The Six Ethea

of MogaDao

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The 6 Ethea represent the overarching thematic structures of the MogaDao practice tradition. The MogaDao techne—MogaDao Qigong, MogaDao Yoga, and Post-Daoist Meditations—represent the somatic experience of the practice. The Ethea is an existential framework of approaches toward being—physical, intellectual, sociopolitical, and spiritual. As overarching themes, the Ethea establish structures of practice and philosophical consideration at once unique within themselves and related to the whole. The MogaDao Ethea are:

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1. Human Fragility: Approaches to Anxiety, Trauma, Grief, Addiction, Immunity, and Aging

2. Mythopoetics: Emotion, Archetype and the Imagination

3. Essence and Transformation: Post-Daoist Gender Theory & Radical Identities

4. Numina: The Body Spiritual

5. Depth Sexuality: The Erotic Basis of Being

6. Eros and Civilization: The Heartmind Warrior and the Sociopolitical Dimension

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The MogaDao Practice tradition

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The MogaDao practice tradition proper began in 2010, with forms and practices and ideologies Zhenevere Sophia Dao began creating or codifying at that time, a creative process which continues to the present. With the exception of The Mythos Form (formerly called "Morning Medical Qigong"), which predates the tradition's creativity and most current canon, and which has progenitorial movements derived from various sources, such as American acupuncturists and taiji masters, as well as clinical Chinese qigong, all of the 150 MogaDao Qigong forms are original "mythosomatic" creations of Zhenevere Sophia Dao, derived from autodidactic research and innovative, choreographical invention. The term "mythosomatic" is an original coinage, attempting to describe spiritualized choreographies that are immanent as well as transcendent, at once physical and spiritual, and rooted in the faith that body and soul are indivisible.

 

MogaDao Yoga employs classical Indian asana in terms of Post-Daoism's 5 Realms Theory, but many of MogaDao Yoga's asanas are original to the MogaDao tradition, in particular with regard to the recently innovated practices (2019-2020) of Primordial Yoga and Erotogenic Yoga, yoga practices which, in the case of Primordial Yoga, are designed to support SACRa Theater's acrobatic necessities, contemporary dance, and the martial arts, and in the case of Erotogenic Yoga, all aspects of sexual well-being. The three MogaDao Meditations, Empty Sky Meditation, Floating Heart Meditation, and Jing Retrieval, though naturally deriving from the historical diaspora of sitting practices, employ unique somatic correspondences and purposes of immanence that place them under the auspices of Post-Daoist meditation.

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post-daoism

 

The MogaDao practice tradition is experientially rooted in the three somatic technes of MogaDao Qigong, MogaDao Yoga, and and the three Post-Daoist meditations of MogaDao. These techne are indivisible from the philosophy of Post-Daoism, which is the ontological foundation of the MogaDao tradition. The Six Ethea represent the codified relevance of Post-Daoism to mythosomatic practice. Within the MogaDao practice tradition, the ontological perspectives of Post-Daoism and the sacralized practice of the arts of qigong, meditation, and yoga commingle, attempting new approaches to studies in trauma and recovery, the role of emotion, archetype, and the imagination, the theory of essences and change, ritual and the spiritual dimension of human being, and eros.

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MogaDao is a queer, multivalent practice tradition and an intersection of somatic, socioerotic, and sociopolitical exploration and inquiry. “Queer" in our usage denotes a conscious and comprehensive undermining of institutions of sociopolitical normativity. We are a safe and profound training ground for individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transexual or transgender, asexual, gender non-conforming, or as queer consociates, namely individuals who are authentically called to surround themselves with queer consciousness in order to effect their own liberation through the undoing of cultural conditioning.

MogaDao is also a community that centralizes the bodies and consciousness—historical and existential—of indigenous persons and persons of color. But what does it mean for a practice tradition, and a dialectic of rigorous inquiry, to centralize indigenous persons and persons of color, even if MogaDao’s founder is presentable as “white”—although she is Filipino on one side of her consanguinity and Jewish on the other—and the majority of MogaDao’s students and teachers are white, at least at the outset of 2021?

It means that simply (and perhaps not so simply) we must understand that the matters of MogaDao’s Ethea—trauma and human fragility, the mythopoetics of the psyche, gender and identity, ritual and spirituality, Depth Sexuality, and the cross-section between spirituality and sociopolitical engagement—do not exist in and of themselves, but rather within the inalienable context of a horrifically biased history which distorts these very inquiries, unless that history and its distortions constitutes the foundational perspective upon the inquiry itself.

The tradition comprises academic studies in queer ontologies, original forms of mythopoetic and archetypal qigong, spiritualized yoga asana, and somatic meditation. The practices, or “techne,” as they are called (harkening back etymologically to the notion of practice as art) are supported by the emergent philosophy of Post-Daoism, originated by Zhenevere Sophia Dao. Post-Daoism combines inheritances of Western Depth Psychology with Eastern philosophical foundations, reinterpreting the former and extending and elaborating upon the latter toward a "justified ontology," or the affirmation of life.