Keynote Address: Seventh Annual Taoist Gathering, Oakland, CA
Yi: Intention, Practice and the Incubation of the Sage
Lorie Eve Dechar, M.Ac.
Presented at the 7th Annual Taoist Gathering in Oakland, California

You are what you practice. We become what we do. I am an acupuncturist, an alchemist, writer of a book called Five Spirits, a teacher, partner, sister, daughter and mother. I am also a lover of the natural world, a rebel, a reader of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, a meditator who walks and wanders as well as sits. These are the things I do. Over time, they are the ways I have become. This morning, I would like to begin by talking about something I have done almost every day for the past 23 years, which is practice acupuncture.

I would like to begin with an acupuncture patient I have been working with for the past two years. His name is Mike. He’s 50 years old, has two beautiful kids, a smart and sexy wife and an interesting production job on a cutting edge TV show. Every time, he comes in for a session, I ask him, “So, how is it going, Mike?” And every time I ask, he replies the same way.

“Not so good. I just can’t get it together to make the changes I need to make. I tell myself to get up an hour early to take a walk and make myself a healthy breakfast. But, every day, it's the same thing. The alarm rings and a voice in my head, says, ‘what's the use?' I shut the alarm and go back to sleep. By the time I get up, it's late. I grab a cup of coffee and a donut, jump in the car and drive to work. You'd think having my chest cut open last year for open heart surgery would have gotten me to wake up and make some changes but it doesn't seem to have gotten through. I ask myself, ‘what's it gonna take?'

I sit across from Mike and ask myself the same question. What would it take? How I can help him. What point can I needle? What words can I speak? How do we ignite that spark of spirit that sets a human being off on the path of practice, on a journey of healing and transformation?

I have another patient, Hannah, who I have been working with on and off for the past eight years. She came to me for digestive problems related to a terrible anxiety disorder. This woman - who was only 25 when I started working with her - looks like an angel. It's hard to imagine that being inside her skin could be so painful. But for many years it has been.

Seven years ago, Hannah fell in love, married and very quickly, became a mother of three children. For a while, I lost touch with her. Then nine months ago, she called and made an appointment to come in for a session. She looked pale and drained and the anxiety was still a big problem. Dizziness, palpitations and phobias compounded the original digestive problems. But this time, Hannah was determined to get better.

“I don't want my kids to grow up seeing me this way,” she said.

We got to work with acupuncture, blood building tinctures, essential oils and Chinese herbs. Within a few weeks, the color came back to her cheeks and the light came back to her eyes.

“I'm feeling better,” she said. “But I still need to find some space for me. I need to do yoga and meditate but I have no time. Even if I try to get up early, the kids hear me and come running in wanting my energy and attention.”

I suggested she take one small step that she knew she could accomplish.

“I could make an altar in our bedroom,” she said. “I could make one clear space just for me that would remind me to breathe.”

The next time she came in, she told me she had made the altar on a bookshelf in her bedroom. Her husband had given her a little plant as a gift that could sit on the shelf.

“He gave it to me and said, ‘this is for when you start meditating.' I felt bad that I haven't started yet.”

“That's ok,” I assured her. “You set an intention and you followed through. That's the beginning. Now maybe there's another small step you could take.”

I continued to support Hannah with acupuncture and herbs, focusing on points that would support her spirit and strengthen her energy. Over the summer, she took a trip. She went on an airplane, an experience that had always triggered panic but she was determined to face her fear and eventually it dissipated.

“I just kept breathing,” she told me. “It was actually kind of fun. For the first time in my life, I realized I'm me, not my anxiety.”

Two weeks later, she came in to my office beaming. There was a dramatic change, as if a veil had lifted and I was seeing her spirit for the first time.

“I got it,” she said.

“You got what?” I asked.

“I got that I just have to start where I am because that's the place I need to be. I just have to start practicing. Even five or ten minutes make a huge difference. I don't care anymore if the house is a mess. I don't need a whole hour with everything quiet. I have three kids. It's not going to look like Yoga Journal. Any time I have a minute, I just put down my mat and do a Sun Salutation. It doesn't matter if I'm in the bathroom or the closet or in front of the kitchen sink . . . I can sit on the floor, breathe, do one Downward Dog or a Cat Stretch.”

I was bowled over. I sat across from this beautiful, beaming woman who was speaking words of wisdom as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Without knowing it, she was paraphrasing one of the greatest Taoist alchemical texts, The Secret of the Golden Flower, which states, “There's no need to fix the length of time of the meditation; it is only essential to set aside all involvements and sit quietly for a while.”

“That's it,” I said. “I think you're getting at it.”

“Yea,” she said. “I think I am. I still get anxious, I still get tired, the house is a mess, we have money problems and the kids sometimes get on my nerves but that's ok. All I have to do is meet myself where I am and begin there. Because what I do - not what I say - is what my kids see and how they will learn to be. I'm doing this for them and my husband and I'm doing it for my own soul.”

Once again, she was paraphrasing one of our great sages, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. who said, “"The primary benefit of practicing any art - whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow"

So, if in fact it's true, and I believe that it is, that “We Are What We Practice,” what is it that allows some humans to find their way to a practice that enlivens them and moves them toward their authentic being and purpose while others hit a wall or impasse that mires them in addiction, habit and instinct driven reactivity leading to a downward spiral of disease, despair and stagnation and ultimately, a wasted life?

How many times have you set yourself a goal for practice and then, like Mike, said, “What's the use?” How many times have you gone to bed inspired to get up early and greet the dawn with qi gong and meditation and instead, turned off the alarm and gone back to sleep?

What does it take to find that spark that Hannah found, and against all odds make a commitment to our own soul?

The truth is that we all have a Mike and a Hannah inside of us. The question is how do we work with these opposing parts of our being?

This morning, I want to talk about practice but not the easy, neatly packaged practice - the ideal practice that in Hannah's words looks “like a picture in Yoga Journal.” I want to talk about practice in relationship to the messy, wobbly, uncertain human experience of growth and becoming. In particular, I am interested in the tension between intention and resistance in practice and how that tension - if we can bear its discomfort over time - will ultimately support us in discovering our true nature and purpose - our de - our virtue and virtuality.

I would like to offer an alternative view of resistance and the addictions, habits and impasses that destabilize our conscious intentions. Rather than approaching these aspects of our being as problems, impulses that need to be subdued, disregarded or eradicated, I want to consider them as friends, paradoxical allies that bring us important gifts that can help us become who we truly are.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of change, I turn to alchemy – the art and technology of transformation. I also turn to the Taoist alchemical system of wushen - the Five Spirits. As a brief introduction, alchemy is a method of investigating the spiritual essence of matter. It is an early kind of science – the way human beings organized their understanding of the natural world from around 300 B.C. to 1500 A.D. – after shamanism and before the advent of the modern Western science. Taoist alchemy has remained a viable system in its own right, miraculously surviving not only the rational materialism of modern science but also the Chinese cultural revolution and immigration from China to the West. Taoist alchemy infuses its wisdom and practices into the great martial arts traditions, Chinese herbal medicine, qi gong meditation, astrology, ceramics and calligraphy as well as classical acupuncture.

The Chinese word for alchemy is lianjinshu. It is made up of three characters - lian - smelting, jin - metal or gold and shu - art or skill. Implicit in the three-part character is the understanding that heat and fire are indispensable for transformation - the warmth of passion, love or will - that art, skill and practice - repeated efforts over time - are also necessary and that the substance to be refined is found, like metal, hidden deep beneath the ground or in the potent darkness of our bodies, our instincts, addictions, defense patterns and desires.

While regularity, clarity of purpose and commitment to everyday practice are a crucial part of alchemical transformation, alchemists also recognized the necessity of uncertainty, hiddenness, darkness, chaos and disintegration when truly new possibilities are coming to life. While negentropic effort is crucial, wu wei - doing by not doing - surrender to gravity, entropy and powerlessness is also necessary.

In wushen, the Five Spirits which I often describe as a mythical map of the soul, the aspect of our nature that supports us in holding steady with our practice over time is the spirit of the Earth Element - the yi. The yi endows us with intention, the ability to unify our knowing (thought) and doing (action), to maintain faithful, steadfast, purposeful application of our creative force toward a single goal

The character for yi is made up of two parts, xin, the open bowl of the heart placed below the radical indicating an uttered sound poetry or a musical note.

The speck at the center of the heart radical is sometimes described as the speck of shen or spirit that comes to us from the stars. It is the light seed of the sage that we are incubating through our practice.

But as we see with Mike and Hannah, transformation is not so simple as listening to our heart and setting a conscious intention. Beneath the realm of the yi spirit and our conscious intentions, there exists a realm of energies that often pull us in very different directions. In Western psychology, we refer to this underworld as the unconscious. The ancient Chinese spoke of it as the realm of Xi Wang Mu - the Queen Mother of the West, the Dark Goddess of the Underworld - the realm of our gui, our ghosts and demons.

In our practice, a gui - an entrenched habit, an intractable resistance, a troublesome emotion, an ancestral inherited psychological weakness or pattern - can either completely throw us off track or become like a friend tapping us on the back, inviting us to take a deeper look at our intentions, our path and our authentic nature.

This phenomenon became undeniably clear for me this past summer when my partner, Benjamin, and I committed to bringing my aging mother to our home on the coast of Maine and dedicating our summer to supporting her in what we expected to be her last months with us on this plane. I knew I was in for a tough period and perhaps one of the bigger challenges of a lifetime, the practice of being consciously present on the level of body, mind and spirit as a parent dies. But I had no idea how tough it was really going to be.

As the weeks of summer passed, all the unloved, shadow parts of my personality surfaced along with difficult unfinished business in my relationship with my mother, partner and family. I found myself “becoming someone” I didn't like too much, acting and responding in ways that were confusing and destabilizing. The loving, patient daughter, mother and partner, the innovative writer, cultural creative, teacher and healer, these comfortable self-concepts faded as the summer progressed. Rather than these appealing images of myself, I saw a raw, confused and emotionally unpredictable woman struggling to discover how to respond to a completely unfamiliar situation . . . the paradox of becoming a mother to my mother and saying goodbye to the person who first greeted me as I entered this world. I had never been “me” without her so who would I become when she was gone?

Despite my understanding about the influence of consistent practice on the development of the Self, when presented with the challenging situation of my mother's end of life, the reliability of my daily practices broke down. I felt that I no longer had any sense of my innate potential let alone a Self that I could actualize. I was distracted and scattered and found myself unable to focus on my yoga and meditation. I was horrified by my increasing impatience and irritability in response to my mother's growing dependency and her simple but ongoing requests and needs.

Each day brought a new challenge: my mother's falls, her nausea, declining appetite, aches, swellings, pain. The walker scarred the pine floor boards, canes banged against chairs, cups of tea spilled and needed to be refilled, glasses of water needed slices of lemon, piles of dirty towels, sheets, plastic mattress covers accumulated by the washing machine. The rifts deepened between my mother's needs for care and comfort, my partner's needs for order, peace and reliable structure in our home, my daughter's need to be a vibrant, creative young woman and my own need for time and space to grieve and do my own work.

I tried to sit on my meditation cushion in the morning but my mind would not rest tranquil on my breathing. I went out for walks in the fields and swims in the cove and came back anxious and angry. I tried to practice noble silence but somehow the cross words snuck out and triggered an upset. I cut my finger badly while preparing dinner for my mother and now have a scar that will be with me for the rest of my life.

Every time I thought about the conference, of getting up in front of all of you and speaking about how practice influences who we become, all I felt were my doubts and fears about my own capacities. I did not want to get up in front of people and talk about something I was actually unable to do.

So, as the summer progressed and the conference approached, the koan You Are What You Practice, in conjunction with my work around my mother's death, took me to a deeper and humbler place than I have been before in my own work, a place of almost total not-knowing. I have had to consider the question of discipline, order and character development in the face of the disintegration of the body, emotional chaos, shifting family ties and loss of control over our environment. For me, as a healer who works on a daily basis with people whose bodies, minds and spirits are in state of upheaval and distress, this is not new territory. Yet, dealing with it so intimately, as I face the raw reality of the coming apart of body, soul and identity has been a completely different level of learning.

It took me two months to begin to surrender to the teaching I was receiving. On the full moon of August, I went out in the night and slept in a field under a sky full of stars, I listened to the wind. I felt something shift inside me and later, when I returned to the house, I opened the Tibetan Book of the Dead and read:

“At this moment, having reached this critical point,

I must not fear the assembly of Peaceful and Wrathful Deities which manifest naturally!”

The peaceful and wrathful deities that manifest naturally… the words of the Tibetan prayer brought me back to one of the most life transforming insights I have had in my studies of Taoist alchemy. In ancient times, there was no value of good or bad placed on these two realms. Like the times of thunder and rain that exist in harmony with the times of quiet after the storm, the gui were recognized as the yin aspect the divine, existing in harmony with the yang shen. Like darkness and light, upper and lower spirits, peaceful and wrathful deities, our shen and our gui are intertwined and exist in creative relationship. Without the tension between these two polarities, nothing can die and nothing truly new can come to life. It is the oscillation between these two states that results in the smelting and forging of our spiritual nature and eventually, in the transformation of our lead into our gold.

One evening at the end of the summer, my mother and I sat outside and watched the stars begin to shine - one by one as the sky darkened. “Look at that,” my mother said, in her low, husky, dwindling voice, “the stars, the universe. Darkness and light. It's all one.” Just then, a low flying shadow passed over, very close to our heads. A bat, graceful as a butterfly but silent and dark. Again and again, the creature swooped over us and I felt a sense of companionship and gladness, a sense of relief.

My practice was a mess, my finger was stitched, my talk for the conference was still unwritten and I certainly wasn't going to win any awards for serenity. But in my own way, I was keeping to my intention, holding steady in the face of the unknown, steadfast in the face of death. Watching the bat fly over, I knew that a dark grace was at my side and that somehow I was on my path.

We Are What We Practice. We Become What We Do. But how do we continue to practice when everything in us wants to run the other way? Where do we find the spark, the intention, that is strong enough to withstand the powerful pull of habit, resistance, gravity and our instinctual drives for pleasure, security, stability and ease?

In closing, I want share a few more words from Tai Yi Jin Hua Zong Zhi, The Secret of the Golden Flower. Here in symbolic language, we learn from the humblest of creatures, the hen sitting on her eggs, and catch a glimpse of the alchemical attitude to practice, resistance and intention.

“The hen embraces the egg, always mentally listening. . . . Even though the mother hen goes out from time to time, she is always listening, and the concentration of her spirits in never interrupted. The hen can hatch her eggs because her heart is always listening. That is an important magic spell. The reason the hen can hatch the eggs is because of the power to heat. But the power of the heat can only warm the shells; it cannot penetrate into the interior. Therefore with her heart she conducts this power inward. When the heart penetrates, the power penetrates and the chick receives the power of the heat and begins to live. Therefore a hen, even when she has left her eggs, always has the attitude of listening with bent ear. Thus the concentration of the spirit is not interrupted. Because the concentration of the spirit suffers no interruption day or night, the spirit awakens to life.”

Coming back to the character for yi, and bringing up a bit of imagination, the graphic can be seen as a mother hen, her feathers outstretched over her clutch of eggs.

This image gives us a key to the alchemical action of the yi spirit and the proper response to the destabilizing influences of the lower spirits. In our practice, we must listen with our hearts, not only to the upper spirits but also to the lower. It is not the length of time we sit or the absolute unbroken perfection of our attention that matters most. Rather, it is our instinctual desire to grow and bring to life, our warmth, our listening and our loving devotion to the egg of spirit hidden in the nest of our hearts that creates the magic. If, even when we leave, even when we fail, even when we become distracted or thrown off course, we come back, we continue to listen if only with one ear, we will eventually create the conditions for the miracle, the cracking of the egg of spirit and the birth of the unique, imperfect, eccentric sage who waits hidden in the nest of our being.

So, in honor of the hen and just so you know, my mother is still alive, still living with us. She has two cracked ribs and no longer walks but she insisted that I leave to come to this conference - as she said, “to meet all those interesting Taoists and come back to tell her all about it.” And I'm not giving up on Mike. He'll keep coming to see me, the third Friday of the month at 10 a.m. and I'll keep asking him, “How's it going Mike?” We'll keep practicing our alchemy together, we'll keep creating the conditions, warming the nest and maybe one day, the egg will crack, the spark of spirit hidden in his heart will ignite and once again, as has happened again and again in the endless infinity of time, another ragged wayfarer will begin to walk the path of Tao, the weaving, wandering journey of transformation.

In the words of the Sufi poet Rumi:
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
Is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking and the joy inside
Will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.

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