Grasping the Dao of Chinese Bodywork (Tuina) By Dan Reid
Central to Daoism is the concept of transformation – spiritual transformation, bodily transformation, even political transformation – and learning new skills is indeed a practice of transformation. The Daoist love of learning is a natural extension of its affinity for transformation and is evidenced by the vast diversity of fields to which Daoist theory is applied, including medicine, martial arts, nutrition, ecology, interior and urban design, sociology, economics, agriculture, and various fields of psychology. It could be said that all disciplines are, in essence, studies of transformation, and to the Daoist, all transformations are shadows of Dao. The quintessential technique for the Daoist, however, is to discover reality by leaving things be and letting them return to “ziran” – to be “as they are” – and thus to find their intrinsic nature (xing). This intrinsic nature is the most permanent existence of a thing and so holds within it the greatest potency, and the greatest potential for longevity. Further, this nature lies within a balance of yang and yin – tension and relaxation, development and atrophy, movement and stillness. So, the Daoist study of transformation brings with it this understanding of balance. With any transformation is a bit of pain. The pain of leaving behind the old skin; the pain of twisting into the new form; the pain of breaking through a preliminary shell. Anyone who takes up the internal martial arts of Taiji, Xingyi, and Baguazhang will feel this odd discomfort of pushing up against our long developed limitations in the body. Standing and positioning oneself in the most effective alignment possible is at first the perhaps least natural feeling. But in time, the body adapts, and the hidden benefits of shifting the body to its primal form arrive, often unexpectedly and not according to any plan of one’s own. Such is also the case in life: as we try to correct our lives to align with what we know is our proper place in the world, unexpected “coincidences” will cross our paths like a branch from the heavens bending down to let us climb out of our situation just The Empty Vessel — Page 34
when it seems the path forward has come to an end. I’d like to tell you of my own journey along one of these branches, and how it continues to reveal to me the true-to-life applicability of ancient Daoist teachings. As a child of the ‘80s, a golden age of martial-arts movies and marketing, the Chinese Gongfu master has been imprinted on my subconscious as an indelible archetype unto itself, encompassing the warrior, the sage, the magician and the healer. Thus, that familiar moment in so many Gongfu movies, where a succession of finger jabs renders an opponent frozen until an equally skilled master comes along to undo the combination-lock, percolated in my imagination as I flipped through Tom Bisio’s handbook, A Tooth from the Tiger’s Mouth: How to Treat Your Injuries with Powerful Healing Secrets of the Great Chinese Warrior. With its Gongfu herbal formulas and therapeutic bodymanipulations, my desire to learn more must have sent out a strong frequency. The first response to this signal arrived as an all-butoffered scholarship to study TCM in China for five years. Though after intense consideration I decided not to pursue it, this opportunity proved to me how much I was willing to change in my life to pursue the path of Chinese medicine. Struggling through a French TCM school in Montreal where I live, however, didn’t seem like much of an option. So, what to do? After about a week of slowly accepting the need to look for more work as a cook, I was randomly introduced to a student of Baguazhang Gongfu… whose teacher also teaches Chinese sports medicine… in Montreal… and offers a full certification course in Tuina massage therapy and Chinese osteopathy. With a “clack, clack, clack!” everything suddenly set into place. Little did I know at that moment that the association I was about to join was in fact the very same through which Tom Bisio learned Chinese sports medicine and external herbalism, and that my soon to be Tuina teacher, Ethan Murchie, followed Tom Bisio as the sitting president of the North American Tang Shou Tao Association (NATSTA) – the association founded by Bisio’s and Murchie’s Gongfu and Tuina mentor, the legendary Vince Black. To briefly note the quality of
