My Daoist Journey: Bill Ryan

This is part 3 of a multipart series.

I took a lot of courses with Bill Ryan at Brookline Tai Chi through the remainder of the 90’s, right up until I left for Santa Fe in 2000. Classes were structured in two-month courses, grouped into threes. There were three introductory level courses in Energy Gates Qigong, followed by three intermediate courses, followed by three advanced courses. As I recall, I only took the introductory and intermediate courses. I took a lot of time off, and I repeated a bunch, but I don’t think I ever learned the third swing - the second-to-last movement of the form - in a class setting. I taught myself from the book first, and Bill corrected my mistakes later during a break in a weekend seminar.

Wu Style Tai Chi Short Form classes were arranged in a similar manner: Six months introductory and six months intermediate. After this, there were two six-month advanced tracks. One was principles, which Bill taught, and the other was details, which was taught by Alan Dougall. I took all of these classes, but I’m going to hold off talking about courses with Alan until a later post. In contrast to the Energy Gates classes, with the short form, each six-month sequence would progress through the entire form. Each time you came back through, you would refine the form further and further. Bill used Energy Gates as warm-up material for his short form classes, and there are a lot of commonalities between the two practices.

At the introductory levels, I gained a lot of the benefits that might be attributed to these kinds of practices in scientific studies that are done in this area: reduced stress; less muscle tension; reduced heart rate and blood pressure; better balance; better posture; better coordination; peace of mind; better digestion; improved liver and kidney function; improved cardiovascular function (especially vascular); deeper, smoother breathing patterns. Things along these lines. These are benefits that you would expect to gain while practicing external qigong, which refers to taiji or qigong forms that focus on the physical body - particularly, the outermost layers of the physical body - similar to many Western fitness activities.

But Wu taiji and Energy Gates qigong are what are known as internal qigong, which refers to practices that focus more on what is going on on the inside. This means both deeper inside the body, as well as working more directly with the qi body, which encompasses the same space occupied by your physical body, and typically extends six to twelve inches from the physical body’s surface. Of course, all taiji and qigong forms - and all Western fitness activities - will work the qi body, but most of them do so indirectly, as a consequence of working with your physical body.

As I progressed through the coursework, I learned and experienced more and more of this internal work. I began to be able to sense my qi body directly. A one-time experience of something new might give you an inkling of something about the world you don’t yet know or understand. Or it might be a fluke. Repeated experiences, each in their own context, reinforcing a general pattern, becomes something that is subjectively real, that one might never otherwise have encountered.

But it’s not just knowledge and belief that we are interested in here, but practice. You aren’t able to, say, move your shoulder blades in ways you never have before, because you believe you can, or even because you know that it is possible. You also need to practice moving your shoulder blades that way. The first time you try it, you might not feel them move at all. It may take many sessions before you feel anything. Keep practicing, and in a few years, it may become second nature to move your shoulders that way.

There doesn’t seem to be much point in going in to the details of the movements of these practices here, because descriptions of the specific mechanics of the movements are not terribly enlightening. The practice of standing meditation, however, has better potential in painting a picture.

In the early stages, standing meditation is quite similar to what I’ve encountered in different contexts under the name of mindfulness meditation. (Although I’ve never encountered anyone in a non-Daoist tradition meditating in a standing posture. They normally sit, either in a chair or directly on the floor.) In the initial stage, you simply stand, and check your body alignments, correcting them where you can. Another common approach at both early and later stages is to work with the breathing, allowing and inviting the breath to be smooth, deep, even, and calm.

The mindfulness part comes in when we scan through our body, observing how things are going. Is there any tension there? Any spots that feel tired or weak? Pain? Not trying to change anything, just checking in, like doing an inventory. In the water methods taught in Bruce Frantzis’ Energy Arts school, we work from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet. Other mindfulness traditions start from the bottom and work their way up. Having a systematic approach is important, or we may end up overlooking the same spots every time: those spots that we have a tendency to avoid or ignore.

In the beginning, we focus on sensations towards the surface of our body, as this tends to be the easiest to access. As we progress, we learn to feel things deeper in our physical or qi bodies. We also begin to learn the dissolving process. Here, instead of just checking in, seeing where we are blocked or tense, we allow the tension to release and relax. We don’t make it happen. That doesn’t work. Rather, we invite it to happen. Bill used the word “let” most of the time: let it happen; let it release; let it go.

The dissolving practice itself has many different levels of practice. I’ve described the most basic above: just inviting the blockage to release; inviting the body to let go. I don’t think it will be helpful to describe the more advanced techniques in detail. You can get these descriptions from the book, but to really learn them, you need to find a teacher who has mastered these techniques, and study with them for a couple of years. Suffice it to say that these advanced techniques follow general patterns of relaxation: down and out. When we relax our shoulders, our shoulders drop. This is the down. When we relax our abdomen, our abdomen expands. This is the out: out from the center, towards the periphery.

How can I explain to you the experience of doing qigong like this? I thought it might be helpful to put it into verse. This is not really a poem. I’m just laying it out this way in the hopes that I will be better able to express myself. Go ahead and read it as if it was prose.

Your entire body is relaxed.
Your skin is relaxed - the whole surface,
Your muscles - every one of them - are relaxed,
Your ligaments and tendons are relaxed,
Your bones are relaxed.
Your joints are open and properly aligned,
Allowing the energy to flow freely through them,
Flowing down from the Heavens and through your feet, deep into the Earth,
You are filled with a quiet vitality.
Your internal organs are relaxed.
You've visited each of them,
Feeling around in there, finding the tensions and the dark places,
Inviting them to release.
Your heart, your spleen, your lungs, your kidneys, your liver.
Your eyes - the backs of the eyes,
The inner ear, the crainium,
The jaw, the teeth, the gums,
You go to each of these places, with gentle love and acceptance.
Some day, your entire self will be free from blockages,
Peaceful and open.
Until that day, you follow the path and practice the Dao.
Your journey is the destination.

Okay, I admit, I lied. That’s actually a poem. But in my defense, it’s a pretty terrible poem. Okay, self-deprecating humor aside, there is simply no scientific study that can show these experiences out, because they are subjective¹. And no scientist, amateur or professional, will ever experience these things for themselves unless they get themselves a great qigong instructor and practice for a year or three.

So the title of the blog post is “Bill Ryan”, and I’ve barely even mentioned Bill at all so far. My friends, all of the things I am describing here, Bill taught them to me. I’m sure there are a few thousand people in the world that could have taught me this stuff, but Bill is the one who did. And not just me. Bill had thousands of students over the years, and I would venture to guess that hundreds of them had similar experiences. I am so grateful to Bill, not simply because he taught me techniques that would benefit my health and peace of mind for the rest of my life, but because he brought meaning and enchantment back into my world; a world that had succumbed to the mechanical meaninglessness and enslavement of the Archons of our times. I’m truly grateful to Bill. Finding him and his school was probably the best thing that has ever happened to me so far in my lifetime. If you are reading this, Bill, Namasté.

I found it quite interesting that during this time in the late 90’s, I had a large number of psychic experiences involving Bill. This has happened to me with other people before and since, but never to the same extent. I imagine this was due to a combination of me doing this intensive energy work, and at the same time having a disposition of a depressed and unattended emotional body, but a hyperactive mental state. (I still have these traits, but to a much lesser extent than back then.)

I’ll share just a couple of examples. There is a principle of feeling like you are being held by a string from the crown of your head. These kinds of principles apply universally, but sometimes you are quite aware of them, and sometimes you forget. One day I was practicing the second swing - one of the movements in the Energy Gates form - and I remarked to myself that this “hanging by a string from the top of your head” principle was particularly easy to remember during this exercise. The very next day in class, we were practicing the second swing, and Bill reminded us of this principle. He then said that this principle was particularly easy to overlook during this exercise.

Another time, I was practicing quite regularly, and feeling around inside of myself, and I was in a quandary about where exactly my kidneys were. I knew where I felt them to be, and that seemed to be a bitter higher than they ought to have been when looking through anatomy books. (I’ve since learned that my kidneys have been higher than kidneys typically are, because of the way I've habitually held my middle back.) The very next class we were in standing meditation, and Bill was walking around the room giving his soft, gentle, verbal instructions. He was mentioning a couple of points to pay attention to, and one of them was kidneys. Probably “shoulders, kidneys, and lower back” was the phrase he was repeating. And he laid his hand gently on my back, right there on my kidneys, as he said that word. In other words, he was showing me exactly where my kidneys were. I know, neither of these examples are mind-blowing. But these kinds of things were happening all the time.

Bill would often walk around the room to visit his students individually and help them out, perhaps making a minor adjustment to a body alignment, or maybe resting hands on your shoulders to help them relax. Even with my eyes closed, I started to sense him coming close. Even if he never touched me physically, I could feel his awareness entering into my qi body, checking up on me, seeing how he might gently help me along. It never felt invasive, but the sensation became crystal clear over time. It’s something I always look for in a new teacher: How far does their awareness extend? It’s a metric you have to be careful using, because commonly, people with strong qi awareness will avoid looking inside you, like they are averting their gaze. And this is good, because poking around in somebody else’s qi body can be extremely invasive. But Bill seemed to have a way of asking up front, qi to qi, if it was okay to come in, and it never once felt invasive.

There were many teachers at Brookline Tai Chi other than just Bill, including Alan Dougall, who seems to have been at the school from the start. Alan is a great teacher who, a few years later, would teach me the Wu style long form. But there were other teachers as well. In fact, when I was a student there, Bill was recruiting teachers from amongst his students. He dropped a few strong hints around me that I might teach there, but unfortunately, even with qigong now in my life, I was still a complete mess emotionally. My recollection of how it went was, Bill was hinting to me that I could teach, then I disappeared from the school for six or twelve months, and when I came back, he had a couple of new assistant teachers. I want to tell you about all of these teachers, because they are all important, and I am grateful to every one of them, even if my memories of them might be incredibly thin. But before I do that, I want to talk about Master Bruce Frantzis himself, in the next installment.

1. Ironically, science does allow a certain class of subjective criteria in. For example, a chemical reaction produces a “clear, colorless liquid.” How do we know it is clear and colorless? “Well, just look at it, you dingbat, you can see perfectly well it is clear and colorless!” Sure, but my sight is part of my subjective experience. Apparently, because we all share this same subjective experience, and anyone who denies that the liquid is clear and colorless is presumed to be deceitful, this is okay. But describe the sensations (other than pain) that you are feeling in your liver, and suddenly you are nuts.