Hello everyone!
I really happy to have found this community. I've been poking around, but today I finally made the effort to introduce myself.
I feel like my relation with Taoism has been as fragment and it has been intense and fortuitous. Setting the tone, my introdcution to Taoism happened way back in the last millennium when I was an undergraduate in college. Curious about Buddhism, I tried to register for a class, but they were all full. Luckily, I saw that there was a Taoism intro class and thought, 'close enough, I guess?!?'. My professor turned out to be Russell Kirkland and that was my introduction to Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and The Seven Taoist Masters, among other texts. This happened at time of my life when I was questioning a lot of what I had learned to believe and the this predominance of question marks had created a sense of confusion, anxiety and isolation. It was in these Taoist texts that I found not necessarily an abundance of answers, but the a sense of kinship and comfort resulting from realizing that I wasn't alone in asking those type of questions and in pursuing some of those same values in the world around me.
Fast forward two and a half decades, and Taoism has always been with me, sometime more intensely, others more diffused , but always there. I have had the opportunity to study different internal arts over the years, mostly Taoist meditation, Tai Chi an Qi Gong, and little bit of Bagua and Xing Yi. Like I said in the beginning, it's always been a bit fragmented, start and stop. Recently, for the past three years, I've had the most consistent streak of studying these arts through the Bruce Frantzis' lineage, both in person and on-line. I have really enjoyed the results and felt like they have become really palpable (that's not really the best description, but you know what I mean, right?).
Well, that's me and Taoism in a nutshell. I look forward to learning from experiences and sharing mine with you. If you have any reading suggestions, please do share!
