Copied from my new book, this gives a clear overview of the neidan / internal alchemy process. The chapters before this one walked the path stage by stage, with their sources, their cautions and their detail. This chapter does something simpler and, for a beginner, more useful. It sets the whole process down in one…

When I first started researching this topic, I expected the answer to be fairly straightforward. The common assumption is that the oldest and most respected Neidan traditions favour a top-down approach to meditation. If that were true, I expected to find that the most famous masters had started training from childhood under close supervision, gradually…

Poor sleep is one of the most common health complaints in the modern world. And one of the most poorly addressed. The standard approach is to manage it — sleeping tablets, melatonin supplements, white noise, blue light glasses. These tools have their place but they share a fundamental limitation: they work around the problem rather…

Of the Three Treasures, Shen is the most difficult to define — and the most immediately visible when something is wrong. It is often translated simply as spirit or mind, but neither word fully captures it. Shen is mental vitality. It is consciousness. It is the energy that fuels the brain’s capacity to think clearly,…

Of the Three Treasures in classical Chinese medicine — Jing, Qi, and Shen — Jing is the most fundamental and the least understood. Most explanations reduce it to a kind of stored essence, a finite substance inherited at birth that gradually depletes over a lifetime. That framing captures something real, but it misses the fuller…

Most approaches to anxiety work on the mind. Therapy, mindfulness, breathwork apps — they address how you think about anxiety, or they offer techniques to manage it in the moment. Neigong takes a different approach entirely. It works on the body first. The mind follows. That distinction matters more than it might sound. The Foundation:…