Cultivating Virtues and Transforming Stress
The quality of our inner energy is just as crucial for our health and spiritual development as the quantity of our internal energy. As we increase the flow of our inner energy and accumulate abundant Chi, we must also pay attention to our spiritual development to maintain balance in our daily lives. Essentially, our virtues are our positive qualities, which Taoists call “virtues.” Our virtues possess wisdom and love. They are wise because they reflect the interdependence of nature, all living things, and the various parts of our bodies. We can only express our virtues in a relationship with one another. Virtues are also wise in expressing love. This love is a way of behaving that strengthens positive connections that bind everything in the universe together.
To sustain our lives, we need nourishment. Our physical bodies require food, but our invisible bodies must also be nourished. The energy of our virtues is a spiritual source of nutrition. Although we may have been trained to obtain this nourishment through our religious beliefs, spiritual food is omnipresent. We must learn how to absorb and digest it.
The Taoist approach envisages the cultivation of virtue energies and the development of life-force for our spiritual growth. These approaches are related because preserving and transforming our energy into life-force can help our minds and hearts open up and be calmer, allowing us to manifest inner joy, happiness, love, and other virtues. When brought together, these form more subtle energies and our spiritual bodies. According to the Taoist approach, people are born with the integrity of love, kindness, compassion, respect, honesty, fairness, justice, and righteousness.
When we are full of virtues, our life-force flows smoothly and effectively. When we neglect to develop our virtues, however, we risk channeling our accumulated energies directly into negative emotions and increasing the likelihood of damaging or neurotic tendencies that we may possess. There is no adverse situation as long as we know how to recognize and transform these negative emotions; they do not stop the energy flow in our organs. We must learn to find a balance and accept ourselves as a whole in terms of both our light and dark sides.
Today’s society can be defined by its fast pace, stressful conditions, and by its inability to cope with the tons of garbage it produces daily. This includes the trash from our homes and our bodies’ emotional waste. Under the influence of a stressful society, our virtues diminish, and negative emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, and impatience arise. These weaken our virtues and force people to survive with low-quality, negative energies. These symptoms manifest themselves as illness, social disorders, and violence.
To regain our virtues, we must first be aware of all negative emotions and take practical steps to cultivate integrity in our daily lives. We can achieve this by practicing mindfulness and meditation, connecting with nature, engaging in acts of kindness and compassion, and developing a deep sense of gratitude. Cultivating our virtues transforms negative emotions into positive energies and builds a foundation for inner peace, happiness, and well-being.
According to the Taoist approach, emotions originate from organs. When you can distinguish between different types of emotional energy in your organs and become aware of what triggers them, you can cope with those emotions more easily. It would be best if you observed which external factors trigger them. For example, this means noticing how another person’s negative emotions trigger anger or sadness in you. Once you have this awareness, you can transform these emotions into a positive life force for yourself. Do not allow negative emotional energy to accumulate in your organs, which could cause trouble. You can better transform your “trash” energy by creating an abundance of positive life-force.
Compassion is the merging of all virtues in their purest form. It is the highest virtue and the most beneficial energy that can be shared with others. To be able to be compassionate, it is necessary to transform negative emotional energy to regain and increase life force. In this way, the positive energy of each organ will be nourished, and each organ will be able to produce its virtue abundantly. Excess virtue energy can be channeled for the benefit of others. If a person tries to be compassionate without transforming negative emotions and recreating virtue energy, they will not have much to offer.
Compassion is the highest expression of human emotions and virtue energy. It is a level of development that requires hard work and diligent meditation practice to thrive in a person’s life. Compassion is not a single virtue; it is the distillation and culmination of all virtues that can be expressed at any moment as a mixture of justice, kindness, gentleness, honesty, respect, courage, and love. Sharing it is the most beneficial energy. The ability to express any or all of these virtues at the appropriate time indicates that a person has turned themselves into an internal state of compassion.