Creativity + Sexual Qi = Life’s Secret Sauce

                            

8-month old Emerald, with the fat legs of sumo wrestler, leads his Daddy around by the short hairs…,photo at a wedding of a couple that met at a Healing Tao susmmer retreat. Score one for the Tao of Love! Emerald lives in the Present Moment, and is thus a source of Continuous Creativity and Boundless Love.

Raising an infant is the best training for Taoist wu wei practice. Wu Wei is the Art of Living Spontaneously in harmony with the Tao. All Creation happens in the cosmic Present Moment. Since babies have no databank of memory to program their behavior with old patterns, they are in a semi-permanent state of Creative Play.

That’s why rigid adults cannot keep up with children. Kids are over flowing with energy because their inner faucet of Qi flow is wide open. I call their state “semi-permanent”, because the joy of wu wei wears off once children are trained to act like a boring, well-behaved adult. Then those adults have to take special trainings to recover the Qi of their Inner Child. Life is silly that Way.                                     photo: Mike Teeters

Inside Chi Flows Naturally:

1. White Dragon Empowerment & Fall Equinox Ceremony: Sunday Sept. 20, 2014, at our Asheville home. See the baby dragon Emerald invited (below).

2. Oct. 17, 18, 19: Medical & Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 1 & 2 in Asheville. Lots of great qigong. Learn the powerful Spinning Pearl Dragon Orbit method from Mt. Wudang. Details below.

Dear Lovers of Life’s Creative Secret Sauce,

In this letter I will share with you my three Simple Secrets of Creativity, and how they relate to the pulsing yin-yang forces of sexual energy. But first, let’s notice how Nature itself is creative.

I hope you had a wonderful summer and are already absorbing the Metal /Gold Element of Autumn. In Chinese thinking Fall season began on Aug. 6 and is will peak on Sept. 22 with the Fall Equinox. Please take the time to honor this powerful portal with your own Equinox Ceremony.

I suggest you align to Nature’s cycle with a focus on Letting Go of your resistance to change. Autumnal change is symbolized by leaves falling off the tree to expose the strength of its core trunk and branch structure. Autumn is time to shift focus from the rich sensory flowering of summer to turn inward, to our branch-like Qi meridians.

Each season had its own special Creative Qi (or Chi, both pronounced “chee”). Nature shifts the quality of its creative force from season to season. Humans can do the same at any time, if they are tuned in. Metal season is great opportunity to discover your true creative strength.

                                                     

Michael Winn performs Red Fire Dragon of Souith Summer Solstice ceremony, at Healing Tao USA summer retreats near Asheville, N.C. Summer program first week’s dates are planned to coincide with Nature’s solstice cycle.

I had a very creative, Qi-filled summer. In May we had a fantastic China Dream Trip. It stimulated creative  response in the 30 Dream Trippers that made that journey of spiritual adventure. Folks are still writing to me about the creative changes in their life that are still unfolding as a result of our “eating” China’s Deep Earth Qi using forms like Primordial Tai Chi/Qigong.

The next Dream Trip will be in August 2016. We’ll visit the Healing Tao’s lineage root mountain, Mt. Changbai, where the Taoist hermits One Cloud and White Cloud spiritually achieved themselves. I found it was super easy to do internal alchemy when supported by Changbai’s deep lake waters being alchemically steamed by the fire of an active volcano. The Qi Field itself was incredibly creative (If you want to get on my early notice list, hit reply to this newsletter, put China in subject line).

                                           

Meditating around a simple floor altar at summer retreat on Medical & Spiritual Qigong Fundamentals 1-4. The methods in this course offer the major Qi circulation and grounding skills needed for nearly all creative Taoist energy work.

                          Taoists Study the Life Force as Creative Process

In June & July, many lucky folks enjoyed a virtual explosion of Creative Qi at Healing Tao University’s 20 summer retreats. The Taoist energetic arts and sciences reveal an amazing range of creativity with every possible Qi application one could dream up. Qi for self-healing, medical Qi for healing others, alchemical Qi for longevity & immortality, sexual Qi for loving relationships, Tai Chi Qi for self-defense, Taoist Yoga Qi for relaxing and opening the body, Fusion Qi for managing negative emotions.

That’s just for starters – Qi is infinitely creative. It’s the very medium of Creation.

We had a new presenter at the retreats who was a big hit —  Michael Gelb. He’s a world-famous author whose focus is Creative Qi itself. He’s written fourteen books, mostly on creativity. Guess what he says is the secret sauce behind his own creative flow? Q-I-G-O-N-G. He’s been studying qigong with many masters over the past 40 years.

I loved Gelb’s seminar. He felt like an “old soul brother” running on a parallel path that finally intersected with my own. He has left no stone unturned in his quest to maximize his creative enjoyment of life. But in the end, he came to the same conclusion that I did: if you want more Creative Qi in your life, doing qigong is one of the most effective places you can start. As you get good at qigong, everything in your life can become creative Qi Play.

Gelb created a special “Leonardo da Vinci Qigong” to enhance creativity, which he shared with us – a very lovely form, and of course, very creative! This form is included in his new book, and shown for free on his site http://michaelgelb.com. His book is called Creativity on Demand: How to Ignite and Sustain the Fire of Genius.

                              
Michael Gelb’s book is really about Qigong – available on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/ld2xtmj)

This is a book that I would have been proud to have written myself. It’s Gelb’s magnum opus on creativity. He interviewed dozens of creative people for the book, including many qigong masters. This added fascinating breadth to his thesis that “creativity is a choice, not a special gift”.

Here’s the testimonial I wrote for the book jacket of his new book:

Michael Gelb belongs to my Curious Souls Tribe – no stone left unturned on his path. His conclusion? The secret sauce underlying ALL creativity is the medium of Qi, the Life Force itself. Creativity on Demand is his masterpiece, a guide to playfully shaping the Qi Field. His methods are fun, practical, and ingenious — applicable by anyone – even if you think you already mastered tai chi or qigong. It will juice up the creative success of any healer, therapist, athlete, or entrepreneur and ground any spiritual seeker. It will clear the cobwebs for everyone – from couples seeking renewal, to a worker feeling life is a boring routine. Gelb unleashes the mystery of Creativity, frees it from the cabal of artists. He delivers it to anyone brave enough to read this book and open the flow of Creative Qi.     – Michael Winn

Gelb is a very thorough researcher. I was amazed at how many people in different fields he dug up who are using qigong to ignite and sustain the fires of their creativity in their profession. Mainstream therapists, life coaches, athletes, artists, many others.

               Simple Secret #1: Inner Smile Opens Space of Creative Play

I got to experience his creative focus first hand. Gelb’s interview with me for this book lasted over 3 hours, as he drilled deep into my creative process. He only had room to condense a few pages into his book about what I had to say. I told him one of my favorite Qi tools for enhancing creativity is the Inner Smile (on pages 92-93 of his book, if you are curious).

I shared with Michael Gelb my three Simple Secrets of the Tao of Creativity. I summarize them here.

The Inner Smile is the first secret. It is one of the simplest yet most creative forms of meditation ever discovered – there are literally an infinite number of ways to do it. It need never to get stuck, mechanical, dry and boring like many seekers I’ve met who sit for years, waiting in vain for total emptiness or enlightenment to smack them in the third eye.

Many meditators feel like they somehow failed. Inner Smile is about process, not end goals. When you focus on process, there’s never a failure, just the success of infinite learning.

During our discussion of the Inner Smile, we discovered that we both share a love for the world’s most famous painting — Leonard da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Why is the Mona Lisa so famous? Because of her mysterious Inner Smile!
      

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with the mystery of her soul’s radiant Inner Smile. She’s asking, “Can you feel who I truly am?”. Contrast it with the modified Mona Lisa showing her personality’s socially available Outer Smile. Which painting draws you IN more deeply? Which Mona feels spiritually more secure to you?

The Outer Smile is our social self reaching out to test and secure psychological safety with people around us. These social connections are important, but very transitory. The Inner Smile is our soul’s essence radiating its truth from the core of our Being. That permanent connection to our Deep Self is what we really live for.

When we connect our ordinary mind to our soul, our Inner Smile lights up. That flips on the Creative Qi switch in our life.

Gelb describes in his book the creative response of school kids when asked what Mona Lisa is smiling about. He got answers like “She knows the secret of what goes on between boys and girls”. Gelb wryly notes that when he posed the same question to a conference of Wall Street types, he got the cynical remark that Mona Lisa’s smile was the result of recent dental work. Kids vs. adults – very different types of creative play.

I use the painting of Mona Lisa in my 120 page ebook, Way of the Inner Smile: Tao Path to Peace and Self-Acceptance. (If you don’t have it, or lost it, please go back and signup again on my home page and download it for FREE from https://michaelwinnv5.qlogictechnologies.com).

It’s never too late to activate your Inner Mona Lisa!!! You might even invite her to become your Creative Muse, as she smiles internally within you, blessing you to activate the flow of Creative Qi that is everyone’s birthright.

            Simple Secret #2: Sexual Qi Boosts Our Creative Fire

One of the things I confessed to Michael during our interview was  how, in my youth, I perceived myself as “UN-creative”.  I was not born with any special talent. My brother David got all the music lessons. Yes, I was intellectually very bright. But internally, I considered that kind of smarts to be little more than a monkey-like cleverness, the ability to read something and feed it back to a teacher.  

My clever mind got me into an Ivy League school. But I when I graduated from Dartmouth with Senior Fellow honors, I still felt like a over-educated monkey without a creative bone in my body. The only time I felt truly creative was when I made love to a woman.

S-E-X – now that felt to me like creative energy at its best. Love-making defined my highest creative moments, it was a kind of religious experience for me. But unfortunately sex was somehow mostly trapped at a deep unconscious level of biology – I could not quite reach into the root of its creative power. I didn’t have the skill to link it up at will with my emotions, my thoughts, my power to manifest what I needed in life. Orgasm felt super spiritiual, but how to integrate it with my spiritual process?

Later I moved to New York city and started a successful career in publishing. That started loosening my creative juices. I was also full of myself, as the youngest Publicity Director in the field. Then I got fired from my job. The reason my boss gave me? “You’re too creative for this corporate world”.  That was actually flattering, given my negative self-image of feeling UN-creative.

But she was right – I was not born to work for someone else. Today I am eternally grateful to my boss for firing me, and forcing me to move on. Thank you, Anna Borgerson. I soon became a free-lance war correspondent in Africa. My creative juices began to flow because my survival – both physically and economically – depended on it.

                    Kundalini: Multi-dimensional Sexual Orgasm

What kicked that creativity into higher spiritual gear was a kundalini awakening in Africa when I was 28 years old. The kundalini experience was a kind of whole-body orgasm.  It was sex elevated to a cosmic level. It made me aware that creativity was a multi-dimensional affair arising from my soul. That my soul was generating the sexual energy that I needed to expand my awareness and creativity into all of my subtle bodies.

It wasn’t until I immersed myself in 1) Taoist qigong,  2) sexual energy cultivation practices with a partner, and 3) Taoist inner sexual alchemy meditation that I ultimately was able to sustain the creative flow of sexual Qi arising from the very root of my soul.

This took me beyond my youthful obsession with physical sex. Learning how to tap my Sexual Qi was like pouring gasoline on the fire of my creativity. Thus the Taoist methods both sparked and sustained my experience of Creative Ignition.

I realized that Taoist Internal Alchemy is essentially a process of capturing our sexual energy and putting it to highe work. It allows us to crystallize our biological impulses into a spiritually pulsating inner pearl, so we can ground our otherwise intangible soul. It’s a method to make our soul both conscious and creative. The benefits flow into our worldly life and good physical health, as well as quickening our highest spiritual destiny.
 
Now I cannot stop the creative flow of Qi (ever notice how long some of my newsletters are? :). But how is this Taoist sexual-spiritual process different from ordinary artistic creativity?  Artists are focused on outer expression, which directs them to tap into their inner psyche. But often they cannot sustain a balanced flow of creativity. Some exhaust themselves (deficient Qi) and feel blocked creatively. Others, like Van Gogh, go mad (excess Qi), and put it into destructive behavior.

This is why many who achieve fame in film, sports, or politics cannot handle the intense Qi flow and try to disperse it with sex, drugs, or booze. Most artists don’t have a scientific, i.e. systematic way to manage their Creative Qi. That’s what qigong and inner alchemy meditation gave me – sustained harmony and balance while at the same time liberating the flow of sexual energy tranforming into Creative Qi.

Everyone has a different destiny, meaning a different place to focus their qi flow. The creative challenge I’ve taken on is to explore the possibility of consciously creating a physical body in the Present Moment. Once we manage that, we’ve conquered death. It is this flow of sexually-charged Creative Qi that has sustained me over the past thirty years as I’ve evolved One Cloud’s Internal Alchemy Formulas for Immortality,  to make them accessible to Western adepts.

        Simple Secret #3: Flexible Energy Body = Youthful Physical Body

I feel I’ve enjoyed some success. The qigong and sexual energy recycling practices have kept me young enough to enjoy starting a family. I’ve got the creative energy to consider having a second child (I turned 63 last week). I hope to accelerate my path of “reverse aging” now that I have an 8 month old expert teacher in Creative Play. Emerald is changing so fast that I have to dtop all rigidity in my Energy Body to match his level of play.

Rigidity is what kills our adult Creativity and ultimately causes our physical death. A rigid Energy Body is caused by having fixed ideas, stuck emotional patterns, limiting physical movement habits and posture, fear of embracing novelty. All of these act as constrictions on the flow of Creative Qi between the spirit realm, our soul, and our physical body-mind. When our resistance to allowing new Qi to flow in becomes greater than our love of creating our Highest Destiny – we are ready to die.

So please don’t do IT. I mean don’t slowly commit spiritual suicide by killing off the flow of your Creative Qi. Keep the juices flowing in whatever passion you pour your Qi into. Consider keeping your Creative Qi pump primed with a regular practice of Qigong. The especially brave will alchemically charge up their Creative Qi with that super fuel called sexual energy.

My study of Taoist energy cycles inside our body, within the planet and Cosmos made it clear why people express their Highest Creavity in different ways. It’s because they have very different elemental constitutions. A Fire Type will exhibit creative flair in a very different way from a deep feeling Water Type. An Earth Type will create beautiful gardens, a Metal Type will have a sharp and discriminating mind. Everyone has all five elements within themselves, and true creativity arises from their interaction. You can find out your dominant and weak elements by looking at your Chinese astrology chart, free on my site: https://michaelwinnv5.qlogictechnologies.com/astrologycenter.html

                    What is YOUR Favorite Flavor of Qigong?

There is no need for anyone to re-invent the Creative Qi wheel. Many qigong forms – like the Five Animals Qigong or Six Healing Sounds – activate the flow of all five types of Qi. There are\ opportunities for you to get inspired by some really great Qi teachers. Michael Gelb is organizing a Super Qigong Summit at Omega for next May 22-25, 2015 (in Rhinebeck, N.Y.),

Gelb has invited me and 6 other of his favorite Qigong masters to make the May 2015 event especially CREATIVE. I’m honored that a majority of the presenters at this Qigong Summit have been or are now on the faculty at Healng Tao USA summer retreat program: Michael Gelb, Robert Peng, Tina Zhang, Minke de Vos, and myself. The other two at the Summit are Roger Jahnke and Robert Tandora.

If you cannot wait until next May, you can catch Michael Gelb teaching creativity at Omega this Oct. 5-10, 2014 (see: http://www.eomega.org/workshops/mastering-creative-energy#-workshop-description-block). Meanwhile, I recommend you get Gelb’s book and spread the gospel about amping up the flow of Creative Qi in your life with Qigong, whatever style you favor.

Or consider visiting gorgeous Asheville, N.C. this Fall and attending one of my low cost weekend seminars. I guarantee you’ll leave feeling a lot more Creative Qi flow in your life.

1. Oct. 17 (eve), Oct. 18-19, 2014 Qigong Fundamentals 1 & 2. Smile, Orbit, 6 Healing Sounds.

2. Nov. 15-16, 2014  Primordial Tai Chi: Way of Enlightened Love.

3. Dec. 6 – 7, 2014 Qigong Fundamentals 3 & 4. Internal Chi and Bone Breathing.