Thanks Bindi. You’re fortunate to have such strong dream guidance. I’ve had nothing like that, although, along with a number of teachers, Cleary’s Taoist I Ching has proved an excellent guide for me. And I’ve needed heaps of guidance. I’d have to say that I have no natural talent for life. My path of shedding unhelpful conditioned consciousness has been hard won through dealing with my general uncomfortableness with embodied life. Hence I’ve made and needed to work through countless errors.  Some huge, such as a period of intense heroin addiction when I was younger. And in retrospect, such ‘errors’ have provided me with my greatest learning experiences.  The stark choice, change or die.    For me, Ming and Xing cultivation just means working with methods that better align both my body and mind with Dao. Although these are intricately intertwined and therefore not two, there’s clearly cultivation methods focused on each. For me, as someone who’d learnt through many years of education to overvalue thinking, qi gong type body focused practices were the most beneficial in my early years. But related theory has always helped me enormously, my understanding of it deepening with qi gong practice, my praxis deepening with my understanding.   Now I’m comfortable using the whole of life as my alchemical cauldron.  I’d say Spirit, the mind of Dao, tries to continually speak to us all through events in our lives, through feelings, but we can only adsorb it to the degree that we can let go of ego and surrender to its great wisdom.    However, when I was younger my life was so out of harmony with Dao, everything was meaningless (or, at least, only superficially meaningful in culturally constructed ways.) I was free to do whatever I wanted, no spiritual guidance held me to a path. Now that’s not the case. My path becomes clearer as I get older and manage to improve my alignment with Dao. Clearer and hence narrower in the sense that I feel uncomfortable when I stray. Which, having written this, reminds me of how I noted the instructions for Neidan are intricate. So too I could say are instructions from Nature. Yet the more I’m able to stop interfering, the more they’re able to change me ‘self so’, spontaneously, effortlessly. So that intricacy becomes simplicity, just like the unfolding of nature.