Foreword, Part 1
Encountering Joe in My Dream
I am Dr. Spring Cheng, Joe’s life, work, and creative partner for the past twelve years. We co-founded the Resonance Path Institute, dedicated to the birthing of a culture that values innate being, reciprocity of relations, and creative expression through individual and collective transformation. I’d like to introduce our partnership as a journey guided by mystery, which brought us together to help each other uncover the gifts we are meant to share with the world.
On December 31, 2012, I did my first fieldwork mapping with Joe. Since then, I have learned the practice and applied it to my own journey, integrating it into my work with individuals and groups, and incorporating it into a curriculum I teach in China. Joe’s work has been instrumental in reconnecting me with the boundless, formless essence of my being—like a pure, resonant tone unfurling from a temple gong, vibrating in the crisp mountain air.
To me, Joe is a mystic hermit living in the midst of the city's hustle and bustle.1 To preserve the integrity and purity of his work, Joe has chosen to remain outside the established professional fields for the past thirty years, embracing a simple life with minimal material needs. His work carries a level of purity in its spiritual essence that deeply resonates with my aesthetic sense as a Taoist mystic.
Mystic hermits have been a uniquely potent presence in China, choosing to exist beyond the bounds of mundane life, cultivating themselves as a vessel for the wellbeing of the collective and evolution of planetary consciousness. Throughout history, some mystics came down from the mountain to share their gifts with the world. I am deeply grateful that Joe, after more than thirty years of solitary exploration, is choosing to emerge from his own “hermitage” and distill his knowledge into this book.
Joe amazes me that, without an external structure and tangible reward, he has been able to sustain long years of hard, disciplined work, completely propelled by an inner will and guidance. He is a rigorous scientist, meticulously tracking the research he conducted on himself, his clients and students, while staying abreast of the latest developments in mental health and cognitive science. I often joke that his office is the shell of a hermit crab. (His astrological sign is Cancer the crab.)
With brilliant ingenuity, Joe has wielded the sharp blade of scientific inquiry to navigate the uncharted realms of feeling and inner experience. He has unlocked secret pathways through what I call a wildness within, a territory in the inner landscape outside the boundary of existing maps of mainstream knowledge.
This territory lies deep within, yet it also powerfully connects us without. Adrienne Maree Brown has beautifully articulated this awareness of selfhood in these words:
“I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do.”
Adrienne’s words illuminate a simple yet profound truth: Who we are at deepest core of our inner being is, by its birthright, connected to all of humanity. This inner core of being, beyond what we do, produce, or perform, is one of the most powerful yet least understood forces for systemic change.
For those of us steeped in the modern mindset, this may seem contradictory to our experience. Removed from the deep core of our being, we cannot perceive how we, as individuals, are intimately connected with the whole at all times. We have been conditioned to believe that our essence, held within the core of our being, has no inherent value or impact on the world. Without measurable performance or production, we don’t feel we deserve belonging, or that we can even sustain our livelihood, let alone become a potent presence in the system.
In reality, the fractal connection between the individual and the whole is embedded in our very biology. Each cell in our body carries DNA that holds the imprint of billions of years of evolution on this planet. Remarkably, our genome shares 98% of its information with chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom — a testament to the deep interconnect-edness of all life. Yet most of the time, this interconnectedness only exists as an enticing concept rather than a lived experience.
To reclaim his birthright to the full brilliance of being, Joe has trekked through this wildness without tracks and guardrails, bearing poverty, living on the edge, walking only with faith and the intimate connection he has cultivated with mystery.
This choice has enabled him to carve out a path that is unique and innovative, while preserving the integrity of this inner wilderness. Unbeknownst to Joe, my ancestors, the ancient mystics and Taoist and Buddhist hermits of the east have also trekked this inner wilderness, through pathways and methods molded by a very different cultural and temporal context.
When I met Joe, I knew for certain that the souls and visions of my ancestors have guided me to meet him and his work, so that a cross-cultural dialogue and an intimate meeting of our ancestral lineages could unfold within our relationship.
Encountering Joe in My Dream
In August of 2012, I graduated from acupuncture school and started to launch my acupuncture clinic.
This was my second career. In my first career, I worked as a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company after receiving a PhD in molecular biology. I was a “model immigrant,” earning top dollar plus full health benefits and a fat 401K portfolio subsidized by the company. My ex-husband (whose name happened to be Tao) and I co-owned three houses in prime neighborhoods near Microsoft’s campus, living in one and renting out two. I had achieved everything shiny promised by the “American dream,” yet inside, I was consumed by an intense pain associated with a deep betrayal of my inner being and ancestral lineage.
In my grandparents’ generation, China was sealed off from the rest of the world, untouched by modern technologies. The majority of the population was steeped in the traditional farming culture that had prioritized sustainability over material progress for two thousand years. My paternal grandfather was a Chinese medicine healer, the only doctor for his entire village. Hence, he also played the role of a community elder. My maternal grandfather worked for a Chinese herbal pharmacy.
Beginning as early as the start of the twentieth century, lured by the immense profit potential of China’s vast population, capitalism and modern medicine began forcing their way into the country. The Western pharmaceutical industry and its investors launched a campaign in the name of science, systematically undermining the credibility of traditional healers. Holistic practitioners were dismissed as wacky, untrustworthy, and backward, and the spirit of traditional medicine was all but crushed. As a result, today, many Chinese, especially those with advanced degrees from Western-influenced education systems, harbor a deep-seated distrust, and even shame, toward their own ancestral healing traditions.
Modern medicine, rooted in a Newtonian understanding of the physical world, focuses on concrete, measurable anatomical structures. In contrast, the holistic medical paradigm of the East perceives the body primarily as qi, a dynamic field of energy, unbound by the physical form. Practitioners cultivate their awareness as both a means of perception and a tool of intervention, using their own qi as an instrument for healing.
The relentless suppression and destruction of the traditional paradigm has been devastating to my native culture and my own soul. The gap between ancestral wisdom woven into my being and the scientist identity I adopted to make a living became a deep well of grief, sorrow, and anger. At times, it left me feeling like a brain prostitute, forced to trade my intellectual prowess at the expense of my authenticity.
In my 30s, life’s journey led me back to the deep knowing of my heart. I embarked on a series of pilgrimages to remote sacred sites in Tibet — at that time, one of the last places on Earth untouched by modernity. Blessed by the spirits of the Tibetan mountains, I discovered the will to break free from the golden handcuffs of a cushy job and set out on a path to reconnect with my ancestral lineage through the study of acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and Taoist spiritual cultivation.
However, running my first small business as an immigrant filled me with anxiety. Folk medicine used to be an integrated thread of a cultural fabric woven by reciprocity, deep attunement to nature, and interconnection based on trust and belonging, all of which was destroyed during modern development. I had grown up in pre-industrial China and spent my adult life in academia and research labs. Entrepreneurship was foreign to me, and I held strong resentment towards the traps of capitalist extraction.
On the day I was filling out the forms from Washington Department of Health to apply for a license, I was envisioning what my acupuncture clinic was going to be. I was both filled with hope and longing, and bothered by a persistent anxiety humming in the pit of my gut.
That night, I had a dream. I saw my clinic nestled on a bustling street in China, surrounded by small eateries offering the familiar, nostalgic flavors of my childhood. Stepping inside, I found its space dark and cramped. I climbed to the attic on the second floor—only to discover, to my astonishment, that it was a portal. In an instant, I was transported to the vast, high plateau of Tibet, the place where my spiritual journey first began a decade earlier.
In contrast to the cramped, noisy street below, here, an immense stillness stretched beneath an endless expanse of deep blue sky. The air was crisp and pure, a gentle breeze stirring the soul awake. Snow-capped peaks lined the horizon, their quiet majesty filling me with awe. As I stood there, happy tears welled in my heart — I had returned to a place that held the very essence of my spirit.
On this plateau, I roamed freely, my spirit light and unburdened. I thought I was alone, yet to my surprise, I encountered a man tending a small garden under the scorching sun, his focus and devotion absolute. Both shy, we didn’t exchange greetings, only a quiet, mutual awareness of each other’s presence. I watched him with admiration, moved by the care he poured into his work, his quiet humility, and his down-to-earth dedication.
To ensure I would recognize him when the time came, my dream revealed his surroundings — a hobbit-style stucco house, painted a soft golden hue, nestled within a lush garden. A wood-burning stove radiated a gentle, glowing warmth — an object dear to me, one of my most beloved household items. Months later, when I visited Joe’s home in Port Townsend for my first in-person fieldwork mapping, I saw that very house with the unique architecture style, the garden, and the wood-burning stove. At that moment, I knew without a doubt — he was the man from my dream.
This prophetic dream was not a new experience. For years, I had cultivated an awareness that allowed me to receive visions of the future in my dreams. The dominant paradigm of modernity dismisses the validity and sacredness of such experiences, along with other psychic abilities such as clairvoyance, telepathic communication and self-healing. These psychological traits are labeled as paranormal, supernatural, or even borderline “craziness.”
In many indigenous and traditional cultures, these traits are seen as innate potentials of human consciousness, natural gifts we are born with. When nurtured with openness and intention, as shamans and medicine people have done in Earth-centered cultures for millennia, they can evolve as profound expressions of evolution — manifestations of the interconnected intelligence flowing through us all.
The legacies of my native culture have allowed me to preserve awareness of my being, the inner wildness, exiled by the modern dominant paradigm. My relationship with Joe has empowered me to find the will and agency to bring the gifts and insights from this inner wildness into the dominant cultural paradigm.
For the past twelve years, I have been exploring how to live with the integrity of my being as a catalyst for transformation, while holding a loving witness to humanity. With that intention, I will offer this story as an introduction to the kind of transformation enabled by psychotopology.
(To be continued next week in “A Taoist Way to Heaven is Through Hell.”)
An ancient Chinese proverb says, rudimentary hermits live on the mountain; intermediate hermits, in the marketplace; and advanced hermits, inside the government. It highlights how the mystic hermits, after cultivating spiritual essence, weave the gift of their learning into everyday life.