Qigong Teacher and Daoist Priest Michael Rinaldini has written a book on the modern day practices of a Daoist. His book, A Daoist Practice Journal: Come Laugh With Me offers the cultivation methods for walking the Daoist path. The entries cover topics like zuowang meditation, scriptures, qigong, the value of silence and solitude, and Daoist, Buddhist and Catholic mysticism, tea drinking and more. Here are some samples of his entries, which provide a glimpse into the heart of his writings.2012 January 14Sky Farm HermitageSolitary RetreatIn silence and solitude I begin another retreat on Saturday afternoon, January 14, 2012. The rest of Saturday afternoon was spent un-packing and settling into a 6-day retreat. 6:15pm What does a Daoist eat while on retreat? Tonight, I made a soup with soba noodles and assorted vegetables. I forgot to bring ginger root.9:40pmI vow to practice ... in silence and solitude, until I realize Complete Perfection.January 158:30pmOne of my goals for this retreat is to write about the common practices between the Daoist and the Christian paths. I am specifically interested in the Daoist zuowang meditation method of sitting in forgetfulness or oblivion, and the Christian fourteenth-century mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing. Both of these ways of meditation or contemplation feature an emphasis on placing the mind's activities into a state of forgetting or the cloud of forgetting. The Cloud, was written by an anonymous author, and it is speculated that the author was a Carthusian monk, and if not, possibly a Catholic priest living a hermetic lifestyle. And so what are the similarities, the common practices between zuowang meditation, and the contemplative practices as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing?January 162pmSitting in silence outside on the porch,The only sounds-birds singing,An occasional movement of the wind,And very faint voices from neighbors down the valley.Odd at how sound travels.And right now, there was the sound of a car, actually,What I heard was the sound of the road,A gritty gravel sound.My mind filled in the blanks,And I instantly labeled it, "a car driving nearby,"Though it could have been a truck.And now my sneezes and coughing,And blowing my nose, all disrupt the silenceA large crow just landed in my valley,Returning me to silence.January 17Sitting on the porch, all bundled up.Drinking Scottish Christmas tea and a banana, and one cookie.A large part of being in silence and solitude is simply listening.Even the wind down the valley.You can hear it as it makes it way up the hills,And now, I feel it against my body,It flaps the page of this journal book.And before you know it-It's gone, and the silence returns.Except for the birds, sound of distant dogs, chickens,And that same sound that cars/trucks make on the gravel road.12:30pmThe Cloud's author says:Forget what you know. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that's going on in the world, until your thoughts and emotions aren't focused on or reaching toward anything, not in a general way and not in any particular way. Let them be. For the moment, don't care about anything (11).And finally, why even bother to think? From the zuowang tradition:I forget the vastness even of Heaven and Earth,Never mind the minuteness of the hair in autumn.Resting in serenity and silence,I listen to Pure Harmony.Still, I am free, away from it all!Movement stilled, language silenced-Why ever think? (212).January 184:30 pmInspired from yesterday's research, and last full day of retreat.Forget everything,Put nothing, between myself,And the Great Emptiness of Ultimate Stillness.That's the nameless Dao!End of Retreat

A Daoist Practice Journal, Book 2: Circle Walking, Qigong & Daoist Cultivation is the second book in a series on the practices for walking the Daoist path by a modern day, western Daoist priest. This second book consists of journal entries by the author from June 2013 to October 2016. It picks up with his journey where he left off in his first book, A Daoist Practice Journal: Come Laugh With Me in February 2013. The main topics covered include Qigong circle walking, both technique and health benefits. It includes a broad range of entries on Qigong exercises, including a simple way of performing energy health assessments on self and others. The key practice which is discussed throughout the book is the core Daoist meditation practice of Zuowang, or sitting and forgetting. In addition to the explanations on the technique of Zuowang is an in-depth discussion on the Daoist alchemy of cultivation. And still more.

Daoyin, the traditional Chinese practice of guiding the qi and stretching the body is the forerunner of Qigong, the modern form of exercise that has swept through China and is making increasing inroads in the West. Like other Asian body practices, Daoyin focuses on the body as the main vehicle of attainment; sees health and spiritual transformation as one continuum leading to perfection or self-realization; and works intensely and consciously with the breath and with the conscious guiding of internal energies. This book explores the different forms of Daoyin in historical sequence, beginning with the early medical manuscripts of the Han dynasty, then moving into its religious adaptation in Highest Clarity Daoism. After examining the medieval Daoyin Scripture and ways of integrating the practice into Tang Daoist immortality, the work outlines late imperial forms and describes the transformation of the practice in the modern world. Presenting a rich crop of specific exercises together with historical context and comparative insights, Chinese Healing Exercises is valuable for both specialists and general readers. It provides historical depth and opens concrete details of an important but as yet little-known health practice.

In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, David J. Mozina invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in today’s south China. He shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Written for students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion, Knotting the Banner will also appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.

This book translates Master Wang's original practice instructions and discourses given during training seminars. His system of internal alchemy goes back to two ancient Daoist texts: the 13th-century Lingbao bifa, linked to the immortals Zhongli Quan and L Dongbin; and the 17th-century Taiyi jinhua zongzhi (Secret of the Golden Flower), also connected to L . Together they are known as the Lingbao tong zhineng neigong shu (Arts of Internal Mastery, Wisdom, and Potential, Based on Numinous Treasure). The texts outline the concoction of a golden elixir through the dual cultivation of inner nature and life-destiny. This book follows the classics and presents all different kinds of techniques--including walking, pacing, sleeping, circulating the five phases, absorbing tree energy, and capturing planetary essences--in a systematic format and with a great amount of instructional detail. It contains a wealth of information invaluable to anyone interested in genuine Daoist cultivation and elucidates numerous rather obscure concepts to contextualize each practice.

Daoists pay close attention to all different modes and dimensions of time. They carefully observe the planetary movements in nature and set up detailed guidelines to match their course and follow the Chinese calendar with its various man-made divisions, such as the twenty-four solar periods, twenty-eight lunar stations, and the sexagenary cycle. Beyond this, Daoists activate the trigrams and hexagrams of the Yijing to designate phases of growth and decline and to mark certain temporal units with specific significance. Moving beyond this, they also work with time in the human body, linking certain features to stages of life and creating temporal rhythms by their own physical actions. They revert the flow of entropy within the body, establishing mastery over time, and transfigure their very physical constitution to subtler levels, opening ways to transcend time altogether. This volume brings together senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners to explore these various topics under three main headings: planetary, calendar, and body time. They cover the entire history of Daoism, from its precursors in the Han to its monastic and popular activation in the 21st century, as well as a plethora of different methods-social predictions, personal horoscopes, physigonomy, healing modalities, qigong, self-cultivation, internal alchemy, and more. Opening new ways of looking at time and expressing uniquely Daoist features, the volume is path-breaking and highly relevant today. A must for anyone interested in time studies, religious practice, and Chinese culture.

Expanded ed. of: Seven steps to the Tao. 1987.