I guess it would be something like,   the matches to light the fire, the fuel for the fire, the cold water, the uncooked rice, the container, the know-how of cooking rice, and the potential to put them all together and start the process of cooking -- that's jing.   The steam that formed under the lid in the process of transforming this jing into qi, cold water into hot, uncooked rice into cooked, the aroma escaping good rice (e.g. jasmine), that steam and aroma and flavor getting turbulent and mobile and moving every grain of rice, bubbling up, aiming upward, gathering under the lid and then escaping the pot and dissipating -- that's shen.   So then, jing is the basis, foundation, prerequisites for the transformation; qi, the process of transformation; shen, the expenditures of this process.  Hence two types of practices, the easy one that goes with the flow, in the direction things go anyway (from concentration to dissipation, from potential to actualization) and the difficult one that goes against the flow.  It is easy to cook rice.  It is easy for the steam to escape.  One can speed up this process by increasing the fire.  One can get more shen faster by spending jing and transforming it into qi, and qi into shen more actively.  The opposite, which is taoist proper, is about capturing the steam that escaped, putting it back in the pot, cooling off the water, uncooking the cooked rice!!  Reversing the "natural" flow of the order of things.  Or, as another taoist metaphor put it, "putting the oak tree back into the acorn."    Now that's tricky.  Which is why you will encounter many instructions as to how to get what will happen anyway to happen at will -- jing to qi to shen transformations -- toward leaving the "material world," the pot and the rice and the water -- the body -- behind, toward a "lighter," "immaterial" existence as pure spirit.  While the opposite process entails seeking out older, immortalist-taoist alchemical reversal practices aimed at preserving and rejuvenating, possibly indefinitely, the material body in the material world -- or at least slowing down the process of its "immaterialization" and gaining longevity.  Capturing dissipated ling (an aspect of shen that I've heard translated as "supernatural intelligence"), finding a way for the steam to condense and drop back into the pot...  But that's probably for a six-year-old, a five-year-old is not ready yet.