Fylgija

Waterdrop, may I ask why you're replacing all mid-sentence punctuation with empty double-spaces? Tbh, it's way too hard to read.

Affable greetings to my fellow Tao bums, hobos, philosophers and Jedi. I began studying & practicing the Tao almost 1 year ago after being introduced to the Taoist philosophy, which blew me away. It was like discovering that most of my personal philosophy, which I've been building over my 30+ years on this Earth, was finally gathered into a coherent system that I could finally do something with. Now that I've finished the Tao Te Ching, countless hours of internetting and personal exploration, I've found myself with 2 or 3 (...thousand) questions and fascinating topics of interest that I eventually want to explore. I'm particularly interested in energy cultivation & application practices via self-integration with the Tao. I've spent my whole adult life struggling to find a way to overcome the pain & disability of a cervical spine injury, which has crippled my life in every way. My greatest fear is meeting the day I die before I had even lived. I spent roughly a decade working at scientific solutions, endless long days of labwork and zany experiments - only to finally burn out and crash, realizing the futility of trying to accomplish advanced medical research on a disability income budget. Since I discovered Taoism late last year, I've made far more progress than 10 years of research ever could have delivered. Where once I could only hobble (occasionally walk, never run), enduring maybe 25 minutes on my feet before giving into pain, I now exercise and go for 1-2 hours of power walks every day. I can even run at high speeds without injury, whereas before I'd end up crippled for days if I dared try running at all. How? By learning how to harness the power of emptiness; aligning my body & mind with the fine-tuned balance of the Tao, utilizing the power of internal life-force energy. Call it chi, call it neurological electro-magnetic energy - I dare say it's the same thing. But I still have a long ways to go, much more to learn and many questions after reading the Tao Te Ching. I look forward to meeting other students of the Tao for the first time, then finding out what I can learn (and maybe share) with you all.