The Tao of Health and Wellbeing 

– A path of transformation

Mid-July 2019 event in London & Brighton – details to be announced soon

I cannot forget the last words of a beloved friend of mine before his death. “The only thing I regret in my life that I didn’t start listening to my body sooner.” To honour our friendship and his legacy, I took those words as a teaching device for my inner development. That was 13 years ago. The first years were hard. Having been a mentally centred guy in all my adults life, thinking, vision, perspective and social architecture have always come first, way before any attention to my body, except during times of ill health.

Getting married to a health professional and receiving the fruits of a gentle but persistent re-education by her has slowly started changing things but the resistance of the conditioning from the old habits of putting my external work way ahead of my inner work has been very strong. Even my meditation practice couldn’t change much of that. I could empty my mind and enter (for short moments) non-dual consciousness but it didn’t help become friends with the life-giving force within my body.

I heard from Anna about her inspiring meeting in China with Dr. Jin Zhenbao. He has healed himself from chronic illnesses with his unique integration of Taoist meditation, Confucianism, Buddhism and anthroposophy, which he is now teaching. No wonder that it caught my attention. To remain true to my form  I started getting acquainted with his work, first, through reading about it. Below, I share with you what I discovered so far.

If we don’t have a complete understanding of life, that is, a composite of body, energy and consciousness, if we are too eager to develop our consciousness, and ignore the need of body and energy, we sooner or later start to stress and damage life itself by all our “good” intention. 

We are not training the will to suffer by teaching meditation, but try to nourish the life and help people become healthier, stronger and more vigorous, and more peaceful, wiser, more creative, freer, as well. And health, strength, vigour, peace, wisdom and creativity are based on energy. They also imbue the capacity to activate the flow of energy in oneself, as well as in other people.

The meditator practices meditation for the purpose of being conscious of one’s energy dimension, which is the living force in each of us. When we try to be conscious of our energy, we actually also nourish it and cultivate it.

The status of energy is closely related to our condition of consciousness. Indeed, if we do meditation with a feeling of love, with a feeling of being connected to the other people, to the world, this attitude often has much stronger effect upon the energy flow in us, which is also good for our physical and mental health.  And in the deepest state of meditation, there is even no specific feeling. There is often an intention in the feeling of love. But in the deep state of meditation, there is no intention, no content. One just feels strong energy, and deep peacefulness.

After this preface to Dr. Jin Zhenbao’s work, let me introduce him to you with his own words:

I had been a law academic and lawyer until 6 years ago. Due to my health problem, I felt driven to really understand why cancer occurs and how we could get rid of it in a natural way. Therefore I gave up my work as lawyer and college lecturer and totally focused on the research and practice of meditation. Then I found it’s closely related to Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism and I need to understand them in order to keep making progress in meditation.  Finally I realized that they together, with the help of scientific thinking and philosophy and anthroposophy as well, reveal to me a new understanding of ourselves as human being, namely, an understanding of a human being that is spiritual and has a potential of ongoing growth, development and transformation.

For me, reading, thinking, writing, communicating with people, giving workshops, are my meditation, with maybe different focuses. They are all what I need. I try to spend every minute of each day in a meditative way, in a conscious way, in a way that is full of energy and invigorating. 


Maybe we can never come to a point where we can say, now I understand life, because I believe the meaning of life is for us to
become, but not just for us to know. It’s a path of transformation, and a path that never ends…  

Either we are more and more conscious of how this transformation happens and learn to be the master of our own transformation, or we suffer from unawareness of this process, live in a pre-programmed way, in a determined way, in an unconscious way. In this way, we keep consuming our energy and finally fall victim to our fate.  So meditation, to sum up, is our effort to be conscious of our innermost drive for life and growth, an effort that has the best effect if it’s practised in an effortless way.

With proper guidance, it’s actually not difficult to experience the flow of energy in the body directly. This is of great significance, as it’s only when we could directly feel it, be conscious of it, we know how to monitor it and cultivate it, and in that way step by step become the master and director of our own life.

We, at Community Intelligence in collaboration with Campus Co-Evolve, invited Dr. Jin Zhenbao to come to the UK and give a presentation and workshop sharing his method in Mid-July 2019. Donations will be based on, the  “pay-what-you-feel right” principle of the gift economy.

Contact us for details.

By |2019-04-15T22:04:25+00:00April 15th, 2019|China, Mindfulness|

Leave A Comment