According to the Wuxing, each of us has five potential virtues that need to be cultivated: goodness, propriety, knowledge, ritual, and sagacity. Each one helps us to refine our better sides. But they become problematic if we try to develop one virtue at the expense of the others. There is such a thing as having too much goodness, craving too much

Since all parts of us—body and mind—are composed of qi, refining the body helps refine the mind, and vice versa. Everything we do to refine one of these spheres will shift our entire being to a more balanced and stable place.

Triggering events of any sort—whether they make us giddy or jealous or furious—are external. Our emotions are being pulled to and fro by things that happen around us, and any feelings of aliveness we may experience are not steady ones. But these externalities don’t have to make us bounce from happiness to sadness and back again. What is within our

Every time we find ourselves dominated by negative or extreme emotions, we are allowing external things to sap our energies, allowing these events to wield too much power over us. Every time we go through the daily grind, trudging through our everyday activities, we de-energize ourselves. Our spirit is being drained away, and we are filling

We commonly hold a dualistic worldview: God versus humanity, matter versus energy, mind versus body—we think of these as separate things. But the Inward Training holds a monistic worldview, teaching that every single element in the world and in human beings is composed of the same thing: qi. Everything, whether it is mind, body, matter, or spirit,

The notion of divine energies was hardly an unusual one in antiquity. In fact, it was a pan-Eurasian concept: in India, there was the notion of prana, or “breath,” and in Greece there was pneuma, or “breath of life,” “soul,” “spirit.” All described a sense that some ineffable, unseen life force coursed throughout the cosmos and was responsible for

The Inward Training says that everything we experience comes from energies called qi and that the most ethereal of these energies—the ones that give us that exhilarated, alive feeling—are the energies of divinity.

From the earliest days of humanity, people have imitated what they imagined was divine to learn how to live and be a person of consequence.

The legend of Laozi as not just a sage but also a god who generated the Way is not as fantastical as it might seem. The Way does not exist in some natural, unchanging order that we must find and harmonize with. Rather, as Laozi shows us, we form the Way by actively weaving together everything around us. Each of us has the potential to become a