Meditation, properly speaking, is the stilling of the mind. Most of the meditation techniques taught today still the mind using one of two basic approaches. The first is the Zen approach of “silent sitting”, facing a blank wall until the mind becomes blank. You sit until the moment of pure awareness arrives, even if it takes twenty years. The second is the Mantra approach, in which the mind is rhythmically lulled to sleep with sounds or images.
After thousands of repetitions the body begins to vibrate at a higher frequency, and the meditator becomes aware of the higher energies operating beyond the sensory process functions of our daily mind. The Esoteric Taoist approach is different. It does not depend on total absence of the flux of thought. Instead, this system stresses the circulation of energy called “chi” along certain pathways inside the body. These pathways help direct the “chi” — also known as prana, sperm or ovarian power, the warm current, or kundalini power — to successively higher power centers (chakras) of the body.
The secret of circulating this “chi” has been transmitted for thousands of years in China, where it brought extraordinary improvements in health and life. But what is this “chi”, and where does it come from? The chi is the primordial life force itself. It begins in human life with the piercing of an egg by a sperm cell. From this original fusion an enormously complex new human being develops. “Chi” is the continuous flow of energy linking the various tissues, organs and brain functions into a unified whole — a person.
Chi also links this person to his environment. The main channels of “chi” energy flow in the body were discovered by sages meditating upon the human fetus inside the womb. They observed the baby grows up around its mother’s navel point, and that through the navel the fetus absorbs nutrients and expels waste. The fetus literally “breathes” through the umbilical cord from the mother into its own navel down to the perineum and up to the head and down from the tongue to the navel again.
Conclusion
The navel point is thus said by Taoists to be the starting point for the flow of the Awaken the “Chi” Life Energy – 25 – primordial life energy, or “chi”, and remains the point of strongest energy storage and circulation in the adult.
