A conversation with Sally Chang, Chief Instructor of Evergreen Taiji Academy, and BZC dharma teacher Shingetsu Laura O’Loughlin. This conversation was offered as part of a Qigong Fundraiser Workshop for BZC, offered by Sally Chang at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn in September 2022.

About Sally Chang

Sally Chang is Chief Instructor of Evergreen Taiji Academy. She is a Teacher, Acupuncturist, and 30+ year practitioner of Daoist Wisdom Arts including Qigong, Taiji, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Sally’s teachings focus on cultivating the innate capacity for healing; and she is known for her warm, focused presence.

For us to reclaim our humanity and to come back in alignment with our wholeness, this too we have to do together—in relationship, in society, in our cultural meetings. That’s our small project. [Laughs]. That is, really, the project of liberation.

Rest is not possible if it’s framed individually. We have this kind of way of relating to rest right now that I feel is very capitalist.

Xin Xin Ming: If You Can Be Like This, Why Worry About Not Finishing?

 If I can give up the idea of what completing the talk would be, then I would be in a very different relationship with the task of preparing the talk, giving the talk, responding to questions. All the energy that was previously bundled up on holding and maintain that view is now released.

Xin Xin Ming: Using Mind to Cultivate Mind

We are creating a fantasy to wake up from fantasy. We are creating a witness to wake up from the unconscious self-indulgence that is the human mind.

Xin Xin Ming: Aversion and Affection

How can I fully be myself and not harm others?

Xin Xin Ming: Reversing the Light

Reversing the light is looking. It is Xin being conscious of who we are, of what’s arising, of what’s going on. It is the clarity of the witnessing of our being.

Those of us who come to this practice, we set aside a lot of time to practice, to try to tame our brains, to try bringing ourselves with some kind of alignment with the universe and emptiness, to try to find the source of our true Buddha nature – not even knowing what it looks like, really. Sometimes struggling to let go of the forms and practices and things that we come to lean on to keep our minds tamed and in line. To make it not hurt so much.

In every situation where there’s an impulse to do something and the mind is still and that falls away—that, by definition, is freedom.

Living from a heart of service clarifies the interconnectedness that is the truth of reality, which is why the embodiment of it over time clarifies delusion and leads to liberation and awakening.