I am a Western doctor who is also practicing Chinese Medicine. Half of the Daoist medicine is gone and still, it feels like we’re only in the first days. In the beginning, one can anticipate how dense and vast this subject may be, and day after day, learning different aspects and methods, a picture is forming. But, this picture doesn’t become easier to contain, on the contrary, we just start to realize how endless the field we try to step into is. At the beginning we just saw a forest, and by slowly walking in, we recognize trees and we look at their branches and twigs, each one represents its own method of treatment in this endless comprehensive system. As Li Shi Fu says our goal is not to heal our patients but to change their thoughts. This may be an even greater, higher and also more difficult goal to achieve than to relieve symptoms or diseases.

The life at the temple follows the rhythms and rules of nature, and we are also starting to adapt and regulate according to our natural rules. Physical exercises, such as Water-TaiJi and Longevity, as well as our daily theory lessons with Li ShiFu, and the cultivation of stillness in the evening, are all part of this course. Cultivating and practicing our gong is one of the most important and highest requirements we have. The ancient Greeks used to say: “mens sana in corpore sano,” a healthy mind needs a healthy body. This unity of body and mind belongs together, as Yin and Yang, and therefore cannot be separated. As Shifu says, a finger of a person without gong is just a “Noodle-Finger”, a finger of a person who trains gong every day becomes a “Needle-Finger.”

After one door is opened we see two more doors coming up, and behind every one of these doors there will be more and more to come. Slowly, slowly we try to find our way through and hereby, we do not just try to open doors but also to open our thoughts. Everything is already in, under and above us. Now it is up to us to let sprout the seeds which were given to us.