Finding its origins in holistic Eastern practices of wellness, the Yuan Gong Institute promotes an alternative to Western-style counseling for sensitives and empaths, especially those who are currently working as activists in the areas of intersectional justice. We currently serve those who have heard the primal call to heal the planet and all its human and animal Nations.

 

Inspired by the art of the "Ape Power Journey" (猿力之旅 ), an ancient traditional Taoist movement style that seeks to reunite practitioners with their ancient primate ancestry as a means of balance and health. While there are formal sets and practices, incorporated into the program are the very movement meditations that our ancestors undertook every day, for example: walking through the woods, looking for food, making a pot with your hands, whittling a stick, or stretching, jumping, reaching, rolling... All these are sets of movements we have made for millions of years, but people have become disconnected from those recursive enactments in modern life, which makes for ill balance.

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While we use basic primate awareness as a starting point for health, individual programs use these techniques as a springboard for other healing modalities -- opportunities to activate the primal blueprint for wholeness that connects us to all living things. 

 

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Our interdisciplinary approach to the cultivation of these connections not only instills health in the individual, but in the living systems surrounding them as well. While the world's challenges are much greater than in those former days, nothing has changed about the dynamism of coming together to become more than the sum of the parts in order to bring new insights, progress, and harmony.

 

All of us working through the Yuan Gong Institute have been in the vanguard of our various disciplines with a common aim: to bring better human understanding through connection. Some of us have studied the connections between higher primates and humans, some have studied the connections between culture, daily life, family, and various modalities of therapy and service, others have studied the long line of hominid evolution. Still others of us have studied the connective nature of the movement arts. All of us, in one form or another, have explored the relationships between humans and their environment, and the importance of rich and holistic contexts for the development of all living things.

 

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In our efforts to understand and find the best passage to the future, we come full circle; through the path of our evolution, in harmony with our ancient anthropoid ancestors and living anthropoid cousins, through wisdom of ancient Eastern understandings of the Way, through the best of current academic, artistic, and social insight, and back once more into the revitalized primal within.

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