The MogaDao Institute
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

The Daoist Body

The MogaDao Institute is the culmination of 25 years of a very particular devotion to sacred physical practice.  The Institute is founded on the faith that the body is a work of the imagination, and that it is possible to fill the body with soul and sensibility, very like the mind is filled with thought or dream.  I believe that the body, like the mind, is capable of surprising and subtle intelligence.  That pliancy and strength, when they communicate in perfect harmony, are not so much qualities of force as they are templates of wisdom.  And that it is possible, through the devoted study of the sacred physical practices of yoga and qigong, and through the study of daoist and daoist-sympathetic Western philosophy, to become more human.  By human I mean careful, and yet capable of compassion and spontaneous creative passion, and daring.  To embody paradox with integrity.

All devoted study is sacred inasmuch as study is a form of gratitude for the gift of life.  Sacred physical, spiritual, and intellectual disciplines can grant to a person a potential world.  This is the scope of the MogaDao Institute.  

We are today accustomed to compartmentalization and specialization.  We go to university professors for philosophy, but rarely do we see in their bodies the philosophies which they teach.  We go to doctors for medicine, but rarely do we see in their bodies or feel in their dispositions that they are philosophers of what is well.  We go to the gym for exercise, but rarely in those contexts are we touched by truths which communicate with our inner lives.  In the ancient East, a philosopher of the Dao was invariably also a sacred physical practitioner of the highest level.  There was no separation between her vastest ideas and her contact with her body.  His body was a representation in microcosm of the ideologies he breathed in words.  And the cultivation gleaned through practice was not only personal but cosmological: senstivity to oneself became sensitivity to the world, to one's Others.  One's ethics were indivisible from one's refinement, one's physical life was indivisible from one's imagination.   

The MogaDao Institute is a root school in the ancient daoist sense of the term.  It is a place of cultivation to which students can come, for long or short periods of time, to study in a sacred context, and with the most precise instruction, the arts of yoga, qigong, meditation, and daoist philosophy.  My faith, and it is a faith founded in the intimate history of my personal life, is that each of these disciplines communicates essentially with the others toward the development of a body that thinks and feels because it is a mind, and toward a mind that moves, opens and transforms, because it is a body.  This potential of the sensuous harmonization of intelligence I call The Daoist Body.

Daniel Villasenor, Founder, The MogaDao Institute