4. Using Taoist Exercises and Other Techniques to Reach Perfect Health
The Taoist exercises are far different than the workout in the gym. In essence, the Tao does not see strenuous exercises as doing much good to the body; rather, it sees slow movement as best for the body and soul. Contrary to the popular science that one needs to pump out a certain heart rate to benefit best from exercises, the Taoists say you should never exercise yourself to the extent of gasping for breath, because every time you do such things, you actually are taking the energy deep inside your body to help you get through the breathless moments. On the surface and over the short run, you may feel physically and even mentally better doing the “pumping,” but the cost over the longer term is too high for the temporal better feelings. The reason you feel better with the typical gym workout is twofold: one is that you take out more energy from your body so you feel good about it, and the other is that after you do that, you can sleep better and feel more relaxed, which give you a better feeling. Even though you do shed some toxins from those exercises, you lose a lot more internal energy, or life essence, in a gradual way compared to other exercises, such as slow walking. Thus, in the end, you become an overall loser instead of a gainer with these types of exercises.
There is evidence showing that people undergoing strenuous training aimed for the “muscle man” status do not end up with better health or longevity. All you need to do is to look at those Olympians and action stars to see whether they look younger than ordinary men and women of the same age or whether they age as gracefully as the ordinary people do. It is apparent that these people, who are among the healthiest and strongest people (at least when they are young), do not seem to age as nicely or as gracefully as they should, confirming that strenuous exercise does not do them long-term good as modern science preaches.
Standing still is a perfect exercise for health
As we age from below, particularly the knees, standing still (Zhan Zhuang) or standing like a post for up to an hour a day can bring great benefit to your body. It strengthens the legs and knees and detoxes the body through sweating and exerting force on the chief detox meridian in the body—the gall bladder meridian. The standing still exercise is also the most basic and fundamental way for martial arts training in many cultures. Over time, the body can build up solid strength through this simple yet most effective exercise.
How do you do it?
Find a quiet place where the wind does not easily blow on you. Stand straight with eyes looking forward and move your feet to about equal width with the shoulders. Then slowly turn your heels outside while keeping the front part of the feet on the ground, such that your two feet form a ninety-degree angle facing each other. Then bend your knees slightly so that the knees are not over the tips of the feet. Your hands hold each other at your stomach or at the back. Keep this posture for as long as you are comfortable with—aim for fifteen to thirty minutes and eventually up to an hour. With this posture, you can immediately feel that the body weight is not directed onto your knees or onto your feet but onto the outside of the lower legs, which is where the gall bladder meridian sits. This exercise uses your body weight to detox while at the same time makes your legs and knees strong. No wonder it is the number-one posture for traditional martial arts training in China. The martial artists, however, often train for several hours a day with the posture. From a health perspective , we only need to train a few times a day for a few minutes each time initially, moving on to fifteen to thirty minutes and progressively toward the one-hour-a-day target to obtain the bulk of the health benefits.
Slow walking is another perfect exercise for health
We all need to move around every day. The experts advise us to take power walks or even jog to gain the best health benefits. The Taoists like slow walking, not fast walking or jogging, as the latter, although it does have certain benefits, costs too high to the body over the long term. Walking slowly for one hour a day will greatly benefit the well-being of everyone. This is because our feet are connected to all organs of the body, according to TCM. Slow walking is actually a comprehensive massage applied to the bottoms of the feet and can be regarded as a massage of the whole body as well. Walking slowly for one hour a day will get practically all the health benefits from this exercise. Slow walking for longer periods of time will cost your own energy, the same as fast walking, and jogging will cost even more energy—the precious internal life force.
You can practice slow walking in your own backyard, and soon you will feel comfortable with it. If you do not know how to do it, remember to watch closely the next time you visit an Asian city and see how the people there do their slow walking exercise every morning.
An improved and better way to do slow walking is every time you land your foot (heel) on the ground, make it like a free-falling object hitting the ground. In other words, your heel lands on the ground as if it carries the whole weight of your body with it in a free-falling way. This should occur as naturally as possible and when you do this, it has some added health effects compared to normal walking. The heel part of the foot is connected to the pelvis and the kidney function of the body. Since the kidney function is regarded as the deepest and foremost body function of the human system, hitting the ground with your heels nourishes the kidney and the fundamental life force of the body. Many older people often have pain in their heels, which is a sign of kidney energy deficiency; walking in this way can greatly help with relief of the heel pain and improve health in one of the most fundamental ways.
If you are sick from a certain illness or want to shed weight, and you want to use walking as the main tool to achieve that, I still recommend you use slow walking as your main exercise. You may increase your time of walking according to your health status and stop before you feel too tired. Gradually, you may increase your stamina to walk longer and longer before feeling tired. For instance, you may be able to progressively increase your walking time to one and a half hours each time and two times a day before feeling really tired. This way, you can not only relieve your illness or shed the unwanted weight, but more importantly, you kept the use of your life force to the minimum, and you can keep the outcome as well. This is because you actually detox more and deeper poisons out of your body from slow walking than from fast walking or jogging. The more regular you do the slow walking, the healthier you become, which gradually establishes a virtuous cycle for you. Do remember to limit your total walking time within two to three hours a day to save your precious energy.
Fast walking and jogging, on the other hand, not only cost more internal energy to shed weight, they are more likely to shed just the water part of the weight as a result of the fast pace of the exercises, which will come back easily as soon as you stop doing the exercise. Because you are likely to lose a lot of life force with fast walking and jogging, you are on a losing spree, and as a result, it is not sustainable in the long term—sooner or later, you are forced to stop by your body, and the weight problem comes back again. This occurs on practically all fast weight loss programs. The slow and persistent way for good health including weight control is at the core of the Taoist teaching and carries much wisdom with it. Unfortunately, few people realize or understand it, and thus we are faced with an ever-growing obesity problem almost everywhere. What is really needed to overcome the situation? Nothing more than a little wisdom!
Using your back to hit a wall to gain an excellent health benefit
The human back is perhaps the most important part of the body. It controls and connects to other parts of the body. The practice of Chiropractic medicine is performed by joint manipulation, particularly on the spine. Some physiotherapists do similar things to manipulate the back to relieve various pains. Chinese practices also place a highly important role on manipulating the back, with massage, moxibustion, cupping, and Guasha all performed primarily on the back. Cupping is a method that uses a vacuum to suck toxins away from the skin, while Guasha scrapes away toxins from the skin. All these methods work on the back to cure all sorts of diseases. However, these methods all need to be done more or less by others to acquire the benefit. An easy way for self-help is using your back to knock against a wall to gain health benefits, which has proven to be an effective way to detox and regenerate vigor for the body.
The method is simple: stand about 10 to 15 cm from a solid wall, relax your whole body, and then use your back to hit the wall. When the back is deflected from the wall, hit the wall again. Repeat in this way with each hit taking about one or two seconds. Breathe naturally, and start with about five to ten minutes of total hitting time for every session for healthy people. You can hit with your whole back, or you can hit different parts of the back in the following order: the upper back, waist, lower back, the left and right shoulder, and then the left and right side of the back, depending on your preferences. If you are very old, three to five minutes may be enough. If you have serious heart problems, some unknown problem with the spine, high-blood pressure, or late-stage cancer, then this method may not be suitable for you.
You should do this exercise progressively in a moderate and comfortable manner, based on your health condition. There may be some uncomfortableness initially, but as long as you control the force of the hitting and the duration of it, it should generally be very safe for most people. This method has shown that it can relieve many problems such as neck pain, back pain, and waist pain, as well as chronic coughing, asthma, insomnia, and constipation. Persistence is required to achieve the best outcomes.
Other exercises that have good health benefits
There are many other exercises from which you can gain benefits. One of the key areas for back pain is the lower back at the waistline. TCM puts a lot of emphasis on this area, as it represents the key area of the human body. A pain in this area represents a life-force deficiency or kidney deficiency of the body. It is not particularly related to age and can occur in young people as well, especially those with bad habits such as masturbation. Many traditional techniques aimed at boosting the life force of the body are concentrated around the waistline and around the spinal area of the waistline. If you have lower back pain, you can use your fists to swing back and forth to hit that part of the body. You can massage that area every day for a few minutes each time, or you can ask somebody else to hit that area with a piece of bamboo or a wooden stick with initially gentle and gradually moderate force. You can also use a far-infrared lamp to heat that area or a far-infrared pad to wrap around the area.
The important thing is that you need to use these things regularly and over a long time to be effective—because any weakness in the back often means a profound deficiency in life force, which requires a considerable effort to gain back your life force and your strength. Your work around the waistline does not need to be long; a few minutes each time, several times a day, might be sufficient, but you do need to do it every day to detox and add life force. This is one of the most important areas for better health, and once you know that, you can develop your own methods for an improved and more effective way to combat the ever-declining life force in your body.
A footbath is a perfect way for health
The biggest secret on longevity is the footbath, or soaking feet with hot water, which is widely practiced in many long-longevity areas identified in China. I described earlier that the feet have a connection to all the major organs of the body, but there is another reason why soaking feet is perhaps the best way for good health. The Taoists see the aging of the human body as a progressive reduction of life essence, which reduces to about half by forty years of age. Parallel to this process is the capacity to detox, which can also be considered as reducing in a similar way. With the reduction of detox capacity, many toxins, poisons, and garbage that cannot be discharged out of the body will stay in the body. And this is the reason why the human body increasingly bulges with the aging process. Toxins in the body actually move around, and since they are Yin in nature, they tend to move toward the Yin part of the body, which is the legs, and particularly the lower legs and feet. If you can open up a channel for waste discharge, then the toxins can be progressively removed from the body, and one becomes healthy again. Soaking feet in hot water actually opens up the waste discharge channel, and therefore it is one of the best ways to detox the body.
Discharging waste actually requires life force—and lots of it—you will know that once you start your detox process. This is why I have repeatedly requested that you save your life essence and life force and not to waste it for any short-term gain, including fast weight loss. The techniques I described earlier are almost all focused on using your own body weight to perform various detoxing functions, which means you waste no or little energy but gain the most benefits. The more energy you save, the more toxins you can dispel.
Foot bathing is almost effortless—all you need is a basin of hot water that submerges your ankles, with an extra kettle of hot water to add to the basin when it begins to cool down. You should allow the water to be as hot as you can bear to get the maximum benefit. A wooden basin is better, but a plastic one can do. If you have been on the Taoist path for some time, you may feel clearly that the toxins are readily coming out of your feet when they are soaked. The layperson might not feel anything, but the detoxification still goes on regardless. Trust this time-honored way of detox, which is far better than any detox program you might have heard of before. If you want to learn one thing and just one thing from this book, then soaking your feet in hot water would be the single best method you can benefit from for your whole life. If someone tells me he can gain ten more years of healthy life with ten years of daily foot bathing, I would not be surprised at all. Many of the people living in poor villages cannot afford to any modern health care but live happily and healthily to well beyond one hundred years. Their main secret is the footbath.
The best time for soaking your feet is in late afternoon or evening or before bed, and the time required is anywhere between twenty and forty minutes. After the soaking, you should scratch your feet all over with your fingers to remove the dead skin, etc., for a few minutes, which effectively massages the meridians and reflection points in the feet. Sometimes, blood can come out as a result of the scratching; do not worry, it is usually dead or stale blood that is let out, which is a good way to improve the health of the feet. Over time, the skin on your feet will become finer and finer, like baby feet, and it will never shed blood anymore, even though you may scratch hard. You will sleep better, look better, and avoid many potentially serious diseases simply by foot bathing. This is perhaps the best way to prevent all future diseases of any kind. It is easy to do, cost-effective, and all you need is to develop a habit to do it every day. In time, you will be surprised by how good it works to bring about good health and well-being. In fact, you can pretty much say good-bye to your doctor if you truly follow this practice.
Depending on the temperature of the water and your health status, the time to whole-body perspiration can be quite different for each individual. In winter, you should stop just after the body starts to perspire. This is because perspiration is good for detoxing, so you need to soak your feet just to the extent of sweating. However, any prolonged sweating wastes your life force, so it must be stopped as soon as it starts in winter. The reserved energy can be used for the next day’s footbath, or for doing another detox job that your body needs. Any other sports in winter should also follow this rule, as winter is a period for restoration of the life essence, and any prolonged sweating wastes your body energy. You will feel profound tiredness in spring, simply because you did not store your life essence in winter.
In summer, you can allow a reasonable period of sweating, particularly if you work in an office in an air-conditioned environment. Summer is the time to detox through sweating; unfortunately, our lifestyle of working in air-conditioned environments has suppressed this natural mechanism. If you rarely sweat all year-round, foot bathing in summer is the perfect way to detox through your skin—a whole year’s poisons accumulated in your body can be dispelled by foot bathing. However, do not allow the sweating to persist too long, as sweating costs energy and should be limited to a certain extent, even in summer. In other seasons, you can choose how much sweating you want based on your health condition and how much you feel comfortable with. If you feel very tired after foot soaking and cannot recover overnight, you probably sweated too much the day before.
There are reports suggesting that foot bathing can increase blood circulation by about ten times—and this is the main reason for the health benefits of the foot-soaking technique. The fact that it works on the lowest part of the body means that it readily removes the toxins where it is most needed. At the same time, it nourishes all the organs of the body through the reflection points in the feet so that sickness in any part of the body can be relieved and even cured over time. In addition, it leads to sweating, which opens up another channel for toxin release through the skin, which is the largest organ of the body. Unlike most other exercises, it does all these things without practically wasting any energy or life force from the body. With so many benefits and no waste of energy, it is no wonder that foot bathing is regarded as the best health promotion method throughout history and over thousands of years. It is a truly time-tested, extremely effective way for disease prevention and recovery, and yet few people in the West know anything about it at all!
You should start with just hot water to get a feel for the method and get used to one of the most profound methods for detoxification before moving on to adding herbs or salts to the water. This will also provide an opportunity to detox some of the poisons from the body so that they will not react with the herbs you add in later. After a few months, you can try to add some Yang herbs such as cinnamon, cumin, ginger, pepper, or star anise. You should add just one herb at a time, say 30 g, and boil it in water for about fifteen to twenty minutes before pouring into your feet-soaking basin. You can also buy herbal bags specially made for foot soaking from Chinese shops if you can find any. The easiest way is to add some rock salt to the water, but be very careful if your feet or your health are in very poor condition with swollen feet or fluid retention in the legs. In such cases, you should stick with just hot water for soaking until your legs and feet are strong enough to withstand the salt. You should also be careful with adding any herbs to the water if your condition is weak. The best way is to experiment for a while and see the benefit or improvement first before using herbs and salts on a continual basis. If your feet suffer from microorganism attacks, you can add 100 or 200 ml of vinegar to the water to combat them.
In addition to foot bathing, you can apply the principle of using water to detox to other situations where it is appropriate. For example, if you have a swimming pool, you can use it as a detoxing tool as well. A word of caution must be offered here—if it is used well, your backyard pool can be an excellent detoxing tool, but as swimming pools are used today, they probably cause more problems than benefits. There are two main rules on using the pool that must be followed to gain the full benefits: firstly, the water must be warm to hot before you can jump in. This requires that the pool has a proper cover on it, and after a few hot days in summer, the water becomes warm to hot. Secondly, you should generally not be in the pool more than once or twice a week. The problem we see today is that people get into the pool when the water is still cool or even cold; this will get you into trouble as the coldness of the water can easily move into your body, causing running noses and sneezing for years to come. If you get into the pool more than once or twice a week, you waste your valuable life force and eventually your skin may become coarse. The benefit of the pool for detoxing can be greatly compromised by the loss of life force. The Taoist books do mention the frequency of bathing, and my own Taoist training suggests the very truth of the matter. You will feel the same once you are on the Taoist path.
You can also try other hydrotherapy methods, such as hot baths, spas and saunas, hot springs, mud springs, etc. These, however, should be strictly limited, as it is easy to cause loss of life force when the whole body is immersed in hot water or under high heat, which may be appropriate for a few times a year at most. These forms of hydrotherapy are much more risker than foot bathing and swimming-pool soaking, as the temperature can be very high and it is applied to the whole body, which means it can cause quick sweating and thus can only penetrate and detox the body at the shallower depth. Cold bathing or cold-water therapy is not recommended and in fact should be avoided, as they do not add energy to the body or detox the body. Many people use winter swimming or cold-water bathing as a way for exercise, which is really an ill-advised way that can seriously hurt the body. Many of these people are found shivering later in life even on hot days, suggesting that their bones have been penetrated by the coldness, which can develop into very severe diseases eventually.
Many people like swimming in the sea, particularly in Australia, as about 80 percent of the population lives near a beach. The problem is that the seawater temperature is often too low to be good for the body. I was initially very puzzled by finding that so many families having swimming pools in their backyards when I moved into a beachside suburb. Later I understood that it was a good move for the health of their families, as the seawater temperature is too cold even in summer. My advice is that swimming in the sea should be strictly limited to the hottest days of the year. When you do swim in the sea, bring a beach umbrella with you and perhaps cover your body with hot sand to the point of sweating to detox your body while on the beach. This way you can gain more than just swimming in the sea, as hot sand is a very good media to remove or drain unwanted dampness from inside the body.
Moxibustion is another perfect way for health
Many people know that acupuncture is an effective tool for regulating the flow of Qi and clearing the way for the life force that may have been blocked at some acupoints along the meridians. This method can be very effective, and the result can be an instant cure or improvement of the symptoms. However, not many people know that there are two words with regard to this healing art: the first one is acupuncture (Zhen), and the second one is moxibustion (Jiu). In other words, acupuncture is only half of the healing art in this traditional Chinese treatment. Acupuncture works on the acupoints—vital spots that regulate energy flow in the body. Compared to acupuncture, moxibustion hardly needs any training and is easy to administer by a layperson. More importantly, moxibustion adds vital energy to the body, while acupuncture only regulates the flow of energy. The reason why moxibustion is not as popular as acupuncture is that it requires the burning of moxa (mugwort) in the shape of a cone or a stick to make it effective, which creates smoke and a smell that not everyone likes. But considering its unique health effects, which are unmatched by practically any other means of treatment, particularly in terms of nurturing the life force, as well as its ease of use, one should try everything possible to use it. The burning of moxa creates powerful heat and radiation effects that are unmatched by other treatments. One can mitigate and cure almost all diseases conveniently by oneself, simply by using moxibustion alone.
As a tool for promoting health and longevity, there are stories from Japan where one family used moxibustion on Zusanli (Stomach 36) and achieved longevity for the whole family—the man lived 243 years, his wife lived 242 years, and their son lived 196 years. Zusanli is an acupoint about 5 cm below the knee, in between the upper joints of the two lower leg bones of the tibia and fibula. The point Zusanli is one of the most used acupoints for better health and well-being and is regarded as the number-one longevity acupoint in TCM. Chinese records show that moxibustion is as old as acupuncture, if not older. Moxibustion can reach to depths that acupuncture and herbs cannot reach. It is cost-effective, unblocks the meridians, expels the cold, and adds to life force. Moxibustion works on diseases if you have any, whether you can identify them or not. In other words, it can search for diseases and cure them by itself. Where there is no apparent disease, it improves your general health by removing toxins from the body. Therefore, moxibustion is an extremely good tool that prevents diseases from happening and is unmatched by practically any other health or curing method that can be administered by oneself.
Traditionally, moxibustion is done with loose moxa made into a cone and placed directly on an acupoint, which is very painful but most effective. Nowadays, the moxa stick, which is a stick about 1.5 cm in diameter and 20 cm long, is used to treat acupoints along certain meridians. You light one end of the stick with a candle. After about half a minute, you move it to an acupoint at a distance of about 2 to 3 cm, until you have a burning sensation, and then you move it away to allow the acupoint to cool down. Then, move the stick back again. In this way, you can heat an acupoint for about fifteen to thirty minutes and move on to other acupoints if needed.
The traditional way of moxibustion is a much more serious treatment than today’s treatment method. In the traditional method, the burning moxa is directly placed on the skin, and when the skin is burnt, it produces blisters and the fluid is trained away. In places like Zusanli, the fluid is drained away in a continuous manner until the fluid is no longer produced. A scar is produced as a result. Although this technique seems pretty cruel by today’s standard, the method does have the capacity to cure serious diseases that are often claimed to be incurable by today’s medical science.
The best way to practice moxibustion is by buying a few moxibustion metal boxes, either from the Internet or directly from China. These steel or stainless steel boxes have holes all around them. You affix a small piece of moxa stick onto the metal bar inside the box, light it, close the box, and put it in a pouch that has an elastic string attached to it. You then put the moxibustion box at Zusanli—your naval—or your lower back, until the box no longer feels warm.
Alternatively, you can buy a ceramic vase of about 20 cm in depth and 15 cm in diameter at the opening, fill the vase about halfway with sand, and then light a piece of moxa stick about 10 cm long at one end and put it on top of the sand horizontally in the vase. Then you put your feet over the vase and let the moxa stick heat the bottom of your feet. This is one of the best Taoist ways of using moxibustion to improve health, as the acupoint Yongquan (Kidney 1) is at the front center on the bottom of the foot (about one third of the foot length from the tip of the toes). The Yongquan acupoint is regarded as the second longevity point in TCM and is widely used for health promotion in the East. Since the Yongquan is at the lowest point of the body, it is more Yin than Zusanli and better suited for Taoist practices over long periods of time, while Zusanli is better suited for combating illness and improving health in a quick way.
Upon finishing a moxibustion session, drink some boiled water at body temperature, using the microwave to heat the water if it is too cold. Boiled water is one of the best drinks for a healthy body. Water from the tap is regarded as too Yin by the Taoists, and boiling adds energy to the water, which perhaps breaks down the molecular structure of the water so that the body can more easily absorb the water molecules. There is a lot more with regard to water than appears to the naked eye, both from a physical, chemical, and biological standpoint as well as to the mythical nature of it. You can study water more if you are interested in it.
Secondly, boiling removes all bugs (pathogens) from the water so that you are not subject to any bugs that may hurt you. Boiling is still the most effective way of removing bugs compared to practically all other methods. Finally, boiling removes many of the chemicals formed due to chlorination of tap water, which can create hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, which are still being studied. Therefore, boiled water (when cooled down to body temperature) is one of the best drinks, which has a number of benefits over tap water. I have studied drinking water quality for over six years in my work and know a thing or two about drinking water, and when combined with my Taoist knowledge, you can be assured that my advice on drinking water is among the best you will ever hear about with regard to what water we should drink.
Compared to foot bathing, moxibustion is a stronger way to harness life force and to expel coldness and other diseases. The burning of the moxa produces a higher temperature than hot water and can penetrate deeper into the body. Foot bathing is stronger at removing toxins due to its promotion of blood circulation in the whole body. Therefore, the two methods have different strengths in removing toxins and building up life force in the body. If you can combine the two, you have a powerful combination of the two best methods for antiaging and rejuvenation. Try it daily for a year, and you will know what I am talking about; try it for three years, and you cannot live without it; try it for ten years, and your longevity is almost guaranteed. By that time, you will know that the Taoists sages are not people talking about fairy tales; rather they are truly remarkable people with deep insight and extraordinary wisdom from which one can learn and benefit greatly.
There are a number of matters that you should be careful about when using the moxibustion method:
1. Never use it on pregnant women.
2. Never use it on the face.
3. Never use it during periods.
4. Never use it with an empty or full stomach; after a lot of alcoholic drink; or in a state of extreme tiredness.
Follow these rules, and you can benefit from all the goodness of moxibustion and avoid any damage it might cause. In general, it is a very safe and powerful practice that suits most people, particularly the elderly, and it can be used under most if not all circumstances.