Welcome to The Tao of Conscious Living
…and Dying
When I was a student of Chinese medicine—a “baby acupuncturist,” as I affectionately refer to my own students—I thought I was learning how to treat disease.
The first question on any medical intake form is always: Chief complaint.
Basically: Why are you here?
As baby acupuncturists—honestly, more like fetal acupuncturists—we learn what Chinese medicine can offer people seeking healing for a wide range of disorders that run the gamut of body and mind: pain, stress and anxiety, insomnia, digestive problems, perimenopausal symptoms, the occasional skin condition, and so on.
But in the ten years I’ve spent actually practicing Chinese medicine, what I discovered instead was something much bigger.
Chinese medicine isn’t just a medical system.
It’s a way of understanding the entire universe.
It’s a philosophy about how life works, how consciousness moves through the body, and how human beings fit into the larger intelligence of nature.
At the center of this worldview is something called the Tao.
The Tao is often translated as “the Way.”
But it’s not really something you can define.
After all, the very first line of the Tao Te Ching says:
“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”
And yet, in my determination to connect with you about something I find really f*cking important—like crucial to a life well lived, which is what I want for you—I’m going to do my best to describe it anyway.
The Tao is the underlying intelligence that organizes everything: the cycles of nature, the rhythm of the seasons, the movement of emotions, the rise and fall of life itself.
According to Taoist philosophy, health happens when we live in alignment with this movement, and disease happens when we lose touch with it.
Over the last ten years of practicing and teaching Chinese medicine, I’ve watched this truth play out again and again in clinic.
People rarely come in with just a physical symptom.
They come in with a story.
A breakup that never fully healed.
A job that drains their spirit.
A lifetime of anxiety they can’t seem to shake.
What Chinese medicine understands—often better than modern medicine—is that the body is not separate from our emotional and spiritual lives.
Our bodies are expressions of our consciousness.
Which means healing isn’t just about fixing symptoms.
Healing is about becoming conscious.
Conscious of our emotions.
Conscious of our patterns.
Conscious of the choices we make every damn day that either bring us closer to alignment… or pull us further away from it.
In this space, I want to explore that process with you.
I’ll be sharing things I’ve learned from ten years in clinical practice, from teaching, from exploring consciousness, Taoist philosophy, meditation, manifestation, and from the thousands of conversations I’ve had with patients trying to understand their own lives.
We’ll talk about things like:
How emotions shapes our physical reality
Why we repeat the same old patterns
Tools for the nervous system and neural reprogramming
How Chinese medicine maps consciousness through the Five Elements
How herbal medicine and flower essences can shift emotional states
This work is about the whole arc of existence- a full-spectrum philosophy. It’s about life, death, and how we navigate the space in between.
We’ll also expand our understanding of Chinese medicine beyond the narrow path of treating symptoms…
into something much bigger:
symptoms → healing → awareness → consciousness → Tao → purpose → manifestation → death
Chinese medicine opened a door for me into a much deeper understanding of life.
My hope is that it might open that door for you, too.
So welcome to The Tao of Conscious Living where every moment is an opportunity to become conscious.
Bibliography
Mitchell, Steven, Tao Te Ching, Harper Collins, 1992
