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Ways To Wisdom
Chi Kung movements open the energy channels, enabling Chi to spontaneously flow to where it's needed in your body.
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The Importance of Breath
If you’re going to write, you need to learn an alphabet, and then you go on to create sentences, paragraphs, and on to the reason for writing itself: to communicate. It’s similar with the breath, though amazingly, not as obvious. Society knows the value of literacy and has established schools to develop it. But with ‘breathing, ‘ the attitude is: ‘Why pay any attention to that? It comes by itself (a reliable, yet risky assumption), and what more is there to learn about it?’
But for those people who are fortunate enough to hear that there is a bit more to the business of breathing, there are great benefits and joys to be had.
Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey
This section of The Dojo is inspired by the work of the late Joseph Campbell.
The insights of this master of mythology and masterful teacher continue to shine, and provide people with the clarity needed to take the next step towards that greatest of life’s accomplishments: a feeling of a life well-lived.
Most of us who know of his work, became aware of Joseph Campbell through his interviews with Bill Moyers on public television in the late 1980s. Out of these inspiring and guiding interviews came a shockingly simple and uplifting admonition from Campbell to the listener: Follow Your Bliss.” By which he meant:
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
The Power of Breath
My friend likes to make the point that people don’t really distinguish between “Life,” and what we do with the time that makes up our lives. For example, we search, hunt, and sometimes obsess, about what we want, without any real recognition of what it is that keeps us alive in the first place. This reminder always causes me to slow down a bit, and become aware of my breath. I take a few deep ones, and appreciate being able to do so, and become aware of the incredible thing “breath” is. Then I take one or two more, say “thank you,” and then continue doing what I’m doing.
Try it. It has a beneficial effect.