Working With the Elements

Most people spend their days touching glass screens, sitting under artificial light, walking on concrete, and interacting more with symbols of life than life itself. We become mentally overloaded while physically and spiritually undernourished. We know thousands of abstract ideas but forget the feel of dirt in our hands, the smell of smoke on our clothes, or the rhythm of working with natural materials.

One thing I have slowly begun exploring is the idea of working with the elements. Not as fantasy or mystical escapism, but as a practical and embodied way of reconnecting with reality.

In Chinese thought, particularly Wu Xing, the elements are not simply substances. They are patterns of transformation and relationship. Earth, Wood, Fire, Metal, and Water are constantly interacting, shaping one another, and moving through every aspect of life.

What interests me is not memorizing theories about the elements. What interests me is physically engaging with them.

Working with clay while building hornos.
Carving wood into tools and utensils.
Carrying and conserving water.
Using fire to cook and transform food.
Sharpening and using metal tools with precision and respect.

These experiences ground a person.

When you work with earth, you learn patience and structure. Clay cannot be rushed. A horno teaches humility because if moisture, shape, and timing are wrong, the structure cracks.

When you work with wood, you begin understanding grain, tension, flexibility, and growth. Wood carving teaches attention. A knife immediately reflects your mental state. Force and frustration rarely create good work.

Fire teaches transformation. It can nourish or destroy. Cooking over fire reconnects us with one of the oldest human experiences. It reminds us that food is not simply purchased. It is transformed through effort, heat, and time.

Metal teaches discipline and refinement. A sharp blade requires maintenance, awareness, and care. Tools shape us as much as we shape materials with them.

Water teaches adaptability and survival. Water carries life through everything. It softens clay, cooks food, cleans wounds, and sustains the body. Learning to respect water changes the way a person moves through the world.

The deeper lesson is that none of these elements exist alone.

Water nourishes wood.
Wood feeds fire.
Fire creates ash that returns to earth.
Earth produces metal.
Metal shapes and channels water.

You begin to see these cycles everywhere once you slow down enough to participate in them.

I think this return to elemental work is important because modern people are often fragmented. We separate physical health from spirituality, work from meaning, food from culture, and knowledge from direct experience. We live in abstractions.

But building a horno, carving a spoon, chopping wood, carrying water, cooking outdoors, hiking through weather, or practicing Tai Chi brings things back together again.

These are not hobbies in the shallow sense. They are ways of remembering that human beings were shaped through relationship with the natural world.

The body understands things the intellect alone never can.

Sometimes the most advanced thing a person can do is return to the foundations.

 

Trusting your path

There’s a strong idea in martial arts that you always need a teacher.

And I get it. Teachers matter. I’ve had great ones. You can learn a lot from people who have walked the path longer than you.

But lately, I’ve been realizing something.

At this stage in my life, I don’t feel the same need for a teacher to explain things to me.

That doesn’t mean I think teachers are wrong. It doesn’t mean I’ve “figured it all out.” It just means my focus has shifted.

I’m in my 60s now. Martial arts, as a system of techniques or even as a pursuit of skill, is less important to me than it used to be.

What matters more is understanding what is actually happening in my body.

Tai Chi has become less about fighting and more about regulation. My nervous system. My breath. My structure. How tension dissolves. How movement connects.

And if I’m being honest, it’s also become spiritual.

There’s something in the practice that goes beyond mechanics. The energetics of it. The way it brings me into alignment. The way it quiets the noise and connects me to something bigger.

You could call that being one with the universe.

That’s where my interest is now.

So when I hear explanations about internal arts, I don’t reject them. But I don’t feel the need to adopt them either.

I’m not looking for someone else’s model to overlay onto my experience.

I’m more interested in direct observation.

What do I actually feel?

What changes when I relax here?

What happens when I shift weight this way?

That’s my teacher now.

Experience.

Not theory. Not lineage. Not terminology.

Just honest feedback from my own body.

If I ever needed self defense, that would mean something has gone very wrong and my life is in danger. That’s not a space for subtlety or philosophy. I’m prepared for that in practical ways.

But Tai Chi, for me, isn’t about that anymore.

It’s about refinement. Awareness. Regulation. Connection.

And at this point, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.

I need to feel it.

I need to live it.

That doesn’t make teachers unnecessary for everyone.

But for me, right now, the path is experiential.

And that’s enough.

Moving With the Hum of the Universe

I know this new age kind of language can turn people off. I usually write about the practical side of tai chi. But honestly, the more I practice, the more I see alignment as the priority. Even over fighting. Even over longevity.

I know that sounds strange coming from someone in public health. We are trained to focus on outcomes, on years, on metrics. But spiritual alignment and nervous system regulation matter in a deeper way. Maybe they lead to a longer life. Maybe they do not. But does the number of years really matter if you are out of tune?  

Another moment that shaped this for me happened almost 30 years ago. I met Master Fook Yueng at a workshop. He taught a form of Tien Shan Qi Gong that he had learned in Tibet. When I practiced it, the experience was immediate and undeniable. It felt like an acid trip without drugs. I was completely in tune. In that moment I knew I was going to do this for the rest of my life.

He was an incredible teacher. That experience also changed my relationship with substances. I have been sober for many years now because I realized I did not need anything external to access that state. The body and the mind are capable of it on their own.

There is another layer to this that I do not dismiss.

For me, the idea of being one with the universe is not abstract or poetic. It is motivating. It always has been.

I remember being a kid in high school when I first heard Brain Damage and Eclipse by Pink Floyd. The lyrics have stayed with me and continue to inspire me.  

And all that is now

And all that is gone

And all that's to come

And everything under the sun is in tune. 

It did not just sound good. It felt like a direction. Like something to aim at. A way of being.

I did not have the language for it then, but I knew I wanted that sense of connection. To be in tune. Not separate. Not fragmented.

I have strayed from that many times. But I have always come back. Even this morning.

Because there are moments when the body settles into something deeper than effort. The nervous system quiets. The noise drops out. What is left feels like alignment. Like you are moving at the right frequency.

You can call it vibrational. You can call it nervous system regulation. The language does not really matter.

What matters is the experience.

For me, that is where the real power is. Not just in strength or balance or longevity, but in the ability to settle into a state where the body and mind feel in tune with something larger.

And that state changes things.

It makes you want to move better.
It makes you want to take care of your body.
It makes you less willing to drift into that slow surrender.

So yes, the practical side matters.

But the feeling of being in tune, of moving with that underlying hum, is what keeps me coming back.

Working in a Native American Community and Chronic Disease Prevention

A large part of my work is chronic disease prevention within a Native American community. What I have learned, both professionally and personally, is that many modern conveniences are a major driver of chronic disease. This is not a rejection of technology. It is a recognition of its cost.

Comfort, efficiency, and labor-saving tools often remove the very movements and stresses that kept human bodies resilient for thousands of years. In the process, we often throw the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional ways of knowing and older methods of living were not primitive. They were refined through lived experience, long before technology insulated us from consequence.

Working for a Native American tribe has given me the rare opportunity to see this firsthand. I see the struggle many Native people face as traditional lifeways collide with modern systems that reward convenience but quietly undermine health. I also recognize this struggle in my own family history. My father was a craftsman in the 1960s, deeply committed to making things by hand. He battled large corporations, mass production, and a culture that increasingly valued speed and profit over integrity and craft. Balancing those worlds is not easy.

There are certainly areas where technology is beneficial and even necessary. But labor-saving does not always mean health-saving. Often it means the opposite.

A simple example is wood processing. If you are cutting down massive trees all day, a chainsaw is the right tool. But if you are splitting your own firewood for home use, replacing physical work with a machine removes an important form of functional movement. Swinging an axe is not just about efficiency. It builds strength, coordination, timing, and endurance. When you outsource that work to a motor, you lose more than calories burned.

The same pattern shows up with footwear. Modern shoes are a form of technology. Highly cushioned, rigid, and expensive running shoes often weaken the feet rather than protect them. Minimal shoes or barefoot movement strengthens the foot, improves balance, and reconnects the body to the ground. Weak feet contribute to ankle, knee, hip, and even back problems. This is not theoretical. It is a biomechanical reality.

Back pain offers another clear example. Sitting for long periods weakens the glutes and the posterior chain. When those muscles atrophy, they stop doing their job. The body compensates elsewhere, and pain follows. This is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of removing movement from daily life.

All of this ties directly to an idea I once wrote about called the inner accountant. The body is efficient. If you do not use a muscle, it does not maintain it. That efficiency keeps us alive in harsh conditions, but it works against us in a world designed to minimize effort. When movement is optional, the body assumes it is unnecessary.

This is where indigenous ways of knowing matter. They are not nostalgic. They are practical systems that embed movement, effort, and skill into daily life. Tai chi, bushcraft, traditional food preparation, walking, carrying, lifting, and working with the hands all serve the same purpose. They keep the body honest.

The unifying idea is simple. Health is not created in the gym. It is created through daily interaction with the world. When technology removes that interaction, disease fills the gap.

The old ways were not anti-progress. They were pro-resilience. And in a time of chronic disease, they may be exactly what we need to remember.

From a chronic disease prevention perspective, tai chi and bushcraft address the same root problem: the gradual removal of meaningful movement from daily life. Conditions like diabetes, joint degeneration, chronic pain, and balance loss are not simply the result of poor choices; they are the predictable outcome of lives structured around comfort and efficiency. Tai chi restores coordination, balance, joint integrity, and nervous system regulation in a low-impact, accessible way. Bushcraft restores strength, load tolerance, and confidence through real, purposeful work. Together, they rebuild the physical capacities that modern life erodes—without requiring gyms, machines, or high-risk intensity. This is why these practices are not alternatives to public health efforts; they are foundational to them. They quietly reintroduce the kinds of movement, attention, and self-reliance that once prevented chronic disease before it needed to be treated.

The Difference Between Bushcraft and Survival That Nobody Talks About

I love bushcraft. I love the skill, the patience it demands, and the quiet satisfaction of making something useful with my hands. Carving spoons, reading grain, refining cuts, learning how wood responds to pressure and edge. It is deeply human work, and it feeds something important in me.

But over time, I have started to notice a difference between bushcraft and survival that nobody talks about.

Bushcraft can quietly let you forget your body. Bushcraft is highly skill-based. When you are good at it, efficiency replaces effort. Problems get solved with technique instead of strain. That is part of what makes it so enjoyable. You can work for hours in a focused, almost meditative state, feeling productive and grounded, without ever pushing your heart rate or demanding much from your legs or lungs.

The human body, though, is brutally honest. It only maintains what it needs. Muscle costs calories. Cardiovascular capacity costs calories. If those systems are not regularly demanded, the body lets them go. I have written about your inner accountant here. 

I noticed this very clearly recently. Over the past month, I carved about a dozen spoons. Long sessions. Deep focus. A lot of joy in the work. During that same stretch, I skipped hiking. When I finally went back out on the trail, the feedback was immediate. My legs felt weaker than they should have. My breathing was shorter. My lung capacity was not where it had been. Nothing dramatic, nothing injured. Just the body reminding me of what I had stopped asking it to do.

This is not a criticism of bushcraft. I respect it deeply, and I will never give it up. But I am also sixty years old, and do not have time to confuse skill with readiness.

When people talk about survival, they usually jump straight to extremes. Getting lost in the woods. Accidents. Severe weather. Emergency preparedness. Civil unrest. All of that matters, but it tends to distract from a more basic truth.

Survival is not primarily a craft problem. It is a capacity problem.

Before you can build a shelter, you have to reach the site. Before you can make a serious fire, you have to process and move fuel. Before you can help a downed hiker, you have to move your own body under stress, often while cold, tired, and scared.

Skill matters, but skill alone does not override emergencies. Cardiovascular capacity and muscular strength do.

Bushcraft often happens in controlled conditions. There is time. There is comfort. There is room to work slowly and beautifully. Survival rarely offers that. It shows up when conditions are bad and decisions are rushed, when everything in your body wants to stop or seek comfort.

That is why it is so easy to fall into the trap of beautiful work. You can spend hours carving a spoon, improving your technique, and feeling productive, while slowly letting go of the systems that actually keep you alive when things go sideways.

Cardio is not romantic. Cold-weather hiking is not cozy. High elevation effort does not feel meditative at first. When it is cold and snowy, and the wind is up, every signal in your body says to stay inside and be comfortable. That is exactly why it matters.

For me, the best cardio is getting out on a trail and pushing myself. Sometimes gently, sometimes hard. Sometimes, when I really do not want to go. That is not punishment. It is maintenance.

The same blind spot exists in tai chi. Tai chi is beautiful. It opens the body, sharpens awareness, and calms the nervous system. It is essential work. But if tai chi replaces cardio and strength instead of complementing them, you end up cultivating sensitivity without capacity. You feel more, but you can do less.

That is not balance.

The real relationship is simpler than people make it. Bushcraft, survival, tai chi, and fitness are not competing philosophies. They feed each other, but only if one is not allowed to replace the other.

Bushcraft refines skill.
Tai chi refines perception.
Cardio and strength maintain your ability to act.

Survival demands all of it.

If you had to reduce preparedness to one question, it would not be about tools or techniques. It would be this.

Can you move when it matters?

Everything else is secondary.

Carve the spoon. Practice the form. Enjoy the craft. Just do not skip the trail.

Because skill without capacity is comfort, and comfort is the first thing survival takes away.

Getting Off The Couch Is The Prime Directive of Survival

Before tools. Before skills. Before plans, gear lists, or fantasies of self reliance, there is one directive that governs survival training. Move. Act. Engage. Everything else is secondary.

Survival is usually imagined as a technical problem. People picture fire making, water purification, the right knife, the right pack, the right system. But most real world failures do not come from a lack of knowledge. They come from inaction.

People freeze. They hesitate. They wait for perfect conditions. They cling to comfort just a little too long. The couch is the real enemy, not because sitting is evil, but because inertia kills. If you cannot get yourself moving when things are uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unclear, no amount of skill will save you.

Movement is the first training skill. Not fitness. Not athletics. Not optimization. Movement is willingness. This is where Tai Chi belongs. Not as performance, not as self defense choreography, but as training the ability to initiate action while staying calm. Tai Chi teaches how to move without rushing, how to stay connected while stepping into uncertainty, and how to act without tension.

This is training, not a command to move blindly. Real survival sometimes requires staying put, breathing, observing, and letting panic pass. Tai Chi trains that as well. Stillness that is awake. Breath that regulates fear. A body that does not lock up under pressure. Preparedness is built by practicing movement so that stillness is a choice, not a freeze response.

This is why walking is such a powerful survival practice. Not because it is intense, but because it trains continuation. Walking forward, when it sucks! Survival favors the person who can continue forward or remain grounded without losing clarity.

When plans break down, when tools fail, when knowledge runs out, the body still remembers what to do. Stand up. Take a step. Or stay rooted and breathe. Engage the world in front of you with presence. That instinct, practiced daily through movement and stillness, is the real foundation of preparedness. Everything else comes after.

Tactics, Patience, and Tai Chi

Bill Waugh spent his life operating in environments where impatience got people killed.

Behind enemy lines, in surveillance, in tracking targets over months, he learned something most people miss.

Tactics are not about aggression.
They are about timing, listening, and restraint.

Waugh famously said:

“Heroes are men who have a plan, and who understand the plan is ever-changing and dependent on enemy action.”

That single line could be written on the wall of any Tai Chi school and still be correct.

Tai Chi, at its core, trains the same discipline. You enter a form with structure, but you never cling to it. The moment you force a movement, balance is lost. The moment you refuse to adjust, you’re already behind.

Waugh’s approach to tactics wasn’t speed or dominance. It was presence. He spent weeks watching before acting. He waited for patterns to reveal themselves. Listening came before movement.

Tai Chi calls this listening energy, but stripped of mysticism, it simply means this:
You don’t impose your will until the situation gives you information.

Another lesson from Waugh’s life is patience as an active state. He wasn’t waiting in a lazy way. He was constantly observing, calibrating, refining his understanding of terrain, behavior, and timing. That same patience shows up in Tai Chi when you settle your weight, regulate your breath, and feel for alignment instead of rushing to the next posture.

In both cases, stillness is not hesitation.
It is preparation.

Waugh adjusted constantly. Small shifts in position. Slight changes in routine. Nothing dramatic. Those micro-adjustments over time created survival.

Tai Chi does the same thing to the body and nervous system. Tiny corrections in posture and movement prevent collapse. Large, forced corrections create instability.

The overlap is simple and practical:

• Have a plan, but don’t worship it
• Listen longer than feels comfortable
• Move only when movement improves position
• Conserve energy
• Adjust early and quietly

Tai Chi doesn’t teach tactics in a military sense.
What it teaches is something more durable.

How to stay engaged without rushing.
How to act without panic.
How to wait without freezing.

Those are not philosophical ideas.
They are survival skills.

And they’re the same ones Bill Waugh trusted with his life.

A Man Caught in a Cultural Shift ( how I now see my father's life and death)

 

In the early 1960s, my father was an adopter of two things that would later become mainstream and then commodified: marijuana and crafts. He made handmade leather goods to sell. Items like jackets, bags, belts, and one small item in particular stand out in my memory: a leather pouch he called a pot stash. Bushcraft people today would recognize it as a kind of possibles bag, but his was made for weed, not flint and steel.

He was a deeply curious and active thinker. His shelves held books on Hinduism, Daoism, shelter building, and design. He was immersed in graphic design and interior design, always thinking visually, structurally, philosophically. Craft for him was not just making things. It was his worldview, identity, and resistance all rolled into one package.

During the hippie era, handmade goods were a reaction against the industrial machine of the United States. Making something with your hands was a statement of integrity. It said, "I am not just a consumer. I belong to a lineage older than factories."

But cultures shift.

When John Lennon was killed, something changed. When yuppie culture emerged, money, status, and ambition were polished into a uniform; my father cut his hair and tried to follow along. He began chasing financial success instead of craftsmanship. He leased a Mercedes-Benz. He opened a business in Manhattan that combined antiques with modern design. His heart was not fully in it, and he did not truly understand the game he was playing.

The business failed. He lost our family home. That collapse sent me down a difficult path of my own.

After that, he drank hard. He smoked heavily. Somewhere along the way, he lost his center.

For a long time, I carried resentment toward him. But now I see his life differently. I see him as someone crushed by a cultural transition he could not metabolize.

I think about early human stone tool makers that had mastered flint knapping and who understood the language of stone. Then copper arrives. Some adapt. Some do not. Some love the stone too much. They do not disappear because they lack skill. They disappear because the world moves on without caring what they were good at.

My father lived through a similar shift. Handmade leather goods were once a countercultural strength. Later, it became nostalgia, and then fashion. Then mass-produced again. Some people rode those waves successfully. Others never recovered.

He had three kids. And maybe handmade leather jackets were not the safest way to support a family under that kind of pressure. I understand that now. I have compassion where I once had judgment.

What is tragic is that not long after, handmade leather jackets came back into fashion. And even today, the bushcraft and mountain man movements never really disappeared. There has always been a quiet current of people who value hand skills, wood, steel, fire, and shelter. He could have found a way to stay rooted in his strengths. He almost did. But he did not trust them enough to endure the lean years.

That is the part that still hurts.

When I graduated high school, I wanted to be a famous painter more than anything. If there had been a devil offering a deal, I would have signed it. Instead, I took a different risk. I hitchhiked across the United States and found Taos. That changed everything.

Taos gave me space to keep my hands busy and my spirit intact. I found wood carving. I found bushcraft. I found Tai Chi. Those practices became ways of staying honest. Ways of keeping my soul tethered to something real. I still carve wood today. I am not successful as a seller. But I am still carving away. Ironically, when I arrived in Taos, I found a strong culture of sheepskin and leather goods makers. 

My father didn't have the vision or faith to look elsewhere. That is where I feel the lineage split and also where it reconnects.

My father lost his way because he could not identify what truly mattered to him as a human being. He believed money would restore meaning. It did not. He died early as a result of his drinking and smoking.

I do not tell this story to judge him. I tell it because I understand him now. He was not weak. He was displaced.

And maybe what I am doing, carving wood, practicing tai chi, and walking instead of running, is my way of staying on the narrow ridge he fell from. Not chasing success at the expense of integrity. Not abandoning craft when culture devalues it. Learning, slowly, to measure life not by applause or profit, but by whether I can still recognize myself in the work of my hands.

Tai Chi is primarily about somatic transformation

 

Much of how we understand change is shaped by our beliefs, insights, intentions, and explanations, but a prerequisite for sustainable change begins in the body.

This is what I mean by somatic transformation: a lasting shift in how the body organizes itself in the world, how it breathes, balances, responds to stress, and moves through space. When this changes, thoughts and emotions follow naturally without force or self-management

For those who are not familiar with somatic, let’s break it down:

• Somatic = of the body (muscles, breath, posture, nervous system, sensations)
  
  

• Transformation = a durable shift, not a temporary technique or mood

So somatic transformation means:

Rewiring how your body experiences and responds to life, especially stress, emotion, and threat. Additionally, it is having your body open to deeper sensations that people who rush through life can’t feel. 

For me, Tai Chi is one of the most effective ways to cultivate this kind of transformation.

I believe that people who stick with Tai Chi don’t practice it as a hobby but as something that is fundamentally being addressed only at the level of the body.

In contrast, Buddhist meditation sharpens awareness and reveals how the mind creates suffering through clinging. These insights are valuable and necessary. Yet insight alone does not always change how the body reacts.

A person can understand non-clinging intellectually and still brace under stress. They can grasp emptiness conceptually and still live with chronic tension, shallow breathing, or a nervous system locked in fight or flight. This is not a failure of understanding. It is a limitation of cognition as the primary vehicle of change.

Tai Chi addresses this gap directly.

Rather than arguing with the mind, Tai Chi trains the body to experience stability without rigidity, power without force, and responsiveness without panic. Through slow, attentive movement, the nervous system learns, physically, what safety, balance, and adaptability feel like.

This learning does not require belief. It requires practice.

Movement as Embodied Wisdom

Tai Chi is often described as meditation in motion, but that description understates its depth. It is a method of reorganizing posture, weight transfer, and breath so that effort is distributed efficiently and excess tension is released.

Over time, practitioners stop forcing balance and begin allowing it. They stop bracing against gravity and begin working with it. The body learns to yield without collapsing and to issue power without aggression.

These are not metaphors. They are somatic facts.

This is why Tai Chi pairs so naturally with Buddhist principles. Where Buddhism clarifies the nature of the mind, Tai Chi trains the body to embody those insights. Non-attachment becomes the ability to let go of unnecessary muscular effort. Equanimity becomes a stable center under changing conditions. Presence becomes literally felt through the feet, the spine, and the breath.

Grounding Through Action

Somatic transformation deepens when movement is connected to activities that have grounded humans for millennia, walking long distances, working with the hands, preparing food, shaping materials, and spending time in natural environments.

These activities anchor awareness in necessity and consequence. They provide feedback that is immediate and honest. They prevent practice from drifting into abstraction or performance.

This is also where Tai Chi distinguishes itself from purely symbolic or ritualized systems. While any tradition can become decorative or performative, Tai Chi continually returns the practitioner to functional realities, balance, structure, timing, and adaptability. If these are absent, the practice simply does not work.

In this sense, Tai Chi is not about cultivating an identity or performing a role. It is about becoming more inhabitable, learning to live inside the body with less resistance and more coherence.

Somatic Transformation as the Point

Somatic transformation does not eliminate thought or philosophy. It integrates them. When the body changes, reflection becomes clearer and ethical action becomes less reactive. Decisions arise from grounded awareness rather than compulsion or avoidance.

This is why Tai Chi has endured not as a belief system but as a practice. It offers a way for the body to learn what the mind often understands too late, how to move through the world without unnecessary struggle.

In that sense, Tai Chi is not a supplement to insight. It is its embodiment. And for those drawn to it over a lifetime, the transformation it offers is no mere accident. It is the point.

Your Body Is Not Broken It Is Stuck in Survival Mode

In my line of work, community health promotion, I occasionally see people who work out hard but then end up in the hospital. It took me a long time to understand why health is much more than lifting heavy weights and running marathons. It is also how your nervous system responds to a hectic environment.

Your nervous system runs on autopilot. This is the autonomic nervous system, and it is always working in the background, whether you are aware of it or not. It has two primary modes. One is sympathetic, which most people know as the fight-or-flight response. The other is parasympathetic, which is largely regulated through the vagus nerve. Neither system is bad. Both are necessary. The problem shows up when one dominates for too long.

Fight or flight is designed for short bursts. It raises heart rate, tightens muscles, sharpens focus, and redirects energy away from digestion and long-term repair. This is precisely what you want when danger is real. The body is doing its job.

The issue is that modern life keeps triggering this response without ever letting it shut off. Work pressure, trauma, poor sleep, constant stimulation, and unresolved stress all send the same message to the body. Stay alert. Stay ready. Over time, the autonomic system gets stuck in survival mode. The body never receives the signal that it is safe to stand down. Eventually, survival becomes the default state.

The vagus nerve represents the opposite side of this equation. It is the main pathway of the parasympathetic system, and it connects the brain to the heart, lungs, and gut. At its core, it is always asking a straightforward question. Are we safe enough to relax?

When the vagus nerve is engaged, heart rate slows, breathing deepens, digestion resumes, inflammation lowers, and the body can finally shift into repair mode. Stored stress and tension can begin to unwind. This transition cannot be forced through thought or willpower. The body has to feel safety before it will allow relaxation.

This is where Tai Chi becomes especially powerful. Tai Chi works because it speaks directly to the autonomic nervous system rather than trying to override it. Slow continuous movement reduces threat signals. Upright posture improves breathing and circulation. Rhythmic motion steadies the nervous system and supports healthy heart rate variability. Attention stays in the body instead of spiraling through anxious thought loops.

Unlike intense exercise, Tai Chi does not keep pushing the body deeper into fight or flight. Unlike passive relaxation, it does not lead to collapse or spacing out. It teaches the body how to move out of survival mode and into vagal regulation smoothly, repeatedly, and safely.

Healing does not happen while the body is braced for impact. Trauma, inflammation, digestive issues, and chronic pain tend to persist when the nervous system believes danger is ongoing. Tai Chi creates a controlled environment where the body can relearn safety through movement, not by forcing calm, but by restoring balance.

Fight or flight keeps you alive. The vagus nerve teaches you how to recover. Tai Chi is one of the most practical ways to retrain the autonomic nervous system by using slow, intentional movement to signal safety, restore rhythm, and allow healing to happen naturally.

 

Karma, and Choosing The Path That Brings Growth

There is a real romance attached to special forces, especially when filtered through books and movies. Discipline, brotherhood, mastery under pressure, mythic testing of the self. But that romance usually edits out the moral residue. Carrying acts that do not align with your inner compass, wars that later reveal themselves as incoherent or unjust, and the long psychic aftermath. For someone wired like me, that dissonance would not have worked for where I needed to grow. It would have been a weight. This is not a critique of the warrior path, but a way of looking at paths and trends that society puts forth. 

The artist's path does not get the same cinematic glow, but it has its own rigor. Watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about pushing the limits of embodiment, expression, and presence. They are not escaping discipline. They are channeling it through a different nervous system. The same is true of great guitar players, dancers, and writers. They are testing how much truth a human body and mind can carry and still stay alive.

That is the parallel with special forces that does not get named often enough. Both are about capacity. One is romanticized because it serves power structures. The other is tolerated because it does not.

Karma matters here. Karma is not about what looks noble from the outside. It is about what pulls you and what will not leave you alone. It is about what you have to do in order to become whole. A soul does not choose the path society applauds. It selects the terrain where its work actually is.

I was born to hippie parents and exposed early to art, music, and Asian philosophy. That was both a gift and a destabilization. I was not handed a single narrative and told to stay inside it. That freedom came with existential vertigo. Other kids had rails, religion, culture, and certainty. I had openness, and openness without grounding can feel like falling.

Punk rock mattered because it gave me a reset. Not truth exactly, but a refusal of false certainty. A clearing of the table. From there, it made sense to look for something older than ideology. Primitive art, early human mark-making forms that emerged from survival and meaning-making rather than doctrine.

Wood carving held that truth. The material does not care what you believe. Grain runs where it runs. Cut against it, and you pay. Follow it, and the form emerges. Every carver anywhere in the world learns the same lessons. That is an embodied truth. That is also why Tai Chi found me. The body reveals what the mind endlessly argues about.

So when I chose art because it offered the most freedom, I would adjust that slightly. It provided the most honest constraints. Freedom inside reality, not fantasy. Wood. Breath. Movement. Health. Writing. None of these lets you delude yourself for long.

Seen from that angle, my life makes a quiet, but precise sense. Carving, health promotion, Tai Chi, writing, and community work in Taos help me translate ancient nonverbal truths into modern contexts where people are profoundly disconnected from their bodies and from meaning. I did not join the army, but I still serve. I did not go to war, but I work with suffering, discipline, and repair.

The question of where the best place for me is might not be geographic at all. It might be this. Standing at the intersection of art, movement, health, and meaning, doing the work that will not leave me alone. From a karma perspective, that is not indecision. That is alignment in motion.

It isn't romantic, but it is necessary.

The Most Overlooked Wilderness Survival Skill: Tai Chi

Outdoor skills are usually framed around the same familiar categories: navigation, fire building, first aid, layering, risk management, and physical conditioning. We talk endlessly about gear, preparation, and the right tools to carry into the backcountry. But there is a missing category that rarely makes it into the conversation, even though it directly shapes how we move, think, and make decisions when the terrain changes or the unexpected happens. It has nothing to do with equipment and everything to do with the person carrying it.

That missing category is our internal skill set—our ability to regulate stress, stay composed under uncertainty, perceive subtle environmental cues, and move with stability even when tired or cold. These qualities often determine whether a situation remains manageable or begins sliding toward trouble. And one of the best ways to train them, though almost no one in the outdoor world talks about it, is Tai Chi.

Most people think of Tai Chi as a gentle meditative practice, something done slowly in a park or community center. But Tai Chi is also practical conditioning for the nervous system and the body’s mechanics. It teaches you to interrupt panic before it snowballs. It teaches your breath to stay long when adrenaline wants to shorten it. It teaches smooth, efficient movement that reduces unnecessary strain and lowers the risk of slips or missteps. And it sharpens awareness so that details in the landscape become clearer instead of fading under stress.

I was reminded of all this on a recent winter hike in the Rio Grande Gorge. It’s a trail I’ve done many times, a descent into the canyon and a climb out along a steep and rugged slope. But with a fresh layer of snow, the trail vanished. The familiar markers were gone, and the terrain suddenly felt foreign. Even though I had the right gear, water, a knife, fire starter, and layers, there was still a moment where my stomach tightened and that subtle, disorienting whisper crept in: “You might be lost.” It wasn’t a dangerous situation yet, but it was enough to trigger the early stages of poor decision-making—the very thing most survival incidents are built on.

Instead of pushing forward blindly, I stopped. I found a patch of sunlight, took a moment to warm my hands, and settled my breath. Then, almost instinctively, I began moving through a few Tai Chi patterns. Slow rotations. Shifting weight. Feeling the ground beneath me instead of fighting it. The more I moved, the more the anxiety dissolved. The land stopped feeling like an adversary. My senses widened. I began noticing small landmarks I had overlooked a few minutes earlier—the way a cluster of rocks opened in one direction, the faint rise of a ridge I recognized, the subtle indentation of the path beneath the snow. Within minutes, the terrain reorganized itself in my mind and the trail appeared again, almost effortlessly.

It struck me afterward how natural that sequence felt. Tai Chi wasn’t something extra I added to the hike; it was a built-in reset button. It prevented me from compounding a small problem into a real one. The practice didn’t “save me”—the situation wasn’t extreme enough for that—but it absolutely corrected the direction of my thinking before it slid into unnecessary risk. And that is the essence of internal survival skill.

When adrenaline hits outdoors, people tend to move faster, breathe shallower, and narrow their awareness. Tai Chi trains the opposite pattern. It teaches you to slow down just enough to see clearly again. It reminds the body how to generate warmth without burning energy, using rotation and breath to bring circulation back into your hands and feet. It keeps your joints soft instead of rigid, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of small but consequential injuries. And it cultivates a wide, open form of attention that lets you read terrain instead of fight it.

None of this requires mystical thinking. These are practical, testable qualities. They translate directly onto icy trails, steep scrambles, loose scree, snow-covered switchbacks, and long climbs. Anyone who spends time outdoors knows that panic, rushing, and missteps cause far more emergencies than rare dramatic events. Tai Chi is one of the few practices that directly conditions the internal mechanics behind those mistakes.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s accessible. You don’t need to be flexible or athletic. You don’t need equipment. You don’t need decades of training. A handful of simple motions can help you breathe deeper, move smarter, and reset your nervous system when the environment becomes challenging. You can practice it at a trailhead, during a rest break, or in the middle of a canyon when the snow makes the world look unfamiliar.

Outdoor participation is higher than ever, and so are preventable incidents caused by panic, poor footing, cold, and decision fatigue. At the same time, athletes across disciplines are embracing breathwork, somatic awareness, and mobility training. Tai Chi exists right at the intersection of these trends, yet it’s rarely discussed in the outdoor community.

It should be. Because ultimately, survival is not just about what you carry in your pack. It’s about the clarity, stability, and awareness you bring to the moment things don’t go as planned. Tai Chi strengthens those qualities. It makes the outdoors feel not just safer, but more alive. It changes how you read the land, how you move through it, and how you respond when the unexpected happens.

It’s not simply a practice—it’s a skill. And for anyone who spends time in wild places, it’s one worth learning.

Karma, the Five Bodies, and What Rock Art Taught Me Today (part two)

 

Standing in Sego Canyon today, looking at these ancient pictographs that once inspired me back in art school, something clicked. Some people like to describe these figures as “aliens,” but what if they’re early depictions of the energetic body — the subtle forms that ancient people sensed, felt, and lived with every day? When you see them in person, that possibility feels real. It’s like staring at an imprint of internal experience painted on stone.

That reflection tied directly back to what I’ve been learning about karma.

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve taken from Sadhguru is that karma doesn’t disappear through escape, not even through suicide. Ending this life only carries your unresolved patterns forward, with even more weight. In other words, the pain we avoid becomes the debt we carry. That understanding alone is a massive incentive to stay, to endure, and to grow.

I’ve felt that in my own life this year.
People have yelled at me more than they have in decades, and at times, I have resisted the lessons beneath it. I feared change. I feared losing parts of myself I had grown attached to. And when people sensed that fear, some tried to take control or twist the dynamic, especially when I stepped into the role of “teacher.”

But I now see that as karma, too.
When someone glimpses a path that could change them, and they’re not ready, they often retreat deeper into their own maze. They choose the comfort of familiar suffering instead of the vulnerability of transformation. That’s the “bartering” of karma: trading future freedom for present safety.

I’ve done it.
I’ve watched others do it.
And it’s always sad, because the maze only grows thicker.

Distractions as Karma Avoidance

Another trap: distractions.
Football games, Super Bowls, politics, endless entertainment, even worthwhile things, become escape routes when they pull us away from the deeper work. Nothing wrong with them by themselves, but if they become a substitute for introspection, then they feed karma instead of dissolving it.

Tai Chi showed me this clearly.
Once I stepped into real internal practice, I realized how many things I had used to avoid my own evolution.

Practicing Tai Chi in Sacred Places

One thing I’ve committed to is practicing Tai Chi in sacred places.
It feels like a way of accelerating the shedding of karma, like sweeping my past patterns out into the open air, allowing them to burn away under the sky and on the stone. Today, moving under the canyon walls, those pictographs watching over me, I felt a kind of alignment inside that I haven’t felt in years.

I felt unconstricted.
And that’s rare, society squeezes people into certain shapes, certain behaviors, certain expectations. I’ve long believed that this compression is one reason our country struggles with obesity: we lose our natural connection to the body. We store fear of our true selves as weight. We let norms dictate posture, breath, movement, appetite, everything.

But Sadhguru talks about something deeper, something I’m just starting to explore.

The Five Bodies: A Map for Karma and Growth

According to Sadhguru, each person has five bodies:

1. Physical Body (Annamaya Kosha)
   The flesh-and-blood shell, shaped by food, habit, movement, and environment.

2. Energy Body (Pranamaya Kosha)
   This is the field Tai Chi directly works with breath, flow, vitality, circulation, Jing/Qi.

3. Mental Body (Manomaya Kosha)
   Thoughts, memories, interpretations, a major container of karma.

4. Intellect / Discriminatory Body (Vijnanamaya Kosha)
   The part that can discern truth from illusion, the tool that cuts through the maze.

5. Bliss Body (Anandamaya Kosha)
   The quiet, inner core untouched by karma, the destination of all spiritual work.

When these bodies fall out of harmony, life becomes heavier.
When they align, transformation begins.

Tai Chi, practiced deeply and sincerely, works on all five.
And I think that’s why I felt the pull to practice here, because places like Sego Canyon remind me that humans have always known the depth of the inner world. They carved and painted what they sensed. They documented the invisible.

Seeing these pictographs today, truly seeing them, made me realize that what I’m working through isn’t new. People thousands of years ago were wrestling with the same internal bodies, the same energetic movements, the same karmic patterns.

Change is hard.
Growth is uncomfortable.
Karma demands participation.

But standing there today under the canyon walls, feeling the wind move through the gap where ancient hands once painted their inner world onto stone, I felt something like gratitude.

This trip is shedding something.
A layer, a weight, a pattern,  and more importantly, I see a way out of the maze instead of deeper into it.

Karma, Change, and the Light I Finally See (part 1)

 

2025 has been a year of extremes for me — highs, lows, and more confrontations than I’ve had since high school. Some of that was on me. I’ve been resisting the next stage of my own growth, standing in denial because change is uncomfortable, and fear can be a quiet anchor.

In Karma by Sadhguru, he writes that many people “barter their karma.” They accept negative experiences as a kind of payment for not changing. I saw myself in that. I kept choosing the pain I knew over the transformation I needed. And that resistance had consequences — tension with others, fear, hesitation. But it also gave me clarity. A light at the end of the tunnel finally appeared because I stopped running from the lesson.

I’m starting to understand that adversaries aren’t obstacles; they’re catalysts. They push you to places you wouldn’t choose, but often need. Whether someone tries to take advantage of your fear or simply reflects it back at you, the direction you turn — negative or positive — is always your own responsibility. That, to me, is the essence of karma.

Today I’m wandering through Moab with the red rock breathing around me. I practiced Tai Chi on the arches this morning, feeling every movement reconnect me to that deeper current inside. And for the first time in a long time, I feel grateful. Grateful for the lessons, the discomfort, the people who challenged me, and the clarity that followed.

Karma isn’t punishment. It’s an invitation. And I’m finally saying yes.