Mandala of Heaven 周天: Taoist Alchemy Course
$40
A Cultivation Practicum
This is an introduction to Taoist inner alchemy, by way of cultivation work with the Zhou Tian, or Mandalas of Heaven, grounded in canonical source texts and living tradition. Key features of this curriculum are:
- A 200+ page structured textbook and workbook (that serves as a companion and book of your study notes, personal reflections, and log of experiences)
- Primary canonical texts translated into English (I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this obscure text translated into English before) with annotations
- Practice instructions that go beyond the free, publicly available lectures and guided experience prompts
- Structures the free, publicly available material into theoretical foundations and practical application
- Emphasis on ethical grounding and safety
- Participant Question & Answer feature (a password-protected FAQs page tailored to you)
The two core lectures on the Lesser Mandala of Heaven 小周天 and Greater Mandala of Heaven 大周天 are already available free to the public, which you can access:
- A Taoist Secret to Cultivating Personal Power: On the Lesser Mandala of Heaven, Xiao Zhou Tian 小周天
- Advanced Introduction to Taoist Alchemy: On the Greater Mandala of Heaven, Da Zhou Tian 大周天
This deeper-dive cultivation practicum organizes what was introduced in those two lectures into a sequential system that becomes praxis-oriented.
The course book, which is a workbook, is a guide on how to integrate those core practices.
In other words, the two free lectures introduce the ideas. This course is where the cultivation actually happens. It is a structured container for the teachings.
The coursework expands the scope in depth and breadth, curating a curriculum to study, practice, and self-reflect on the Mandalas over a period of 100 days, guided by a 200-page course textbook, through which you will:
- Notably increase your internal vitality, awakening and actualizing otherwise untapped core powers, &
- Master the foundational principles and symbolic systems shared among many lineages of folk magic across Asia, essential in Taoist mysticism and esoteric Buddhism.
Deliverables
- A 200+ page cultivation manual and workbook (digital PDF delivered to your email inbox; you can order a printed spiral-bound copy of the book via a third-party print-on-demand site at-cost). Your course text becomes your one-stop consolidated resource with all of the following and more:
- Authoritative reference tables and diagrams
- Organized sections with clear, beginner-accessible explanations of core Taoist principles, especially in the area of inner alchemy
- Step-by-step guided practice instructions
- Canonical sources and textual translations, so that you know where these practices come from and how they were historically understood
- Reflection prompts and line space for you to log your insights and experiences right next to the reference materials– this helps to reinforce your learning, and also serves as a journal– you’ll be able to refer back what you wrote in here and assess your own progress
- MP4 downloads of just the guided meditation. I’ll send you two versions: one that has Heart Sutra musical incantations in the background layered beyind my voiceover narration, and a version that’s the voiceover narration only.
- 300-dpi resolution digital image of the cover design (17.25” x 11.25”), which can be be used for art prints, wall hangings, etc. In Taoist and various Eastern esoteric traditions, such a design would be called a form of Spirit Map (靈圖, líng tú) or magical painting (術畫, shù huà).
- Cover design features four mandalas from the post-Geluk era (circa 17th c.) representing the canonical four Buddha families and generally symbolic of a four-fold cosmological system of protective guardians.
- The central seal that spreads across both the front and back covers is the Blue Medicine Buddha. The 64 hexagrams appear both as an 8×8 square diagram and as a full circle.
- Original translations and annotations of excerpted chapters from the Dao Men Yu Yao 道門語要 (Fundamentals of Taoist Alchemy), circa 1271 – 1325, specifically the two chapters on the Lesser Mandala “運小周天之法” and the Greater Mandala “行大周天之功” with explanatory annotations
- Fundamentals is a collection of much older canonical essays compiled by Huang Shang 黃裳, a Taoist priest of the Zhongpai 中派 (Middle Pillar Lineage), a tradition of Taoist inner alchemy
dated back to the Yuan dynasty founded by the master Li Daochun 李道纯. - The essays date back to the Yuan dynasty, received texts of the Lineage, while the date of Huang Shang’s compilation is unclear, though speculated to be the Qing dynasty.
- The Middle Pillar Lineage was known for its syncretizing of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.
- The term “黃裳,” Huang Shang’s namesake, is a direct reference from Hexagram 2, Line 5 of the I Ching.
- Fundamentals is a collection of much older canonical essays compiled by Huang Shang 黃裳, a Taoist priest of the Zhongpai 中派 (Middle Pillar Lineage), a tradition of Taoist inner alchemy
- QUESTION & ANSWER WITH BELL | Course Participants Only FAQs Page. Email me your questions and I’ll compile the Q&As into a password-protected page for course participants only. This is your opportunity to ask me any questions you have related to these subjects.
- Admittedly I’m not great at responding to emails, especially ones with questions that may involve a thoughtful, thorough reply. But the questions submitted through this course curriculum will be prioritized, and I’ll answer them via multimedia formats on a password-protected FAQs page.
- You can ask anything related to this subject matter. Or ask how I personally practice, or apply certain principles. Feel free to ask about my perspective, or ask the questions on Taoist mysticism that you can’t seem to find anywhere else in English.
Download the
Course Syllabus
Through the framework of the Lesser and Greater Mandalas of Heaven, this course introduces the foundations of classical Taoist inner alchemy. It will consist of studying translations and annotations of canonical source texts on the Mandalas of Heaven, guided practice, and reflective work.
Download an Excerpt
Read the First 49 Pages
For a sampling of what’s in the course book, click on the above link to a PDF to read the first 49 pages, which outlines your learning objectives, gives you the table of contents, and introduces the premise of this Work.
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Writing the Holistic Tarot Audiobook: Some Reflections
Recently my publisher reached out to me about doing an audiobook version of Holistic Tarot, but, you know, Holistic Tarot was like 850 pages, so an audiobook version would need to cut from a 200K+ word count down to maximum 85K. That’s like … crunch, crunch, crunch… 57.5% of the original book!
I like the idea of someone being able to put on their headphones and listen to educational content on the tarot while going about their day, multitasking. I could approach it as scripts to a podcast series, and each chapter is an episode that builds on the previous episode and leads to the next. So I said yes.
That said, the project has turned out to be a lot harder than I initially presumed. You can’t just cut out 115,000 words from the original text with no revisions to the remaining text and have it make sense. Not to mention my printed book was graphics, table, and chart intensive, so now I have to carefully review the manuscript to make sure it’s audio-friendly.
Funnier yet are some of the self-realizations that are happening while I reread something I wrote well over a decade ago.
One, tell me why it reads like AI wrote it even though this was a decade before LLMs. Em dashes galore. Compare-contrast sentence structure (FYI, that’s academic writing; it’s kinda how those of us who get graduate degrees were trained to write, especially in legal writing. “It’s not just ___, it’s ____” is littered all over any legal brief). Or starting sentences with Moreover, Nevertheless, Notwithstanding, Whereas… I mean crap, that’s still how I write contracts.
Actually, we know why — it’s not that I sound like AI. It’s that AI was trained to sound like academic writing, and my writing style at the time was academic, and not just academic, but specifically juris doctorate academic, and those kinds of publications were a big part of what AI learned from. Funny enough, I do recall back when HT first came out, I got a lot of criticism about how the book’s style came across as too dry, pedantic, even robotic.
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2026 Year of the Fire Horse 丙午
February 17, 2026 through February 5, 2027 is the lunar year of the Fire Horse. The heavenly stem “丙” corresponds with the sun, and thus emanates with a bold radiance. Paired with the earthly branch “午” for Horse, corresponding with yang Fire and the zenith of solar energy, there’s a great deal of scorching, volatility, restlessness, but also, wild and free liberation.
The is the sign of the stampeding horse, fast and unrestrained, independent, fierce, but magnificent to behold. Fire Horse years are years of radical change, upheaval, transformative events that were a “long time coming,” which is to say earlier events in the years leading up to this moment set the stage for this blaze.
The last time we had a Fire Horse year was 1966, the launch of China’s Cultural Revolution. That was the last time in most of our collective lifetimes that we had a Fire Horse year. Before that, 1906 was a Fire Horse year, the year of a Persian revolution, the Russian Peasants’ Uprising, and a year of radical political reform in terms of gender and democracy.
Fire forces are at their peak this lunar year, which amplifies all the corresponding aspects we associate with Fire: expansion, asserting, the Mars force, heat, seeing red, passion, ambition, youthful energies and their ideologies dominating, innovation, technology, theater, politics, strength of the military (compared to, say, if it were a Wood year, it’d be agriculture, or in a Metal year, education, in a Water year, law and policy, etc.)
Also, crazy that I’ve been blogging here for now well over 12 years that I have a blog post on natal years from the last Year of the Horse in 2014, here.
Chinese Astrology circa 246 BC: Wuxian Five Star Divination
Wuxian’s Five Star Divination 巫咸五星占 is a system of astrology that dates back to the Qin dynasty, around 246 BC during Qin Shihuang’s reign, documented in a manuscript from that era titled Five Star Divination 五星占, the “five stars” being Mercury (Water), Venus (Metal), Mars (Fire), Jupiter (Wood), and Saturn (Earth). The astrological text is attributed to Wuxian 巫咸, and so this system of astrology became known as Wuxian’s Five Star Divination.
Wuxian 巫咸 (also referred to as Xian Wu, 咸巫) is the ancestor god and ascended master of the Wu 巫 shamans. Venerated as the first and most masterful Wu 巫 and thus every Wu 巫’s primordial ancestor, he may or may not have been an actual historical figure; either way, Wuxian is a fixture in Chinese lore and deified as a patron god to shamans, healers, and, in particular, diviners and astrologers. In this video lecture, “Shamanism Meets Taoism: The Hidden Link in 3,000 Years of Magic and Mysticism,” we talk about Wuxian 巫咸, the primordial ancestor of all Wu 巫 shamans, at timestamp 12:35.
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Is magic and mysticism a replacement for trauma therapy?
This commentary sums up my responsive thoughts to a certain heated, well, highly-engaged – we’ll call it – provocative discussion that was going on in my social network. The assertion presented was: Magick is not a replacement for therapy and definitely not a form of trauma therapy. By extension, anyone making such claims is unethical, misleading, and hurting vulnerable populations.
Just for the full context so you can catch me if I’m off, the quote was:
“Guys, Magick IS NOT a replacement for therapy and it’s DEFINITELY NOT a form of trauma therapy. Please do not listen to anyone who tells you differently. Such a claim is unethical, misleading; and even worse, hurtful to vulnerable people who seek healing. I am a licensed therapist with 20 years of mental health experience and an occultist. I hope this means something. . . . Jessica says magicians posing as ‘magick healers’ are no different than evangelical faith healers who prey on the vulnerable. She say the key is EMDR, not LBRP.”
I want to start by saying there is nothing there that I disagree with. In principle, the author of this original post is right. And also, this is the right messaging.
“Magick,” beyond Aleister Crowley’s definition of “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” is use of ceremonial rituals, sigils, visualization meditations, meditations in general maybe, mantra work maybe and so by extension, affirmations (?), herbalism to an extent, and various other “woo-woo” practices like candle magic, spell jars, spellwork, trying to time certain forms of workings to seasons, lunar phases, or planetary movements, and/or using divination as a form of diagnostics tool.
So what do I really think? Can such modalities that we categorize under “magick” replace trauma therapy administered by a licensed, qualified healthcare provider?
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2025 Year in Review and Reflection
Oopsie doopsie, this “2025 Year in Review” is coming so, so late. A bit emblematic of my 2025, though, which is anything online-related gets relegated to lowest priority. Eeps. It’s because this past year I’ve kept my work more local community oriented, and my focus more family oriented.
I find that too much gets lots in translation when it’s via social media. I notice how in person, we assume the best in people, but online, we assume the worst. In person, we delight in how similar we actually are; but social media would have you think we can never get along.
2025 has been a year that demanded discernment. Can you discern truth from falsity, what’s natural and what’s edited, what is authenticated and what is entirely AI generated. Economic fissures between the have’s and the have-not’s are widening, which in turn is stoking civil unrest, all while we ravage our environment.
Tarot and I Ching Correspondences (Reference)
I’m an I Ching aficionado and also a tarot aficionado, wrote chonky books on both subjects, so naturally I’ve thought long and hard about how the two systems reconcile. This page is a download of a tarot and I Ching correspondence table for your easy go-to referencing.
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Seeing Auras; Ascribing Meaning: Sensory Experience vs. Moral Evaluation
Cross-posted from my newly minted Substack
I see auras. And also, I pay no attention to them. For most of my life I presumed it was a defect with my eyesight or brain or both — which by the way, that’s most likely it.
That said, medical explanations don’t take away from the spiritual implications, at least not for me. Ocular migraines and severe astigmatism are both known to cause a person to see a halo-like glow around people. Chronic dry eyes and corneal irregularities compounding ocular migraines and astigmatism can then make the glow appear to bear color.
Synesthesia can also be another culprit for what we think of as seeing auras. Your senses get cross-wired, so you see color when you hear sounds, hear musical notes when you see colors, and feel notes and numbers on a musical scale in different bones; likewise, someone’s presence — which we can all sense, it’s the “vibes” you get off a person — can get color-coded, and that’s the aura color a synthesthete might see.
Having not just one or some but all of the aforementioned conditions is probably why, medically speaking, this is what I see when I look at people:
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When People Call My Work “New Age,” What They Really Mean
Note: I wrote this after two generous glasses of port on an empty stomach…
Every so often, someone calls my translation of the I Ching or my work-in-progress on the Tao Te Ching “New Age.” They’ll say it dismissively, as if they’ve discredited the authenticity of my work, and the legitimacy of my scholarship. Funnier yet, not one has been able to competently articulate how and why my work is more “New Age” than its counterparts. For some reason, my interpretation is automatically assumed to be wrong if it departs from what some old white guy from the 50s wrote about these Chinese texts, and we give the old white guy, taking a Christianized outsider perspective, miles and miles of grace.
When pressed, their explanation collapses onto itself in circular reasoning. “It just sounds New Agey.” Or “Well it’s because she’s an occultist so she can’t possibly be unbiased, neutral, objective, and scholarly.” They’ll say it doesn’t sound like “ancient Chinese wisdom.” And that expectation is problematic.
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