It is said that the highest essence of truth is used for examining one’s own mind and body.
---Chuang Tzu
What is the Integral Way and the Five Healths?
People often ask: what is the main teaching of the Integral Way? What is the purpose of the Path of Constructive Life? We say that we teach and offer guidance to living a true and complete life. What then is a complete life? This life attains complete health in five areas: physical, mental, spiritual, moral and financial. This life has a good body, a mind with keen understanding, a soul shining with wisdom, a personal life free of emotional entanglements, and no financial burdens. Accomplishing these Five Healths forms the foundation and freedom to fulfill one’s personal dreams and aspirations and brings joy and creativity to one’s life.
The College of Tao within the Integral Way provides courses to help people achieve the Five Healths.
What can we learn from these courses?
1. Physical Health: learn how to take care of your body and nurture its inner healing power; engage in longevity and wellness practices and become actively responsible for your own health; form healthy life habits and a balanced lifestyle.
2. Mental Health: learn how to manage and refine your thoughts and emotions to develop a clear and open consciousness; develop an educated yet unprejudiced mind; bring peace and effectiveness to your life.
3. Spiritual Health: learn practices to purify and strengthen your spirit; develop your spiritual awareness, spiritual understanding and exercise spiritual independency; learn, apply and experience the universal subtle law to live a fulfilling and effortless life.
4. Moral Health: learn and experience that your true nature is virtuous, kind, forgiving, upright, trustworthy, and brave and possesses utmost clarity; learn the subtle law of energy response and how to live harmoniously in both your inner and outer life.
5. Financial Health: learn how to cultivate a correct attitude toward finance that can enable you to overcome your financial challenges; learn how to create a financial plan and develop your ability to manage money and be independent and self-sufficient.
Of all the Five Healths, physical health is our natural foundation or, as we say, the body is our temple. The mental aspect, or mind, is our manager and the spirit is our true guide. Most of the time our spirit is latent, often disabled by our busy mind and willful ego. Moral health forms the core of our life and expresses the integration of our body, mind and spirit, while financial health brings freedom in our modern day living.
Each aspect of the Five Healths has its own element: body-earth, mind-fire, spirit-water, moral-wood, finance-mental. Just as we need all 5 elements to support our life, all Five Healths are necessary to support our well-being while we live in this world.
The Integral Way provides many time-tested methods to help people achieve the Five Healths. These include healthy diet and living tips from Dr. Mao at Ask Dr. Mao and numerous chi exercises and practices to restore our health and resolve our emotional and mental conditioning which you can read through Chi Practice and Healing Arts and learn from our certified chi movement instructors. We teach spirituality through natural living in our College of Tao courses and we provide support through this community website and many other avenues such as the many books and tapes that you can find at Tao EShop.
