine doesn't talk about symptoms or diseases like we do in the West. It talks about patterns that would be Liver Heat or Liver invading Spleen or whatever.   Tahnee: (13:57) But what I understand is something like a schizophrenic episode would be literally a case of the Hun becoming more dominant. Or when you have poor Blood to anchor the Hun, you don't sleep well, and you have wild dreams where your Hun will wake you up, Liver will wake you up in the middle of the night at 1:00. That's a really common thing we hear here in customer service a lot of the time.   Tahnee: (14:20) It's like, "I wake up every night between 1:00 and 3:00."   Tahnee: (14:23) And it's like, "Oh well, that's a sign that you probably don't have enough Blood to anchor the Hun, so you're not getting a really good sleep. So when it starts to move, that Liver time, it wakes you up because it's such a burst of Yang energy through the body."   Tahnee: (14:38) So the psychological stuff's super interesting and definitely something I'm still learning a lot about. But just understanding these kind of energies that animate us and create our experience is really interesting. So we would not look at... Even when we go to talk about the herbs and what they do from a Daoist expertise, if you nourish the Fire, if you nourish the essence of the Heart, if you work with that energy, if your intention and your presence and your practise is about that, it's going to feed it.   Tahnee: (15:11) I know Tony Robbins hijacked it, but intention, Qi, Blood, those things all follow one another. I think it's where your energy intentionally goes, your energy follows.   Mason: (15:21) Where the mind goes, energy flows.   Tahnee: (15:25) Yes. That ability to focus your intention, your energy, your mind. And then, let your energy follow that. And then, your Blood will follow that because Blood follows Qi. That's how you do a Qi Gong practise. That's how you do even when you practise the medicine. You have to be so focused on so present because you're conducting the flow of Qi and the flow of Blood. You're giving Shen to that practise, whether it's your Qi Gong practise or your healing practise or your herbal practise.   Tahnee: (15:52) So intention is such an important part of what we do of Shen because it's bringing Shen into your life.   Mason: (15:59) And guys, when we're looking at Shen, the mind is put in there in terms of the definition, within the definition. And it's kind of like the mind is definitely a tool used in the personality. It's something that's used in order to express our personality, process what's going on in life so that we can gain more and more wisdom, when Tahns talking about being there and being a practitioner bringing Shen to the table.   Mason: (16:26) In order to offer a healing space for someone, people around you, be a good person, be less of an asshole, I think we'd all agree that continuing to cultivate our virtuous nature, which isn't an easy thing to do but it is considered a dividend of developing your Shen, that you cultivate those that are associated with strong Shen. Forgiveness, compassion, love, like deep love, deep gratitude, and the capacity to really have that virtuous nature be a part of yourself.   Mason: (17:07) And so, the mind and Shen have an interesting relationship. Because if you are extremely Shen deficient, and if you're shying away from that part of yourself which is more than just the physical, then you see the mind take over the show more and more. And therefore, you move into this place of the way that you get virtuous, you have less... You put a glass ceiling on yourself, I find, in terms of your capacity to really tap into your higher self. And over years and decades of work, have that higher consciousness emerge through your organ systems and be embodied so that forgiveness and that love and that gratitude is something that's just... You don't have to think about it. It's just there, and it's just dripping from you. And that's when you see that in 90 year-olds and 100 year-olds.   Mason: (18:02) They just come to work, and they're just legends. And they're just beautiful white lights to be around. And you see when you don't do that work or don't allow that more mystical aspect of yourself that the mind can't grasp, whether you really want to go into Daoist thought or be religious or spiritual or whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Just let go, just that little bit. Then the mind needs to go into morality.   Mason: (18:23) And so, you do the right thing and be forgiving. Whereas, Shen is where you start to dissolve any sense of right and wrong. And when you can move into that place and get to that, when you can get away from wrong and right, you really do have an opportunity to discover that part of yourself which is virtuous that's outside of the morality and the right and wrong of what you're current clique is telling you, how you should be and how you should be a good person.   Tahnee: (18:53) That reminds me of Rumi, "Out beyond the idea of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field, and I will meet you there." It's just like my teacher says the more spiritually aware you become, the less you'll subscribe to cancel culture and woke movements and all of this stuff because we start to see that everything, depending on your perspective, exists in shades of grey. There's no... I could say I'm right, but I could just as easily say you're right, really if I start to think about it.   Tahnee: (19:27) I think one thing I wanted to quickly make the distinction on too is the mind as in the brain, and the mind as in the Heart. Because in Daoist thought, the Heart is the mind, but it's not how we think about mind. So we think about the cognitive machine that whirls around in our heads which is more associated with the Kidneys. In Chinese medicine, it's called the Sea of Marrow. So it's literally an extension-   Mason: (19:54) The brain.   Tahnee: (19:55) Yes, so the brain is literally an extension of the marrow in your bones. It's kind of this blood-filled goopy thing floating around in your skull. And if you think about your skull as being a bone, it could really be the marrow because it's literally encased in bone on most sides. But yeah, the Heart is more the perceiving mind that is beyond that logical idea of things being rational. Because if you've ever had even a kind of heart-based experience, it's not a rational experience. It's sublime, and it's feeling-based. And it's intuitive, and it's everything that the mind is not.   Tahnee: (20:37) So there's this... I guess the best analogy I have is from yoga, but it's this idea that yeah, we have the functions of the mind which are useful and essential. We can't get through life without them, and great, but we don't want to live there and limit ourselves to that. We want to remember that there's this bigger self that is perceiving all of this and living all of this as well, and that can hold all of this even though the little mind might not think it can.   Tahnee: (21:05) And that to me, is sort of what Shen and the Heart hold in our... No matter how much weird shit goes on around us or what traumas we experience, there's this part of us that's bigger than all of that that can hold it. Like I said, the language I have for this is more out of yoga than out of Daoism, but I've seen this stuff in the Daoist texts as well. From working with Mantak Chia, I know that he also speaks about these things too. That's kind of the big, capital S, self. So that's what the Heart really projects, I suppose, and holds for us in this lifetime.   Tahnee: (21:40) So it takes us out of this small s, selfish self that has greed and wants to be pissed off at someone and wants to be right, and wants to be at war with the world in some ways. The best example of that I think of is a meta-meditation, like a Buddhist where you make all beings be happy. And then, make people that hate be happy, people that are evil be happy.   Tahnee: (22:04) It's this kind of practise where you practise being grateful and being compassionate to people you would normally not like to yourself, which is a massive thing for a lot of people. "can I truly be loved and be happy?" So I just wanted to distinguish between the mind and the brain which we would naturally link to as Westerners, having been raised in our culture and the mind to be the Heart, which from an Eastern perspective, is a little bit more out there and broad and big.   Mason: (22:34) Yeah. Well the taking of Shen herbs, I'm glad you brought that up. And just to keep it really simple, it is associated with the Shen herbs if you are feeling what we call that monkey mind, you'll find that through developing Shen and through taking Shen herbs and focusing on bringing your virtuous nature through. I find it to become evident, we all have this experience. But especially we can think about having a chip on our shoulder.   Mason: (23:05) In business, it's the best dojo, having resent towards competitors or someone that's wronged me. I'm not saying it takes... Forgiveness isn't something that just is done. The capacity needs to be developed. And over the years, I've experienced that nature of, "Do I really want to live with this resentment of someone because they're ripping this off, or they're not doing it the way that I think they should be doing it?"   Mason: (23:36) And it's the classic, spiritual one-on-one lesson that you're the one that needs to live with it. I don't need to live with it. But in order to calm yourself enough, just quiet that monkey mind. And as well, go through and do that deep work over decades and decades so that the monkey mind can be quiet to begin with. You see the pay off. You can see why the Daoists are like, "Yeah look, of course we need a strong body. We start with Jing, and we start with a strong body so that the Qi can move, and we want to cultivate lots of Qi and life."   Mason: (24:10) But what's the point if you don't develop your Shen and your virtuous nature? The reason we do that, the reason we want to be athletic and athletically apt is because you see a lot of people say, for example, a lot of people whose parent here. You'll see they'll get to 60, say 65 or 70, and there is just no way they've got the Jing and the Qi to get in there and do some deep psychological work and create forgiveness or get off the right or wrong. So just say politically, be able to get to the point where they can open up and take more of a broad view of life for their capacity to be happy, not have a monkey mind, not have resentfulness.   Mason: (24:54) And therefore, it kind of goes a little bit further with the dysfunction, if you don't develop your Shen. All of the sudden, you're stuck with your dysfunctions. You haven't developed a virtuous nature, and therefore, you become one that projects onto children, other family members, society, "This is what's wrong. This is why I'm right." Or you become extremely timid and don't have the capacity to stand for yourself and express your spirit. And it's an absolute, to be really blunt.   Mason: (25:24) I don't think it's right or wrong that people end up that way. But when you look at an objective level, if you have people who don't go into maturation, which is what Shen is, a lot of wisdom, then you become a burden. Right? And you become someone that projects, and it's not my job to be like, "That person's making me a victim."   Mason: (25:47) That's not what I'm saying. But if I'm saying from myself, if I got to the point where I'm 70 and I've got my anger issues that I haven't really worked on, "I don't like being judged," I know how much of a problem I'm going to be and a drain I'm going to be for Aiya. And that's really a harrowing feeling, and the Daoist and all these wise cultures saw that's the point. I don't care how big your muscles are, how much Qi you've got in your Spleen, if you can't really embody compassion, then what was it for?   Tahnee: (26:22) That's interesting because this phase of life... I think I'm right on this. I think earlier, when you're a little kid, you're in the Wood phase. And we're in the Fire phase now which is really about the soul learning through living and learning through trial and error and making mistakes. And it is kind of like a student-ship of the soul, ideally. And it's interesting given our culture how little people invest in their own spiritual development, I guess. I'm sure the people in these podcasts are slightly different, but in general, it's just not really a priority for people until they get a lot older. And like you said, the baggage is so heavy by then, yoga talks about every experience we have creating an impression. And if you dig the same line 100 times in the sand, it becomes a very deep line, and it's very hard to get rid of.   Tahnee: (27:12) And I think that's these kind of... You see people as they age becoming really stuck on certain ideas or certain things just loop and loop. It's because early on, when they had the opportunity, I think, to become conscious of that and to start to shift their perspective and their behaviour and their patterns, they've chosen not to do that. And the Bhagavad Gita talks about you want to put the reins on the horse and teach the horse. And then, learn to control the horse so it pulls the chariot in the right direction, not too fast, not too slow. And that's what I think this Shen stage of life is about.   Tahnee: (27:48) And then, we hit the declining... Oh sorry. I think we're always ascending. We hit the declining years, and then we hit the deep wisdom years in the 70's. And all of the things have to happen for us to end up there. And I think that's where-   Mason: (28:03) A lot of opportunity's lost.   Tahnee: (28:04) Yeah. If you've just hustled and made sure there's money and done your thing and whatever, you've not spent a lot of time on yourself and worked through your own stuff that you've brought through, which we all have. That's part of living. Then, you're going to end up in a bit of a shit fight later on, I think. And I think that's a lot of the people I talk to with menopause and when I spoke to Jane Hardwicke Collins about this. We talked about how women have that transition period in their late 40's, early 50's where suddenly their life catches up with them. And they realise all the places where they've bent over and not given to themselves first, and where they've been taken for granted or prioritised the things that weren't in service to them.   Tahnee: (28:53) That's the teaching of that time, and it's an invitation. The Blood has stopped. The Blood remains in the body, and that's when the Shen really rises in a woman if she's willing to meet it. But it means looking at all the things that are uncomfortable and all the things... Shen isn't all just sunshine and rainbows unfortunately. Sometimes for it to shine through, like you're saying, we have to do a bit of work. Peel away some of the layers.   Tahnee: (29:15) And that's why meditation is correlated with Shen building. It's being able to sit there. And again, I don't know the Daoist language for this, but in yoga, you've got the higher mind and the lower mind. And the lower mind is always there. It's not like you're calling it, the monkey mind. It's just monkeys are monkeys. No point trying to stop a monkey, but you don't want to live from that place. You want to live like you're watching the monkey and going, "What a funny monkey," and giving it a banana and being kind to it, but knowing that monkeys will do what monkeys will do.   Tahnee: (29:48) And living in this higher place that takes a bit of practise because A, it's not common in our culture. It's not really celebrated to not be easily reactive, and people love drama. How much do people love drama? Netflix is just drama to the enth degree, and it's fun.   Mason: (30:07) Drama's fun.   Tahnee: (30:07) It is fun. But it also catches us, and it spirals us through these emotional things. And it really can be damaging to our health.   Mason: (30:15) Well it's distracting. I think the biggest thing, if you start looking at the fact that you've got... You're saying we're in our 30's. We've got a good 10 years to dive in there and maybe do some therapy or do some... For me, it's do some integrating from a crazy amount of plant medicine I did in my late 20's and actually allow that to maturate into something. Consistently catch myself, consistently make decisions about where I dramatise. And just get in there and get really gritty. And you only have a certain amount of time.   Mason: (30:48) I'm not saying we're not allowed to do anything that's completely entertaining or total drama-dom.   Tahnee: (30:53) Well it's supposed to burn.   Mason: (30:54) Yeah, exactly.   Tahnee: (30:55) It's meant to be fun as well.   Mason: (30:55) Exactly. Oh, god to be meant to be fun. But in terms of just how distracted we let ourselves go, without going into morality, it's right or it's wrong kind of thing. But at some point, you go, "Shit, I better get on the horse here and develop myself a little bit."   Mason: (31:14) So the nature of meditation, the nature of why the Daoists saw Shen herbs... These are the herbs that tonify the organs associated with Shen, mainly the Heart, Heart Fire. But also, we're seeing the correlation between Shen tonics, Liver-Wood tonics. And then, you see some supporting herbs in there that are doing some work on the Spleen and Lung, and then, the Kidneys of course. Because you were talking about the lower mind and the upper mind, being the Kidney associated with that monkey mind.   Mason: (31:52) You can't really correlate the way the mind is seen the West with the way the Daoists see it.   Tahnee: (31:56) Oh yeah, where the brain is the Kidney.   Mason: (31:58) Exactly. So if the brain is the Kidney, and then the Heart is our higher thinking and our Shen, that's why there's herbs like polygala root that are in the SHEN blend that are actually running along the psychic vessel, the penetrating vessel from the Kidney to the Heart in order to connect those two styles of thought and bring sexual energy and bring a virtuous way of relating to our sexual energy, and merging that with the heart. It's also called our Will Strengthener, and it brings pure will power to our way of being.   Mason: (32:31) So you'll see herbs like polygala being some of the most potent Shen tonics because it brings a calming effect, not because it's a carminative, not because it down regulates the nervous system, but because you come integrated in a way. That without, you're not going to be able to spiritually develop yourself because you've got this drive and this sexual hunger and this power to create. Yet, that's not merging necessarily as smoothly as it could with this loving, forgiving, jovial, non-judgmental, non right and wrong, non shame-based way of living.   Mason: (33:06) And so it's really just calming. So these Shen herbs, you can see quite often, you start taking a herb like reishi, many people have felt it, but especially if you take SHEN blend with herbs like polygala. You can immediately feel, due to all the various actions, a calming effect. And that's good, but we're not taking this so you can be calm today. The idea of the SHEN blend and Shen herbs is we're going to be taking them either sporadically or over time. Maybe it's week on, week off, however. I don't know how you're going to take it.   Mason: (33:41) But in conjunction with meditation, doing your work, doing your practise, showing up with self, going to therapy, just being real. Taking that trajectory towards being someone who is, in their older age, able to have a laugh and a sense of humour. When life hits them, have water go off a duck's back. What happens if you lose a million dollars? Are you going to be able to let that go?   Tahnee: (34:06) Well that's the thing with the Heart because it's so much about... So the Heart has four... Normally in Chinese medicine, all the organ systems are in pairs. But the Heart is two pairs, four in total. And it's administrative role of the Triple Burner, the San Jiao, which is about regulating temperature and fluids across the three Dan Tien. So around your Heart-Lungs, around your digestive function, around your reproductive function. So that's one aspect of it.   Tahnee: (34:35) Then you've got the Small Intestine, which is about the ability to be discerning. So that's a really important function of the Heart, not judge but to just discern, to know the difference between what's true and what isn't true, it's own perception, which is assimilative and eliminative, getting rid of, a function of the Small Intestine. And then you've got this pericardium which is this protection around the Heart because the heart gets damaged by our interactions with humans.   Tahnee: (35:06) If we get heartbroken or even if we're just treated poorly in any way, every little cut starts to go deeper and deeper. And so, that's so much of the Fire years. Like I said, the human is also learning to relate and learning to forgive and not be hurt by our interactions with each other and to find the people or the types of people that are going to be the most suited to us, and this idea of remaining open-hearted throughout our lives.   Tahnee: (35:40) And that's something you see again in older people that have been hurt. They close off from love. They close off from receiving any goodness from anyone because they've been hurt once, or twice, or three times. So that's one of the offerings of working with the Heart energy and Fire energy, to stay in the space of open-hearted-ness and to remember that the Heart is protected. It has this whole meridian designed just to protect it from overheating, from being hurt, from being damaged.   Tahnee: (36:09) And when we do get broken-hearted, to honour that, and to let ourselves time to heal instead of rushing on. So I think that sometimes the Shen can get hidden when we've become so damaged that we won't let ourselves be seen.   Mason: (36:25) So heart-broken.   Tahnee: (36:26) Yeah. It's a classic thing, but this is just our relating and our ability. If you think about a saint, they're able to sit with anyone and not judge. The leper comes to Jesus, and he's like, "I love you. I love you like my child." The rich billionaire, fat person, the whatever, everyone comes, and they don't care. They sit there, and they love them. And there's no judgement , and there's no story.   Tahnee: (36:54) They accept things for what they are, and that's something that is an offering, I guess, of this Heart energy. So yeah, that's what I thought would be a useful thing to remember. As well, it's our relating and our inter-relating, and our joy in being social and being with others and being a part of a tribe. And again, it's what these years are about. Finding our tribe, finding the people that we want to be with, finding our place in the world, finding the people we want to share our lives with.   Mason: (37:27) And remember that there's no definition. We're not looking at important... I can feel Tahns is really honing in and giving you an example of what the pure energy of Shen is terms of a saint. That is within us, but integrated with all the other parts of our body. That's there and can be purely expressed while you're a smart ass, while you're just enjoying what's... You don't have to walk around being-   Tahnee: (37:51) Yeah. Whatever your personality is.   Mason: (37:52) Exactly.   Tahnee: (37:53) And most saints are very funny, give them half a chance. That's Buddha, you have a sense of humour. I think people forget that the cosmic joke is very funny.   Mason: (38:07) One of the virtuous things when you're high in Shen is extreme political incorrectness.   Tahnee: (38:13) I've never met a Daoist that wasn't funny, ever. They've all been f-ing hilarious.   Mason: (38:18) Uh-huh (affirmative). So Shen herbs, the way they're going to generally work is to bring a stability to the way that Fire rages. Remember, Tanz was talking about being comfortable within your body. It's like the fire in the hearth, the fire in our home, that is the Heart. And if it's raging too high or if it's erratic, it's going hot and cold. And when you think about it, you're sitting next to that fire. The flames are licking out. You're not going to be able to sit next to it.   Mason: (38:49) Now, that's your Shen. Your Shen is you, your Spirit, sitting next to the fire in that home. And if it's raging, it's going to be start and a bit fiery itself. And it's not going to be able to sit there and be calm. You're not going to be able to have calm emotions. You're going to have erratic emotions. You're going to have an erratic mindset. You're going to be cracked out.   Mason: (39:07) If it's too cold, how are you going to really... You're really cold long enough, you are not going to allow joy in your life. You're not going to be able to express it. And that's what Shen is about as well. So a lot of these Shen herbs are about bringing a stability to that Fire. And that stability, a lot of the time, is coming directly through the Heart, maybe moving the water Qi from under the heart in the case of spirit poria.   Mason: (39:33) Pearl, a great stabiliser, especially because it's a real cold herb for the Liver Yin. Therefore, it's going to ensure that we don't have this excess Fire, Yang, within the Liver-Wood, which is going to create these brittle branches that are then going to excessively feed the Fire very fast. We have suppleness and cooling within the Liver-Wood so that we don't have as much Fire. And Wood being fed into the Fire; therefore, we're more stable.   Mason: (40:01) And then the other way that they work, they're basically nourishing of the Shen. So the reishi mushroom, the asparagus root, the albizia flower, these are Shen nourishers. And so, that's literally about cultivating that Fire and going and building in a way that's going to be burning appropriately for the season. And this is why our practises, our spiritual practises, our meditation, the way that we're interacting with nature and our emotions, it needs to be seasonal. Because you remember, everything is really coming down to us developing Shen.   Mason: (40:40) And different seasons, you need your Fire to be doing different things that requires you acting in very different ways. Remember, all organs and practises are essentially serving the emperor of the Heart eventually. So just being aware of that and remembering Shen, developing your own Shen. Getting to know you and your Shen, you're going to keep on hitting brick walls in terms of being the way you think you should be, the way you think is virtuous. And you might have to go and do some... You might have to have some real dark nights of the soul as you go along. And they get easier as you go along to really learn, "Well, that's just not going to happen. This is the nature of who I am and how I act. I'm going to have to go and deal with it and express myself in a way that isn't the Disney version or the picture-perfect way."   Mason: (41:23) And if you can do that on the other side of it, there's this ease where all the crap, more and more... It's never perfect, I'm being idealistic. But more and more, all the crap falls off you like water off a duck's back. And there's some things with us, and now it's a funny time to bring up relationships since I just put that post up on Instagram about us quitting SuperFeast and being an official power couple.   Mason: (41:49) But one thing I've just noticed, like most relationships, it's always the amount of Shen you can develop in a relationship... And it's chalk and cheese if you look four years ago to something you'd say, and I'd take it personally and bring it up in a hostile way. Verse now, if you bring it up, a lot of the time it can just be, like I said, water off a duck's back.   Mason: (42:15) And the same with you. I can feel adjustments to the way that you say things, and I feel less and less when you bring them up. I don't feel them as injustices. Not all the time, but I can bring things up a little, with a little bit less charge and a little bit more forgiveness. And I tried doing it the right way for a couple of years and being a better man, and it just wasn't working. I had to go in and be like, "Far out, what's actually going on here?"   Mason: (42:42) And sure enough, after a while, as everyone's experienced with relationships and at work and with their children, things start smoothing out a little bit more. And since we've all had the experience of seeing ourselves develop and potentially becoming less erratic or less timid or something like that, you just go, "Wow, I've got the opportunity to take this and run with it, make this the main driver of my life to make sure I end up as an 80 or 90 year-old that's super functional and fun to be around, or at least carries a little bit of wisdom, has the energy and the capacity to share my wisdom and be a joy to be around."   Mason: (43:20) That's why the Shen herbs... That's why reishi was depicted in Heaven by the Daoists. It's why the Shen herbs were considered... They were the most revered. And it's why they were the ones that would eventually be consumed the most. You can just get yourself and your lifestyle set where you're developing your Jing, and you're not leaking a battery. Easy. You've just got your sleep practises, cool. Eventually, you don't have to think about that quite as much.   Mason: (43:50) And the same as Qi. You've got your practises. You've got your Qi Gong. You're allowing your emotions to move smoothly. You're eating an appropriate amount, appropriate for the body. You've got deep breathing going on. You're spending time in the sun. You're charging. You're developing that Qi. Then, you're free to just go in and actually just consistently work on your Shen. It's always where it ends up. It seems boring in the beginning of the journey. But at some point, you're like, "God, this is where it's at."   Tahnee: (44:26) Boring to whom? I think it's such a pleasant outcome, I suppose. When you start to feel like you've integrated and settled and grounded, and obviously a continuing process. But I remember the first time I took reishi. I think I took it to... It wouldn't have been vipassan. It must have been a non-vipassana, but it was a 10-day retreat. I think it was a tantric retreat in Thailand. But just the grace of the herb with the practises, it was just so beautiful and really connecting to yourself in that way, I think there's something really beautiful about when you start to experience your Shen. It's definitely not boring. I think there's an ideological thing, perhaps it's a little bit virtuous sounding. And a bit like, "Oh."   Mason: (45:27) It sounds wanky.   Tahnee: (45:28) Yeah. I get that.   Mason: (45:29) Me too.   Tahnee: (45:29) I definitely thought that as well sometimes. But I think the lived experience of it is really beautiful. And when you're living in that place, even if it's for periods of time as it becomes more integrated, you tend to sort of move in and out of your own evolution. I'm sure many of you can relate to that. But yeah, there's this real beauty and grace in sitting and resting in that kind of awareness of the Heart. You look at all the traditions from the Christian traditions, I may argue that they all came from the same place, possibly the Vedas. But they're pointing to this union of fire and water, this Heart, Kidneys, the Daoist example of this.   Tahnee: (46:17) And yeah, when we've nourished ourselves on this level, which many of you have working with Jing herbs, and working with changing lifestyles and building more functional ways of being, and you start with herbs. Herbs in the SHEN blend or just Shen herbs in general, it's a very quick and powerful transition, I suppose, into that more conscious state, without sounding like a total douche.   Mason: (46:48) But you're easy to be around.   Tahnee: (46:49) Yeah.   Mason: (46:50) Way easier to be around. And the whole factor, we talk about personality. Because we're not talking about an idealistic way of being or a spiritual way of being.   Tahnee: (47:00) It's just you.   Mason: (47:01) It's just you. That's the whole point of it.   Tahnee: (47:03) Without the bullshit.   Mason: (47:04) Without the bullshit. We can't reiterate that enough. And I think everyone has to go through their experience of trying to develop themselves towards an ideological way of being. To think, "I'm going to be accepted by this little cult here if I act in this way." And that doesn't just count towards spiritual hand-on-heart stuff, which for some people, that's-   Tahnee: (47:25) Their truest expression.   Mason: (47:28) Exactly. But it's in all manner of ways. The guy who's working on Wall Street and thinks that he's gotta be a hustler and work that way his entire life. It's same deal. Its just like, "Pop your head out of ideology a little bit. Maybe you have to stop being so Jing deficient to begin with. Get your lifestyle where I can see you can have some Qi. And all of sudden, you've got the energy to actually get some Shen coming, developing, and cracking through."   Mason: (47:50) And that's what the Shen character is, the written character. It's the sun, moon, and stars with a rope coming up to them. The two hands pulling down to signify the connecting of the supernatural and that part of ourselves that's way beyond this.   Tahnee: (48:09) Yeah, highest consciousness.   Mason: (48:11) Bringing it down here and merging it with us. So you're going to like this blend, guys. It tastes bloody delicious.   Tahnee: (48:19) Which is lucky because Shen herbs are bitter usually.   Mason: (48:22) Yeah. And of course, we've got reishi in there as a big one. It's the queen of the mushies. So you can already see, it's going to be working on the nervous system, immune system, Kidneys, Liver health. It's going to be doing a bunch of other things. But in terms of calming the monkey mind, bringing some calmness to yourself, less erraticness in the emotions, giving you the capacity to express a bit more happiness and develop that Shen and everything else that we've talked about. Go deeper in meditation. For some of you, it's going to be really, really good for sleep.   Mason: (48:53) We've had a couple of people who have just been atrocious with their sleep. And Shen's been able to come in quite immediately and help them go super deep with continued usage. For others, it's not a sleep blend. For some people, when you get your Shen expressing, perhaps too quick sometimes, the dreams can become quite out there. Some people love it.   Tahnee: (49:20) Especially if you're Blood deficient, I think.   Mason: (49:22) Yeah.   Tahnee: (49:23) Yeah. It's good to check up with a practitioner if you're not sure.   Mason: (49:28) Don't try and treat any kind of psychosis or extreme insomnia or depression or anything with this SHEN blend. And we're not just saying that as a disclosure.   Tahnee: (49:41) Disclaimer, yeah.   Mason: (49:42) I said disclosure. No, that's like a UFO podcast is next. Talk to your practitioner. But the Shen herbs can be used in conjunction with other treatments you're doing. But just go slow with it. But reishi's in there, so of course, that's just opening the heart wide open. I'm very excited that a bunch of you... Another major herb in the blend is the albizia flower. It comes from the tree of happiness.   Mason: (50:05) This flower is an absolute shining light. You just smile. I smile when I look at it. It's just a great mood elevator. And then we've got asparagus root as the third major herb in there.   Tahnee: (50:22) She's a legend.   Mason: (50:23) Yeah, shatavari's a legend. And so, there's a lot going on, integrate hormone regulator, integrate Jing tonic in itself. But asparagus root was used by the Daoists in order to allow us to fly. And so, with our meditations and in life, the idea is in life, if something happens and shit's hitting the fan, you're going to be able to fly up, rise above the situation. Look down, get a more of a bird's eye view so that you're not just reacting to it down on this animalistic level, this reptilian level.   Mason: (50:52) And it's the same in your meditations. You bring this buoyancy so you can fly through yourself with greater ease and just get a couple of, "Ah yeah, all right. I can see how I'm doing that and doing that." Such a great herb. But that's the one sometimes people... I don't think you like that at night.   Tahnee: (51:09) I was laughing because it makes me fly at night, only if I take large doses. I remember taking three teaspoons one night, and I was up till about 4:00 in the morning.   Mason: (51:19) Jesus.   Tahnee: (51:19) Do not do that at home.   Mason: (51:21) Oh I'm sorry. I wasn't Jesus in exclamation. I was just like, "I'm pretty sure that's what Jesus did when he went to India and studied his spiritual practises." But whatever.   Mason: (51:29) And then, we've got some more support, a secondary, bringing in spirit poria. So spirit poria, medicinal mushroom, bringing in that secondary medicinal mushroom magic.   Tahnee: (51:41) Not to be confused with regular poria.   Mason: (51:41) No, it's a much more precious, I guess I'd say. Poria's one of my favourite herbs by far. Spirit poria is the sclerotium that makes up about sometimes 10, 20% of the actual... You break off the fruiting body-   Tahnee: (52:03) Which is regular poria.   Mason: (52:04) Which is regular poria growing off the pine. The mushroom was inoculated into the pine, then put under dirt. But right there, normally you can't get access to the mycelium, the body, the inside. But with spirit poria, that is just that 10% or maybe 20% where it's emerging from the pine. And it's in that transformation. It's in that process of transforming the pine.   Mason: (52:31) And you can also get to access to the body, which you can't get in the wild of any other herb. And so, it's got this otherworldly quality. So it's got all the Qi, Spleen tonifying-   Tahnee: (52:43) Functions.   Mason: (52:44) Water metabolism functions and immunological functions. But it's just got this additional bringing of transformational light into the Heart.   Tahnee: (52:54) So just a quick fun fact, because chaga is also a sclerotium. So that means they aren't true mushrooms in terms of the actual expressed fruiting body, which is what you would normally get. So just for people that are interested. Because I think a lot of the time, we say chaga mushroom, we say spirit poria mushroom. And we say that because it's easier than saying chaga sclerotium and explaining that to someone. But this is what makes these particular herbs really special, chaga and spirit poria because you can't really cultivate sclerotium.   Tahnee: (53:33) Chaga's never been able to be cultivated. Spirit poria isn't cultivated in a lab or anything like that like you can get with most medicinal mushrooms. They can grow them in an artificial environment. You can't do that with these guys. So these are cultivated in an outdoor setting, like how they would grow in nature. So just a fun fact.   Mason: (53:52) We'll put a video of me-   Tahnee: (53:55) Harvesting.   Mason: (53:57) Yeah. At the poria farm. And I explain what spirit poria is, and you can actually see me pointing out. So go to the show notes for that.   Tahnee: (54:04) And they grow in tropical parts.   Mason: (54:06) Yeah. Yunnan.Yunnan provence. There was a hotter region, they were growing in the middle.   Tahnee: (54:13) In the grass. In the middle, yeah.   Mason: (54:14) In that middle belt of China, but it poria was becoming more popular. And the local government or the provincial government, wasn't regulating the harvesting of pine. And so, 95% of the herbal world doesn't give a shit about that, and they continue to do that there. But those doing Di Dao, who were doing true Di Dao, part of Di Dao is sustainability or leaving it intact. And so, it moved to secondary preference. And we moved to a secondary preference, which is Yunnan Province. It's still Di Dao. It's still said, "You go get your herbs from Yunnan Province in this micro-climate in the ancient text."   Mason: (54:56) But it's just not our first-   Tahnee: (54:58) Preference.   Mason: (54:58) Preference. Which is as always, guys, with the sourcing. We're going to prioritise the environment.   Tahnee: (55:03) Longevity of it. Yep.   Mason: (55:05) And so, yeah. So the farmers who I was meeting, they moved their whole operations and their whole family. And they moved to Yunnan. And there, the government's like crazy regulatory. And that's why there's a cap on how big your farm can be because you can only go and harvest so much wild pine. And they send helicopters over. You've got to prove and show that you've used all your tags. And they go through, and basically if they find that you've taken any other additional pine, then you're going to get some serious fines.   Tahnee: (55:36) Fine-age. And I think too, when you think about what sclerotium is, it does have this part of the tree still in it. That's where a lot of these medicines come from. Because if you look at pine and you look at birch were chaga grows, they're both very potent trees in their own rights. Spiritually, the pine is the Daoists' favourite bloody tree. I talked to Master Chia about the pine. He loves a pine. But incredibly medicinal trees as well.   Tahnee: (56:07) And then, even oak, which is what lion's mane is grown on.   Mason: (56:10) And reishi.   Tahnee: (56:11) Yeah, really medicinal trees. So for us, having that tree energy is really important.   Mason: (56:19) Tree Qi.   Tahnee: (56:19) Yeah. So we don't work with grain growing or anything like that which is, again, another thing that's commonly done in cultivated environments. So you've just got to think about what the energetics are going to be of these herbs when you consume them. So again, another fun fact.   Mason: (56:38) Yeah. Then we start getting to the assistant herbs. Pearl, I've talked about. That is a micro-ground pearl.   Tahnee: (56:50) Yeah. So it's not an extract. Sometimes people get confused, but it's literally ground up pearls.   Mason: (56:51) It's ground up pearls, very ancient medicine, very mineral rich, energetically Cold. Just a beautiful Shen tonic, so calming to the mind, and one of the most beautifying. It's a really beautifying blend as well for the skin. Between the asparagus root, the pearl, and all the Blood building herbs that we've got in there, plus no scrunching with anger. No crow's feet. That's what happens when you're a bit more happy, but pearl, and yes-   Tahnee: (57:22) Just smile lines.   Mason: (57:22) As always. Yeah, just smile lines. And pearl, as always, sustainably harvested, because we've had a few people ask where they're farmed. In the wild.   Tahnee: (57:28) In fresh water.   Mason: (57:29) Yeah, fresh water. Polygala, I talked about. It's one of my favourite herbs, the will strengthener, connecting the Kidney sexual energy, the Waters, as Tahns was saying before. The ideal behind this life is taking the Water, mixing it with the Fire, creating alchemy. And polygala is one of those herbs that is taking the Water of the Kidneys and connecting it with the Fire of the Heart. And of course, the Kidneys are the regulators, kind of like the grandma of the Heart. Just clipping it, we need Water in order to keep that Fire under control and keep it grounded and rooted.   Mason: (58:06) So I'm very excited that you're all going to be taking polygala when you take this blend. Got rehmania in there as a Blood builder. Beautiful Shen tonic in itself, but especially grounding in bringing that Yin Jing Water energy and that building of Blood so that we can get the Shen moving around.   Tahnee: (58:22) Love rehmania.   Mason: (58:22) Rehmania's amazing. And then, some aged citrus peel. That's in there as a Spleen-Lung tonic as an augmentor of the Spleen, Stomach, and Lung to ensure smooth integration of the other herbs. It's a beautiful assistant herb. And then, the other assistant which goes in, which is a pretty typical one traditionally in Shen with other Shen herbs, is longan. It's a beautiful Blood and Qi tonic. Heart and Spleen energy, so longan is used in smaller amounts. It's considered in its own right, the longan fruit, as a Shen tonic just to be taken on its own.   Mason: (59:03) In terms of when you put it in there as an assistant to other Shen tonics, you see this amplification of the nourishing of the Heart. It's palpable. I've tried it without the longan, and then with. And it's super palpable.   Tahnee: (59:22) So that's probably why it tastes good because longans are delicious.   Mason: (59:26) Longans are delicious. That's the dragon eye energy coming through, guys. So it's also a Qi tonic. So it supports the Blood moving through the channels because you can't just build the Blood. You need the Qi tonics there moving it around.   Tahnee: (59:43) It's a really good women's herb too. And it is kind of like a lychee if you've never seen a longan before.   Mason: (59:43) A little lychee.   Tahnee: (59:43) Yeah, like a little, round, brown lychee. But they grow around this area and in the tropics.   Mason: (59:51) You find them at Harris Farm when they're in season.   Tahnee: (59:56) There you go. Harris Farm.   Mason: (59:58) Yeah, I know.   Tahnee: (59:59) First time they've been mentioned on the SuperFeast.   Mason: (01:00:00) Yeah. I know because every time... My mum was at her old place, Harris Farm was up the road.   Tahnee: (01:00:07) Yep. I've been there.   Mason: (01:00:10) Yeah. You've been there.   Tahnee: (01:00:11) They have some good organic stuff actually.   Mason: (01:00:13) Boronia Park.   Tahnee: (01:00:14) Shout out Boronia Park.   Mason: (01:00:15) Yeah, shot out Harris Farm, Boronia Park yeiiiiiwwww! Down in Sidney there. Mom's moved on up the road to Putney since then. But guys, any questions let us know, in terms of taking the Shen. I personally like it in the morning. It sets me up for a really calm, it's not calm as in a floppiness. When you have your Shen tonics coming through, there's a calmness. But I feel really my value, I feel principled in that sense, just to give you that little bit of a sense of how I feel. It's not just calm and just like, "Yes. Sweet, man. My thoughts are slow."   Mason: (01:00:56) No, no, no. My thoughts are kind of like... My mind is calm. My thoughts are able to come through real clearly. I feel crispy, and I feel my principles. I feel virtuous in hopefully a non-egoic way.   Tahnee: (01:01:10) You're tuned in, like the radio channel's clear, it's coming through. You've got that connection. I think that's the feeling of being dialled in to yourself, which I think is not a... The calm is from the steadiness of the mind instead of the doubting mind, the kind of the mind that is not completely satisfied is a very agitated state to be in. And so when we're calm, when we're just clear and we're getting the frequency right for ourselves, it's a really beautiful feeling.   Mason: (01:01:45) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Tahnee: (01:01:45) I think, and I agree. I personally like it in the morning, I've taken it at night while we're trialling it. I didn't have any issues with it, but I just feel like it's a really nice way to start the day.   Mason: (01:01:55) Yeah.   Tahnee: (01:01:57) Beautiful intention to set.   Mason: (01:01:59) And it's good. It's like smoothies. Adjusting hot water with a touch of milk and honey works that way. Goes in with any teas. You can do hot chocolates and coffees with it and smoothies with it. Same deal. If you're doing it at night... As I said, I've got to reiterate, for some people, they didn't love it in the morning. Some people were just like, "Nah, I didn't really need to be that... " They didn't need that Shen tonifying steadying.   Tahnee: (01:02:23) Stillness.   Mason: (01:02:23) But at night, was when they really benefited and really were able to go deep into a Yin state for them. So find, pick your time. Pick what's appropriate for you. Chamomile tea at night, beauty. You're laughing.   Mason: (01:02:37) Hit us up if you've got any questions.   Tahnee: (01:02:38) Yeah, really excited to hear your feedback your all, and experiences and all those things. So let us know. We love hearing from you guys, and-   Mason: (01:02:49) Shen on.   Tahnee: (01:02:49) Shen on. I also say [shu-yage 01:02:51], bon voyage.

On This episode of The Healing Springs Show, host John Edmonson interviews Mantak Chia Universal Healing Tao.

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave Asprey talked with Master Mantak Chia about sexual energy. Dave has tested out the Taoist teachings of male ejaculation versus orgasm and discovered that they work. During this interview, he gets answers to serious questions about why.Master Chia is the director of the Tao Garden Health Spa and the Universal Healing Tao training center in northern Thailand and a world-renowned expert on Sexual Tao. Master Chia has authored more than 60 books, including Taoist Foreplay, Sexual Reflexology: Activating the Taoist Points of Love, and the bestselling The Multi-Orgasmic Man. A student of several Taoist masters, Master Chia founded the Healing Tao System in North America more than 40 years ago and developed it worldwide as European Tao Yoga and Universal Healing Tao. He tours the globe giving workshops and lectures and has taught tens of thousands of students and instructors.Taoism considers sex to be a sacred act. “Sacred because sexual energy is the reunion of two major forces, love and sex,” says Master Chia. In this how-to episode, you’ll learn how to lengthen a penis and strengthen a vagina. You’ll also learn how to harness sexual energy to increase your creative power and even extend your lifespan.“If you can control ejaculation, you can control so many things,” Master Chia says. “Fewer ejaculations mean more energy for your body and brain. And sexual energy makes you smarter.”Master Chia and Dave also get further into Taoist practices like food, movement, breathing and mindfulness – and how they affect your life force. The ultimate key to all of this? “The primordial light, because light is everything,” says Master Chia. Listen on to find out more.Enjoy the show! And get more resources at https://blog.daveasprey.com/category/podcasts/

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave Asprey talked with Master Mantak Chia about sexual energy. Dave has tested out the Taoist teachings of male ejaculation versus orgasm and discovered that they work. During this interview, he gets answers to serious questions about why.Master Chia is the director of the Tao Garden Health Spa and the Universal Healing Tao training center in northern Thailand and a world-renowned expert on Sexual Tao. Master Chia has authored more than 60 books, including Taoist Foreplay, Sexual Reflexology: Activating the Taoist Points of Love, and the bestselling The Multi-Orgasmic Man. A student of several Taoist masters, Master Chia founded the Healing Tao System in North America more than 40 years ago and developed it worldwide as European Tao Yoga and Universal Healing Tao. He tours the globe giving workshops and lectures and has taught tens of thousands of students and instructors.Taoism considers sex to be a sacred act. “Sacred because sexual energy is the reunion of two major forces, love and sex,” says Master Chia. In this how-to episode, you’ll learn how to lengthen a penis and strengthen a vagina. You’ll also learn how to harness sexual energy to increase your creative power and even extend your lifespan.“If you can control ejaculation, you can control so many things,” Master Chia says. “Fewer ejaculations mean more energy for your body and brain. And sexual energy makes you smarter.”Master Chia and Dave also get further into Taoist practices like food, movement, breathing and mindfulness – and how they affect your life force. The ultimate key to all of this? “The primordial light, because light is everything,” says Master Chia. Listen on to find out more.Enjoy the show! And get more resources at https://blog.daveasprey.com/category/podcasts/

Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin; the King and Queen of SuperFeast, join forces on the pod today to bring us a beautiful conversation around the healing art of Chi Nei Tsang. Chi Nei Tsang is the ancient form of massage practiced in the Taoist healing system. Chi Nei Tsang is used to detoxify and energise the body's organ systems via the release of stagnant Qi. Chi Nei Tsang is performed primarily on the abdominal region however the technique is a full body practice. Tahnee shares her personal healing journey with the practice both as a student and Chi  Nei Tsang practitioner, outlining the methods you can use at home to encourage the smooth flow of Qi throughout the body as a whole.    Tahnee and Mason discuss: Tahnee's healing journey with Chi Nei Tsang. Chi Nei Tsang as a healing art. The core philosophy of Chi Nei Tsang. Integration and congruency as an integral part of personal evolution. Tonic herbs as vessels for change. Health sovereignty and home based health care. The energetic personality of the body's organs. The value of rest and listening to your body's wisdom.   Who are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? Mason Taylor: Mason’s energy and intent for a long and happy life is infectious. A health educator at heart, he continues to pioneer the way for potent health and a robust personal practice. An avid sharer, connector, inspirer and philosophiser, Mason wakes up with a smile on his face, knowing that tonic herbs are changing lives. Mason is also the SuperFeast founder, daddy to Aiya and partner to Tahnee (General Manager at SuperFeast). Tahnee McCrossin: Tahnee is a self proclaimed nerd, with a love of the human body, it’s language and its stories. A cup of tonic tea and a human interaction with Tahnee is a gift! A beautiful Yin Yoga teacher and Chi Ne Tsang practitioner, Tahnee loves going head first into the realms of tradition, yogic philosophy, the organ systems, herbalism and hard-hitting research. Tahnee is the General Manager at SuperFeast, mumma to reishi-baby Aiya and partner to Mason (founder of SuperFeast).   Resources: Nourishing Her Yin Event Video (The Chi Nei Tsang portion of the chat starts around the 38:45min mark) Mantak Chia Website Mantak Chia Self Massage Book Mantak Chia Chi Nei Tsang Book Dan Keown   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:   (00:01) Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. I'm sitting here with my lovely Tahnee.   Tahnee:   (00:07) Hi.   Mason:  (00:08) So Tahnee, as many of you know, is SuperFeast mumma, my baby mumma. And well, one thing we haven't been doing as much as we'd like because Tahnee is running SuperFeast and teaching yoga and getting ready for yoga teacher trainings and doing all kinds of things while we raise our little human, and our dog as well that we have now.   Mason:  (00:34) One of the things we haven't done as much is sit down and jam on the podcast, but we've really worked hard to be able to carve time for that as we focus more and more and more on the educational piece. Now, as you guys know, when it comes to SuperFeast, we're really rock and hard on these Daoist Tahnee herbs and in talking about them and educating and taking them in that frame of sovereign health and taking responsibility for our own health.   Mason:  (01:04) And that is why also we educate about many, many other things, not just herbs. And today, we're going to be kind of revolving around organ health and that companion to herbalism, which is massage and self-massage, and we're going to say where it goes. Tahnee studied Chi Nei Tsang Daoist abdominal massage. As we were just saying, it's designed to be a self administered healing art. Right?   Mason:  (01:35) Again, something we work with herbalism. Everyone knows our herbs. You need to go to a practitioner to get herbs. I can't possibly figure out what herbs to take, especially when you see really institutionalized Chinese medicine, it's very like this paranoia around herbs. You might as well not eat any food because every bit of food that you eat is going to have an energetic impact on your body. That's like extreme institutionalization.   Mason:  (01:58) But massage can be like that as well, just a subconscious, “Hey, I got to go and see a masseuse in order to get my healing.” But one thing we're going to dive in today with Tahns is how we can bring that into our own lives. So why don't you … I know roughly, but why did you choose to go and do Chi Nei Tsang massage out of everything you could have been doing?   Tahnee:   (02:23) You remember me having a crisis of faith before I went in to that?   Mason:  (02:26) Yeah.   Tahnee:   (02:28) I had an eating disorder growing up was why, and I kind of hated my tummy, not even just physically, but I just always felt like all of my health problems came from there. It was always bloating or gurgling or not digesting something or there was pain or there was just weird sensations. And I just felt like it was this kind of mysterious land in the middle of my body.   Tahnee:  (02:59) And so much of my practice, up until that point, had been on the anatomy of the muscles and the tendons and the bones. And yoga is very physical, but we don't talk a whole lot about the organs per se. It sort of gets mentioned. You've done yoga training as well. You know it's like, “Yeah, this is good for your organ health,” but doesn't … in terms of really the unique characteristics of the organs, their personalities, their functions.   Tahnee:  (03:27) I'd studied Chinese medicine a little bit at that point, so I kind of knew that there was some interesting stuff there, but I hadn't really gone deep into it. So I don't even remember how I heard about Chi Nei Tsang. I think it was on the internet somewhere and I just had this weird feeling like, “Oh my God, I have to study that.” And it made absolutely no sense. I'd never received one. I'd never seen it done.   Tahnee:  (03:51) It was literally like … I believe in writing maybe in a blog post or something. And it kind of coincided with me being about to travel and a few things kind of happened. I think I was traveling like the next year or something. Anyway, I looked up who invented this thing and where it came from and I found Master Mantak Chia, who was kind of teaching it in Thailand and that he'd revived this lineage, which got lost in China after Chairman Mao kicked out all the healers and philosophers and artists and intelligent folks.   Tahnee:  (04:24) That's a bit of a broad stroke, but a lot of people had to leave China around that time. And so in Thailand, one of the remaining masters of this art survived and my teacher met him. This man saved his uncle's life and so he was curious about studying it, so he basically apprenticed himself to this guy for a few years.   Mason:  (04:44) That guy was Mantak's uncle, you said? That was insane. It was like three days with the deepest kidney disease, was that right?   Tahnee:  (04:51) Yeah. So apparently in Thailand, if you get unwell, they don't want your death on their records because it reflects poorly on their funding and stuff. It's like the more people that die in the hospital, the worst funding they get, sort of thing, or they get investigated or something. So basically, the doctors apparently told this guy he had to go home and die because they couldn't do anything for him.   Tahnee:  (05:12) He had kidney disease and it was so far along that it was just done. And Master Chia's family had heard of this guy and they contacted him. He was in Bangkok. So they traveled to Bangkok and took the uncle there. And apparently, he had three days of excruciating treatment, which from what I understand, and hopefully if anyone knows better than me, they can let me know, but I'm pretty sure it was like 12 hour days of massage and this man was screaming in pain.   Tahnee:  (05:40) It was apparently incredibly painful, but the healer was able to free whatever was causing the problem probably on a multidimensional level. And yeah, he walked out of there three days later, fine and lived a long, happy life as far as I'm aware. So Master Chia was so impressed. And this is a guy that traveled back to Hong Kong as a teenager to start studying Daoist healing.   Tahnee:  (06:06) He had a master who … he used to work to preserve his life and he was very much au fait with the whole canon of healing tradition that came out of the Daoist philosophy and he was just so impressed with this. He was like, “I have to keep this alive.” So yes, he basically studied with this guy. I think he was an apprentice for a couple of years and then kind of his peer.   Tahnee:  (06:29) He worked alongside him for a while and then he basically systemized what is now Chi Nei Tsang. So there's a few places you can study it around the world. Thailand tends to have a bit of a hotspot of it. And then in The States as well, it's more common. It's not really well known in Australia and certainly when I first google at … I don't even know if I spelled it properly and I couldn't really work out.   Tahnee:  (06:51) There was nobody I could find to give me Chi Nei Tsang. Anyway, I ended up going traveling and in Guatemala, I received one from a woman at a little town off San Marcos, La Laguna. That's where I was. Lago de Atitlan was the lake and she gave me one and I remember going home and I felt like shit and I cried. I think I was very resistant to it. I was like, “Yuk.”   Mason:  (07:19) It's like when you discovered … whenever you find something that ultimately becomes a love … I don't think it with me, but you hide it. That was the same with doing, yin yoga, right? You absolutely hated it.   Tahnee:  (07:31) I think I have a really strong resistance to what's good for me probably. I think I'm really confronted sometimes by the depth of my own suffering like how shitty I can feel through my own self and Chi Nei Tsang really highlighted for me how much stuff was stored in my body that I was just ignoring. So I think there's this part of me, this maybe more intelligent part of me that knows it's good for me and then there's this other part of me that has a toddler tantrum about the situation.   Tahnee:  (08:02) So I had my toddler tantrum, decided I was never going to do that again. Then I ended up somewhere else in Thailand at the sanctuary, which is this like a resort. And there was a guy there doing Chi Nei Tsang as well, and it was a completely different experience with him. And I wouldn't really say I enjoyed that either, but it was more just … I didn't enjoy the therapeutic relationship.   Tahnee:  (08:24) I felt it just wasn't something that I enjoyed. It didn't really do anything for me compared to the first one, which obviously moved a lot of stuff. I found it to be quite kind of superficial and I was like, “Oh, okaymaybe I'm wrong about this whole thing.” So that, I was in traveling through Thailand on my way to this training. So I was kind of having a lot of doubts.   Tahnee:  (08:54) And then I obviously spoke to you, I think you were back in Australia and I was in Chiang Mai and I was going, “Oh my God, what am I doing? I'm about to spend $4,000 on this training with this guy I've never met, with this thing I'm not even sure I like.” And like I guess my gut, funnily enough, drew me to it and … yeah, I decided to go and I was very, very ill when I arrived. I'd very stupidly eaten some fruit off of the ground in Thailand.   Tahnee:  (09:24) And would you believe I got sick? And it was probably the worst gastro I've ever had ever or could even imagine, lying in a toilet … Oh sorry, lying in the shower with the shower, running just pooing because I couldn't get to the toilet. It was so bad. And that went on for three or four days. I was supposed to get there early and enjoy the grounds and do some practice and spend the whole time pooping.   Tahnee:  (09:47) And the cute little staff were bringing me soup and trying to look after me and I just couldn't handle life. And I met Mantak Chia the night before we were supposed to star and he said to me, “Tahnee, you need to go to the hospital.” I said, “No, Master Chia, I want to do your training.” And he was like, “Well, my advice would be you need to go to hospital. You're very sick.” And I said, “Yeah, I know, but I want to stay.”   Tahnee:  (10:05) And he said, “Okay, well. Then we'll take care of you.” And yeah, within three days, I felt amazing having like … I was being practiced on every day. It was a really great group. They all looked after me for the first week while I was healing and the second week, I just felt amazing. So yeah, it just was really proof in the pudding, I guess, of how effective it was. And just … yeah, it's such a beautiful thing.   Tahnee:  (10:29) I think so many of us are so vulnerable with our tummies and we don't like being touched there. And even within our love making, a lot of us are sensitive to having our tummies touched and played with and I think it's something now as we evolve as a culture, it's really useful to start to think about, “Well, what's going on there?” And that's what's so interesting about the Daoist perception. It's that it's not the brain that thinks and creates thought and emotion.   Tahnee:  (10:57) It's the organs. The Heart receives everything that comes through and then it filters it out to the different organs of the body. And so anything that's stressful, the Liver is going to deal with. So that can manifest into anger and irritability, but just any kind of a stress. Any fear is going to come through the Kidneys, any thought, analyzing, thinking and that can turn into anxiety and worry that comes through the Spleen.   Tahnee:  (11:23) The Heart receives joy, but too much joy, excess joy can injure the Heart. I think I've missed one. The Lungs. The Lungs kind of perceive our grief, but also that bittersweet beauty of life. So there's this really … working with those as archetypes, I think it's a really powerful way of starting to live because you're out of your head and you're down in your belly.   Tahnee:  (11:47) You're not just perceiving with … even like in spiritual traditions, it's like, “just feel with the heart,” and it's like, “well, no. That's not enough.” There's different seats of consciousness in the body and when we look at it through this lens, it really aligns a lot with yogic thought as well. And when we look at where the energy of the organs manifest from, it manifests from the chakra, from the multidimensional body, but that's kind of a more complicated story.   Tahnee:  (12:13) But we're looking at this really kind of … we're looking at the organism being a powerful receiver and transmitter of thought energy and emotion as well as an alchemizer of physical compounds. You can put something into the digestive system and it can be alchemized into Blood and bone and transport it out to the Liver and the Kidneys and moved around. We can breathe through the Lungs and that becomes this fuel that fires our entire body, our metabolism.   Tahnee:  (12:44) That's just, to me, some real mystical shit right there. Science can talk about these things, but it can't really explain them. And when you look at what Daoist practice is all about, it's about alchemy. It's about how do I take these kind of gross material things and transform them into something more? How do I be a physical body and at the same time be a spiritual being?   Tahnee:  (13:06) And how do I have enough strength and enough capacity in my energy that I can hold that spirit in me? And it'll not just be this idea or this concept, but actually an embodied experience. So, yeah. So Chi Nei Tsang opened up that a lot more for me, I think. I think yoga had started that process and I think I just … Obviously, having had an eating disorder and having had digestive stuff through my life, it made me realize you literally digest your entire life.   Tahnee:  (13:36) It's not just food, it's thoughts and feelings. And so I started to realize, yeah, I wasn't digesting my life fully. There was some work around that for sure. It wasn't an easy process, but worthwhile.   Mason:  (13:51) So the Chi Nei Tsang is speeding up the emotional or energetic processes around that?   Tahnee:  (13:57) You've heard it. Like you touch someone's organ and suddenly, they're in tears and it's like, “ well what happened?" You know? And it's like acupuncture, it's like herbalism. It's like therapy or any of these things. Part of it it's the practitioner's Qi, so the ability of the practitioner to facilitate and transmit energy so that the person's body can respond. And it's partly the person, it's the individual. And I think what I love about Chi Nei Tsang and Master Chia is it's all about self healing.   Tahnee:  (14:32) It's not about someone else doing that healing for you. So I don't heal anybody when they come on my table, but I can facilitate what maybe needs to move for them to release the blockage to healing. So yeah, I might touch someone and they might cry, and to me, that's a positive thing because their energy that was blocked is now moving and all that energy wants to do is move.   Tahnee:  (14:54) That's... Health is movement, is flow. Anytime we have a blockage to movement of Qi, of energy, we're in trouble. That's what all bad things in the body are, tumors, injuries, any kind of inflammation, anything like that, it creates a blockage to flow. So when we start to move that, then we get a chance to get fresh blood into that space, fresh energy into that space, nutrients that are required for healing.   Tahnee:  (15:23) So the touch part of it is therapeutic in that there's a transmission of Qi and a mechanical movement of tissue which creates space for healing. But then I think a lot of people just to be touched in a non-sexual way with intention is really powerful too. So I think there's that side of it. And then a lot of the techniques are based on Qi Gong, so we have to visualize color and sound and use different positions and hand positions.   Mason:  (15:51) Do you find yourself doing that?   Tahnee:  (15:53) Yeah. So the idea is that as a practitioner, you're the bridge between the heaven and earth. So you're releasing toxic Qi down to the earth because the earth … Like how a tree loves our carbon dioxide and we love its oxygen, the earth is really happy to receive what's negative for humans. It's like compost for it. It turns it back into positive good stuff. And the heavenly Qi is what we can use for healing.   Tahnee:  (16:20) It's like universal violet light Qi which comes down and again, you learn to feel and transmit these things. And I'm certainly not a master at this like Master Chia is a master at this, but as you get more sensitive to it, it becomes more perceptible definitely. And yeah, these things are all really powerful.   Tahnee:  (16:38) So as a practitioner, your job is to be open to that flow and to be able to channel it, and as the receiver, you're obviously starting to build your perception of these things. So one of the reasons a therapeutic relationship is useful at the beginning is many of us can't feel our energy. We don't know what Qi feels like. We don't know what our organs feel like. It's just tense and tight and painful.   Mason:  (16:58) Well, it's almost like we're scared to actually go in there and touch it. Like, “Am I allowed to do this? Can I just touch my liver like this? Is that bad? Is it going to explode?”   Tahnee:  (17:08) Yeah. Well, you've seen people at workshops that I do. They're like, “Aah.” And I'm like, “Just press into your tummy.” And they're like, “What?” And people freak out of it and I get that. Again, I was like that when I first started exploring this stuff.   Tahnee:  (17:22) And I think I still like … Massage may tell me sometimes, because my mom used to tell me to do it when I needed to poo and stuff, but I never really liked … I had an idea of where the organs were from studying anatomy, but I didn't … I would never have gone and, like you said, and tried to poke my own liver because like you say, it's like, “Well what happens if you do that? Is it a balloon that'll just pop or?”   Mason:  (17:45) Yeah, I think the extent of what everyone has, I think it comes up sometimes in yoga teacher trainings and anatomy trainings of just following the line of the colon. That's what it would be like. And even in geriatrics and that kind of thing, it says, “That's what I'll do. I'll just follow that line,” and that's probably the extent of it.   Tahnee:  (17:59) Yeah. I think for a lot of people, even to touch their colon is to not appreciate that this is an organ that is working against gravity for a solid portion of the transit of your feces. So it's going up the right side of your body underneath the liver. The liver is meant to deposit toxins down through its tissue into the large intestine to be transported out.   Tahnee:  (18:18) Often, a lot of people have congestion there, so the liver remains toxic and that goes back into the blood then that has to go across the body again. Not exactly the most mechanically simple process given that we all sit all day in a half rounded shape, and then it goes down the descending colon and to exit the body. So there's a lot of potential just in the colon for things to go wrong.   Tahnee:  (18:47) But then you've got the Liver, you've got the Stomach, Spleen kind of system. You've got the gallbladder's there, which can often get blocked in a lot of people. The bile gets very thick and sticky especially if people are in a really low fat diets and stuff. The fat actually triggers a release of bile. Anyone who's done a liver flush will know all about that.   Tahnee:  (19:06) And the kidneys, which are harder to massage, like I usually have to work with someone for at least … best case scenario, probably three or four sessions to get there because just for most people, they're too tense and they can't relax enough to let me go into there.   Mason:  (19:20) Yeah, I think you've got that one-   Tahnee:  (19:21) Abdominal cavity. Yeah.   Mason:  (19:22) … maybe once with me.   Tahnee:  (19:23) Yeah. I think once. But, yeah. And then obviously they can, especially if someone has a diet or has the sense of proclivity toward calcium build up and stuff, they can get quite painful if people have that. So I suspect that it was what happened to Mantak Chia's uncle. It was that they had to work on the kidneys to break up all the calcification in order that the kidneys could start to filter again.   Mason:  (19:50) Well, it's the same … It's same plaque build up. It's just one of those things that make us susceptible to gravity. And it's always that. When you were talking about that story again, that's actually what I was thinking. I was like … It makes sense that this guy's … Like what gets the turtles, the great turtles. They're hundreds of years old and it's just this bad calcium arthritic buildup that eventually just makes it, “Nope, can't swim anymore. I'm tightening up.”   Tahnee:  (20:13) Freeze.   Mason:  (20:13) It's what happens to organs naturally. It's like plaquey build up in the heart, plaquey build up in through the brain for stroke and so on and so forth. Arthritis has a lot to do with age, has a lot to do with the fact that we've got inflammation, blockages of Qi, low immunity, all these kinds of things. But then, it's always … It seems like this big leap in perception of self healing.   Mason:  (20:41) It's like to be like we've got our exercise and that moves our lymph … Yet we've got such a hectic world that it would … Superficial massage and superficial movement isn't a lot of the time.   Mason:  (20:55) It'll do a lot, but as soon as he started getting into really spending an hour or spending two hours, or even spending 20 minutes of yourself really getting on verse, just doing a rub in a clockwise direction on your belly, all of a sudden, it just opened up this whole layer of deeper intention, which I was just like, “Oh man, if we had this in hospitals, you would just completely and utterly avoid so much shit.” I mean, I think it's like one of the-   Tahnee:  (21:28) We're very scared of pain though and it hurts. This is a thing. I was actually talking to our acupuncturist about this the other day because he does the traditional Chinese massage, which is painful, right?   Mason:  (21:39) It can be.   Tahnee:  (21:42) And Master Chia teaches us to massage. We get in between each rib and we rub really hard and it's like to break up all that gristle and that fascia in there. It's painful. And I remember like cry laughing when I first had it done. I was like, “This is outrageous.”   Mason:  (21:57) Especially in the ribs because … I think a lot of guys relate. You said the cry laughing like that. You see all this … What you're seeing when you've really overly ticklish and skittish, you can see it's like a compensation that you have with your [crosstalk 00:22:12].   Tahnee:  (22:11) Yeah. Well, and Master Chia said they're people that avoid pain through laughter. So there'll be people that make a joke when they're feeling uncomfortable or so he said, “You can tell a lot about a person's personality when you're massaging that part of their body because there'll be people that avoid discomfort with humor.”   Mason:  (22:31) Yeah. That's me.   Tahnee:  (22:32) Yeah, me too, to some degree. And he said, “As they get more comfortable with …” And I think all of us … I certainly know over my … I think I've been practicing yoga now since I was 15. I'm 34 and that's a long time. And meditating not anywhere near that long, probably like 10 years at the most, maybe eight. I feel like my personality has changed a lot.   Tahnee:  (22:58) Not that I don't find humor in things, but just that I don't need to avoid discomfort as much as I used to, so I don't have as many compensation patterns. And if you think about avoiding an emotion, that energy has to go somewhere. This is one of those … I think it's Einstein's laws or... “Energy doesn't leave. It just gets transformed.” So if we don't express our emotions, then the energy has to be stored.   Tahnee:  (23:24) And so it will be stored as tension, usually in the body. And so what you'll find is people will have chronic patterns of tension, which are related to emotional patterns. A really common one is neck tension. A lot of people have that and they find if they get stressed, they get neck tension, which is the Yang channel of the Liver, the Gallbladder channels.   Tahnee:  (23:42) It's all around the neck and the trapezius muscles there and the back of their heads. If you ever get those kind of back of the neck headaches, they're often related to Gallbladder, which means your Liver is stressed and which means you're stressed. That's kind of the pattern. And this is an emotional thing. You're not capacitated to deal with the level of input you're experiencing and it's manifesting as stress.   Tahnee:  (24:07) So that's an emotional response to an external stimulus that manifests as a physical symptom. So people would go take a painkiller, but that's done nothing to deal with what's actually going on. So a better thing to do would be to learn to manage stress or reduce the input so that there's less external stress.   Mason:  (24:26) Look, another thing there is when you're getting rubbed and you're hitting a point, it's possibly like a trigger point. What's it called? The ouchy points.   Tahnee:  (24:40) Well, all trigger points, acupuncture points.   Mason:  (24:42) Acupuncture points. That's what I am thinking… I forget the name, but it just means it was like an ouchy point. It's like a barefoot name for the, those running around barefoot acupuncturists, but you can't stop the perception that you're going to be able to get it out of your body. You're in Meridian at that point.   Mason:  (25:00) That's always one of the things I was like … I really think about the fact that feeling emotions, feeling your Qi and then feeling your physicality, that's all intertwined in that. That's all related, right? So it's constantly getting these headaches in the back of the head and you're getting this tension in the back of your neck. One of the things we're trying to do is go like, “All right. Well, let's feel you know and what's the path of least resistance?   Mason:  (25:26) Is it feeling where physically, that tension pattern is coming from?” You're feeling the emotion that's associated to it and I think I can relate to the fact that we're also not embodied that. You can quite often try and intellectualize that idea and it's hard to slow down to get that perception of whether it's the emotion or the physicality.   Mason:  (25:48) I was feeling it this morning when I was running with Goji. I was like, “Oh, for the first time I can feel why sometimes when I run, that tension emerges into my neck,” and all I did is it took me having less agenda with my running and slowing down.   Tahnee:  (26:05) Yeah. It's adrenaline which creates stress as well because running is a stimulus to the body that you're in danger. You have to work … In my opinion, you have to work very hard to maintain equanimity while running that you don't have a negative effect on your adrenals. That's another story.   Mason:  (26:19) Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why I like barefoot running as a philosophy.   Tahnee:  (26:23) Yeah. And I think if you are stressing the Kidneys, it'll affect the Liver. That's where your manifest that tension from, because the sinews will tighten because the Liver gets stressed. But again, if you can manage it, I think it can be very healthy as well. But, yeah-   Mason:  (26:37) It's healthy because then the dog's worn out.   Tahnee:  (26:42) We have a Kelpie. She needs running. Yeah, I think it's healthy that there's … I think from … This is where herbs certainly are useful because I look at … Let's say there's someone with a chronic liver pattern. Herbs that support the liver are going to really support their capacity. So I would look at yoga practice. I would look at … This is why with Tai Chi Yin especially, but you can do this in a Yang practice too.   Tahnee:  (27:09) It's just a bit easier to communicate these ideas to students because it's slower, but you can work on the Liver channels when you're about to bleed for example, because your blood is moving and your body's kind of creating new blood and there's all this good stuff happening on account of your menstrual cycle about to occur. So if you work on the Liver channel in that time, you take your liver herbs, you nourish and support yourself with enough rest and minimal stress.   Mason:  (27:36) Which Liver herbs are you talking about?   Tahnee:  (27:38) Well, I'd look at things like He Shou Wu, I'd look at … It depends on the person and the constitution, but typically, you're going to look at … From our end, we're working with tonics. If you wanted to be more kind of medicinal about it, you could certainly work with other ones. But I'd be looking at things like Dong Quai, things like He Shou Wu, things like maybe Schizandra if you're constitutionally appropriate for you, Reishi.   Tahnee:  (28:01) There's all going to manage the symptoms. Again, it would depend on the woman and what is going to work best, but they're the ones I'd be looking at. And for me, I'm a Livery constitutiony person, so liver herbs in general just work well for me and they keep me balanced. Whereas someone who's more of a Speeny constitution person would be better with Qi herbs and so on it goes.   Tahnee:  (28:25) So I think the thing with herbs as we work with them, with the tonic kind of side of things, it's like I'd stick to stuff that works really well for your body and generally, we're going to find that most of the herbs we sell work on the Liver, Kidney, Spleen areas, which are the most important in terms of general metabolic health. For sure, if you're asthmatic, work on your Lung channel. That's super important.   Tahnee:  (28:53) If you're going through a lot of emotional stress with grief, work on the Lung channel. This is where these ideas of emotions become really powerful because it's like, “If I know I'm going to …” say someone dies, it's like that would be a time to really ramp up my Lung herb regime because it's really common. And some of you may even know people that someone dies and then that person grieving gets a really bad respiratory infection or pneumonia.   Tahnee:  (29:20) Actually, I've read some studies that correlate a lot of the secondary deaths after married couples, like say the husband dies and the woman will die of pneumonia or some kind of respiratory failure. And that makes a lot of sense. If you look at what Chinese medicine says, that level of grief is going to injure the Lung literally on a physical level and then it's going to be susceptible to pathogens which are bacterial infections or whatever.   Mason:  (29:42) And then you're looking at physical manipulation as well.   Tahnee:  (29:47) In terms of massage?   Mason:  (29:48) Yeah.   Tahnee:  (29:49) Yeah. Well, so that's why Chi Nei Tsang is just another tool in your tool kit. So it's like, “Okay. Well, I know I'm going through something really potent and powerful. I'm going to massage my ribs. I'm going to take my herbs. I'm going to talk about my feelings. I'm going to meditate or do some kind of a practice that connects me to my body and myself.”   Tahnee:  (30:05) That isn't a mental thing, like you were saying. This idea of being able to think through your emotions is kind of futile because they're not a thinking process. The brain in Chinese medicine is from the Kidney's and has little to do with feeling, if anything really. It's more of like the feelings tell the brain what to do. The feelings dictate the response.   Tahnee:  (30:26) So if I have to go on stage and I'm afraid of speaking in public, then my Kidney's are going to tell my brain to initiate my panic response and I'm going to go into, like, my bowels might empty. I might start hyperventilating. I might … Whatever people-   Mason:  (30:43) That's an extreme.   Tahnee:  (30:45) Well, that used to happen to me when I had to public speak. I used to get the poos. This is what I mean. My belly was so sensitive to things. As a kid, I used to say to my mum, “I feel sick.” And she'd be like, “You have to poo.” And I'd be like, “Oh.” I was so disconnected from that part of my body and I would respond to everything through it.   Tahnee:  (31:05) If I was heartbroken, it would show up in my belly and I was like … I feel everything through my tummy and I was terrified of having it touched because I guess subconsciously knew that that's where it was all going to be. And I actually managed to get through the training without any massive emotional dramas.   Tahnee:  (31:27) A few people I worked on that fully broke down and had some pretty big crises on the training. And I think probably because I'd been meditating and doing a lot of other stuff in the lead up to being there, I was probably in a better position than if I'd gone-   Mason:  (31:42) It can just crack you wide open.   Tahnee:  (31:43) Yeah. I think, if anything, meditation did that more for me than Chi Nei Tsang. But Chi Nei Tsang really for me, gave me a practical tool and a piece of biofeedback where I could … I know that if I'm touching my tummy, it's really sensitive and inflamed that I need to probably, first of all, check in with my diet, maybe drink a bit more water and then look at what's going on emotionally in my life and what I might need to balance out.   Tahnee:  (32:08) And similarly with clients and anyone I work on, it's just like there's so much information there. You look at the navel area, it's where we were connected to our mothers for 10 months of our lives. So there's all of this idea of nurturance and what we did or didn't receive in the womb that remains with us after we are born. Again, this is energy that doesn't disappear or just get consumed. It just changes form.   Tahnee:  (32:36) So it still exists. Our ancestral line, the navel is associated with the ancestry of our entire lineage. So I've had people that are very open, energetically have big visions of their past lives and various things through that center because they've been able to connect to it through that. And again, there's a transmission that occurs when two people who are energetically open work together.   Tahnee:  (33:02) So that's something that can happen if I'm working with someone who's on that level, I suppose. I've had people obviously with trauma stored around their uterus and different parts of their body where we've worked through that kind of stuff. It's always really interesting what the body holds that the person isn't willing to share.   Tahnee:  (33:25) And I mean I would never … It's something as a practitioner obviously you're really mindful of, but I never try and force anything out of anybody. Often, I'll see or hear something that I try not to … And I mean that more on an energetic level. I don't literally hear anything but I can sometimes have visions of things or whatever and I'll just wait and see if the person wants to share that with me or not.   Tahnee:  (33:50) Sometimes I might offer it if they ask, but that's probably the trickiest part to navigate, I guess because often, like I said, it's stuff that we've blocked away for a reason.   Mason:  (34:03) Well, it's interesting. I think what you're talking about there when you didn't get blown out of the water and have a huge peak experience that was hard to integrate, which I think is an interesting. It's like anything. It's like whether you go to meditation, silent retreats, plant medicine or you do like huge doses of the mushrooms when you begin to like in a lot of the time and sometimes it's because we're desensitized and sometimes, it's because when we need it.   Mason:  (34:27) We have this huge peak experience that's super transformational a lot of the time. And then it's, “Okay. And now it's a time to integrate.” And what is integration? Well, integration is you know, you've got a lifestyle that consistently is supporting you to stay healthy. So your physical tissue and your Qi can work through anything that you're bringing up as well that you've got the foundation so that psychologically, you can handle these changes that are occurring. And it's quite simple, but-   Tahnee:  (34:59) Jing, Qi, Shen, right?   Mason:  (35:00) It's very simple, Jing, Qi, Shen. But what I like … Again, what comes up constantly with Chi Nei Tsang, it's like, “Oh great.” Well, we like a peak experience and they're fun. However, generally … Especially if you're going to be doing the chop wood, carry water and integrating a little bit into your own lifestyle, you are consistently working psychologically and emotionally on something.   Mason:  (35:25) And hopefully, you can keep that in a point where you don't consider yourself that you're someone that … You've got something wrong with you or you're bad or broken because you always have to be working on something. That's the development of our Shen. It's the whole point of taking life experiences and taking it through the peculator and hopefully, bringing out some wisdom so that our virtuous nature can come forth.   Mason:  (35:48) So I mean, important to not expect all these knock-it-out-of-the-park experiences. I like to, I think, when it comes to Chi Nei Tsang. I know that's definitely-   Tahnee:  (35:58) I mean, I don't think that's common. I mean, I think for whatever reason … My yoga teacher talks about this a lot. He's like, “The karma has to be right for these things to happen. You can meditate for 40 years and never have a peak experience. It doesn't mean you shouldn't meditate.” I think he says that he's meditated for 40 years and never had a peak experience.   Tahnee:  (36:19) And I've meditated for less than 10 years and had a bajillion peak experiences. And why, I don't know. For whatever reason, I'm predisposed to them and he isn't. It doesn't mean that he shouldn't teach me or that he shouldn't teach or … He is, as far as I'm aware, a very advanced meditator, far more advanced than me and able to maintain his focus for much longer. And I think it's just like anything.   Tahnee:  (36:48) It's like for some reason, sometimes certain stars align and stuff happens and other times it doesn't. And I think that's my experience with Chi Nei Tsang. I've had clients where we just have a beautiful healing, connection. I just massage their bellies and we spend time together and that's all it is. And then there's people that are puddles on the floor and I have to spend three hours talking to them to get them calm down again. So I think it's just-   Mason:  (37:15) And all in all, if we're trying to sustainably create this ongoing system in our lifestyle to help us consistently transform right, I think that's kind of fair to say whether it's on a micro or macro level as we're moving along, we'd love relationships to become richer, to work more towards passions or get more onto the path of our destiny. I think this has been a really, really nice practice for me.   Mason:  (37:42) It's not something I'd sit there and do in 20 minutes of every afternoon, but every now and then, I can really … I feel it and I get in there. And it's a nice one having a tool and the arsenal because you're moving along and you get to these crescendos when you're possibly going to really get some distinction on an emotional set that you have or something that's going to allow you to create distance between your noticing and your reaction, something most of us are working on and especially working on at the moment.   Mason:  (38:10) And then just having … And then you've got your herbs to support that. You've got your personal practice, your time in nature, your relationships and having … You've got your physical practice and you've got your fascia stretching, whether it's Yin or whether it's the work I'm doing with Benny, Movement Monk Benny. We got all those things.   Mason:  (38:25) But then having this … I think this in the arsenal, quite often for me, it's enough to just bolster all my efforts to make sure that I bring it up to cresendo that point and then I don't just … it doesn't just slide back down and actually I can't get the boulder over the mountain. It's just one of those things I can use to just really bring it along that physical touch, that physical manipulation.   Mason:  (38:47) And it's the same with any deep healing, as you were saying, when you've got menstrual issues that are hardcore congestion in through the female sex organs or a tumor sitting within an organ. Why would we not touch these things? It's so difficult for the body to overcome these huge blockages.   Tahnee:  (39:08) Well, it's painful, is reason one … Usually when there's stagnation, which is what you're talking about in those two examples, then there's pain because things congest around there, the toxins build up and it's usually a got an emotional component. And pain science is one of the most fascinating areas of science because it's purely subjective. I could have cut my arm off and you could cut your arm off and we can both describe completely different levels of pain.   Tahnee:  (39:32) It's not like there's one pain scale that everyone, like they go, “Oh, happy pain or sad pain at the hospital,” but they're completely subjective experiences. You tell the doctor how you're feeling and that's where to digress a little bit. Like lower back fusion, it's proven to be completely pointless. It doesn't stop lower back pain whether it's fuse the discs of the lumbar spine, usually, it's all completely, the surgery is a waste of time.   Tahnee:  (40:01) And I feel very confident in saying that, what was actually proven to be best is psychotherapy and movement. And the combination of those two are going to relieve stress. They're going to manage emotions. They're going to support the Kidney and Liver channels, which low back pain typically is correlated to. So we're looking at this system, I suppose, with the body as opposed to individual symptoms.   Tahnee:  (40:26) So if I was looking at menstrual symptoms or a tumor in my sessions, it's like tumors are typically cold stagnation, so you want to warm that up. And again, cancer's a tough one for us to talk about. As everybody knows, it's the big thing you can't talk about. And if I have someone come with cancer, I obviously don't work directly on their tumor usually because it's not appropriate, but I'll do energy work on it.   Tahnee:  (40:52) So I've only worked with one person with bowel cancer and that felt to me like a black sticky tar-like energy, so I just spent time countering that with healthy Qi. And she was going through different courses of treatment anyway, so it wasn't really appropriate for me to do anything beyond that. I was just there to support.   Tahnee:  (41:18) But from my experience working with a lot of types of infections and things as well, anytime I felt anything really chronic and bad, its felt like black tar. I can, in really heightened states, which is not frequent for me, unfortunately. I can feel like I can pull that out. But that's only been like twice that I've felt that. And I've spoken to some acupuncturists and healers about it that I know and they have said, “Yeah, that's when you're a really strong Qi Gong practitioner.   Tahnee:  (41:48) You're able to actually pull that out on an energetic level,” which I'm sure there are healers out there that can do that. I'm not at that point. But yeah, I think normally, it's like, well, if you're warming it up, you're increasing blood flow and circulation. In general, these are going to be really helpful things to get going. Like menstrual disorders work really well with Chi Nei Tsang. If anyone out there has any kind of menstrual stuff going on, start massaging your uterus every day.   Tahnee:  (42:13) You don't have to do anything fancy, just scoop around your pubic bone and your inner pelvis and just get in there. And if it feels painful, spend some time rubbing it until it stops feeling painful. It's that simple. It doesn't have to be complicated. In Chi Nei Tsang we have lots of complicated techniques and I've certainly used a lot of them, but I also have found when teaching people, it's best to just … simple, simple, simple.   Tahnee:  (42:38) So just if it hurts, spend some time on it, breathe into it, send some love to it, give it a good massage and generally, you'll find that these things dissolve. That's what I've found really interesting in my body. It was like you feel something that feels like a huge knot or a lump that it's really painful and it's like, “I can't possibly deal with this.” And 10 minutes later, it's gone. And it's like, “Wow.”   Mason:  (43:02) And sometimes, it's not.   Tahnee:  (43:02) Yeah. Well, sometimes it's 20 or 30 or 40 minutes later. And like I said, I've had clients that come back three or four times and I finally get to a point where I'm able to soften them up enough. So there's lots of things that can happen...   Tahnee:  (43:15) But yeah, I think in general, anytime we're looking at pain when there's touch and those kinds of things, it's generally coming from some kind of Qi stagnation and it's usually helpful to massage it. Again, within reason. Don't go hard on yourself.   Mason:  (43:34) Well, that's kind of the real … we mentioned barefoot running. It's like that's something that's very obvious for people to say, “You start running barefoot, not in shoes. If you put that little bit of new stress on your ankles and your arch and your knee, the whole rule is if you feel little tweaks or if you feel anything becoming, feeling really vulnerable, you open yourself up to something.   Mason:  (43:54) That's it. Your session's done for the day. And I feel like it can be the same like this. And in terms of techniques, I mean, I really started like going deep when I let go of the techniques. When I was rubbing my organs and I let go a little bit more of going like, “All right, now here I'm in the duodenum. Okay. Now, in the pyloric valves and …” again, I was intellectualising a lot rather than just getting to know myself through feeling and through touch.   Mason:  (44:28) Because my mind quite often works like if I can't explain what I'm doing externally, how do I justify doing this in the first place? And through that, my techniques got more advanced in relationship to my unique little organ system rather than trying to use a particular technique. That was really nice, getting that little insight.   Mason:  (44:48) But I think that's just something … This is … Everyone's on practice here. Even though it's called Chi Nei Tsang, it's literally just you sticking fingers and-   Tahnee:  (44:58) Yeah. Well, look, I've only received Chi Nei Tsang from probably let's say 20 or 30 people in total in my life and let's say 30 of them were on training. Oh, sorry. 20 of them were on a training. And then I've had Master Chia, Utah, the lady in Guatemala, the guy in Thailand, probably … I'm trying to think of any other professionals who've massage me … oh, Sola.   Tahnee:  (45:26) I've had a few professionals messaged me and they've all been very different in how they approach Chi Nei Tsang. And even friends of mine who having received them from me were like, “Oh my God, I have to go study this.” They called me up and were like, “It's so different to what you do and I wanted to learn what you do.”   Tahnee:  (45:42) And I was like, “Well, I think like anything … Anyone who's learned to teach yoga or done anything, it's like you put your own spin on things.” So I certainly think while I respect Master Chia's work and his techniques … And he's very much a stickler for the techniques. I'll often start much further along than he recommends in the flows that he teaches and stuff.   Tahnee:  (46:07) I think I've just found intuitively there's different techniques I'm really comfortable with and ones I'm not comfortable with. There's ones that I've found effective in general for people that I wouldn't … I had … Utah did one on me one time where she just pulled my spleen for like an hour and went, “Oooh,” and that was it.   Tahnee:  (46:27) And I was like, “Well,” and it was amazing, but on paper, that sounded like there was no flow to that. It wasn't a massage per se. It was kind of a shamanic style of healing. So I think there's probably a lot more of my influences from her and on that side of things where it's just-   Mason:  (46:47) She's Mantak's student-   Tahnee:  (46:49) Yeah, yeah. She's in her 60s and has been living with him in Thailand with her husband for, I would guess, 20 or 30 years. I remember speaking to her about it, but I can't remember exactly. And she's European, so she travels all through Europe teaching this and she's a master in her own right. And just like … we've spoken a few times about that she has a different style to Master Chia and teachers differently to him.   Tahnee:  (47:11) And I know there's people in The States that have developed their own versions of Chi Nei Tsang now and this woman in Thailand who has her own version. So I don't think there's a right or a wrong way. I think it's anything that just each practitioner will have their truth and the best way of expressing it. But I think if you're just curious about touching your own belly, you've got permission.   Tahnee:  (47:32) Go do it. And it's interesting. The history of it, I find really interesting because it correlates a lot to what happens in our culture now. I think is, it became unfashionable to touch. The healers weren't allowed to touch the higher cast of person they want … Especially not allowed to touch women. It went from being like a village-based medicinal practice to like a more systemised medicinal practice.   Tahnee:  (48:02) And Chinese medicine has evolved a lot over the centuries and the millennia. So Chi Nei Tsang came about from a much older time when hands-on healing was considered appropriate and then that lost favor especially as Western styles of healing penetrated into China. And I'm studying acupuncture at the moment. So I just learned that that was around the late 1800s, early 1900s.   Tahnee:  (48:29) But yeah, I think when we look at that, we see that we lost a lot of the touch based healing arts from China. And massage, in the West, is very different to Tui Na, the Chinese style of massage, which is more similar to what I have learned. And you've had massages with John, our acupuncturist. He gets into all the gristle and runs up and down the bones and gets right into all the fascia.   Tahnee:  (48:55) Most Swedish style massages, they're nice for moving Chi at a superficial level like you're talking about, but in terms of getting Chi into the joints, which is where it really matters and that's why Yin Yoga, Qi Gong, that type of massage is so important because the joints are where the Qi … This is when you talk about calcification and stuff before. It's where the Chi will stagnate the most easier because the joints are dense.   Tahnee:  (49:17) There's no blood. Blood andi are really close, but when you're looking at an elbow or a knee, there's very little blood in there. And so these are really prone to deterioration really quickly, especially if our Liver is struggling, which again, like we said, everyone is stressed. So that's really common in our culture. So it makes a lot of sense to do these painful joint based massages like we do in Chi Nei Tsang.   Tahnee:  (49:41) Chi Nei Tsang isn't just the belly, just to be clear. It covers the entire body, so we'll do anything that needs doing, really. I've done Chi Nei Tsang on a friend of ours who's in his 70s … Nearly in the 70s and it was all around his knees and his pelvis because that was what was required. And it's really about where are the blockages of Qi, how do we break it up so that these blockages are removed.   Tahnee:  (50:06) Again, it was a very painful session for him, but he felt incredible and could walk differently afterwards. So it's these kinds of ideas of maybe the session won't be that fun, but the benefits are going to be huge because you're breaking up adhesions and … Yeah. Anyone who's had a frozen shoulder and had manual therapy done on that, I've heard it's very, very, very painful. And it's the same idea. It's like to get that fascia to dissolve-   Mason:  (50:31) Adhesions on the fascia, yeah.   Tahnee:  (50:32) … Yeah, you need to heat it up and it needs to be broken up in a lot of cases. And there's some really interesting work around how sensitive fascia is and that breaking it up isn't always that helpful if there's a really strong emotional component because it just creates more trauma. And I think there's something to that, so I think you want to work with a good practitioner who understands the nuance of when it's appropriate and when it isn't.   Mason:  (50:54) Or have your own ability to actually process emotions and just look historically how you've done it that it's very accessible.   Tahnee:  (51:00) Yeah, I've worked with this really inspiring woman when I taught yoga in Newcastle. I think she came to my classes for … I'd want to say like 18 months to two years of Yin Yoga and she had a frozen shoulder and she'd just sit there. She'd sit next to the wall and she'd do half versions of everything because she couldn't really do a lot. And I remember speaking to her and she's like,” I can like lift my arm up over my head now.”   Tahnee:  (51:24) She was just … And it took a really long time, but she just kept showing up. And that was a really inspiring to me and that's really indicative of how long it takes to change fascia. We're literally talking about reshaping ourselves and the shape we are is because of our thoughts and how we respond to the world and how we respond to life and what we were conditioned to postulate ourselves toward or against.   Tahnee:  (51:45) You'll see people in families have same posture and those kinds of things and it's because we learned so much of this and we're conditioned as children to pick up on our parents physiology and their responses to things and how they … We've both done therapy, all about that. So our bodies hold that just as much as our minds and our personalities and our thoughts and emotions do.   Tahnee:  (52:07) So it's a lot quicker to change a thought than it is to change the body. I think that patterns are very slow to change, but again, I would say the pattern is more closely correlated to the body. The yogic tradition talks about samskara's and vasana's, so these character traits and conditioned ways of behaving. So a samskara is like a conditioned pattern of behavior and vasana is like when that becomes who I am.   Tahnee:  (52:37) So I might say I'm Tahnee and I am a yoga teacher and I've been doing the thing, teaching yoga so long that I identify with that as me. And if you take that away from me, I'm going to suffer because it's who I am. And that's just a silly example, but it's a good one to demonstrate it.   Tahnee:  (52:55) So when we look at the body, the body will often mirror these same ideas because your yoga teacher will walk a certain way and they will hold themselves a certain way and they will think certain things and they will speak a certain way, and so as a result, you start to embody this idea of something instead of actually just maybe being more authentically like you.   Tahnee:  (53:14) And so yoga is all around how do we remove these hats that we wear, all these masks that we wear to the world and find out what's really underneath. And I think Chi Nei Tsang is one of the tools that we can use to start to dissolve some of those attachments and conditioned patterns I suppose. So I think it all fits into me to the same framework.   Tahnee:  (53:35) I separate yoga and Taoism when I teach because it's easier that way, but I see them as being very similar, if not the same, at the risk of offending some people. I think that the ideas fundamentally are very, very similar.   Mason:  (53:48) When you get bare bones about it, everything is, unless there's a very, very unique spiritual intention that someone would have.   Tahnee:  (53:59) Yeah. Well you could look at maybe Tantra as deviating because it starts with the assumption that there's oneness, whereas … I mean, I think … Oneness to me is a whole another podcast, so I don't think we'll go there. But if anyone's interested, let us know and we can go there because I love talking about this philosophy stuff.   Tahnee:  (54:18) But coming back to Chi NeI Tsang, I think when we can embody ourselves fully and unify with ourselves, that's the first step. It's the absolute foundation. It's the fundamental step to any personal growth and transformation and evolution, which is what this path is about. You can't take tonic herbs without changing and evolving and this is why we do this. It's certainly what motivates me to get out of bed every day.   Tahnee:  (54:45) And it's not this idea of becoming someone better or … It's just like I can feel that there's so much that I look through when I look at the world that isn't me. And it's like … And I've felt me, and these two things aren't completely congruent yet and that's okay. I'm still really young and I think that there's time, but I think that the more I practice and the more I explore these really ancient healing traditions, that I can feel this congruency coming.   Tahnee:  (55:17) And that's what yoga talks about. It's like we start to abide in our true selves. It's not this split where we think we're one thing and we do something else. And we're all hypocrites, every single one of us, and yoga doesn't say hypocrisy is bad. So much as it says, well, it's a sign that your inner and outer worlds aren't aligned. You say one thing, you do something else. You think one thing, you do something else.   Tahnee:  (55:36) There's no congruency there. It's because you haven't fully integrated. And that's what I think all of these healing tools point us toward. It's this idea of being able to be congruent and cohesive and consistent and all of the good things.   Mason:  (55:55) So we'll put the video from the Nourish Her Yin event where you're on stage taking everyone through a little massage sequence.   Tahnee:  (56:05) Can we do a better video than that?   Mason:  (56:05) Yeah. That's what I was going to say. It would also... Goji's (dog) getting in there. It'd be really good to just have a couple of different series like YouTube videos.   Tahnee:  (56:16) Well, what I've got in mind is doing a self massage one and then showing a simple partner massage or something, just a little flow.   Mason:  (56:27) Well, especially it's a good for mums and dads in the household to just have a little bit under your belt in terms of a little digestive flow.   Tahnee:  (56:35) Yeah, well, if you have a bubba, I wouldn't do Chi Nei Tsang so much as just rub their tummies really gently in a circular … So you want to go, I'm never good at this way, but clockwise, I think. Is that the right way? Yeah. So you want to go-   Mason:  (56:48) Looking at the belly clockwise.   Tahnee:  (56:49) So if you're looking at your baby's tummy, you want to go clockwise around. So basically, from their right to their left, an arc like a rainbow, that's going to help, especially if they get colic or any kind of constipation or anything. It's going to help to move what is stuck. And babies, like us, they process a lot through the digestion.   Tahnee:  (57:12) They're very open energetically, so it's always interesting to have a look at what else is going on in the family life if that sort of stuff is happening, what they might need to be buffered from or what they might be experiencing. I mean, these amazing little perceptive beings they are, so pretty cool. But yeah, Aiya doesn't love being massaged, unfortunately.   Tahnee:  (57:35) I always had dreams of, “I'll massage my baby.” And Aiya is, “Oi, get off.” So maybe when she's a bit older, she'll appreciate having a massage therapist mum.   Mason:  (57:44) That's all I was thinking. It's like when you get a little bit older, it's like having your little herbal remedies around and you have your Gua Sha stone around-   Tahnee:  (57:49) She does like Gua Sha.   Mason:  (57:54) … she does like Gua sha. You have your little Chi Nei Tsang technique. I mean, all we're talking about is a very practical focus even like putting too much on it and it's just very simple skill sets that hopefully, are going to keep you out of a doctor's office.   Tahnee:  (58:08) Yeah. I kind of always think-   Mason:  (58:10) Or a naturopath's office.   Tahnee:  (58:11) Well, I've said this to you before, like about being a cool old grandma, and I think it's such a shame in our culture. We've lost … I know … even when I was in Japan, when I was 16, the grandma and grandpa and the aunty and uncle all lived in the same compound and they were old, the grandma and grandpa and they did all the prayers.   Tahnee:  (58:30) They'd light all the incense, set up the alters every morning, facilitate that. If I saw the kid had a cold or something, grandma was boiling up stuff. I was too young to really comprehend exactly what it was, but now I'm thinking she was probably doing some herbal treatments or something. It's like they were holding that wisdom and that role in the family of just providing the health care. And you'd use a doctor only in a really extreme situation.   Tahnee:  (58:55) And I think there's really something … I know you saw me, I started reading nursing books and how to look after sick people because I was thinking, “Well, if I Aiya's unwell, how do I manage that?” And I think there's this lack of skill in our culture that us younger people have especially, that we don't know basic home remedies for things that aren't silly.   Tahnee:  (59:20) Like, “Oh, garlic if you have a cough or whatever,” I'm thinking more like, “How do I actually know when a fever is okay and not okay?” Because fevers, in my opinion, are an incredibly powerful healing tool and it should be left alone in general, but I know there's a point when they can get dangerous too. So it's like we've got to … h

Mason and Tahnee come together on the podcast today, to take a dive deep into the wonders of Qi, the second Treasure in the Taoist system. In the West most of us are familiar with the concept of Qi being energy, however the Taoists understood Qi in a more expansive context. Today we're excited to explore the philosophy and application of the Qi Treasure and to introduce our SuperFeast family to our new baby - The QI blend! Tune in to get the full download and learn how these beautiful Qi herbs can help you activate your potential and feel truly vibrant.    Tahnee and Mason explore: Classical Chinese Medicine vs modern acupuncture application and diagnoses. Qi as a force present in all things, tonic herbs included. Dis-ease as a manifestation of blocked/stagnant Qi - "the only time we get ill is when our Qi is blocked" - Tahnee Inherited physical, emotional and mental patterns as factors that can interfere with an individual's free flow of Qi. Personal practice and Qi cultivation. Constitutional typing and Five Element Theory. The new SuperFeast QI blend. The relationship between Qi and Blood. The Taoist concept of humans being the bridge between heaven and earth. The Three Treasures; Jing, Qi and Shen. Qi as a subtle but transformational force. The self healing capacity of the body. When and how to use the QI blend. Wei Qi and external environmental pathogens.   Who are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? Mason Taylor: Mason’s energy and intent for a long and happy life is infectious. A health educator at heart, he continues to pioneer the way for potent health and a robust personal practice. An avid sharer, connector, inspirer and philosophiser, Mason wakes up with a smile on his face, knowing that tonic herbs are changing lives. Mason is also the SuperFeast founder, daddy to Aiya and partner to Tahnee (General Manager at SuperFeast). Tahnee McCrossin: Tahnee is a self proclaimed nerd, with a love of the human body, it’s language and its stories. A cup of tonic tea and a human interaction with Tahnee is a gift! A beautiful Yin Yoga teacher and Chi Ne Tsang practitioner, Tahnee loves going head first into the realms of tradition, yogic philosophy, the organ systems, herbalism and hard-hitting research. Tahnee is the General Manager at SuperFeast, mumma to reishi-baby Aiya and partner to Mason (founder of SuperFeast).   Resources: Yi Jing - The Book Of Changes  Rhonda Chang Digesting The Universe Book  Karma and Reincarnation - Dr Motoyama Book  The Power Of The Five Elements - Charles Moss Book Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:       (00:01) Hello, lovely people. I'm here with the lovely Tahns.   Tahnee:       (00:04) Hi.   Mason:      (00:04) So we wanted to tackle one together on this beautiful Saturday morning. We're in the podcast room. We've had torrential rain overnight, so the Qi of the land is absolutely pumping. It's conductive out there. And we thought it'd be a really good, beautiful time to chat to you guys about the concept of Qi. Obviously we've got a little bit of an understanding in the West of what's Qi? Qi is energy, everything's Qi. And we wanted to go a little deeper into the nuance. We're going to talk about, Tahns is definitely going to be going in through everything that she's studied with yoga, Taoism, anatomy and all her, everything else, Tahns will go into it. Being an abdominal masseuse, being a Yin yoga teacher.   Mason:    (00:47) Tahns works with Qi a lot, and is developing a really nice understanding of this huge concept. And so we're going to be looking at what Qi is in the body. Going to be looking at how many different layers and variations there are. But also then we're going to be looking widely in the body, in the three treasure system of Taoism. That's a bit more of a macro view of what Qi is in the body. We're going to be looking at what it is, how to cultivate it, in that context. How Qi herbs work in the body, because one thing I think you guys, you should be understanding by now is that Taoism is appropriate for the lifestyle. Yes, We're talking about there's Taoist's, hermits in the mountains, just going on doing nothing but Qigong all day, living off one grain of rice. And then the rest is tonic herbs and spring water and constantly meditating.   Mason:    (01:39) But the concept of Taoism, they can cross over to a mother of four, simply being able to manage her health and her family's health through some very basic principles. So Qi can get incredibly complex when you go into all the different ways that it can be deficient and rebel in the body and so on and so forth. And so there's that clinical understanding of Qi, we can get a little into that, and how it's represented. But then there's a very accessible, I guess, conversation around Qi that we want to be having at the same time. So no matter how much time you have or interests you have, you're going to be able to get a dialogue.   Tahnee:    (02:23) Yeah, hopefully we keep it in the accessible realm today.   Mason:    (02:27) Well I like getting inaccessible as well because it's interesting and I think it's nice as well just to have that context for everyone to reaslise, you don't have to remember all this. And at any point that it gets, if you're dealing with something heavy internally at any point it gets too much and you reaslise you can't retain it, there are practitioners, and we like teaching you how to find particular practitioners. I'm down the rabbit hole when it comes to acupuncture and that. I'm down the rabbit hole of Rhonda Chang stuff and finding a practitioner that it's actually ... I think it's getting more and more difficult to find an acupuncturist that's actually practicing what Rhonda calls Yi, actual medicine that isn't layered over with Western, basically biochemistry or Western symptomology. But that's-   Tahnee:    (03:09) Or pathology. I'm studying Health Science degree, majoring in acupuncture at the moment actually. And it's interesting how little we really touch on the more shamanic aspects I suppose of Chineseedicine, which is definitely what I'm more interested in. And as someone who's received acupuncture for a long time, the people that are more versed in that are definitely, in my opinion, more effective practitioners for me. So yeah, it's interesting to think about that, and even in terms of when we're talking about herbalism, what we do at Superfeast, to taking a herb that has a lot of Qi, and has a lot of intention in terms of its cultivation, its processing, versus taking a lot of just things you can buy over the counter. I'm thinking about this little compressed tablets and all that stuff that are... You can take them and they can have an effect for sure. But I don't have the same connection to them that I do to the Taoist Tonic Herbs. It's a really interesting nuance for me and something I'm exploring.   Mason:    (04:18) But you can feel, in a clinical setting, it's more steely. It's more, and especially when it gets symptom, when it becomes pathology based, and symptom based, it's very much okay, this is the diagnosis and... Unfortunately it's going, it's starting with ... I think what we're talking about guys before we jump into Qi, and yes we're going to talk about the Qi blend, and Qi herbs and all these kinds of things. But these tangents are why we get the big bucks. So we're talking about if we start with, okay, you're having headaches, so we start with the symptom and then we go, hh, there's four different types of headache. There's going to be a hot headache and a cold headache, and a deficient headache.   Mason:    (05:10) And I'm not an expert on this, I'm just enjoying it because it's slightly anarchist from what the current Western Chinese Medicine looks like. It's not Yi, it's not medicine, it's not traditional medicine. It's washed into this Western approach where it's what's the symptom? Okay. Oh, you've got, gosh, I don't know, you're nauseous. Okay. Generally the pattern is it's going to be one of these four or five different types and we're going to find it and then we're going to treat you by hitting, via the dictation of what we know to use. If it's this type of nauseousness we're going to use these points and this herb.   Mason:    (05:52) So there's this tendency for a lot of practitioners these days to be, feel tickled by the fact that yeah, wow, I found someone had a headache and I had options in how to treat them because everyone's different. But it's still a textbook version of treatment. And just going through Rhonda's stuff. She's just, it's still not medicine. It's still not proper Chinese Medicine, based on the classics. The classics would be doing a 100% ... Well we don't know, you don't make any assumptions. We just go in and find what's going on within the Yin Yang-   Tahnee:    (06:27) Individual treatment.   Mason:    (06:28) Very, super individual. There's, what's going on within the Yin Yang, and what's going on within the five elements, the Wu Xing. And so in that sense, there's no rules ever. And it's hard, because it's hard to commodify that, it's hard to bring people into-   Tahnee:    (06:46) Well it's hard to systemise and teach that. And I think when you look at the history of anything that gets codified and systemified ... I don't know if that's a word. You lose a lot of the nuance that when you work one-on-one with someone and learn something in a oral tradition based on apprenticeship and just doing the thing with supervision. That was what really got lost in China when Mao Zedong came through and he really created these colleges, these places to go and study acupuncture. And you could do... Or Chinese Medicine I should say, not acupuncture, the whole scope of practice that they decided would be most useful for treating the masses of China. And that's what we've inherited. And there's people Rhonda doing amazing work, trying to keep the old tradition alive.   Tahnee:    (07:34) And I think that's certainly where you and I lean toward, in our interests. But I can sort of see how you have to learn, you have to go to school because there isn't really another way to do it. But then you have to take responsibility for actually going and immersing yourself in the art of healing, which is a really different thing. And it's the same with the Che Nei Tsang I do. I learned with Master Chia and I've had lots of friends go and study with him after receiving treatment from me. And they're Oh my God, when I got there it was totally different to what you do. And it's yeah, because I'm bringing my whole life of experience, all the things I've done, all the different trainings I've taken.   Tahnee:    (08:16) When I work one-on-one with someone I'm bringing that plus my own Qi and my own Je ne sais quoi, every individual has their own special gifts. So I think you can't ever copy someone else, but you can definitely learn from other people. And I think as long as we remember that these things are both a science and an art, then we can be really ... It's the same with the herbs. So we would get, people write to us and they say I have a headache or I'm exhausted. Well we can only give a general answer to that because we're not seeing you. We're not talking to you. We're not investigating your history and really our duty of care, to do that over the internet or the phone is not there. We can't manage and support that. But that's where a practitioner-   Mason:    (09:00) Well it's not even-   Tahnee:    (09:01) Well that's where a practitioner is so useful because that therapeutic process of sitting down with someone, having them hear you and witness you and mirror you, and then also treat you. I think that's really powerful, and especially if they're an educator or there's someone that's going to help empower you toward your own understanding. Those are the best kinds of practitioners. And if you find one, hold on because I have had people that I've worked with for five or six years because they've just done so much for me in terms of getting me to be my own practitioner. To become responsible and sovereign for myself and you outgrow them over time for sure.   Tahnee:    (09:39) There's probably three people I've outgrown but I really, I value them so much as teachers. I think that's just the constant journey of life is wherever you are in your path, find the people that can support and nourish you. Know when to let go, know what to integrate and transform it yourself. A lot of this stuff we're talking about today is really relevant to this. Qi, it's that ability, once we start to get everything flowing and harmonise then, if we're talking about treasures, we've got strong Jing, we've got strong Qi, then we've got strong Shen and we're really potentiated and in our Dharma in the world, to cross our traditions a little-   Mason:    (10:16) Well not cross, but put them next to each other. You can have them next to each other, it's fine.   Tahnee:    (10:19) Well they're actually very similar. And I teach yoga, definitely with a huge, I guess, eye on the Taoist tradition because I think what the Taoists do is describe the subtle body really well, and describe the alchemical processes that happen. The yogis talk about it as well, but it was quite secretive and because of Muslim invasion and all sorts of things it got a little bit lost. So it's really cool to look at it from both sides. And if you believe that we all are incarnated spirit, which is what these two traditions point to, and that the purpose of our lives is to fully embody our spirit in this physical form. It's not to ascend, it's actually to descend the spirit and to have that spirit fully animate and penetrate this organism and its expression in this life, that's Dharma.   Tahnee:    (11:10) That's this idea of us living our true path. And that could be everything from nurturing a child, to creating an empire. There's so many, and it doesn't have to always be a positive Dharma, because depending on our karma, and the things we bring, we may have different things we have to express. But I think when we look at this idea of potentiating the human, which is what we're doing here, at the end of the day it's yeah, we want to be really conscious of how we choose to work with people. The kinds of information we choose to integrate into our home practice, into our culture. It's something you talk about all the time, this idea of creating culture, and these are constantly slippery conversations. It's never black and white. It's never, I'm this, because this is the Yi Jing, right? Everything changes. The Book of Changes is the foundation of Chinese Medicine. It's this idea that nothing stays the same.   Mason:    (12:08) It's a good point. If you go and find a practitioner, you go, have you studied the Yi Jing?   Tahnee:    (12:13) Well yeah, I think it's definitely not, to my knowledge, taught very extensively in acupuncture school, in inverted commas. But yeah, I think this curiosity, but you can go study the Yi Jing, it doesn't have to be this mysterious, this thing. And if you're interested we'll put it in the show notes about the YI Jing. I'm just making a note to do that.   Mason:    (12:34) Well, I feel like, sorry to butt in, the reason that it's brought up a little today, because I think we're going to be talking about a lot of concepts of Qi, and within this system when we're coming from a Western system, and when we're interacting with, especially at the moment new waves of Chinese practitioners, sometimes we don't see a lot of effectiveness. I think that's fair to say.   Tahnee:    (13:04) Yeah.   Mason:    (13:04) And I think what I want to bring up is that one, we're not putting the complete expectation on you here to be able to immediately affect your own Qi. However, at the same time we're talking about, this is so beyond proven and effective. And just because... You talk about it as well Tahns, when women going through menstrual issues, which can be blockages of Qi and you go and see a practitioner and it doesn't work. You haven't gone to someone who's practicing Yi medicine, and that's just the reality. And Rhonda talks about this all the time, a lot of the practitioners... And I just want to make sure everyone listening is just, we're trying to give you enough space and opportunity, what I call, to activate the placebo.   Mason:    (13:45) These Qi herbs, whether we're talking about tonic herbs, or whether you know what, there's some more severe stuff going on. Maybe the general tonic herbs aren't going to do it and you need to go to a practitioner that's going to get a little more nuanced. These things, they just work. They work. For thousands of thousands of years they've been working in the most complex system. At the moment, now, even in Chinese Medicine hospitals in China, they've got a Heart department, the Kidney department-   Tahnee:    (14:14) The stroke department, I just found one last night, what I wrote you, I will tell you about this later.   Mason:    (14:19) Which is interesting, but there's no stroke in Chinese Medicine.   Tahnee:    (14:24) No, but they don't, they just say, if you come with these things, we can treat you as an individual in our hospital.   Mason:    (14:30) No, they don't. That's what's happening. Sometimes it's happening. They're not doing that a lot at the time. They're having, well I'm going to treat you for-   Tahnee:    (14:37) Oh, that's when they're mashing up the Western piece-   Mason:    (14:38) No, they're it's a Western thing, and the prejudice is, in certain instances Western Medicine is just going to be more useful. And more and more and more I see how amazing ... Don't get me wrong, I see how amazing Western Medicine is and how incredible, to an extent, drugs are and can be. And I can see how people need an institution. But that's the placebo of the Western Medicine. It's so compartmentalised and institutionalised and there's theoretically all these safety checks, which is an absolute bullshit... On its own it's amazing, but it's unwarranted faith that they're being given by the population.   Mason:    (15:17) But the whole prejudice, although the whole, subconsciously for a lot of people, even in these Chinese medical hospitals is that a lot of the time the Chinese Medicine just isn't as reliable. Where it's, from what I'm understanding, not that I understand it necessarily, but I'm awakening my own reality. You saying it's shamanic, and then shamanic is scary therefore that mustn't be effective, That must be very ambiguous and we're calling in spirits to do the healing verse... Of course that's not the case. The real old Chinese Medicine, especially in relating to what our Treasures are and nourishing our Treasures through Qi herbs and a lifestyle that's generating our own Qi, we're generating our ability to have our Qi go through phases of transformation constantly so we don't have blockages.   Mason:    (16:07) This is extremely effective and it's not this thing that's, well it's not actually, not as reliable as Western Medicine. Western Medicine might be really reliable to get you back to a somewhat normal state for the next couple of years without actually dealing with your core problems. And if you're going to go to real Chinese Medicine though, you need someone really working closely with you, and educating with you, and going deep into what your issue is. And we just don't have time for that in an institutional level.   Tahnee:    (16:37) Well I don't think it's unique to Chinese Medicine, but I think when you look at all of the ancient traditions, it was very much around community based model and individual personalised care based on diagnosis that really took into account the whole organism. So it's talking about symptom management, which is what Western Medicine is really good at versus healing or, you talk about with Rhonda's work. This idea of true medicine, which is more to do with... My teacher always says, you're trying to put yourself out of business as a practitioner. So you're trying to get the person to the point where they are self managing and they're sovereign in their health and they'd only need to see you maybe seasonally, maybe once every couple of years just to check in and make sure everything's going well.   Tahnee:    (17:26) And as educators, that's something that I'm really passionate about, for me anyway, I don't want to speak for you. But the more people expose themselves to different ideas without judgment, without needing to make something right or wrong, it gives you this capacity to hold, that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, hold multiple opposing ideas at the same time. So the Chinese Medicine says there's a universal force that is animating and that turns this sack of fluid and chemicals into a body, And when it goes away, we become chemicals and fluid again, and we dry out, and we dissolve and we become food for the bugs and bacteria. Right? So this is the foundation of Chinese Medicine. It starts with this underlying idea of universal consciousness. Western Medicine doesn't have a underlying theory. It starts with pathology,   Mason:    (18:17) Well that's fine. But as long as it's kept in its little place over there.   Tahnee:    (18:21) Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. I think as a culture we have gone, Oh, okay, we're going to worship the altar of modern science, but we forget that it has limitations. And similarly, Chinese Medicine has limitations. It's great to have a sterile surgical environment to operate in a car crash situation-   Mason:    (18:41) Absolutely.   Tahnee:    (18:42) Yeah, I know you know this, but I'm just trying to explain it for people that are listening. If I am in a car crash, I want to go to Western hospital for my immediate treatment and then I'd love to go to a Chinese doctor to maintain and improve my health over time. It's this idea of childbirth, in Chinese Medicine that's an opportunity to get healthier. And in Western Medicine it's, cool, you had a baby, see you later. We don't ever want to see you again, basically. They might check in on you for six weeks or however long the process is.   Tahnee:    (19:10) And so there's this two very different ways of looking at health, really. One is coming from a educative... And almost a faith based type of health that the natural state is health. That's what I feel is for me the big difference. Whereas Western Medicine is almost, things are going to break all the time and we're just going to keep patching them up. But it's the roof is going to collapse one day. You can't just keep putting screws in and polls in, and bandaging shit up and expecting it all to stay there. It's going to just all fall down one day.   Tahnee:    (19:45) And so that's where I think I prefer to sit in this idea that, we are by design, whether it's intelligent design or evolutionary design, I don't know, but we are by design healthy, and we are by design moving always toward health. And the only reason that ever happens is because our Qi gets blocked in some way. And it's either emotional or physical or mental, either we have a thought recurring that creates a blockage or we have an emotion recurring that creates a blockage, or we have some physical-   Mason:    (20:16) Something structural.   Tahnee:    (20:17) Mass. Yeah, that creates a blockage.   Mason:    (20:18) Yeah, or even the Qi blockages from parent to child, you'll see a hunch or something go from mother to a daughter and that's going to create-   Tahnee:    (20:28) Yeah, inherited.   Mason:    (20:29) Inherited, and that creates a blockage in an organ, that's going to create an emotional pattern or expression.   Tahnee:    (20:33) It's 11:11 everybody just letting you know. But yeah, I think, for me, just that idea even of inherited physicality is so interesting, because if learn how our parent thinks, and how our parent relates to the world, then we model that and then our bodies express that as well. So I find that really interesting when you look at, I used to teach yoga to people in families quite regularly and you would see that the genetic, it's not even the structure is inherited, it's the mental and emotional weight is inherited. And you would see that manifest, and you would see how they would react and respond in similar ways to things. And that's one of the things I love about yoga, is because it offers us this opportunity to hold space for ourselves, to examine that and decide whether or not we really want to carry that on.   Tahnee:    (21:30) Because, sometimes those things are great. Sometimes we have power house parents who are super rad and really give us a lot of gifts and help us to really express our own unique gifts. And sometimes we have people that really just pass on a lot of trauma, and a lot of suffering. And this idea of, and Chinese Medicine talks about this too, around the ages of 28 to 30 is this transition out of the ... Jung's work in particular is really interesting on this stuff. And he took a lot of that from the Indian and Chinese traditions. But this idea that we start to release our parents and we start to forgive them for what they couldn't offer us. And then we take responsibility for what we need to manifest to really fully become ourselves as we move into our 30's and 40's. And I think that's, we don't talk about that much in our culture. There's a lot of blame and there can be a tendency to just go to therapy and to stay in this loop. And I love therapy, don't get me wrong. I think it's really powerful, but I think you have to graduate from therapy at some point.   Mason:    (22:30) Well, this, a lot comes back to the concept of why you'd have a practice to cultivate Qi, and move Qi, and why you'd be moving every day and why you'd be working on your emotions, why you'd be taking Qi tonics, why your diet is appropriate for you to cultivate Qi. Because if you've got this Qi moving, Qi needs to transform, that's why if anyone, if you are relating to your body in a stagnant Western model, if you're trying to be optimal, if you're trying to be balanced. There's just no such thing as a stagnation. Everything is constantly moving and moving into these stages. Moving into that place when you're 30, or if you're going to therapy and you're identifying these patterns and things that you've picked up from your parents. If you're healthy, if you've got strong Jing foundation, and Qi is said to be in the Treasure system, the child Jing, if your Qi is moving, then you're going to be able to actually transform things internally. That's the alchemy. As long as you keep on moving, I think that's what you were leaning to as well.   Tahnee:    (23:26) Yeah. Well that's what I think is super important because I think sometimes people just keep bumping up against themselves and they get stuck. And that's what I mean about, sometimes these external things, therapy or yoga, or meditation, all these things, they can almost become traps where we continue to validate ourselves through the external thing that we do. You can see that a lot in the spiritual community where it's okay I don't the way I was brought up. I'm going to really change that and then I'm going to push back against that culture, instead of really integrating the parts of you that are really from that culture. And this is a lot to do with that shadow work that Jung talks about. But we need to have really strong Qi, and strong Shen to do that work.   Tahnee:    (24:11) And a lot of the time when we're pushing back against something all the time, we waste a lot of our energy and this is our Qi, and so we don't have a lot available for healing. Even for clear thought, it's this idea of when we're depleted, which can be exhaustion, that's Jing Qi, because this is always, this was really confusing for me when I was first learning Chinese Medicine, it was Qi, Jing Qi, this Qi, that Qi, Yi Qi, so many Qi's.   Mason:    (24:36) Gu Qi, Kong Qi-   Tahnee:    (24:37) But everything is Qi. Yes. Everything, you're Qi, I'm Qi, matter is Qi, the bookshelf is Qi.   Mason:    (24:37) The laptop is Qi.   Tahnee:    (24:37) Yeah. But then the force is Qi, and this is where the idea from yoga of Shiva and Shakti is really helpful for me, because if you think of Shiva as form and Shakti as ... I'm sorry, Shiva is consciousness and Shakti is form. So this idea of the union of consciousness and form is the expression of Qi in the manifest world. So we see in this 3D reality form because of Qi, and because of its interactions and from that Yin and Yang in the five phases, this is this snowball I guess of creation. And then when we want to transform our Qi, we have to really engage those two forces. We have to engage the Shakti, which is more the Jing. The Shakti is the reproductive force. It's that cellular force that regenerates and if you want to have healthy cells and not have cancer, and all of these things, it's, yes strong Jing, strong Shakti.   Tahnee:    (25:43) I actually read a really interesting study last night. This is a small tangent, but they studied, I think it was a hundred and something people who had Alzheimer's, and they were looking at the types of patterns, because you know how you were saying before that a headache can be Liver Yang, it can be this, it can be that. So they looked at the percentage of people with which patterns, and 100% or maybe, it might have been 99%, a hundred people of 110 or something, had a Kidney deficiency, basically a Jing deficiency. And then on top of that they had extra things. So it's 70% had a Liver thing, and this many had a Spleen thing and whatever.   Tahnee:    (26:24) But nearly everyone had a Jing thing. And I was isn't that interesting? We talk about brain function all the time, we talk about this ability to maintain the health of our brain, which is the sea of marrow in Chinese Medicine, which comes and originates from the Kidneys. And this simple study, just looking at the patterns of every person with that, every single one of them, nearly, had a Jing deficiency.   Mason:    (26:49) And what I was alluding to before, just so there's a clearness in tonality, having those kinds of patterns, just being recognised that normally if this, it's going to be a Kidney at the source of it. What is limiting and what Tahns isn't talking about is going, oh okay, so if you have Alzheimer's, we treat the Kidneys this way. That's a Western model. That's starting, so if you're going to an acupuncturist ... I'm not throwing shit at anyone, they're probably going to be able to be effective, but let's just say me going in my new cracked out, reading Rhonda Chang stage.   Mason:    (27:24) If you go to an acupuncturist and they're I treat diabetes, I treat Alzheimer's. That's what I specialize in. Just be careful because in that instance of we see a pattern most of the time with Alzheimer's, being there's a Jing thing. Well you can map that back to the sea of marrow that Tahns is talking about, being governed by the Kidneys and the Kidney Water. But then being able to go out, if there's rules that arise through studies, then you're stepping outside of medicine.   Mason:    (27:58) Australia is stepping outside of the Chinese Medicine. You need to be able to recognise patterns and then be able to make sure that you can go in and break all rules if necessary, in treating what's personally going on within that person's Wu Xing element. Because why is that going on within their Kidneys, for some it might be, they've been around too much Fire burning up their Water. There might be the Spleen, it might be a Spleen thing, Spleen might be-   Tahnee:    (28:22) Yeah for sure.   Mason:    (28:23) So anyway, just wanted to put that caveat just in case anyone was confused by my tonality before.   Tahnee:    (28:28) Yeah. Well I think, I guess if we can just make it clear that each individual gets treated, not the disease. There's no pathological identifying, often in the translations of the texts it will be febrile diseases. But at the end of the day we're looking at, what is this individual pattern, what is this individual treatment plan for the person presenting in front of us. And it will change in time depending on the season, depending on the state of their life, depending on all sorts of things. So how you would treat someone when they're pregnant is going to be very different to how you would treat them when they're not pregnant, because their body's operating in totally different states of-   Mason:    (29:09) Yeah. Which is really annoying for a Western mind.   Tahnee:    (29:13) Well, I think it is a different head. And I know for me it took, I think it took me a few years to really be able to put on a Chinese Medicine hat and-   Mason:    (29:25) You almost have to be in a bit of a parasympathetic state to be able to rest and digest actually what, the gravity of just that personalisation.   Tahnee:    (29:32) Yeah. Well there's a book that I read recently that I really loved, which I felt really encapsulated a lot of the stuff I learned and-   Mason:    (29:39) What's that?   Tahnee:    (29:40) It's called Digesting the Universe, I brought it for you.   Mason:    (29:42) Yeah, that's right.   Tahnee:    (29:44) But yeah, he talks a lot about just this idea of literally digesting the universe. This capacity about bodies, not just to digest the food that we eat and the air that we breathe and all of these things. But also to digest our purpose, our emotions, the energy coming from the universe. That's the purpose of the human is to sort of be this bridge between heaven and earth. And it's a really powerful mission, I suppose. And where, I guess this gets pretty esoteric, and we probably should start talking about Qi a bit more, but it's this super important thing because it's well, if we're looking at why we want to be strong and healthy, why are we want to cultivate Qi?   Tahnee:    (30:33) It comes back to this idea of so we can really embody our full potential in our time here. So we aren't just fighting with ourselves and suffering. There's a certain amount of challenge involved in every life of course, but we can meet it with grace, or we can meet it with more pain and more suffering. And so I think this is, for me, this idea of the Triple Treasures is a really powerful one in terms of just how to best move through life in a graceful way, I suppose. Because it's Jing, that foundation, the form, the structure, Qi, the animating force, the metabolism and the movement of energy in the body-   Mason:    (31:13) And emotions.   Tahnee:    (31:14) Yeah, and emotions and thought. And then Shen, the ability to really be tapped into the higher source of consciousness or whatever, in the 3D reality. Not needing to go live in the astral plane. Because the Taoist Masters can do that, my teacher can go astral travel till the cows come home, but-   Mason:    (31:33) And then the cows are come home Master Chia, I'm bloody hungry mate.   Tahnee:    (31:38) Yeah. And my other teacher, Paul's teacher, he would do a lot of healing in the astral, he would work a lot with spirits and ghost and-   Mason:    (31:45) [crosstalk 00:31:45] that was?   Tahnee:    (31:46) Dr.Motoyama, I'll put his links to his books in the show notes.   Mason:    (31:51) So that's especially around karma.   Tahnee:    (31:53) No, he did a lot of work, actually scientific work in measuring the Meridians-   Mason:    (31:58) Oh that's right, he was the groundbreaking right?   Tahnee:    (32:01) Well his work hasn't been accepted by mainstream science yet, but he put people in ... I've got an interview with Paul coming up so I won't tell the story too much because listen to Paul. But yeah-   Mason:    (32:10) Paul Grilley that is.   Tahnee:    (32:11) Paul Grilley. Yeah, he put people in the Faraday cage and had the Taoist Masters on the outside and on the inside, so a Faraday cages impermeable to magnetic and electrical force. Right, so if you're in a Faraday cage, you're isolated, there's nothing can get through to you. And they had machines in there that would measure Qi, and they were able to see that the Taoist Master could transmit his Qi through this Faraday cage, which is wild because you can't send an electronic signal through there. You can't send a mobile signal through there, whatever-   Mason:    (32:42) Were they picking it up as an electrical signal?   Tahnee:    (32:45) They have really sensitive equipment that can measure Qi. So he divides this thing called the AMI, which measures the Meridians. And Paul and Suzee both had, they were both attached to it, and he could use this machine to tell what people's constitutional weaknesses were. So his was heart, Dr. Motoyama's, and he died of a heart thing in the 80's-   Mason:    (33:03) Well he predicted that before that?   Tahnee:    (33:04) Yeah, in his 40's of something, he was, ah that's my weakness, that's how I'm going to go.   Mason:    (33:09) That's even our acupuncturist, even just relating to what type of constitution are you? In that Charles Moss style of what's going to dictate, are you a Fire constitution, are you a Water constitution, and then associating that somewhat with where your constitutional deficiency is. That was an interesting thing for me. Where's your constitutional deficiency? If you're deficient there, that's essentially ... You're going to die of something, and that is going to be a dictation of what constitution you have.   Tahnee:    (33:41) Yeah. And I think what's cool when you know that is, this is what John, our acupuncturist says to me all the time, he's live in your element. So it's actually, even if it's your weak... Not that it's your weak spot, but you'll feel best in your element, but you'll also, that will be where you'll show imbalance as well. So I'm a liver constitution. And so for me, moving fast, being creative, thinking, ideas, those things will really stimulate me. Getting shit done, that's my constitution, and when I'm in that, when I'm full of blood and full of Qi and rested and juicy, my upward Yang can express. But if I start to deplete that, then I'll get Heat, then I'll get digestive stuff, then I'll get my Kidneys tapped out, which is all related to this Liver system getting overwrought. And me overdoing my constitution.   Tahnee:    (34:39) So it's learning to embody the gifts of your constitution without flogging your constitution, I suppose.   Mason:    (34:48) Yeah.   Tahnee:    (34:49) A fire person might be really charismatic and great at speaking and really enthusiastic and able to bring all the joy. But if they overdo it, they're going to get depressed and tapped out and want to hide from everybody. So there's this Yin and Yang, I suppose, of the constitution embodiment as well. But I love these ideas, Ayurveda has prakruti and vikruti, which are your foundational constitution and then what you're currently out of whack in. So I might go and get acupuncture for my Spleen if I'm out of whacking in my Spleen, but my underlying constitution is Liver. And often the acupuncturist will still treat the Liver Channel as well because ... and this is what Rhonda talks about a lot, if someone's a Livery person, you can treat the Spleen, but it's not going to do as well as if you actually treat the Liver and the Spleen, or just the Liver in some cases.   Mason:    (35:39) Yeah right, that's what Charles Moss talks about a lot as well. That's what, what's his name? That was-   Tahnee:    (35:43) Wellesley.   Mason:    (35:43) Wellesley's, not Matt Wellesley-   Tahnee:    (35:48) I can't remember.   Mason:    (35:48) Anyway.   Tahnee:    (35:48) John Wellesley's maybe.   Mason:    (35:50) Wellesley, whether ... I'm not complete-   Tahnee:    (35:53) 1.    Wellesley he is.   Mason:    (35:58) The J stands for, Jay Wellesley. I'm unsure of the effectiveness of his work. All I know is the work, that Power of the Five Elements book by-   Tahnee:    (36:15) Charles Moss.   Mason:    (36:15) Charles Moss is super interesting. So I don't know whether it actually works too well, but I assume it does, in some instances. But their thing is find the constitutional deficiency, or typing, and then just treat it. And if you treat it, you're going to create such a dam release of Qi that it's going to essentially clear up other blockages. I think that's a very simplistic, I think however there's so much truth to be able to, you need to know where to go, where's the pinnacle point? Where's the king or queen pin that you can just hit? And then, at the same time, go and find where the almost symptomatic deficiency is, and then treat it that way as well. Until you can get back to that constitutional deficiency.   Tahnee:    (37:00) Yeah. Well I think this is where, if we look at Qi and for example the Qi blend, it gets interesting because ... So we have a culture of anxiety and overthinking and doing a lot and worry and-   Mason:    (37:12) Not being able to digest the universe.   Tahnee:    (37:14) Yeah. And at this particular time, especially, we've just had crazy bushfires raging through Australia, it's flooding now today, the M1 is flooded, which is the big highway near where we live. So this is within three or four months we've had a bushfire and now we're having a flood. And so these things challenge our ability, they challenge of Shen, right? They challenge our ability to understand and integrate, and so they can really deplete us, because we're trying to hold on and-   Mason:    (37:43) Make meaning.   Tahnee:    (37:44) Make sense of these things, which really comes through our Spleen, Spleen Stomach pairing. I'm just going to say Spleen now because it's easier for me. But this Spleen organ, which is the digestion and transformation of the things that we take in, which is everything from food and water and stuff, but also information, ideas-   Mason:    (38:04) And heavenly Qi.   Tahnee:    (38:06) Yeah. And so when we're looking at how we use Qi herbs and what, it's with Jing, so many people are exhausted and they're burning the candle at both ends, so by working on the Kidney Channel, they get results. But if you understand your constitution, I'm constitutionally Liver, so I'll take Liver herbs all the time, and then I'll have things Jing and Qi herbs regularly, because they support the main organs that support or draw from my Liver. Right?   Tahnee:    (38:39) So just from my understanding of the elements, I just know that if I stay in that triangle, it really helps me to stay balanced. Whereas other people might be more Heart, Lung, Tiver people. So the different constitutions are going to have different combinations of formulas that work well for them. And if you look at all the longevity formulas, they were really working with the Triple Treasure herbs, the Jing, Qi, Shen herb's and they were working, probably in my opinion, with herbs that were good for their constitutions. You look at the guys that lived on He Shou Wu and Ginseng, yeah they were using these herbs to really bolster their capacity to hold Qi in the Meridians. And so what we're looking for is to get stronger.   Tahnee:    (39:23) And to get stronger is, I think of this as the great analogy that, I don't know who taught me this, but it's always stayed with me, You want to increase your capacity to hold more bandwidth. So it's if you dig a channel and run water through it, if it's only shallow and you put a lot of water through, it just floods out and you can get quite unwell from that, putting too much Qi in too soon. So people that do Vipassana and lose their marbles, which happens, they hadn't built the Qi capacity, the Pranic capacity to hold what they were-   Mason:    (39:57) What's coming through.   Tahnee:    (39:58) What's coming through, yeah.   Mason:    (39:58) The same with plant medicine, you see people just-   Tahnee:    (40:01) It's just getting electrocuted. It's just too much energy through a system that wasn't designed to hold.   Mason:    (40:06) Too much insight.   Tahnee:    (40:06) Yeah. And you can't integrate it because it's too much too soon. So what we look at with herbs and meditation and physical practice, and this is why if you look at Chinese Healing, it does include not just herbs, but Qi Gong, it includes breathing practices. It includes acupuncture, massage, meditation's, these kinds of things-   Mason:    (40:26) Taoist yoga.   Tahnee:    (40:27) Yeah, because we have to work on the multidimensional experience in a multidimensional way. So just to meditate all the time is going to put you out of whack, but just doing exercise all the time and never meditating is going to put you out of whack. So you need to find the middle ground between all these things, and it's going to be a little different for each individual as well. But this is what we're looking to do. So when you start taking tonic herbs, you take a little and you just let your body adjust and you start to open up to that. And it's the same with QI blend, right?   Tahnee:    (40:59) This is going to nourish the Spleen, it's going to nourish the Lungs, it's going to support the capacity of the body to draw energy, which means you're going to have more available energy, but you don't want to go crazy hard on that at the beginning. You want to make sure that you just ease into that. And in time your body will get used to running more Qi through the Meridians. Which you can think of the Meridians if you need a physical analogy, as the spaces in between the tissues and the bones. So they're correlated to the fluids that run through the fascia.   Tahnee:    (41:29) And if you look up extracellular tissue, extracellular matrix, look up fascia, F-A-S-C-I-A, you can have a look at this gelatinous gooey substance that exists inside of the body. And the theory at the moment is that this is where the Qi runs, because when you look at the myofascial Meridians and what the Taoists, where the Chinese and the Taoists lay it out in the Meridian points, they correlate to these fascial lines in the body. And they're individualised to each person. So again, you'll look at an acupuncture book and it'll say, this point is too C-U-N, Cun from the midline or whatever, but that's going to be based on the individual's body and their size. So for someone who's a giant like me, it's going to be slightly different to someone who's really small and compact, their Meridian points will be closer together.   Tahnee:    (42:18) And it's just on account of that the scale of their body is different. And so you want to look at increasing your capacity to hold energy. And this is where we, in our lives, use movement practice. We use breathing practice, we use herbs, we use good food. We use rest, because all of these things allow the body to grow and change. And this is the purpose of life, right? Is to learn to be with change, be with the Tao, with the flow of life, and to become really capacitated and powerful and strong in ourselves.   Tahnee:    (42:51) And so I think this blend really excites me because I think, when we look at children, when we look at our culture of poor digestion and the amount of people that have crap digestion is just out of control. And when you look at this ability to digest life, and as a metaphor for digestion, it's well yeah, if you're having digestive problems, what aren't you digesting? What in your life, this was a huge one for me. I, in inverted commas, can't eat gluten and certain things and it's a lot to do with, for me it was a lot to do with working through the emotional as well as the physical stuff that was required for me to be in a capacity to digest and to receive and to take in nourishment from what I was eating.   Tahnee:    (43:39) And so when we work on our Qi, we work on strengthening the Organ Systems involved in that. And that's the Earth Element. This is, Rhonda talks about it as a soil, and it's tending our garden, it's creating a really fertile bed in which to plant the seeds of our Dharma to spring forth. And I feel it's a really foundational, if you look at a lot of the ways the five phases are drawn, the Earth is in the center. It's the middle of it all, and it's the beginning of the all, and the end of it all, we begin in the soil and we end in the soil.   Tahnee:    (44:11) And if you look at chemical matter, which is what we are, we're carbon based life form, the soil is full of carbon. It's this idea of composting, transforming the food with heat into nutrition for the body. There's our alchemical transfer-   Mason:    (44:26) In a big bag of bacteria.   Tahnee:    (44:29) Yeah, where-   Mason:    (44:31) That's the human body I'm talking about.   Tahnee:    (44:32) And soil, soil is bacteria, we're bacteria. There's a lot of correlation when you look at these analogies they chose were really, really good. They really encapsulated something that is so easy to understand and so simple, but has such depth. And that's what I find so inspiring about it. Because I feel like sometimes the more I learn, the more I reaslise how simple it is.   Mason:    (44:54) Well that's it, the simplicity is what there is. And that's why, it's an interesting thing. I watch my own Western mind, even to an extent wanting to go and carve it up and explain it. What does it mean? And what were they meaning by that? Ah, now it's almost validated, because I can see that correlation between soil and the human microbiota. And that's really interesting, I've made a mental connection. But in your mind, you're essentially going to be able to go take yourself further into a sympathetic state. You're not dropping down feeling, rest and digesting place, which is where healing happens. And so you see where this ineffectiveness of modern Chinese Medicine starts coming through because we need to make it all mental verse. Just being able to sit in the simplicity, which is where we're going to need to be sitting in our households working on our Qi for decades and decades and decades.   Mason:    (45:43) Does it make sense for us to go, right, I'm going to use these Qi herbs because I know that QI is an electromagnetic force and it gets collected in this part of this spleen, not the actual Spleen element, the actual spleen organ, and I have to know about the spleen organ and I need to know about its relationship to the pancreas. It's not realistic when you're just trying to enjoy your life and spread more awesomeness. To an extent, going into, specialisation is interesting and it's good, but the simplicity, what you're talking about there, is just, that's always what's going to make this accessible and then allow there to be consistency.   Mason:    (46:15) What you were talking about before with heavenly Qi, I think it's got everything to do with the Qi herbs. It's got everything to do with these herbs, Codonopsis, White Atractylodes, and Poria and Astragalus, in that humans being the bridge between heaven and earth is what, it's a core in many philosophies and it's a core Taoist belief, which is, just being a metaphor in itself. I don't mind it just been that. So we've got that relation, so it's Tian, Ren, Di, it's sky, human, earth, and each of those, they're Three Treasures in themselves. Right?   Mason:    (46:52) And so we see, same as with Shiva being that Yang and being that consciousness, and then that Qi, humanity being associated with that treasure of Qi. And then we see the Shakti being that earth and that Yin, it makes sense. It's the same as, Pachamama being mother earth and earth, and Pachacarma, that father son in the shamanic circles. But you can see then there's Three Treasures in, for sky we see sun, moon, stars, humans, we see Jing Qi Shen, and then for earth see water, wind, fire. So they've got their own Jing, Qi ,Shen.   Mason:    (47:31) But humans sit in the middle, We are most appropriately, if we're going to be a bridge, Qi is going to encapsulate us the most. And that's why you, we see ... that's why I'm excited to have more and more Qi blends coming through just in our little, and being able to educate about Qi and the cultivation and Qi and movement Qi in our little circle. In our little circle here, because Jing has been such a focus because everyone's been I need energy. Everyone's been so exhausted and so that's not a place to start. You need a foundation, you need an actual ... You need to be connected to say the gas, you need wood to burn in order to actually have digestion, or to have immunity. To have physicality, to have the possibility for your skeletal system to stay appropriately strong throughout your life, for your knees to stay strong, so you don't just start deteriorating, which we see.   Mason:    (48:22) Celebrating Western Medicine, but everyone's deteriorating at 60 years old. And that's well that's what happens, the thinning of the artery wall, that happens when you're 60, we can hold that off a little. But that's not what I believe is the normality. But at the same time that Jing, once you've got a lifestyle where you're not leaking that Jing, as we know, well where do we move? That's why a lot of the Taoists would be, Jing herbs would be there, in their circulation. The less stressed they were, the less they had to continue to take Jing herbs, you would take them every now and then.   Mason:    (48:59) Maybe water was, they have a Kidney Water constitution. And so that's why they enjoy it. And maybe sometimes they just putting a little extra money in the bank by taking a Jing herb. But a lot of the time you're going to see them sit. A lot of people sit, in their tonic herbal practice, on Qi herbs longterm. Okay, so why is that? Because it's the bridging force, it's that bridging Treasure. And yes, we're going to be talking about how digestion wise, the Spleen Earth system is what is taking in food, and able to cook and ferment our food. It somewhat controls that metabolic fire, and our ability to then extract what we need from what we're eating. Especially if you're eating a diet, something that's appropriate for you and your diet.   Mason:    (49:49) You were speaking to that before. It's why you've personally had to move away from a bit of a vegetarian diet, because you need lots of blood, and if you don't have lots of Blood, your Liver is going to be deficient in Blood because it stores, and you see things go wrong. That's why you can't go into this Chinese medical, Western compartmentalise, symptomatic external idea based of how to treat. The same way you can't go into external diets, this diet's correct, just with some nuance. You can't start with ideology, you can't start with institutional thinking. You need to start ... and you can't just go, offhand, but everyone's individual, everyone needs to personalise. Yeah, you do. But that's where you absolutely need to start with no prejudice in terms of how that person needs to live. Whether it's in a medical system or whether a dietary system.   Mason:    (50:44) But in that nature of us being that middle treasure, and that bridge, it's why, also with this lifestyle that we've got a movement practice that's moving out our Jing. We're increasing our ... What was the analogy you were using, in terms of you don't actually have the bandwidth. We need to slowly, with consistently, through a good diet, good Qi herbs, through our, whatever it is, you're own type of meditative practice, and breathing practice. Even just breathing well, they don't need to be real clinically done either, it's just a lifestyle that's hopefully not too stressed out. So you can breathe. You don't need to be this monastery, two hours a day practicing yogi.   Mason:    (51:32) I think that's another big thing, there's too much pressure. Find your own way. You can go your own way, with finding how to cultivate your Qi, without prejudice of what it's going to look like. So in that sense, we're in a rest digest place, so that we're able to actually digest the food that we're eating. But once we're in that place where our lifestyle is becoming extremely individualised, but it's visceral, it's felt. I'm moving, not because the CrossFit person or the Ashtanga yoga person, or whatever it is, they told me to move that way. I'm connected to my body and how I'm going to move myself and move my Qi. And that's going to increase your bandwidth. All of that, allows you to digest the universe because you're moving your Qi, and you're cultivating Qi, and that's all you need.   Mason:    (52:22) We don't need to theoretically understand the in's and out's of how the universe is working, in order to do this. It can't be done solely, or even in a dominant sense, in this mental framework and especially within a sympathetic nervous system turned on. Fight or flight, which we're all doing. We're all fighting. We're all fighting to justify our existence, especially with social media. Definitely feeling that come up in myself recently, trying to personalise more and more. Just nuances of it, but can you really just sit in a rest and digest place? Then you're actually going to be able to cultivate some Qi.   Mason:    (52:58) When you start cultivating your Qi, you're actually, and through the Qi herbs they're going to be focusing on your Spleen Earth and your Lung Metal, to make sure that you're getting a lot from your food, get a lot of Gu Qi from your food, and a lot of Kong Qi from the air that you are breathing. And then beginning to cultivate that electromagnetic charge within those organ systems, but then also unifying those two daily forms of Qi so that that can, in the Yang form, be distributed into your subcutaneous tissue, into your surface Meridians. That's known as your Wei Qi. And so that's what keeps you protected.   Mason:    (53:34) And then also down into your deeper Meridians, the 12 major Meridians and beyond. To actually nourish your tissue, or to nourish your organ system. Sorry. And in that sense, when you can get a lifestyle flow going down that route, you're drawing less and less and less and less and less on your Jing in order to get through the day. And more and more and more via your movement practice, breath, food, Qi herbs, right? You're drawing on, you're increasing your capacity and your bandwidth to utilise daily Qi. And the idea is, you get so good at that, which is, this is where the Taoism comes in, whether it's for everyone or not, but you can actually start then creating so much, and cultivating so much that then that can percolate down and start to be stored as Jing. Right? Because remember Jing is just Qi. They're not completely different things. It's just different-   Tahnee:    (54:25) It's our chemical form of Qi. I think there's ... I can't remember the numbers, but there's in one of the Taoists alchemy texts they talk about, it takes seven whatever's of Qi to and make one whatever of Jing, I don't know if you can remember the?   Mason:    (54:41) No.   Tahnee:    (54:41) No. And the same with, that much to create Shen, it's this really huge process of refinement. And one of the things I think that's really important to think about, is that idea of exhaustion, if you're going through the day and by three or four you're completely knackered and you still have to push through. Let's say you have small children, we know all about this, you have to push through till eight or nine until they're finally in bed and you can start to unwind and rest. Then you've basically just used all your Qi by three, and you're now tapping into your reserves. And this is having to go into a savings account every week to live. You're going to run out of cash at some point. And that's when we hit that exhaustion that people contact us about.   Mason:    (55:27) Yeah. Can I talk to ... Because there's a nuance there that is, I think it's useful for people, just remembering, you, may have been working on your Jing for a long time that you might get to that three o'clock or that four o'clock and you feel fatigue. So for that fatigue or that fatigueness in your limbs, mental fatigue, that's more closely associated with that treasurer of Qi.   Tahnee:    (55:51) Yeah, like heaviness.   Mason:    (55:52) Yeah.   Tahnee:    (55:52) And even, if you imagine sagginess ... I don't know how to best explain this, but you know when you've been on a plane for a while and your feet get fluidy and heavy and swollen and stuff, that's because your Qi is stagnating, is not able to circulate, and you've run out of battery power, I suppose, to move your Qi.   Mason:    (56:14) And there is, don't mistake that for the fact that when you get to three to five o'clock, it's bladder time in the Organ Wheel, and that is a time for less intense energy.   Tahnee:    (56:28) Yeah, but that's where you would have a yoga nidra, or go have a cup of Qi, and do a meditation or something that recharges you.   Mason:    (56:37) Absolutely, do a ... That's what I did, I went live yesterday on Superfeast, and I was having a little rebound, and I had my afternoon Qi. But just to, you might have your lifestyle dialed in where you don't become exhausted necessarily. It might take a few months of you not really changing until you really actually start going, shit, I'm getting exhausted here. So in that instance, it's a perfect time to be working with these Qi herbs, right. Verse, if you are actually exhausted and you need external stimulus to give you willingness to get up and get going. That is a Jing deficiency, and you need to use lifestyle and Jing herbs. And that's when you potentially need to make big changes in your life in order to ensure that you're not leaking your Jing.   Mason:    (57:25) But it's almost, with Qi, it's almost a little harder, because the subtlety, you can't just do a 30 days of Qi and then completely change the direction of the way your emotional patterns work, and the way you've constructed your workflow and all these kinds of ... you can't just do, 30 days of Jing, people get off stimulants, get on Jing and then can feel completely recharged, in terms of what it's it changes their lives. My gosh, I'm not leaking Jing, you were able to do something.   Mason:    (57:57) Qi is, it's more subtle. It's more transformational and rewarding in the end, but it takes that little more consistency. It's less extreme, but the rewards of you altering your lifestyle in minute ways. Oh, I need to do a little less exercise, a little less, more of that exercise. I need to alter my diet. So this is where it challenges ideologies, right? So when you're Jing deficient, you open yourself up to ideologies, because you don't have a foundation of who you are, and what you are. But then once you've plugged that Jing deficiency, you've still got those identities externally attached to ways your parents lived, the way we live in the West, the way a liberal voter lives, a way a vegan lives, or a carnivore lives or whatever it is.   Mason:    (58:45) But in the Qi stage, when you're cultivating more and more Qi, you are personalising more and more for yourself. So you need to know yourself and understand yourself. And that can be confronting, because you need to know yourself emotionally. I'm definitely confronted by it, it's difficult work. You need to start understanding what's actually going to work for you. So it's going to challenge every prejudice that you had about yourself and every little external identity grab that you had. So just know, that's where you're really getting alchemical internally, when you get to this point when you can sit in the middle and cultivate that Qi. And when you do have that Qi flowing and cultivating, through these things that we're talking about, that's when you naturally, your flame gets bigger, and your light, your Shen, you can start actually really learning some deep things about yourself. And learning from life experiences and bringing that forth in your own wisdom, which is your Shen.   Tahnee:    (59:42) I think, what I'm really thinking about while I listened to you talk about that is, this idea, I think we were talking about it before, not in the podcast, but before we came on, but about, how basically the idea is to become a wise child. And if you look at a child, if they have an emotion and they're permitted to have it, it just gets expressed. They have a tantrum, they kick, they scream, it lasts for five, 10 minutes and then it's done. And then they're hey, can we go play in the muddy puddle, or whatever. And it's, that energy hasn't been stopped in their body and it hasn't created a blockage.   Tahnee:    (01:00:24) And what we do as adults, over time, and we learned this from childhood, and thi

Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares how abdominal massage helps digestion, absorption and elimination and why this could prevent disease. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com/ Featured Product: http://sarinastone.com/chi-nei-tsang.html    

Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares information about a complex QiGong meditation to be performed once your Inner Smile practice has been mastered. Blending fire, metal, wood, earth and water using Taoist Inner Alchemy. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com https://www.sarinastone.com PRODUCT PAGE: http://sarinastone.com/5-element-qigong.html

Grandmaster Mantak Chia answers questions about ancient Taoist magic. He discusses history, Chinese shamanism and how Hollywood has changed our perception of what magic is. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com https://www.sarinastone.com FEATURED PRODUCT: https://sarinastone.com/manifest-destiny.html

Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares information about a QiGong meditation designed to connect us all consciously and then infect the field with abundance, love and health. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universaltao.com https://www.sarinastone.com Featured Product: : Learn the World Link Meditation

Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares a QiGong form designed to awaken deep inner knowledge and self-awareness. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com https://www.sarinastone.com Learn More: https://sarinastone.com/manifest-destiny.html  

Aisha Sieburth shares how QiGong movements unlock stuck energy and support emotional detoxification. This totally supports brain function, muscular health and our ability communicate comfortably. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. Links: https://www.taodelavitalite.org https://sarinastone.com Featured Product: https://sarinastone.com/mens-qigong.html    

Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares the Medical QiGong technique of connecting the mind to the organs and using inner alchemy for health and longevity. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com https://www.sarinastone.com FEATURED PRODUCT PAGE: https://sarinastone.com/inner-smile.html

Today’s podcast – Aisha Sieburth shares how Tao practice helps women learn about their beautiful body and how attain and maintain sexual organ health through the Healing Love QiGong. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. More about Aisha:  https://www.taodelavitalite.org More about Sarina: https://sarinastone.com Featured product: https://sarinastone.com/womens-qigong.html    

Taoism? The Way? All sorts of esoteric references exist that do a bad job of describing the origin and justification for this system of self mastery, medicine and universal understanding. In this amazing deep dive with Master Mantak Chia we delve into the beautifully simple yet profound philosophy of Taoism. The great man has taught over 500,000 people about Taoism since he first went to New York over 40 years ago, espousing the principles of the 5 element system, and helping countless people engage with their physiology, their health and the world around them through this profound healing modality. This was such an amazing opportunity, and Master Chia was really on fire, describing colossal and mind bending concepts such as Qi/Chi, the life force and universal energy systems with such simple and effective metaphors that we were allowed to gain superb insight into this ancient eastern philosophy, and glean practical advice from this Taoist Master on many aspects of wellness including the inner smile to support organ health and qi flow, and some great insight into capturing and enhancing sexual energy for men and women alike. This one was a real treat for us, we sincerely hope you enjoy the journey :)    

Today’s podcast – Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares simple QiGong exercises to be practiced while seated at work or while traveling. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com, https://www.universal-tao.com, https://www.sarinastone.com PRODUCT PAGE: https://sarinastone.com/pain-relief.html

Have you ever felt been plagued by some physical ailment or had a mystery pain that won't seem to subside?  Sometimes the health of our physical body eludes us and finding the root cause can seem out of reach….enter medical qigong. This week, I had Medical QiGong educator, practitioner and consultant, Sarina Stone on the show.  Sarina's story with quigong begins with meeting Medical QiGong Master, Mantak Chia. He taught Sarina that her emotions produced energy and that energy affects everything, including her health at the time.  He showed her that the energy generated by a smile could change her day, her life, and the lives of people around her. She was healed from a number of maladies using Universal Healing Tao Medical QiGong meditations. As a result, she studied with Master Chia for over 25 years and developed many incredible products that help others achieve radiant health and emotional balance. “You can't really have a healthy body if you have an unhealthy energetic system.  Whether it is emotional energy or the physical electromagnetic energy - we first we have to master ourselves and it is absolutely possible, I am living proof. “ – Sarina Stone On today's episode, Sarina shares about the various types of qigong, how the practice can help you feel younthful, and how to understand our own sexual energy! Last week Laura Powers shared about how to receive messages, how to know the difference between fear and intuition, and what angels everyone should connect with. Check out last week's episode to find out more! If you haven't had the chance to download the guided meditation that I have been talking about in the last few episodes, grab it now! Also, don't forget to listen to the end of the episode for this week's new take action item! To find out more about Sarina Stone visit her website. Send me your questions and show topic requests to info@thesoulfrequency.com .  Follow me on Facebook  and on Instagram. There is nothing better than living a life that feels good to you and having people support you in doing so. LISTEN TO MORE SOUL FREQUENCY SHOWS! WANT TO SHARE THE SHOW? –  share this show through iTunes and many other podcast directories. WANT TO LEAVE US A REVIEW? – leave us a review in iTunes!  I would love to hear from you!! As always, my hope for you is that you love big and live abundantly! xo

Today’s podcast – Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares what that luminescent violet light is that so many people see when they meditate, connect with source and make love. Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com https://www.universal-tao.com https://www.sarinastone.com Featured Product: https://sarinastone.com/personalized-medical-qigong-training.html  

Today’s podcast – Grandmaster Mantak Chia shares where he spent 2017 and what he taught students from around the world.  So many countries, so much QiGong to share.  Sarina Stone is in Master Chia’s beautiful home in Thailand for this amazing series of conversations. https://www.mantakchia.com, https://www.universal-tao.com, https://www.sarinastone.com

Master Chia has over 50 years experience in his field and has educated tens of thousands of students in Taoist practices, whether in his facility in Thailand or in the seminars he has held in virtually every country on earth.  WATCH THIS FULL EPISODE FOR FREE: https://londonreal.tv/e/mantak-chia-sexual-energy/ 

Master Chia has over 50 years experience in his field and has educated tens of thousands of students in Taoist practices, whether in his facility in Thailand or in the seminars he has held in virtually every country on earth.    WATCH THIS FULL EPISODE FOR FREE: https://londonreal.tv/e/mantak-chia-sexual-energy/ 

Today’s show is about true nourishment vs. eating just to feel full. True Medical QiGong always includes nutrition - Master Chia is a fan of Five Element cooking. Our guest, Chef Marshall, explains how a simple understanding of food, water, sleep and dynamic movement provides profound support for a happier, healthier life. Get dynamic energy and stamina without harmful stimulants with Sarina’s favorite juice! Learn More About Master Mantak Chia Find Advanced Learning Materials, Books, Videos, and More On Sarina Stone's Website Discover The Healing Tao  

Today’s show is about true nourishment vs. eating just to feel full. True Medical QiGong always includes nutrition - Master Chia is a fan of Five Element cooking. Our guest, Chef Marshall, explains how a simple understanding of food, water, sleep and dynamic movement provides profound support for a happier, healthier life. Get dynamic energy and stamina without harmful stimulants with Sarina’s favorite juice! Learn More About Master Mantak Chia Find Advanced Learning Materials, Books, Videos, and More On Sarina Stone's Website Discover The Healing Tao

Today's show is about the importance of a healthy brain. Rich Wonder, Master Chia’s annual guest practitioner in Tao Garden offers simple, natural therapies that actually help the brain become fit and allows us to tap into higher knowledge – without drugs. Learn More About Rich Wonder Relax, Release, and Connect With People You Love With A Guided Meditation With Sarina Stone. Learn More About Master Mantak Chia Find Advanced Learning Materials, Books, Videos, and More On Sarina Stone's Website Discover The Healing Tao

Today's show is about our relationship to animals and the medical and physical benefits of having them in your life. Five Animal QiGigong has been in existence for thousands of years. Master Chia speaks often of our connection with nature; Mike Fry goes deeper in to the issue and gives great advice. Mike fry is an animal advocate who teaches animal shelters how to end the killing of healthy, or treatable pets. Today he proves that some of us really are healthier with a little unconditional love. Discover More About Animal Rights  No Kill Learningand No Kill Nation Listen To Great Music With Dreamy Piano and Ethereal Vocal Harmonies Highlighting Taoist Transformational Poetry and Story Telling. Learn More About Master Mantak Chia Find Advanced Learning Materials, Books, Videos, and More On Sarina Stone's Website Discover The Healing Tao

On today’s show, Master Chia answers questions from students and listeners from around the world. It might get a little weird. Want To Talk To An Expert About Medical QiGong? Make an appointment and do it! Learn More About Master Mantak Chia Find Advanced Learning Materials, Books, Videos, and More On Sarina Stone's Website Discover The Healing Tao

Mantak Chia is a Taoist Master. He is best known for his teaching Taoist practices under the names of Healing Tao, Tao Yoga, Universal Healing Tao System and Chi Kung. Throughout decades of teaching, he has run numerous workshops, written a series of books, and published a number of training videos. For this reason, some people call him an author, a teacher or a healer. He views himself primarily as a teacher, who helps his students empower themselves through cultivation of their chi.   CHAPTERS 00:00 Trailer. 02:00 Brian’s thoughts on the episode. 04:50 Brian’s introduction. 05:28 World-wide teaching. 07:14 Growing up in Thailand and starting to teach in New York. 10:09 What Chi is and why you need Qigong. 12:59 The abdominal area is where you can store energy. 14.56 How our second brain affects the brain in our head. 21:02 Scientists increasingly believe in the concept of energy. 22:09 Taking care of the five major organs. 23:38 When you’ve put the organ in the right place then there are the five elements. 25:31 Simple exercises for creating fluid and energy flow. 44:23 Using your inner smile to arrive at arousal. 59:53 Whole key around sexual energy is arousal. 1:04:37 To be a great lover you have to practice on your penis and ladies practice for gate one. 1:18:36 Learn how to work with the lady, through gates one to three. 1:25:51 Lady’s exercise for gate three. 1:31:46 Love and compassion has to go together with arousal and orgasm. 1:33:01 Length of time it takes to learn these techniques. 1:36:49 Mantak’s new book EMDR and the Universal Healing Tao. 1:37:33 Where Mantak discovered all these techniques. 1:38:14 You have to put the work in to feel the benefits. 1:40:23 A non-stop world-wide teaching lifestyle. 1:42:31 Success secrets. 1:43:22 How technological progress is affecting people. 1:45:27 Progressing from the popular practice of meditation. 1:48:24 What keeps Master Chia awake at night? 1:51:17 Phone call to the 20 year Mantak Chia. 1:52:44 Best advice Mantak ever received. 1:57:01 Advice to the 20 year old watching who wants to grow up doing great things. 1:58:13 Brian’s summing up.   NOTES Master Mantak Chia website http://mantakchia.com/ Master Mantak Chia on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Master-Mantak-Chia-68129403912/ Master Mantak Chia on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantak_Chia   BOOKS: The Multi Orgasm Man https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multi-orgasmic-Man-Sexual-Secrets-Should/dp/072253325X The Multi Orgasm Woman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Multi-Orgasmic-Woman-Sexual-Secrets-Should/dp/0061898074 Awakening Healing Light https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awaken-Healing-Light-Mantak-Chia/dp/0935621466 EMDR and the Universal Healing Tao https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/EMDR-Universal-Healing-Tao-Psychology-Overcoming-Emotional/1620555514 Other books by Mantak Chia https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mantak-Chia/e/B000APK3LG   TOPICS DISCUSSED Qi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi Tao or Dao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao Mesentery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesentery The second brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system Yin and Yang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang Parasympathetic nervous system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing EMDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing

On today’s show, Master Chia talks about psychedelic tripping – the Taoist way. The truth is, you don’t need to take drugs to have a psychedelic experience. Chinese monks have been doing it for thousands of years…

Master Mantak Chia is nothing short of Legendary Status. Born in 1944 in Bangkok, Thailand, to Chinese parents, Taoist Master Mantak Chia, 73, began his life's mission in 1950 at the ripe age of 6, when Buddhist monks began teaching him how to sit “and still the mind.” He was mesmerized by the intrigue of meeting Taoist Master One Cloud Hermit, “who demonstrated extraordinary powers.” One Cloud fully initiated Chia into the ancient and for century's secretly guarded practices. This episode covers SO MUCH. The energy body, balance, how to maintain and support a healthy energetic system. We get into karma, soul destiny, love. It took us 2 years to book Master Chia and it was worth every email we sent him. You will not hear this anywhere else. GAME-CHANGING LISTEN.

On today’s episode, Master Mantak Chia talks about stress. Some people say it has no effect on our health and wellness. Others say it has devastating effects on the immune, hormone and glandular systems, energy, and relationships. Master Chia is an expert on the subject and will explain why stress is a nasty killer.   For more information on Master Mantak Chia, please visit: MantakChia.com   For advanced learning materials, books, videos, and more, please visit: SarinaStone.com   For more information on The Healing Tao, please visit: Universal-Tao.com