Chapter One
Finding Your Footing
Enjoy good health.
Weaken your ambitions.
Strengthen your essence.
—from The Complete Works of Lao Tzu,
translation and elucidation by Hua-Ching Ni
After thousands and thousands of years in exile, the Monkey King finally gets a break. Buddha summons him and tells him to get ready, for a long journey awaits him. A monk has been appointed to bring back the sacred scriptures. He will have to travel all the way from China to India and then back again, with the Monkey King as his escort.
Fortunately, the journey you are about to embark on is not quite as long, at least not when measured in miles. But the challenges you face trying to get pregnant can be every bit as daunting. You need to prepare yourself for whatever lies ahead. How can you do this when you might not even know what you are facing? You do it by making sure you are physically, emotionally, and spiritually strong before taking even a single step.
In traditional Chinese medicine, the mind, the body, and the spirit are one. You do not live your life in a vacuum. Nor do you stand still—you are in motion every second, every minute, every day of your life. Imagine a clock with the pendulum swinging. But while the pendulum is moving, so is the clock, trying to find balance in motion. Now think of your body. When you are stressed, overworked, emotional . . . guess what happens? You leave yourself vulnerable to outside forces like viruses, germs, and bacteria. Sickness, by definition, is the imbalance of yin and yang, or interopposing and intersupporting forces.
You are a complete and complex individual with a unique constitution. What establishes being in balance for you is entirely different than balance for someone else. Our circumstances, our surroundings, our genetics all leave an imprint on us. In traditional Chinese medicine, there are no absolutes. Everything is relative. There’s no such thing as perfect health. But there is better health. And better health means better fertility. You hold the power to attain it.
You could say that my family has been at this for a long time. I come from almost seventy-six generations of Taoists. Taoism is a lineage, in the same way Judaism and many other spiritual traditions are. But it’s less a religion than a way of life. It is based on embracing nature and understanding the world. It teaches you to care about improving yourself. Most importantly, it teaches you to always embrace nature rather than damage it. In a way, it’s not that different from what Henry David Thoreau, in Walden Pond, believed: that you must preserve nature at all costs. We believe this because the answers to life’s questions lie in nature.
In order to try and understand the philosophical underpinnings of balance—of health and sickness, of life and death—Taoists focus on five major areas of study. A child growing up as I did in the Taoist tradition chooses early on which of these paths to walk. There’s astrology, as in fortune-telling, which teaches how constellations and human energies affect out lives. I Ching is another form of fortune-telling, but one based on randomness. It teaches how to handle and manage changes in our lives. Another path is feng shui, the study of how the placement of objects affects our energy and how our physical environment can be conducive to our life force. There’s martial arts, which teaches how to find inspiration and knowledge in the observation of animal movement in nature—a knowledge that can then be used to strengthen our body and increase our understanding of the relationships among people. And finally, there is healing.
I was predestined to be a healer. I started on this path when I was just a little boy. But I did not start with the study of medicine or healing, because for Taoists, the five paths are just extensions of life itself. My father and mother taught me first and above all how to be a good person. That is the Taoist way. We started with an understanding of the good and the bad in the universe, and learned how life worked. My brother—who is also a healer—and I learned to sweep floors, to help out, to understand the importance of family and the social unit. We also learned the importance of cultivating yourself and taking personal responsibility. Many people hear the word responsibility and think of some heavy burden. But as a child, my responsibility was to play hard and study hard, and to appreciate the life I was given. That’s all I was asked to do.
Yet even as I went about my everyday life of playing and doing simple chores, I was learning profound lessons. Take a little thing like sweeping the floor. Looking back, I see that sweeping was so much more than cleaning. It was the way I swept the floor: the patterns I created, the way I felt when I was doing the task. Every day, there was a different energy to my sweeping. Some days, I felt impatient. Other days, I felt so good that I did a little extra work. And on those days when I felt particularly happy, I could see things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, like the dust particles on the hardwood floor and the way they danced in the light.
By the time I was in elementary school, I started learning tai chi chuan and chi gong, two Taoist forms of meditative exercise that require contemplative thinking and silence. At the time, I didn’t understand this silence and why the people were standing like statues. But slowly I could see the value of this kind of quiet time and the lessons you could learn from it. It taught me how to be calm. That was the real beginning of becoming a healer. I was learning the Taoist ways that would prepare me to go on and learn the practice of Chinese medicine.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Tao of Fertilityby Daoshing Ni Copyright © 2008 by Daoshing Ni. Excerpted by permission.
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