Over the last six months, we’ve seen a lot of press about mindfulness and meditation (most recently TIME Magazine’s cover story, The Mindful Revolution). From school children to athletes to military personnel, mindful meditation has become a popular practice in society today. Meditation, in its many forms, is a vast territory to explore in terms of level of skill, technique and result. We benefit from the ancient traditions that developed a profound understanding of the mind and spirit, and how to transform the individual. The Taoists in particular recognized the importance of developing a strong foundation to seriously enter the path of meditation. The Taoist practice of yoga was essential to building this foundation.

“If you want to develop the spiritual side of yourself, the Taoists consider that energetic fitness is paramount in providing the necessary foundation. They point out that you don’t construct a building from the top down; you start at the ground and work your way up.First you must become healthy and have a stable, coherent mind and emotions. Then you are ready to advance to deeper aspects, or spiritual fitness through Taoist meditation. Before you can get to the core of your soul, you need to have cleared away enough blockages in your physical, emotional and mental bodies. This is the key to having strong and balanced chi running through your system, which is the purpose of Longevity Breathing yoga. If you embark on a spiritual path before this, you can get stuck in some mental or emotional processes that can unravel and confuse your energy system for a long time. You could end up metaphorically spending thousands of hours trying to mentally process an energetic jumble running amok inside you. In most cases instead you could do Longevity Breathing yoga exercises for 100 hours and save yourself a lot of wasted time and unnecessary grief.”  -Bruce Frantzis, Longevity Breathing Yoga, Mediation from the Inside Out