Welcome, Dearest Reader,

I am deeply excited that you’ve chosen to invest your time and energy in exploring and mastering your inner world of feelings—your emotional body. One thing we can say with absolute certainty is this: no matter how wealthy someone is, no matter how healthy, and no matter how amazing their relationships or life may be, to claim they never experience challenging or difficult feelings would likely be a great untruth.

And so, I present to you this book on mastering the emotional and feeling body. Let me be clear: mastering the emotional body does not mean you will never again experience painful or difficult emotions. What it does mean, however, is that you will have in your hands a 5,000-year-old Taoist spiritual technology that allows you to transmute negative feelings back into the life-force that created them in the first place.

The key principle I want to share in this book is that all feelings, at their root, are created by Qi (Chi)—the life-force. This is the central difference between Western psychological methods and the Taoist spiritual technology you’ll be learning and embodying here.

In Western psychological approaches, thoughts and feelings are seen as primary. In contrast, the Taoist view—far older—holds that the life-force, or Qi, is primary. Qi creates both thoughts and feelings. To use a simple metaphor: Western psychology works on changing the software, whereas Taoist alchemy upgrades the hardware and enhances the flow and efficiency of the electricity running both hardware and software.

Another fundamental difference is that Western psychology is mainly focused on the human experience, while the Taoist approach recognizes that Qi, the universal life-force, governs not only our inner world of feelings and thoughts, but also the outer world of nature. For example, in Taoist wisdom, the Wood phase of Qi gives rise to the human experience of anger, as well as to the virtue of kindness that arises from the Soul. This same Wood phase is also responsible for a tree’s growth and the expansion of the universe itself.

In essence, the life-force has a language and principles—and it is possible for each of us to learn this language, understand these principles, and more importantly, embody them. The result is that you no longer feel like a victim of your thoughts and emotions, but instead come to see them as sacred opportunities to engage with and co-create alongside the life-force within.

As you journey into mastery of your emotional body, you’ll find that your outer relationships become more harmonious. You’ll cultivate deeper compassion for your fellow human beings, each walking their own path. And you’ll come to realize that the outer world of nature is also alive within each of us.

It is my sincere wish that everyone who dives into this book—and the alchemical meditations within—will discover the truth: that we are all magical creators on this extraordinary journey we call life.

With love,
Andrew Kenneth Fretwell