It’s about finding a range of techniques or healthy habits that appeal to you and fit comfortably with your lifestyle. In addition to these things, you will practice sexual intercourse in the right fashion; you will eat and drink moderately; you will avoid drafts and dampness; you will not trouble about things that are not within your competence. I later discovered that this form of exercise was within yang sheng, which means “to keep in good health” in Chinese— martial arts forms designed to nurture the body to achieve overall wellness. It is a very self-empowering concept as it teaches us not to rely or become dependent upon other people or things for our health and wellbeing. Those who know breathing procedures [吐納] claim that only circulation of the breaths [行氣] can prolong our years.

In the present day, the text survives in numerous fragments and citations, especially in the Yangxing yanming lu (養性延命錄, "On Nourishing Inner Nature and Extending Life"), ascribed to Tao Hongjing (456–536), Sun Simiao's 652 Qianjin fang (千金方, "Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold [Pieces]"), as well as in early Japanese medical texts such as the 984 Ishinpō ("Methods from the Heart of Medicine"). Judging from this, the achievements of emperors and kings are the leftover affairs of the sages, not that which fulfills the person or nourishes life [完身養生]. In the twentieth century, yangsheng evolved into the modern Westernized science of weisheng (衛生, "hygiene, health, sanitation") on the one hand, and into qigong on the other (Despeux 2008: 1150).

Selley Liu, who has been leading a style of Yangsheng for more than a decade, said she came to realize that what is most important is to find the way that works best for her. Some examples of other renderings include "keep in good health; nourish one's vital principle" (DeFrancis 1996), "nurturing vitality", "nourishing the vitality" (Needham and Lu 2000: 72, 115), longevity techniques" (Engelhardt 2000: 74), and "nurturing life”, “cultivating life” (Dear 2012: 1). Methods of neixiu (內修, "inner cultivation") include tuna (吐納, "breathing techniques"), taixi (胎息, "embryonic breathing"), daoyin (導引, "gymnastics"), and xingqi (行氣, "circulation of breath/energy"), which are all old forms of what is today known as qigong (氣功).

Although there is a comprehensive range of books, videos and VCD's available in Chinese, unfortunately, at this time the development of Dao Yin Yang Sheng Gong in the U.Even more appealing, a key principle of Chinese medicine is balance; that means not being perfect or excluding foods or having too many rules or pushing yourself to exhaustion with overwork or over-exercise. The Beijing University of Physical Education is the home of the Dao Yin Yang Sheng Gong Centre, Professor Zhang Guangde's headquarters since his official retirement. Despite Yang Sheng featuring prominently in the early Chinese medical literature, the curricula of modern schools of Chinese Medicine schools in both Asia and the West pay scant attention to it. People would pay the Chinese medicine doctor (with produce from their fields) when they were well and would stop paying the doctor when they fell ill. In accord with the natural grain [依乎天理], I slice at the great crevices, lead the blade through the great cavities.

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Collins, Roy and David Kerr (2001), Etymology of the Word “Macrobiotic:s”[ sic] and Its Use in Modern Chinese Scholarship, Sino-Platonic Papers 113.