Welcome to The Dig.
Why is this guide to Tao Yin called The Dig, you might ask?
Well, the name actually comes from two places.
The first is the origin story of Tao Yin itself. Thousands of years ago, excavators in China went looking for gold in an ancient tomb. What they found instead were 44 drawings on a scroll: simple figures stretching, breathing, and moving in ways that didn't look like much at first glance. No gold. No gems. But those drawings turned out to be one of the oldest records we have of a health practice so old it predates Yoga and Qi Gong. They were digging for treasure and found something far more valuable.
The second is the practice itself. Tao Yin is, at its core, an inner dig. It uses movement, breath, and intention to find the energy, calm, and clarity that are already inside you. Not by adding something new. By clearing away what's covering it up.
This guide was originally an 8-part email series we shared with our community. Each email went a layer deeper into the practice, and each one came with a quote, a reflection, and something you could try right away. The response was so strong that we decided to adapt it into a single page so you can come back to the full experience whenever you need it, or share it with someone who might find it meaningful.
Think of it as a map for your own dig. Eight layers. Each one takes you a little further in. You can move through them all in a day, spread them across a week, or just bookmark the ones that speak to you. There's no wrong way to use this.
Each layer includes a free practice video. We'd encourage you to actually do them, not just read about them. As one of the quotes in this guide puts it: to know and not to do is not yet to know.
Let's begin.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
— Marcel Proust
There's an old Taoist parable about a man who's lost his keys. He's outside under a streetlight, frantically digging through the dirt and bushes. A friend comes by and starts helping him search. After a long time, the friend asks: "Where did you last see them?" And the man says, "Inside the house. But there's more light out here."
Most of us do something similar. We look for the things that matter most — energy, calm, clarity, a sense of feeling good in our own skin — in the places that seem brightest. A new app. A new routine. A new thing to buy or fix or optimize. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. But the keys have always been inside.
That's what drew me to Tao Yin. It's a practice of going inward through the body, through the breath, through attention, and finding what's already there. Not adding something new, but learning to look in a different place
Drop into a introductory Tao Yin practice (20 minutes)
We start standing with some warmups to get the energy moving, then come down to the floor for flowing stretches, and close with a restorative posture that might be the best few minutes of your day. No experience needed.
Think of it as brushing away the topsoil. The next layer goes deeper.
Try it once and see what you notice.
"Why stretch the body? Stretching brings the energy from the interior to the exterior, lengthening the meridians and bringing Qi to the surface. It feels good because it allows energy to flow more easily."
— Mantak Chia
Have you ever noticed that after a good stretch, you don't just feel physically looser. You feel emotionally lighter too?
There's a reason for that, and it goes deeper than most people expect.
In Chinese medicine, the body doesn't just hold physical tension. It holds emotional tension too. The liver stores stress and frustration. The stomach and spleen carry worry. The heart holds anxiety. The lungs, sadness. The kidneys, fear. And they all meet in one central place: the solar plexus, which ancient Chinese medicine called the Yellow Court. In imperial times, the Yellow Court was the courtyard where all the officials of the empire would gather to discuss their problems. And that's exactly what happens in your body. Every stress, every worry, every old fear shows up right there in that tight spot just below the sternum.
Most of us know this place intimately. It's where you feel the clench before a hard conversation. It's where anxiety lives when you wake up at 3am. It's where undigested emotions pile up when life gets busy and there's no time to process them.
We digest emotions the same way we digest food. And a lot of us are walking around with emotional indigestion.
This is why stretching, done slowly, with breath and awareness, is so much more than a physical practice. When we gently open the body, we're not just lengthening muscles. We're creating space for all of that stored energy to start moving again. To come to the surface, as Mantak Chia says. To finally flow.
That feeling of relief when a stretch lands just right? That's not just a muscle releasing. That's something older than that.
This layer's practice is a morning routine from the Tao Yin tradition. It starts at a point on the lower back that Chinese medicine calls the Door of Life, then moves through the meridian lines of the legs, the arms, the chest, and the head. It takes about 13 minutes, and you can do it seated in a chair if you want to.
Think of it as the first real layer of the dig. Layer 1 brushed the surface. This one starts to clear what's right underneath.
This layer's practice is a Tao Yin morning stretch (13 minutes)
If you don't have 13 minutes right now, try this instead.
Sit comfortably and take a slow breath in through the nose. Place three fingers gently on your solar plexus, that soft spot halfway between your navel and the base of your ribs. Press in lightly and just breathe. Feel whether there's any tenderness there. Most people find there is.
As you exhale, see if you can let that area soften just slightly. Not forcing anything. Just inviting a little release. Do this for three or four slow breaths. You're not trying to fix anything. You're just saying hello to a place in your body that doesn't get much conscious attention.
Try it once and see what you notice.
"Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor."
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Here's something most people don't realize. Your lungs don't actually breathe on their own. They're passive. They just sit there. It's the muscles around them that do all the work: the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles between the ribs, the muscles across the chest.
And here's the thing. Those muscles can get tight and weak just like any other muscle in your body. When they do, our breathing gets shallow. We take in less air. We feel more tense. And most of us never connect the dots because we're still breathing, just not very well.
I sometimes tell students that your lungs don't shrink from aging. They shrink from not being used. The breathing apparatus, the muscles that expand and contract your ribcage, those are what weaken. And the good news is you can stretch them back open. You can literally exercise the mechanics of your breath the same way you'd stretch a tight hamstring.
When I first learned this, it changed how I thought about a lot of things. Most of us spend our days in a slightly activated stress state. Shoulders up, jaw tight, breath shallow. The body is stuck in go mode and we don't even notice because it's become our baseline.
The breath is the one place where the conscious mind and the unconscious body overlap. You can breathe without thinking about it, but you can also choose to slow it down, deepen it, change its rhythm. That makes it a bridge. The only system in your body that runs on autopilot but also responds to your intention.
That's why I love the Thich Nhat Hanh quote. Feelings come and go like clouds. The breath is the anchor. Not because breathing is magical, but because it's the most direct way to shift your nervous system from stress to calm. From doing to being.
This practice is short, about 8 minutes, and it works directly with that bridge. It starts with Soaring Eagle, which physically stretches the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles. Then it moves into Spinal Cord Breathing, which activates the cranial sacral system. If you've ever had trouble turning off your mind at night, this one is especially worth trying.
Tao Yin Breathing Practice (8 minutes)
If you only have two minutes, try this. Stand or sit comfortably. As you inhale through the nose, let your arms float up slowly to about shoulder height. Pause at the top for a beat. Then let them float back down as you exhale. Pause at the bottom for a beat. Do this five times, as slowly as you can.
Notice what happens in the space between the inhale and the exhale. That little pause is where the nervous system resets. Most people feel it by the third breath.
"The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste."
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 12
This one surprised me the first time I read it. Five colors blind the eye? Five flavors dull the taste? It sounds backwards.
But Lao Tzu was pointing at something I think most of us feel, even if we can't name it. When there's too much stimulation coming in, we stop being able to sense anything clearly. More input doesn't sharpen our awareness. It scatters it.
The first few layers of this dig were physical. Tapping, stretching, breathing. This layer is different. This is where we go from the body into the heart.
I notice this pattern in myself. Too many tabs open, too many conversations going, too many things pulling at my attention, and by the end of the day I feel less connected to my body than when I started. Not because anything went wrong. Just because I spent the whole day oriented outward.
Our heart energy has a natural tendency to do this. It goes out into the world and invests itself in what's happening around us. Someone says something kind and our heart lifts. Something goes wrong and our heart sinks. All day long, we let outside circumstances pull our emotional energy in different directions. In psychology they call this object-referral. My happiness is connected to an object or a thing or a person out there.
The alternative is self-referral. My happiness is connected to my state of internal energy.
That's a simple idea but it changes a lot. When your heart has roots on the inside, it becomes very hard for external circumstances to pull you out of your center. You still feel things. You still care. But the anchor is in a different place. The five colors don't blind the eye when the eye knows where to rest.
Most of us were never taught how to do this. We were taught to achieve, perform, react, respond. Nobody sat us down and said: here's how to give your heart an anchor so the world doesn't knock you around all day.
This practice helps give your heart roots. You're tethering it inside so that it becomes very hard for external circumstances to pull you out of your center.
When I first studied Tao Yin, this was the very first standing sequence I learned. It flows through all five elements in about 10 minutes. Metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. Each one corresponds to different organs, different meridian lines, different qualities of energy. But it all starts in that one spot on the chest. Because if we're going to start anywhere, we might as well start at the heart.
This is the part of the dig where you stop seeing random stones and start seeing the outline of something. A pattern. A map. Not something you need to memorize. Just something you can feel once someone shows you where to look.
Feel the Five Elements Meridian Stretch (11 minutes)
If you only have a minute, try this. Stand comfortably and place both thumb knuckles on the center of your chest, right between your pectoral muscles. That point is called CV 17, the heart center. Press gently, take a slow breath into your belly, and just feel whatever is there. You don't need to change it. Just notice it.
That spot is considered the seat of emotional balance in Chinese medicine. Most of us walk around with tension there without realizing it. One breath with your attention on it can shift more than you'd expect.
"To know and not to do is not yet to know."
— Wang Yangming
You can read about breathing and understand how the diaphragm works. You can study the meridian lines and memorize their names. You can nod along to every word of the Tao Te Ching. And none of that is the same as lying on the floor at the end of a practice, feeling energy pour through your body like warm water, wondering where the last hour went.
Knowing about something and knowing something are two very different experiences. One lives in the head and the other lives in the body.
This has always been the Taoist way. When Lao Tzu sat down to write the Tao Te Ching, the very first thing he wrote was: whatever I tell you here, that's not really it. You have to walk the path yourself. I can be a tour guide, but I can't walk it for you.
The first four layers gave you pieces. A morning routine. A breathing practice. A five-element sequence. Each one was valuable on its own. But Tao Yin was never meant to be experienced in fragments. It was meant to be experienced as a whole, the way a river is more than the sum of its individual drops.
That's what this layer is about. Not a new concept. Not a new technique. Just a longer, fuller practice that lets you feel what Tao Yin becomes when the pieces come together. There's an introduction at the beginning, then a 30-minute guided practice, followed by more context about the tradition and a Q&A section where I answer common questions from students.
If you've been reading more than practicing so far, this is the layer where that changes. Set aside the time, press play, and move with me. That's where the real understanding lives.
This is a full 90 introduction to Tao Yin. It includes an overview of the practice, a 30-minute guided routine, and a Q&A where I answer common questions from students new to Tao Yin.
Watch the full introduction to Tao Yin training (90 minutes)
If you only have a few minutes, go back to whichever practice from the earlier layers felt best in your body and do it one more time. You'll notice it lands differently now that you have more context. That's how Tao Yin works. The same movements reveal new layers the more you return to them.
"Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?"
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 15
I've noticed something interesting when I teach. When a posture gets challenging, people speed up. It's almost automatic. The legs start to burn in a lunge and the breathing gets faster, the movement gets quicker, and the mind starts looking for the exit. How much longer? When is this over?
It makes sense. Our whole nervous system is wired to move away from discomfort as fast as possible. But speed is rarely what the moment is actually asking for.
I watch this happen off the mat too. A hard conversation comes up and we rush through it. A big decision is looming and we grab the first answer that feels okay. Life gets uncomfortable and we reach for the phone, the snack, the distraction. Anything to get through it faster.
Lao Tzu asked: do you have the patience to let the mud settle? Most of us don't. Not because we lack patience as a personality trait, but because nobody ever showed us what it feels like to slow down inside a hard moment instead of rushing through it.
That's what this layer of the dig is about. The ground gets harder here. The earlier practices were gentle. This one asks something of you.
Here's what I tell my students when we're deep in this practice: notice that when your mind starts to become active, your body speeds up. And when your mind is calm and slow, your body reflects that. The two are connected. So if you want to calm the mind, slow the body. And if you want to slow the body, lengthen the breath.
The other thing I love about this movement is the arms. One arm reaches forward. One arm reaches back. The forward arm represents the future, the energy of what we want to create. The back arm represents the past, the energy of where we've been. And the heart stays right in the center, in the present moment.
A lot of our emotional energy comes from either the past or the future. We're replaying something that happened or worrying about something that hasn't. This posture lets you feel that physically. You hold both at once, and you stay centered between them. Not by ignoring either one, but by breathing through both.
This one is longer and more physically demanding than the earlier practices. Take it at your own pace. If you need to shorten the lunge, shorten it. If you need to pause, pause. The practice isn't about how deep you go. It's about how slow you stay.
Drop into the Tao Yin Lunge and Flow (13 minutes)
If you only have a minute, try this. Stand in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take one breath as slowly as you possibly can. Inhale for five or six seconds. Pause. Exhale for five or six seconds. Pause. Just one breath. Feel the stillness between the inhale and the exhale. That's the tide. That's where the mud starts to settle.
"Can you let your body become as supple as a newborn child?"
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 10
I think about this question differently now than I did when I first read it.
Can you let your body become as supple as a newborn child? For a long time I heard that as a physical goal. Get more flexible. Stretch further. Become softer in the body. And that's part of it. But I don't think that's what Lao Tzu was really asking.
My daughter Harper taught me something about this when she was about two months old. I'd be up with her at two, three in the morning, and she'd be wide awake, shaking her hands, kicking her feet, completely uninhibited. No tension anywhere. And then she'd stop, sigh, and go completely still. Nothing held. Nothing carried over. Just release, and then rest. That's not something babies have to practice. It's what they are before the world teaches them to hold on.
Most adults are the opposite. Something stresses us out on Monday and we're still carrying it in our shoulders on Friday. We hold conversations in our jaw. We hold worry in our gut. We accumulate tension the way a house accumulates clutter, one thing at a time, so gradually we stop noticing it's there. And then one day we realize we can't turn our head all the way, or our lower back aches every morning, and we think that's just what getting older feels like.
Lao Tzu wasn't asking about flexibility. He was asking about holding. Can you stop holding? Can you let things move through you the way they did when you were new?
This is the deepest layer of the dig. We've been working our way down through body, breath, heart, and mind. This layer goes from standing all the way to the floor. From movement to stillness. From doing to just being. There's actually an exercise in this practice that I named after Harper. But the real point isn't any single movement. It's what happens after you stop moving. When you lie on the ground and let the earth hold you, with nothing left to do and nothing to fix.
Let it all go with The Baby floor routine and meditation (17 minutes)
This practice moves from standing to the floor, from movement to stillness.
There's a spinal twist, a shaking exercise I learned from watching my daughter, and a full guided meditation where you lie in warm sand by a river bank, feeling the earth beneath you and the sun above, letting Qi flow through you like water. It's the most complete experience in the series. Give yourself the full 16 minutes if you can. You deserve that.
If you only have a moment, try this: lie on your back, shake your hands and feet in the air for about 30 seconds, really let them go, and then drop everything down and take one long exhale. A real sigh. Feel what's different. That little discharge is more powerful than most people expect.
"There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.
It is serene, empty, solitary, unchanging, infinite, eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name, I call it the Tao."
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25
I read this passage at the end of every Tao Yin course I teach. It always lands differently.
There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. Before all the complexity, before the 10,000 things, before the stress and the schedules and the tension we carry in our bodies. Something simple, complete, and still.
I think that's what most people are looking for, even if they wouldn't use those words. Not more information. Not a better system. Just a return to something that was already there before all the noise piled up on top of it.
Over these eight layers, we went on a dig together. We started at the surface with a simple practice of body, breath, and mind. We tapped on the Door of Life. We stretched the muscles that make breathing possible. We mapped the five elements. We slowed down inside a challenging lunge until the mud settled and the water got clear. We lay on the floor and let go.
None of it was complicated. None of it required special equipment or years of training. And yet, if you practiced along with even a few of these videos, I suspect you felt something shift. Something in your body opened up. Something in your mind got a little quieter. Something that was always there, underneath everything else, started to surface.
That's the Tao. Lao Tzu said he called it that for lack of a better name. I don't think the name matters much. What matters is whether you felt it.
To feel good in our bodies is also to feel good in our hearts. To feel good emotionally is to feel good in our minds. And to feel good in our minds is to feel good with our relationship to all of life. That's the thread. It starts in the body and it goes all the way through.
Find a quiet spot. Stand or sit comfortably. Place one hand on your belly and one hand on your heart.
Take three slow breaths. On each inhale, feel the hand on your belly rise. On each exhale, feel the hand on your heart warm.
Body. Breath. Mind. Those are the three layers you've been working with through this entire guide. They're also the three treasures that the Taoist masters said were the keys to everything.
After your third breath, just stand there for a moment. Feel the difference between how you are now and how you were when you started reading. Not in your head. In your body. In your chest. In the space behind your eyes.
That's yours. Nobody gave it to you. You dug it up yourself.
Everything in this guide came from the Tao Yin tradition, one of the oldest movement practices on the planet. The videos you watched are pieces of a much larger course that I've spent years developing from the lineage I learned directly from my teacher Mantak Chia.
If something in these eight layers moved you, and you want to go deeper, the full Tao Yin Online Course is where this practice opens up completely.
It includes eight modules of stretches, flows, breathwork, meditations, and Qi Gong tailored to pair with Tao Yin, with lifetime access to all of it. The course is offered as a cohort experience with live practice sessions, Q&A calls with me, weekly practice parties with fellow students, a 3-hour Yin Yoga workshop, and an invite-only online community.
Over 16 weeks, students typically find they're sleeping better, carrying less tension in their back and hips, breathing more deeply without thinking about it, and feeling a kind of calm energy that stays with them through the day. Some come in with chronic pain. Some come in wanting something slower and more internal than yoga. Some just want to feel good in their body again. All of them leave with a practice they can use for the rest of their life.
Learn more about the full Tao Yin Online Course
And if the timing isn't right, that's okay. This guide is yours. Come back to it whenever you need to. Share it with someone who might find it meaningful. The practices aren't going anywhere, and neither is the treasure.
