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:…

In 2011 I flew to Malaysia specifically to meet Master Jiang Feng. I had been training seriously for a few years by that point and had heard about Faqi — the emission of Zhen Qi — but had never experienced it directly. I didn’t know what to expect. What I experienced that day was something…

The term gets used a lot in internal arts circles. Someone mentions they’re an indoor student of a well-known master and people are impressed. It sounds like the real thing. Serious transmission. A direct line to something authentic. Sometimes it is. Often it isn’t. Having been an indoor student of two lineages — Gengmen Pai…

If you have spent any time researching internal arts or meditation online, you have probably encountered all four of these terms. You may have wondered which one you should practice. You may have tried to understand how they relate to each other. You may have felt confused by apparently contradictory explanations from different sources. This…