Cultivating a Skeptical Mind
Craig Mallett Despite diving quite deeply into an esoteric tradition of spiritual cultivation, I was and still am a very skeptical person by nature. If someone talks to me toting stories about enlightenment and energetic prowess, I’m even now usually inclined towards doubt, or at the very least to see it as just a […]
An Introduction to Daoist Training
Craig Mallett What on earth is a Daoist? Why train in this strange Daoist way? After 20 odd years of training, it is often easy to forget that most people haven’t even heard of half of the things that I completely take for granted. Many of my friends are talented teachers in various niches […]
Am I Doing It Right?
Craig Mallett One of the most common questions I get when teaching people new to the Daoist approach is “am I doing it right?” While perfectly understandable in a modern world that encourages us all to not ever feel like we’re good enough (the honest answer “no, it’s terrible because you’re a beginner and […]
Removing, Not Adding
Craig Mallett We often say in the tradition that the Daoist way is one of removing, not adding. Yet the first thing we do is learn a million practices. So what do we mean by this? It’s useful to remind ourselves that the exercises (and the way we exercise) are the tools we use to aid […]
Reorienting Towards Pain
Craig Mallett Regardless of the modality of practice, one of the most common reason I have seen that people enter into this kind of work is to find away to escape their experiences of pain, particularly in the body. We often go to physiotherapists, or do movement practices or yoga or Pilates all in […]
A Daoist’s Thoughts on Food
Craig Mallett I wanted to put together a basic guide on food and dieting from my understanding of the Daoist perspective. Although there are 20 million ideas about how to eat well these days, the Daoist way has been well established for many hundreds if not thousands of years, and so isn’t at the […]
A Daoist Perspective on Choice, Values, and the Virus
Craig Mallett I’ve had a good amount of people ask me what the Daoist view of the current situation with viruses and vaccines and lockdowns and so on is, so I thought I’d reiterate the main points I keep making with people by writing a juicy article. The Da Xuan tradition differs from many […]
Marshmallows & Momentum
Craig Mallett The image of the dynamo is used in Da Xuan to give a feeling of how the training gets started. In the beginning, it takes quite a bit of willpower, effort and juice to get going, but at some point the momentum of your efforts begin to make the practices move themselves. […]
Morning Practice
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Daoist Self-Cultivation
Craig Mallett One of the major attractions I had to Da Xuan Daoism as a system of self-cultivation is that there is not really any fixed idea of how a person should act or behave. Despite this lack of pre-determined behavioural ideas, there is still the idea that we can always evolve and improve […]
Breath, Energy, & Upheaval
Craig Mallett Breathing is a big topic in the Da Xuan tradition. When we look at the view that the tradition takes of the human being, we see it split into thirds. One third is the physical aspect (Jing), which is all about the cultivation of the body. As the body is material and […]
Circulation of Importance
Craig Mallett Health and wellbeing are interesting words. We tend to throw them around assuming we are all meaning the same thing, but upon closer consideration it becomes clear that they are entirely dependent on the context of what that individual considers to be important. Some people think being healthy means to be able […]
Balancing Yin & Yang
Craig Mallett The concept of balancing Yin and Yang is central to Daoist thought. It’s this idea that orients us in our practice, asking us to not give one side of the coin more importance than the other. The Yin is more manifested, but more limited. It is the structure, the physical body, the […]