Beneficial Articles
Articles and Tips for a Holistic Life, Natural Living, Self Knowledge
Holistic inspirational and motivational articles for personal wellbeing.The topics we present here, are opening doors to more aware of yourself in relation to the environment and transformation
Start with a Holistic Life or Natural Living and Self Knowledge
Chifull Team has a background of Dao cultivation, study and practice for many years.
Our knowledge of natural well-being and health and experience with (ancient) scriptures and martial arts has proven to be profoundly beneficial to our life.
We are sharing our skills to support and empower people on their personal journey.
"When one door closes, another door opens"
ChiFull Team
Journaling for self knowledge
With journaling, you explore your thoughts and feelings that surround the events of your life by keeping a diary or a journal.
You can do this in different ways. If you want to use journaling as a tool for stress management and self-exploration, it works best to do it consistently. But, nevertheless, even if you decide on journaling occasionally it can work very stress relieving when you focus mainly on the emotional process. One of the most effective ways to reduces stress with journaling is to be very detailed about your feelings and thoughts when you write about stressful events. It’s important to do whatever feels right when you decide on which method to use for your journaling experience.
With journaling, you allow yourself to clarify your thoughts and feelings while gaining valuable self knowledge.
Journaling can also be very helpful in solving problems. It seems to be easier to hash out problems and find solutions while making notes on paper. Journaling to release trauma helps to process the events by re-exploring the emotions involved, resulting in an easier way of releasing them. The reason why it’s easier to resolve problems, and processing traumatic events through journaling is that both hemispheres of the brain are used in the process, which allows the experience to become fully integrated within one’s mind. Journaling can also be very helpful if you want to focus on other areas of your life. This can be accomplished with gratitude journaling or even coincidence journaling.
It’s scientifically proven that journaling benefits one’s health.
The following was discovered:
* Journaling can decrease health conditions
such as asthma, arthritis
and many more.
* Journaling improves our cognitive functioning.
* Journaling counteracts many of the negative effects of stress.
* Journaling prevents us from getting sick, by strengthening the immune system.
Just like other self-help methods, journaling may have some drawbacks. People with learning disabilities may experience difficulty through the act of writing itself. For perfectionists, it may be hard to just focus on thoughts and emotions because they are concerned with how their work reads or other distracting factors. If you become aware of your coping mechanisms you will be able to make beneficial changes. What is seen can be released. You have the mental power to change your patterns of behavior and/or thought.
Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching)
The Dao De Jing, (Tao Te Ching) is a book, written by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu over 2,500 years ago. Naturally, if that’s all it is, this story has no function. The Dao De Jing is not just a book. It is a Chinese collection of 81 classical texts that holds the concealed answers to our existence, the deeper meaning, and understanding of life, to what is and what isn’t.
The legend of Laozi
Little is known about the author of the book. Supposedly he was born in 604 BCE in Ku County, which today is known as Luyi County in Henan province.
The legend goes that Lao Tzu wrote the 81 verses after he decided to leave his house in Henan, where he worked as a keeper of the imperial archives. Already being old and wanting to retire to the mountains, he packed up his things and set off on his donkey.
When he reached the border gate between China and the wild, he was stopped by a border guard, who asked him about life’s truth. In exchange for passage, Lao Tzu would have to share his wisdom with the guard.
According to the story, Lao Tzu dismounted from his donkey and wrote the entire Dao De Jing in one sitting. After that, he was allowed passage through the gate, never to be seen or heard from again.
Naturally, the truth of this legend has been questioned and contested. Some historians claim the book is a collection of centuries of wisdom, not written by Lao Tzu alone. Some even claim Lao Tzu is a fabricated character, made up from bits and pieces of several other existing people.
Reading and explaining
If you think you can just read the book from cover to cover and know the answer to everything, you will be disappointed. Although it seems that Lao Tzu was wise beyond his time, the 81 verses have been written so cryptically, you’re just going to have to read between the lines to find out The Truth
for yourself.
The first chapter already gives you an idea:
The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
Is not the eternal Name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding
.
A tip from Lao Tzu himself is already concealed in this first chapter: in understanding the Absolute Truth, one should not get attached to the actual words. This, of course, goes for all spiritual, ancient texts that have been translated from one language to the other, interpreted by many people and re-interpreted and re-translated all over again.
But once you approach the subject with an open mind, you will realize it’s not so much about the words and their conceptual meanings, as it is about what they point to when you dwell on their deeper meanings and teachings – what feelings reading these texts will evoke in you. And the fact that you don’t understand directly, but you are curious enough to want to understand, this is the inspiration teaching. So it’s important to start with something you do understand, and from that small point of light to go on and walk through the book.
Ancient teachings, why Dao?
In our second book 'Wu Wei versus Awareness' we give an overview of the diverse ancient teachings of the East. Those are still being practiced today and have many followers and students.
We found the more spiritual and religious background of Buddhism and Hinduism, and Veda's and Dao with each having also a practice concerning well-being and health.
Historically the Veda's
were written before Dao philosophy, and we are not going to delve deep into the differences. All along with the historical timelines, there has been a lot of co-mingling between the diversity of teachings, and we can use the best of everything.
If we look at both hemispheres on this earth, we can see the Northern Hemisphere (China) and the Southern Hemisphere (India) with its own climatology and circumstances. And that is where we put our focus on with regard to our work.
In these modern times, we are able to get herbs, spices, and groceries being brought in from far. People have started traveling all over the world, there is a lot of migration as well. However, our bodies and energies are connected to the local atmosphere at the place we live at the moment. It is a logical thing, whatever grows in your own environment and climate has a match with your body as well. We could even say: You grow where you are now because what you eat and drink grows your body.
Adaptability
What Chi-Full aims for is an optimal balance and harmony in body-mind-spirit by growing and raising our adaptability to changes.
This means that we:
1. Help people reconnect with their inner being (microcosms)
2. Help people understand and work with the polarities in their environment (macrocosms)
Chi-Full works from the methods of the Dao because of the compatibility with climatology and environmental circumstances in the Northern Hemisphere. That is because climate conditions, like dampness, for instance, are found here as well. If we want to become in optimal condition, well-being, and health we have to make use of what Nature is offering us. This means that we have to become aware of what grows locally and how it affects the conditioning of our body-mind-spirit.
We offer a different approach toward well-being and health where people can start to work with from their homes. You can just start at some point and keep moving along the different topics that are appealing to you as an individual. If you start working with the items presented here, you will gradually become more aware of yourself in relation to the environment and be able to adapt yourself to changes. As a result you will be able to release stress and tensions along the way, just because you start to see (get) the bigger picture of the underlying mechanism that functions here (called Life).
We cannot separate our inner world from the outer world, because those function together as a whole and are ultimately connected.
If changes occur in our inner world, we definitely affect our outer world,
If changes occur in our outer world, our inner world will be affected as well.
Therefore, we reconnect to the inner world first, to clear the way for optimal energy flow through our channels (meridians), to be able to feel deeply and restore our intuition.
You may wonder why this is necessary.
We have become overly connected to the outer world and have started neglecting our inner world, which is first important for the well-being of the individual. It is just common sense, as a human being, we feel and use intuition as an important tool for living (survival).
We encourage you to feel into this subject and start inquiring about yourself.
Here’s one of our favorite short Tao stories, showing how unpredictable life can be, and teaching that we’d better not be attached to it, whether in success or in failure, if we’d like to live with peace of mind, and to become out of a stressful life.
The Horse
Once upon a time in a village in ancient China, there was an old farmer who lived alone with his son. They were very poor. They had just a small plot of land outside the village to grow rice and vegetables and a rude hut to live in. But they also had a good mare. It was the son's pride and joy, and their only possession of value.
One day the mare ran away.
The old man's friends came to him and commiserated. "What a wonderful mare that was!" they said. "What bad fortune that she ran off!"
"Who can tell?" the old man said.
Two weeks later the mare returned accompanied by a fine barbarian stallion. Friends and neighbors all came around and congratulated the old man. "Now you have your mare back, and that stallion is as fine as any in the land. What a stroke of good fortune!"
"Who can tell?" the old man said.
Two weeks later the son fell off the stallion while riding and broke his leg. Friends of the old man came to him to express their sympathy. "It's too bad your son broke his leg, and right before the planting season, too. What bad luck!"
"Who can tell?" the old man said.
Two weeks later, the war came to the land, and all able-bodied young men were drafted. The troop that contained the men from the village was at the front in a bloody engagement, and the entire troop was lost. All the men from the village died in battle.
The young man with the broken leg stayed home. His leg healed. He and his father bred many fine horses and tended their fields.
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