When a Western practitioner first takes up Taoist exercises, one question almost always arises: why does the master never speak directly about my problem? I come feeling anxious, and I am asked to visualise a mountain. I come feeling angry, and I am made to work on the suppleness of my tendons. I come feeling sad, and I am invited to breathe through my skin. On the surface, there seems to be no connection between the exercise and the difficulty that has brought me here.
This apparent inconsistency is neither negligence nor mere folklore. It lies at the very heart of a millennia-old method, the precision of which often eludes modern thought because the latter has become accustomed to addressing problems through their content: naming, analysing, explaining, recounting. The Taoist tradition proceeds differently. It does not address what the problem ‘says’, but the way in which it is embodied. It does not seek to undo the knot by pulling on it, but to alter the tension of the threads surrounding it, until it unravels of its own accord.
This editorial aims to explore this logic of indirect transformation in depth, setting out its foundations, mechanisms, applications and implications, so that we may understand why an exercise that appears to have nothing to do with the problem nevertheless acts upon its root cause.
The first break with ordinary thinking consists in ceasing to regard a deep-seated problem as a mental object. Fear, anger, sadness, a blockage, trauma, confusion or exhaustion do not reside solely in the head. They constitute a complete organisation of the being: a particular muscular tension, a quality of breathing, an inner posture, a way of perceiving the world, a heartbeat, a tightening of the abdomen, a narrowing of the gaze, a habit of the nervous system.
The body of the fearful person is not the same as that of the hot-tempered person. The anxious person breathes shallowly and rapidly into their chest; their weight shifts upwards, their pelvis stiffens, and their shoulders rise imperceptibly. The hot-tempered person tenses their tendons, clenches their jaws and compresses their right side. The sad person closes off their chest, lets their sternum sag and dims the radiance of their skin. These descriptions are not metaphors: they describe real, observable patterns, repeated thousands of times a day, which ultimately form the physical foundation of the emotion.
From this perspective, a persistent problem is not a mental event that drags on: it is a structure that persists. The body, the breath and attention have organised themselves around it, just as a landscape is carved out around a river. As long as the riverbed remains, the water will return to it. One can discuss the water endlessly; it is the riverbed that must be transformed.
Why not tackle the problem directly, by naming it, analysing it, fighting it? Because the mind that would like to wage this battle is precisely the one that is caught up in the problem. It goes round in circles with the same story, the same emotions, the same reactions. It knows the problem by heart, recounts it skilfully, comments on it endlessly, and yet nothing changes.
Worse still: a head-on attack risks reinforcing the problem’s identity. By constantly saying ‘my fear’, ‘my anger’, ‘my block’, ‘my wound’, we solidify what was merely a process. The problem becomes a possession, a territory, almost a proper name. The struggle gives it importance; importance gives it energy; and energy gives it longevity. Those who battle their insomnia feed it with their struggle; those who fight their anxiety provide it with a faithful adversary every night.
The Taoist tradition has long observed this paradox. It has derived a strategic principle from it that is found both in the internal arts and in the philosophy of the Tao Te Ching: that which resists hardens; that which yields transforms. One does not straighten the water; one alters the slope. One does not force the lock; one seeks the key.
The most apt image for understanding this method is that of the gardener. If a plant is growing poorly, no sensible gardener pulls at its leaves to correct it. Instead, they adjust the light, the water, the soil, the air, the exposure and the season. Then the plant transforms of its own accord, without any effort directed against it, simply because the conditions for its growth have changed.
Taoist exercises work in exactly the same way. They do not target the problem; they alter the environment in which the problem exists: the breath, attention, circulation, relaxation, verticality, the relationship with emptiness, and the relationship between the Heart and the Kidney, between the Liver and the Spleen, and between the bones, tendons, organs and skin. Every aspect of the internal environment is a condition for the problem’s existence. Change enough of these conditions, and the problem, deprived of its ecosystem, can no longer persist in its former form.
This is an internal ecology. The symptom is not an enemy to be vanquished but the expression of an unbalanced environment. The task is not to eradicate, but to rebalance, to nourish, to soften, to open up, to ground. And when the environment regains its vitality, what was growing crookedly straightens itself out without ever having been touched directly.
This brings us to the question of imagery, which so baffles the rational mind. Letting light flow, sensing a mountain, breathing like a tortoise, imagining water flowing down, fire subsiding, wood growing, metal cutting, emptiness opening up: what is the point of these visualisations, if not therapeutic poetry?
This is where we must be precise. In the Taoist tradition, the image is not mere decoration. It is a practical tool, in the most concrete sense of the term. It fulfils four simultaneous functions: it gives the body a direction, the breath a quality, intention a form, and the mind an indirect path to reorganise itself.
Why does this work? Because the image speaks to a layer of being that predates reason. The body does not respond solely to logical words; it responds to forms, rhythms, directions, sensations and symbols. Tell someone to ‘relax your shoulders’ and they will tense their shoulders whilst trying to relax them.
Suggest that they feel as though their arms are hanging like branches heavy with rain, and their shoulders will drop of their own accord. A direct command engages the will, which is a form of tension; an image engages sensation, which is a form of listening.
The right image can relax an area that analysis cannot reach. It can open up an inner space without the student needing to relive or explain their problem. This is a point of considerable importance, particularly for old wounds: the indirect approach allows one to work without reactivating the issue, to transform without having to go through the pain again, and to heal without requiring a narrative.
The indirect method is not vague; it follows a precise sequence of steps which tradition formulates as follows: use the Yi, or intention, to guide the Qi; use the Qi to alter the body; use the transformed body to soothe the mind; and allow the mind to naturally regain its clarity.
First, the Yi. Taoist intention is not the tense will of the Westerner who seeks to achieve a result. It is a calm orientation of attention, a direction maintained without strain, much like holding a course rather than pushing a boat. The image is precisely what gives Yi its form: without an image, intention drifts; with the right image, it becomes a guiding force.
Next, Qi. Where attention goes, so goes the breath; where the breath goes, so goes the flow. Attention consistently focused on the pelvis, the soles of the feet, and the lateral expansion of the ribs, genuinely alters the distribution of muscle tone, the depth of breathing, the quality of blood flow, and the state of the autonomic nervous system. What tradition refers to as the circulation of Qi encompasses a range of phenomena that the practitioner senses long before they can put them into words.
The body, then, is transformed. Not overnight, but through the patient accumulation of thousands of guided breaths, mindful postures and repeated moments of relaxation. The tissues soften, the points of support shift, and the body’s vertical alignment is reorganised. And this transformed body ceases to provide the problem with its physical foundation.
The mind, at last, finds peace, not because it has been persuaded, but because the ground on which it was agitated has stabilised. Clarity cannot be manufactured; it returns of its own accord when the conditions causing cloudiness disappear, just as muddy water becomes clear again as soon as one stops stirring it.
Nothing illustrates this method better than concrete examples.
Let us first consider anxiety. A person experiencing anxiety does not always need to talk about their anxiety; sometimes, they have already talked about it too much. Their system is wound up: their breath is high, their weight is high, their attention is high; everything is rushing towards the head and chest. The work will therefore focus on grounding, weight, the pelvis, bringing the breath down, the image of deep water, and the stability of a mountain. None of these exercises mentions anxiety. But little by little, the body stops racing, agitating and tensing up. Anxiety loses its physical anchor, and anxiety without an anchor is anxiety that can no longer be reproduced in exactly the same way.
Let us now consider anger. Those held captive by it have a body of anger: stiff tendons, a compressed flank, breath blocked as it rises. We shall not work ‘against anger’, which would amount to pitting one tension against another. Instead, we work on softening the tendons, gently expanding the Liver, lateral breathing, the fluidity of wood, and the ability to let things pass. The problem is not attacked; its mechanism is transformed. Wood that bends does not break, and the energy that used to flow explosively learns to flow in a nurturing manner.
Finally, let us consider sadness and withdrawal. Here, it is certainly not a matter of forcing oneself to be cheerful – that gentle coercion which modernity so readily inflicts upon the melancholic. It is a matter of recreating the conditions in which life can flow: opening the chest, clarity of the breath, the lightness of metal, and the connection between the skin and breathing. We do not ask the person to feel better; we simply reopen the windows of the house, and the air does the rest.
In all three cases, the same logic applies: the exercise does not resemble the problem, because it does not address the narrative of the problem. It addresses its energetic root.
You will have noticed, in the previous examples, the presence of the five elements—water, wood, fire, metal and earth—which underpin the whole of Chinese medicine and internal alchemy. It is important to understand their function within the indirect method: they constitute a grammar of transformation, a repertoire of qualities that the image enables us to summon.
Water, which flows downwards, teaches the system what depth, rest and the ability to return to the source mean; it is the natural remedy for anything that rises too high. Wood, which grows, teaches supple expansion, growth without force, and direction without rigidity; it releases what is compressed. Fire, which subsides, teaches the heart clarity without agitation, and radiance without dispersion. Metal that cuts teaches just separation, the ability to let go of what is dead, to make room; it is the master of mourning and of breathing. Earth, finally, teaches stability, assimilation, the centre; it gathers and redistributes.
The master who offers an image does not, therefore, choose at random. They read the pupil’s configuration—where energy rises, where it is blocked, where it flees, where it closes off—and summon the quality that is lacking in that area. The image is a prescription, as precise in its field as a medical prescription is in its own.
It is important to emphasise the ethical dimension of this method, for it is not merely effective: it is gentle. The oblique path allows one to work without violence, without forcing, without entering into a psychological struggle.
The student is never required to expose themselves, to recount, or to relive. They are not defined by their problem, since the work does not even name it. They never fail head-on, since there is no front line. They simply practise: they breathe, they ground themselves, they open up, they go deeper, they let things flow. And transformation occurs at their own pace, from the side, almost without their realising it.
This gentleness is not methodological timidity. It is the direct consequence of a profound understanding: what is forced closes in on itself; what is respected opens up.
The nervous system of a wounded being is a fearful animal; one does not tame it by chasing it, but by creating the conditions for it to come of its own accord. The indirect method is the art of creating these conditions.
There remains the objection that modernity will not fail to raise: is all this not merely suggestion, imagination, or symbolism without substance?
One can respond in two stages. Firstly, by noting that the sharp distinction between the imaginary and the physical reality is precisely what the Taoist tradition rejects, and what contemporary body sciences tend, each in their own language, to qualify: attention alters muscle tone, the mental representation of movement alters the movement itself, emotional state alters physiology, and vice versa. Taoism has never completely separated imagination, breath, body and mind; it regards them as facets of the same living process.
Secondly, by recalling that the validity of the method is, first and foremost, practical. An image held with precision becomes a guiding force; it is not a theory to be believed, but an experience to be had. The student who has felt their weight shift downwards for the first time, their chest open up for the first time, their breath reach their abdomen for the first time, no longer asks whether the image ‘really exists’. They have observed what it does.
The logic behind these exercises may seem symbolic, indirect or strange to a mind that is too exclusively rational. But it is in fact very precise, and its precision is that of the craftsman rather than that of the theorist: it is verified in the finished work.
To conclude, we may return to the most evocative image of this entire method: that of the knot.
When faced with a tight knot, force is the worst of tools. The harder one pulls, the tighter it becomes. The Taoist method does not break the knot: it alters the tension of the threads around the knot until it comes undone. It relaxes here, mobilises there, creates some slack, redistributes the forces, and one day – without us knowing exactly when – the knot is nothing more than a memory of thread.
This is the true effectiveness of the oblique path: the exercise does not necessarily address the problem itself, but it transforms the deep place where the problem takes root. It does not merely address what the problem reveals; it addresses the way in which the problem is embodied. It does not seek to explain; it shifts the inner structure that allowed the problem to persist.
And once this structure has changed—the breath settled, the body relaxed, the mind at peace, the ground rebalanced—the mind naturally regains its clarity. Not because it has been imposed upon it, but because nothing obscures it any longer. Such is the unassuming promise of the Taoist tradition: one does not conquer peace; one ceases to generate turmoil.
A deep-seated problem is not an idea: it is an organisation of the body, the breath and attention. The mind that seeks to resolve the problem is often caught up in it: a head-on attack only reinforces what it is fighting against. You do not correct a plant by pulling at its leaves: you adjust the light, the water and the soil. The image is not mere decoration: it is a key that gives form to intention, quality to the breath and direction to the body.
Clarity of mind cannot be manufactured: it returns of its own accord when the inner landscape regains its balance.
The rest is a matter of practice – patient, regular and without struggle. For in this tradition, the most profound transformation is always the one that seems to have fought against no one.
All of the above might lead one to believe that understanding alone is enough. That whoever has grasped the logic of the oblique path, the grammar of the five movements, the chain of Yi and Qi, now possesses the method and can apply the remedies to themselves. This would be the mind’s final illusion, the most subtle, because it disguises itself as knowledge.
For the essential element is still missing, and this essential element has a name in the tradition: the Fa. The Fa is the method, but not the method as the West understands it—a protocol that could be set out in a manual, photocopied and distributed. The Fa is the living method: the practical knowledge of the how, the when, the how much and the for whom. It is the art of the correct prescription. And this Fa is possessed by the master alone.
One must understand why this possession is not an arbitrary privilege, a jealous hoarding of knowledge, but a necessity inherent in the very nature of the teaching.
The images, exercises and principles have been in the public domain for centuries. The classical texts have been translated, the postures photographed, and the visualisations described in countless works. And yet, those who practise alone using only books rarely achieve transformation. Why? Because the exercise is not the method. The exercise is the instrument; the Fa is the hand that knows how to use it. An acupuncture needle is a trivial object; it is the gesture that heals. A Taoist image is a simple phrase; it is the timing, the balance, the adjustment to the individual student that make it effective.
The master possesses the Fa because he possesses three things that no text can contain.
Firstly, he possesses the ability to read the situation. Faced with a student, he does not see a category—an anxious person, a hot-tempered person, a melancholic person—but a unique configuration: this particular breath, this particular uprightness, this particular tension, this particular gaze. Two anxieties that appear identical may call for two opposite remedies: one requires descent, the other requires opening up first, without which the descent would crush it. This insight cannot be learnt from books; it has been instilled in him through decades of observation, and above all because another master, before him, had read his own terrain and refined his own perspective.
He then possesses a sense of the moment. The same exercise, given too early, achieves nothing; given too late, it achieves nothing; given at just the right moment, it achieves everything. The Fa is an art of kairos (the opportune moment, the right instant): knowing that this pupil, today, in this state, is ready for this image and not for another. This is why the master sometimes seems to hold back, to delay, or to refuse to give what is asked of him. He is not hiding the treasure; he is waiting until the hand is capable of holding it.
He ultimately embodies the method. The Fa is transmitted not only through the master’s words, but through his presence: the quality of his breath, the stability of his grounding, the clarity of his gaze are themselves silent teachings, which the pupil’s system picks up and imitates far below the threshold of consciousness.
One cannot learn relaxation from a tense person, however accurate their words may be. The method passes from body to body, from presence to presence, just as a flame passes from one candle to another: the second candle may know the entire theory of fire, yet it will only be lit through contact.
This is the secret, and we now understand that it is not a secret through concealment, but a secret by its very nature. Nothing is hidden, and yet everything must be passed on. The principles are open to all; the Fa is imparted only through relationship. This is the profound meaning of the lineage in the Taoist tradition: not a hierarchy, not a power, but the sole channel through which the living method can flow without degenerating into a dead formula.
This requires the student to adopt a particular attitude, which is perhaps the foremost of all practices: patient trust. Not blind submission—the tradition never asks one to relinquish one’s discernment—but the acceptance that one cannot be one’s own master, precisely because one cannot read one’s own terrain with the eyes that this terrain has shaped. The mind caught up in the problem cannot prescribe the remedy for that problem: this is the ultimate consequence of everything this editorial has set out. Those who choose their own exercises always, without realising it, choose those that reinforce their existing mindset rather than transforming it.
And this imposes a reverse responsibility on the master: to hold the Fa is not to possess it for oneself, but to carry it for others. The true master is not recognised by what he shows, but by the accuracy of what he gives—to each his own, to each in his own time, to each his own measure. His greatness lies not in the breadth of his knowledge, but in the precision of his action.
Thus the circle is complete. The oblique path transforms the problem without naming it; the Fa transmits the method without being able to write it down. In both cases, the same truth holds: what is most effective is that which cannot be grasped head-on. One does not seize the method, just as one does not seize peace. One receives it, within a relationship, at the right moment, from a hand that has itself received it.
This is why tradition says that without a master, the exercises remain mere gestures, the images remain mere images, and the texts remain mere texts. With the master, the same gestures become transformation, the same images become keys, the same texts become paths. The difference between the two cannot be seen from the outside. It is called the Fa. And therein lies the whole secret: the final teaching is not something one learns, but an encounter one has.
