We take for granted how fast and cheap information is transmitted and obtained nowadays.

It seems possible to access more in a single day than our ancestors did in an entire lifetime! Is this good or bad for our minds, emotions, bodies, relationships, societies?

The potential for learning and progress to improve our lives is present more than ever at our very fingertips. Yet, has this led to actual learning and progress?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daology.substack.com

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to Daology with your host Paul C. Wang. Thanks for being here to receive this download on the Dao of Healing.

To start I want to mention an upcoming Daology course called Emotional Alchemy during which I focus on how to gain understanding of and skill with the energy of our emotions, which are crucial for wellbeing. Please stay until the end for additional details on that.

So in this episode I want to give you a four-step map of healing. No schema is ever complete and everyone has a unique process. And yet there are principles that apply generally. I organized them for you using the acronym H.E.A.L. Besides an explanation, each also outlines an exercise.

Before offering you this H.E.A.L. framework let’s introduce some context.

Firstly, healing is not just for those who know they are sick with a diagnosis of some sort. The reason is because health is not merely absence of illness and its symptoms but presence of wellness of its signs. Moreover, wellness includes addressing mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, natural plus social, financial, economic, political, ecological dimensions.

Secondly, healing usually involves many layers we are not aware of. Thus, we can seemingly appear healthy but not sense aspects that are already awry. These unconscious factors in fact always affect us and profoundly so until they are realized and released.

Thirdly, healing is not easy nor linear to say the least. It can be a dizzying maze of fear, frustration, failure. It may bring up loneliness, desperation, even suicidality. However, there are moments of surprising beauty, grace, awe too. These arrive less as earthshaking epiphanies than as small wins, short glimpses, sacred whispers which slowly accumulate towards wholeness.

This is a good segue to present the H.E.A.L. model because the letter H stands for Hope.

H.e.a.l.

Hope

This is about seeing as healing.

Blind hope is criticized as wishful thinking. But sometimes imagination and faith are all we have and where we begin. Can we envision a different self and situation? Dare we believe in change or can we only conceive the status quo? Develop a growth oriented mindset. Connect to a greater purpose, power, possibility. Germinate the seeds of opportunities to rebirth yourself.

Practice: Look for examples of overcoming hardship. What films or books depict stories of redemption? Find heartful inspiration wherever and whenever you can as oases of light during those dark nights of the soul.

h.E.a.l.

Edit

This is about feeling as healing.

Acknowledge that our history led us here. And it will inevitably perpetuate if we choose to retell the same old story. Reality shifts when our identity does. Otherwise our past trauma automatically becomes further future drama. If these loops of karmic causality are not broken now then we can never heal. Furthermore, the knot we must most untie often lies below the surface and in the shadows. No multitude of angelic forces can save us if we deny confronting and negotiating our own inner demons.

Practice: Review exactly what happened. Analyze where are you stuck and why. Study your intense recurrent emotional reactions. They expose our strongest triggers rooted in our deepest wounds. Examine and rewire these patterns.

h.e.A.l.

Act

This is about doing as healing.

Proactively seek knowledge, support, counsel. Reduce playing futile games of blame and shame, excusing and escaping. Instead get curious and creative, even courageous and outrageous. Deliberately educate yourself on how to decisively engage change. Minute conscious actions moment to moment gradually compound into transformation.

Practice: Express your specific needs and directly ask someone for help (best from a real human and not Google or ChatGPT). Take what you’re shown and make it your own. Test and repeat and retest then reinvest results. There is a momentum within the wave of every breath to correct course.

h.e.a.L.

Let

This is about being as healing.

Relinquish assumptions of what was, is, and will be. Suspend fear-driven hyper-vigilance and make room for magic. When you have exhausted all options then pause and lay fallow. Get quiet and listen to silence. Surrender everything, even hope for what was so that what may be can appear. Allow synchronicities and serendipities that you cannot fathom to manifest from the uncertain and unknown. True independence is dependence on more than oneself. Grant space for grace. Acceptance, humility, patience, receptivity are practical virtues to embody.

Practice: Admit your limit. What is beyond my control to change? Remember instances when micromanaged plans collapsed and all actually worked out for the best. Meditate on these divine gifts to train trust in the mystery and miracle of life. This is an antidote to catastrophizing.

Ok I hope you found H.E.A.L (Hope/Edit/Act/Let) to be a useful mnemonic tool. In closing, I will frame a few final observations.

No human can be fully healthy alone. We ache to see and be seen, hear and be heard, touch and be touched by others, even the apparently invisible, inaudible, intangible. Isolation, solitude, cocooning are temporary medicines. Eventually we must emerge to merge with ecosystemic community.

That being said, any entity, such as gurus, guides, goddesses, can help suggest strategies, expand perspectives, bear witness. Their fire can reignite our dimming confidence and burn our blinding cynicism. However no matter how potent, they cannot substitute the mandatory daily ongoing work of healing for us. The web can hold us but we must weave it.

Ultimately, healing happens when our fractured facets — especially those we experience as painful, messy, bad — identify with and as the totality. Universal and personal partner into an undivided individual. Each one becomes a fractal reflection of the One. This internal integration then refracts outwards to bless the world.

Finally, relating organically to emotions is an indispensable aspect of healing. To learn more and dive deeper, join our 2023 Fall Daology course on Emotional Alchemy. We explore how to transmute energy, transform emotion, transcend ego from the view and through the tools of Chinese medicine, philosophy, alchemy. It runs four consecutive Mondays 5:30-7:00 pm PST starting August 1. If you cannot attend live recordings will be available.

That’s it for now. Thanks for attuning. I invest copious time, thought, energy into every podcast with the intention of catalyzing more people like you. Feel free to post, share, review Daology on your platforms so we can amplify its message:

Cultivate nature to nurture culture.

May your kind generosity be beautifully multiplied to serve our collective healing…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daology.substack.com

“I once read a silly fairy tale, called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

— Horace Walpole, January 28, 1754

Serendipity was first described over two and a half centuries ago as “accidental sagacity”.

It speaks to an awakened awareness attuned to meaningful coincidences.

When have you encountered the improbable if not seemingly impossible?

What is the alchemy of aligning with a wider world of wonder?

Stories of synergy, synchronicity, serendipity inspire us to trust life more deeply.

This is a healing salve to allay stress, anxiety, uncertainty, which plague many of us.

Practice: Open eyes and mind past old assumptions and default narratives.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daology.substack.com

Do you wash?

Do you brush?

Do you wipe?

Do you try to wash your stress, brush your emotions, wipe your thoughts away?

Let’s explore some potent memes to evolve the Who, What, Why of self-care hygiene! This is an insightful one worth a listen if you need clarity, inspiration, guidance on:

Mapping your many identities

Understanding spectrum of care

How we constipate our energies

Attuning spirituality anytime

Preventing overdose and bypass

Emotional enemy, friend, teacher

Learn More Skills: https://daocenter.com/dao-of-self-cultivation-fall

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daology.substack.com

Dao of Emotions
Our Story Between Wellness and Illness

Welcome to the first episode of the Daology podcast! For this inaugural occasion, I briefly introduce Daology (Dao + Logos) then recite a piece of proetry (prose + poetry) inspired by my clients, patients, and students. They teach me so much about life via their personal stories and collective histories.

A common issue and considerable factor that determines our position on the spectrum of wellness or illness is the quality of our relationship to emotions — both our own (primary) and those of others (secondary). These interactions are diverse and dynamic. However, overarching principles apply and underlying processes unfold as a Dao of emotions:

Emotional Emaciation or Emancipation
From Sealing to Revealing and Feeling to Healing

We begin to suspect our own feelings as wrong and even dangerous after being repeatedly blamed, criticized, punished for expressing them. Especially by authority figures and relational groups who we depended on for survival, meaning, belonging when we were just young, vulnerable, impressionable children.

Thus, reactively adapting to others and adopting their norms, we reliably abandoned our own beating heart due to the undue and unfair social pain and disdain it caused. Estranged from the rest of us, its vital beauty, power, sensitivity was numbed, starved, paralyzed.

However, since the solar soul which illuminates our mortal form essentially longs to dance free in full flow, this psychic amputation projects as disconnected relationships, unsatisfying vocations, fragmented lives.

Ultimately, no one, a guide, any guru, nor goddess is able to unlock this otherwise eternal, infernal, internal quarantine but ourselves. And above all, discovery of self-love is the master key. Each turn of it simultaneously requires and acquires: trust and truth, forgiveness and forbearance, courage and encouragement.

Because we become identically identified with repressed energies from ancient patterns, their catharsis will likely become so temporarily uncomfortable such that we may crave, negotiate, beg to mask up and shut down again. Spiritual surgery to extract old egos is excruciating!

Imagine what can happen when an innocent prisoner unjustly incarcerated for decades is finally released. Spasms of caged rage, grief, anxiety, terror are common and commensurate as the victim is allowed to end a withering jail-cell sentence and enter an enlivening new rebirth. Yet, when the latter becomes too overwhelming, return to the familiar limitations of being behind bars appears more appealing.

The difficult reintegration process — following severe prolonged disintegration — is often disorienting, bewildering, and apparently counterproductive. Things seem worse than ever before! We outright doubt our perception, choice, sanity. But if we can learn to accept and yearn to navigate these waves of emotion as indices indicating motion through purgatory to metamorphosis to resurrection to emergence from emergency then wholeness gradually and inexorably ripens.

Moreover, due to our universal intergenerational inheritance of epigenetic trauma, once we play out our personal drama then there is also accruing karma from past lineages to help pay off. Furthermore, even if that ancestry is cleared, we can build credit to benefit future descendants by nurturing better culture.

We may be wary and it may lay buried, but the way is always beneath our weary feet. And at any time we can reset upon the golden path even if beset by regrets we cannot forget. Yes, none of us escapes here unscathed nor perfected. Yet be not scared nor ashamed for our sacred wounds do not just scar but mark us as wise warriors, holy healers, sublime sages, magic mystics, spirit shamans.

Now, dear Dao friends, fellow earth angels! Let us walk onwards together, head held high, spine spirally aligned, heart broken open, eyes with gaze ablaze.

— Paul C. Wang 玄道 Xuan Dao • daocenter.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit daology.substack.com