Wang Fengyi and Five Element Virtue Healing

My Personal Experience

I ended up at the 2012 retreat out of sheer luck, or yuanfen (緣分 or karma), depending on your perspective. I had recently dissolved my goat farm and moved from a small village in Northern New Mexico to Oregon to teach at the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland. My life had been turned upside down, my trust in the inherent goodness of human nature had been shattered, and I was full of unresolved grief over the loss of my simple farming lifestyle full of goats, bees, a beautiful wild mustang, and apple trees, which had made a lot more sense to me than my new life near the big city of Portland. I had years of experience teaching Chinese philosophy, religion, and medical history, and of translating Chinese medical literature. I considered myself a practitioner of Chinese medicine in the sense of "nurturing life" with my biodynamic farming practices: connected to nature and all the microcosms and cycles in the macrocosm, from the seasons, stars, and moon to my animals' reproductive cycles and the microorganisms in the soil. But I had never practiced those aspects of Chinese medicine and culture that pertain to what we might call "cultivation of the heart" in English. While obviously influenced in my outlook on life by my lifetime of studying the wisdom of the ancient Chinese sages, the truth of their message had never fully sunk in or touched me to the core of my being.

The 2012 Shanrendao (善人道 "Path of the Virtuous Person") retreat changed all that within the first few minutes, when we received our first assignment: to contemplate (and then publicly acknowledge) the debt we owe to our parents and ancestors, or in other words, to honor our roots. As a native German only a generation removed from the Holocaust and Nazi trauma and the granddaughter of an important general in Hitler's army, I had grown up full of shame of my own history and roots and had resolutely turned my back on my family's and country's past by moving first to Taiwan and then to the US as soon as I could, denying my national and family identity. As for so many Germans of my generation, my country's horrid past has instilled in me a visceral aversion to nations, anthems and flags, war, bullying, violence, authority, men in uniforms, racism, and other aspects of the Nazi regime. But the German public and private determination to never allow history to repeat these horrors has also left deep wounds in many of us, due to unresolved emotions, denial of personal responsibility, trips to concentration camps etc. at too vulnerable an age or without sufficient space for processing, and trans-generational trauma.

For two weeks in the summer of 2012, I learned to honor my roots in the service of xiao 孝 ("filial piety," i.e., loving service and devotion to our parents), the foundation of self-cultivation and highest expression of the Dao in Wang Fengyi's system of emotional healing. With my retreat neighbor, a young Jewish woman from Israel, holding my hand in silent support, I learned to see and embrace my roots, in my case an intensely painful process. I realized how indebted I am to all of my heritage, both the parts that I had always embraced, like my pediatrician grandmother and all the other doctors in my family, and the parts I had chosen to deny and ignore, by beginning to embody the key principle of Wang Fengyi's teachings:

Bu yuan ren 不怨人

DO NOT BLAME!

— WANG FENGYI

After many long hard days of introspection devoted to "emptying out the garbage can," by recognizing and admitting our past wrongdoings with sincere remorse and intense emotional releases, for the first time in my life I was able to experience true gratitude for the world around me, first to my parents, for everything they had done for me, and then for every other aspect of my life, down to the core of every cell in my body, accompanied by deep regret for my previous lack thereof. The first thing I did after the conclusion of the retreat was to call my parents to thank them, and my life has never been the same since.

Opening up to my parents' love and support, I have learned to cultivate the virtue of earth, trust and sincerity, 信實 xinshi, in the five-elements cycle, to give just one personal example of this work. And the cultivation of this trust in the universe has allowed me since to make the leap of faith, take on the work of translating Master Liu Yousheng's book (see below), and eventually start my own publishing business to see the book through to publication. The picture below shows a painting hanging in my tea room that my Shanrendao retreat neighbor, Sara Frankenburg, made after the retreat and presented to me in appreciation of our time together. I look at it every single day. May the work of love and healing and forgiveness continue to grow and ripple outward in all of our lives...