Have you heard of the Steps of Yu?<\/p>\n
Yu was a man in the prehistory of China, a man tied to its shamanic roots. He could transform into a bear, predict the weather and change the course of rivers. In some stories he is the First Man, the one who separated Heaven and Earth, and started the human lineage. He is the First Shaman, the first to pull mankind up form the ooze, to teach people the secrets of spirits and gods and of Nature. He is also part of the Taoist creation myth… not the one found in the Tao Te Ching but the creation told by the Taoist peasantry, the people who lived the Tao in their daily lives.<\/p>\n
Yu also danced the patterns of the stars, especially the Big Dipper which was considered sacred. The pattern he traced with his dancing was an invocation launched to the gods of the Heavens. And here we see a link with Tai Chi. The notion that a set pattern of steps, performed ritually, can connect the dancer to a greater reality. That a body moving through space can become more than that; it becomes a conduit for forces, a link between Heaven and Earth.<\/p>\n
I’m charmed by the thought of a modern Tai Chi practitioner and Yu, separated by 4000 years of history, both slowly moving though divine patterns, in search of some cosmic connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have you heard of the Steps of Yu? Yu was a man in the prehistory of China, a man tied to its shamanic roots. He could transform into a bear, predict the weather and change the course of rivers. In some stories he is the First Man, the one who separated Heaven and Earth, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[33,36,35,13,30,32,14,34],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-tai-chi","tag-chinese-history","tag-shaman","tag-shamanism","tag-taichi","tag-taiji","tag-tao","tag-taoism","tag-yu"],"yoast_head":"\n