Hello Friend,
We are all passengers on Spaceship Earth. What a hoot, huh?
Thank you for your interest in our training programs. Here’s an overview and some further details about what Neidan Yoga can offer you.
Overall, the program is very practice-oriented but with online training and support. You can refer to the preceding page, titled Workshops and Training Programs, for more details about the course structure and the options available for you. The first year aims to help you develop essential life and esoteric skills that can make the difference and empower you to realize your most important goals.
You don’t need to know much about yoga or spiritual techniques, such as breathwork and meditation, in order to benefit immensely from the year 1 topics available for you. Neidan Yoga incorporates modern science and medicine but within the traditional framework of practice taught in three great yogic traditions—Hindu yoga, Tibetan Buddhism and Daoist yoga. The course is self-sufficient, but you can also just cherry-pick the material and choose what to incorporate into your current spiritual practice.
Traditional Roots of Neidan Yoga
The main yogic traditions we follow are:
All the world’s a TORUS — best you learn how to synch with it and go with the real flow of life. This is why we practice expanding and sinking qi in the hatha yoga poses. Similar to the space meditations of Buddhists, this method offers you a fabulous and effective way to ground into the field of Light.
1) Hindu yoga — Swami Satyananda (also, all other teachers that stem from his teacher, Swami Sivananda); this entails the foundations of advanced yogic sādhana, such as prāṇāyāma and midline energy work. Āsanas find double duty as a vehicle for physical cultivation and energy cultivation (by incorporating expanding and sinking qigong into the practice).
2) Tibetan Buddhism — Dzogchen: Bön tradition (mainly Tenzin Rinpoche) and Nyingmapa tradition of Dudjom Lingpa (mainly Lama Alan Wallace); Vajrayana: Kagyu, Bön and all other Tibetan Buddhist traditions for generation and completion stage practices, especially phowa, tummo and 8 yogas of Naropa (Tulku Lobsang Rinpoche, Tenzin Rinpoche, Lama Zopa, Patrul Rinpoche and many others)
3) Daoist yoga — Chinese medicine (acupuncture and medical qigong) provide the foundation (for instance, Jerry Alan Johnson for medical qigong); Neidan (qigong for the central channel): Parting Clouds Daoist Education, a sect of Quanzhen Longmen, this Daoist community provides formal training toward ordination which includes neidan as part of the curriculum; and the Dragon Gate lineage as taught by Wang Liping (see Nathan Brine's books: The Taoist Alchemy of Wang Liping, volumes 1, 2 and 3; Nathan is authorized to teach neidan by Master Wang Liping).
lineage and the genesis of neidan yoga
You might wonder, “Where did this guy come up with the structure of Neidan Yoga? Is it based solely on his personal experiences? Or, was he initiated into the underlying traditions?” Really good question! And, an important one to answer. Here’s the pith:
A serious practitioner of any of these traditions will realize that all these paths are solving the same problem with essentially the same techniques. The cultural trappings differ but the deeper goals and eventual realizations have much in common. Modern unified physics provides a rigorous framework for understanding yoga as a way to tune the body's energy fields in terms of toroidal dynamics. You can check out the following website, if you're not familiar with this concept: Universe might be shaped like a Doughnut.
So, the short answer is that the cards are on the table and out in the open for anyone to see these days. That is, modern science has gone one up on these hoary esoteric traditions and provides clear, demonstrable equations that utterly clarify the perennially fuzzy and wishful thinking surrounding spiritual practice: There is a goal (the quantum field with even finer levels of organization, yet to come) and there is a path (yoga aided and abetted by snippets of modern science and health medicine).
So a comprehensive and timely modern model exists for advanced yogic practice. How’d it end up here? Fate, really. If you know anything about Vedic astrology, you will find it all neatly delineated and categorized there. Asking any really well-trained and spiritually-inclined Jyotish astrologer will get you to the same explanation.
What do the Jyotish charts show? My spiritual teachers and personal karma conspired to kick me through all these different modern sciences and traditional mystical paths. It’s a common story for a lot of folks—you plan one path and fate decides upon another. Sound familiar? Probably does. Most people have to deal with such curve balls and topsy-turvy turns of events every so often along the way.
Throughout my adult years, I have simply tried to go with the flow and get a better handle on which advanced meditations provide genuine value in light of modern research. I certainly had no agenda to develop some unified model of anything. What happened, then? One puzzle led to another. Each answer opened doors but some of them led out into the woods and far afield. So, the answers also led to more questions.
And then, sneaky fate played its tricks: over time—and, relentlessly—Indian, Tibetan and Chinese yogic traditions all ended up squarely in my lap—one after the other after the other. I scribed what was taught and applied what seemed to fit. Across a handful of decades, this whole esoteric edifice has made more and more sense—frighteningly so, at times. The vision is splendid but the thorough realization of how far adrift we, as a human family, are from accord with nature (much less, Light) rears up as a titanic specter and something not to be easily brushed aside.
In short, the possibility of spiritual advancement still hangs around, and some folks still take advantage of the opportunity. But getting a glimmer of that brilliant and potent brew out to everyone truly poses the greatest riddle and bummer of all time. What a tough challenge. But this is what’s asked of each one of us—no exceptions. There you go. Best to take it all in stride. And, that’s that.
Now, of course, I am a serious lifelong meditator, yogic practitioner, and do have legitimate transmissions in all these traditions. That helps. At present, I’m navigating through all the materials presented on these pages as a Daoist yogi and world yogi. My goal? Traditional mountain hermit: Short on words but long on Light. I wish this—in whatever form works—for you, too.
Techniques and stages of neidan yoga
Knitting these three streams together, and cobbling in a touch of modern best-practice (especially, from unified physics and the health sciences), illumines the important landmarks to be found as one progresses in Neidan Yoga:
1. Develop rudimentary skills according to all three traditions (especially breath retention and the ability to sense and manipulate qi).
2. Develop emotional self-awareness according to the most evolved western psychotherapies (all of which are body-oriented) and use Jyotish to deepen this.
3. Develop advanced awareness at the lower jiao (refer to Nathan's book for the xiatian breathing).
4. Use the energy and focus cultivated in step 3 to kindle the tummo fire (according to Tibetan Buddhist practice and Bön practice).
Whole-body movement - the essential link between the earth below and the heavens above. You start simply and evolve the moves only as your meditation improves—otherwise, it’s just Phys Ed … fun but not worth much. The real payoff yields magic and health and a happy balance of both earth and heaven.