"VIRTUES AND TRANSFORMING STRESS"

"HEART OF THE UNIVERSAL TAO PRACTICES"

The quality of our internal energy is just as important to our health and spiritual development as the quantity. As we increase our internal energy flow and accumulate surplus of chi. We must emphasize spiritual development to maintain balance in our daily lives. In essence our spiritual qualities are our positive attributes or what the Taoist call "virtues". Our virtue have the nature of wisdom and love. They are wise because they reflect our interdependence with the Tao with nature with all life and with the different parts of our own body. We cannot exhibit the virtues except in relation to each other. The virtues are also wise since they express love: the attitude that strengthens the positive bonds connecting everything in the universe.

We need food to sustain our lives. Physically we need material food

but we also must nourish others subtler bodies within us. They are soul and spirit bodies. The enery of our virtues the universe the stars and the planets provide a source of spiritual food. Although we are trained to depend on our religious beliefs to give us ths nourishment spiritual food is actually all around us. We need to learn how to obsorb and digest this. The universal Tao offers the means by wich we can access these energies to cultivate the soul and spirit and to enhance our total being. Taoism recognizes both the development of the virtues' energies and the cultivation of life force to create te soul and spirit bodies as important aspects of spiritual growth. These approaches are related because retaining and recycling internal energy into life force and can help to open and still our minds/heart bringing forth inner joy happiness and love and other virtues. When combined these give birth to the subtler bodies of energy and spirit.