sleep alchemy 睡功

Esalen April 7-11, 2025

meditating in wudang

When I moved to Wudang I didn’t really know anything about inner alchemy or Daoist mediation. I had read a few books, but really I was just going there for something like a martial arts vacation, a gap year between undergrad and grad school. But I quickly found, for master Yuan, everything was really about inner alchemy, and even the most mundane practices, like doing a horse stance or sparring, were ultimately just waystations on the path toward the inner alchemical meditation tradition. One of my favorite things about how training in Wudang was structured was the hour-long seated meditation practice every evening. I don’t think I’d ever really meditated for more than about 30 minutes before that, so it was a bit of an adjustment, but having that atmosphere, and frankly the peer pressure, to just sit for an hour, enabled me to engage more deeply in a real meditation practice for the first time in my life.

We meditated like that for years. Every day. With very little instruction. Master Yuan taught us the proper sitting posture, told us to lead the breath down to the belly, and that was about it. He would drop in on our meditations every so often, sometimes he’d take everyone’s pulse to check on how the practice was going. About a year into our training we began having weeklong meditation retreats, where we would suspend all the rest of our training and simply sit for eight hours a day. We would prepare these little medicine balls beforehand, and fast for the duration of the meditation retreat. Still he taught us almost nothing. It was really frustrating for other students just dropping in on the practice. But everyone in our class, at that point, was pretty much resigned to not having any idea what was going on and just following the master.

It was three years into our training that we had one of these little retreats and one evening master Yuan came and told everyone to lay down. He then led us through some guided practices that were very cool. After the practices we simply laid there in a kind of contentless meditation, the sort we’d been doing for years, and like every night, our evening meditation wound down and we all went back to our rooms. He didn’t tell us what he had taught us, and it was classic master Yuan fashion, he always made everything seem like it was just something random he just showing us off the cuff, on a whim. It took me a few years to begin to understand this skillful dimension of the transmission. He was actually inducting us into the central meditation practices of our lineage, the sleep alchemy.

Chentuan paying a visit to his five organs

sleep alchemy

Wudang has a long history of sleep masters, going all the way back to the patron saint of sleep alchemy, Chentuan 陈抟 (872-989 CE). He is one of the “hidden immortals” in our lineage’s mytho-historical pedigree. Chentuan spent decades meditating in Wudang before one day encountering a “golden being” 金人 who told him to go to Huashan 华山, a few hours north, to complete the elixir. Chentuan’s cave is near Nanyan 南岩, the southern cliff temple, which is where Zhenwu achieved complete awakening. Zhenwu was also led to Nanyan by a “golden being,” in a very weird story.

Ok, I think I’ll just write it out:

sleepy zhenwu and the boy of light

Long ago, in a quiet farming village nestled at the base of Wudang Mountain, the villagers began noticing something strange—a small, glowing, golden child, no more than three feet tall, wandering the fields in wide, slow circles. Curious and a little unnerved, they decided to follow it. Their search led them to a hole in the ground from which the radiant figure seemed to emerge, but no one could quite explain what it was.

Strange as it was, the village soon experienced an unexpected blessing: that year’s harvest was the most abundant anyone could remember. And the pattern continued—each year, the luminous child returned, and each year the crops flourished. Naturally, the villagers began to see the glowing figure as a kind of guardian spirit, offering it reverence and small rituals of thanks.

But one year, the luminous child didn’t return. That year’s harvest was catastrophic. Faced with famine, the villagers gathered to discuss what could have happened. During the meeting, a young goatherd spoke up: he’d seen a demon dragon lurking in the mountains, and he was sure it had swallowed their radiant protector.

With nothing to lose, the villagers rallied. Armed with whatever tools they had, they climbed into the mountains. There, they found the dragon—and sure enough, something golden glimmered beneath its scales, writhing faintly from within. The dragon had swallowed the luminous child but couldn’t digest its pure, radiant energy, leaving the beast weakened and vulnerable. The villagers attacked, and in the chaos, the young goatherd leapt onto the dragon’s back, riding it like a wild, thrashing horse. They managed to subdue the creature, stuffing it into a burlap sack (as one does with troublesome dragons).

On their way back to the village, the group stumbled upon a prince from the nearby Jing Le Kingdom (静乐国), resting in a meadow under the afternoon sun. The prince awoke, listened to their tale, and then said something unexpected. He explained that he was cultivating the Dao, seeking to achieve awakening within this very lifetime. Turning to the burlap sack, he addressed the dragon directly: if the creature wished to atone for its past misdeeds, it could assist him on his path to immortality.

To everyone’s surprise, the dragon agreed. So, the villagers released it. The prince climbed onto the dragon’s back, and together they flew to the sacred cliffs of Nanyan, where the prince continued his cultivation. Over time, he perfected his alchemical practice, achieved the Dao, and ascended as Zhenwu (真武)—the Daoist Warrior God and patron deity of Wudang Mountain.

As for the dragon, it remained by Zhenwu’s side. Every night, while the prince practiced the profound arts of sleep alchemy, the dragon coiled protectively around him, its once-wild spirit transformed through its devotion to the Dao.

Old wooden statue of Zhenwu sleeping with the dragon, up at Nanyan, 太子卧龙床

tradition and transmission

That story lies at the beginning of Wudang sleep alchemy, which in our tradition is known as the Hibernating Dragon Method 蛰龙睡法, where you take up the same position as that old Zhenwu statue, and drift into the nondual hypnagogic space of light sleep.

But the reason I’m writing this up right now is to provide some framework for a workshop I’m offering with my kung fu brother Jeff in April at the Esalen institute from April 7-11 of this year (2025). It’s a week-long retreat where we’ll be going over the fundamentals of this form of meditation, from the posture of the physical body, to the landscape and orientation of the subtle body. We’ll delve into the fundamental practices involving a form of “inner observation” 内观, paying respects to our five organs: kidneys, liver, heart, spleen, lungs. We’ll go over more practical things too, like lifestyle adjustments, pre-sleep rituals, and the basic Daoist approach to dream. We will be going carefully through the text of an alchemical poem by out lineage’s founder called Song of the Hibernating Dragon 蛰龙吟, which guides us step by step through the practice. This is the first time either of us has taught this stuff publicly, so it will be a bit of an experiment. But if there’s anywhere made for this kind of experimentation, it’s Esalen. I hope to see you there.

Click here to check out our esalen workshop