Why Laying the Foundation Is the Hardest Work: Cultivator Series (Part 3)

Stuart used to talk about the Laying the Foundation stage as men restoring Jing to the kidneys and women restoring or settling the Blood in the womb. This stage sounds simple on paper, but in practice it’s one of the hardest stages for people to truly enter. Many students hover around it for years, working hard but never quite getting through.

The reason is simple, but not easy to face.

Laying the Foundation isn’t a technique. It’s a reversal of how most people have lived their entire lives.

To restore Jing or settle Blood means energy stops leaking by default. It means the body doesn’t need constant stimulation to regulate itself. It means emotions don’t have to be in motion all the time. It means the body becomes home again.

That’s not mystical. That’s deeply unsettling for many people.

From an alchemical point of view, Jing and Blood are protective substances. They don’t settle just because you want them to. They settle when conditions are right, when the system feels safe enough to stop discharging energy outward.

For men, Jing won’t return to the kidneys when there is chronic stress, constant mental agitation, compulsive sexuality, or an identity built on effort and desire. The kidneys represent existential safety. For many men, that safety was never established early in life. Jing learns to leak upward into fantasy, ambition, sexuality, distraction, and constant activity. That leakage feels like being alive. When it begins to stop, it can feel like something is dying.

For women, Blood won’t settle in the womb when emotional vigilance is constant, caretaking is habitual, arousal is used to regulate the nervous system, or stillness has historically been unsafe. For many women, the womb hasn’t felt like a place of safety—it’s been associated with obligation, vulnerability, or loss. So Blood keeps circulating. Movement feels safer than rest.

This is where many people get confused.

They mistake movement for progress.

They assume circulating energy means advancement, intensity means transformation, insight means alchemy. But foundation work feels like the opposite. It’s quieter, slower, less dramatic, more ordinary. People think nothing is happening, when in fact something very threatening to the ego is happening.

Settling dismantles identity.

Many people’s sense of self is built on mental activity, emotional reactivity, sexual intensity, spiritual seeking, or being “interesting.” When Jing or Blood begin to settle, those structures weaken. Familiar motivations dissolve. Life can feel flat for a while. Meaning has to come from being, not doing.

That’s why people resist this stage, often without realizing it. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it works too well.

Classical texts didn’t talk about nervous systems or trauma, but they assumed something many modern people don’t have: the capacity to be still without fear. If stillness has been associated with danger, collapse, abandonment, or loss of control, the body won’t settle. Energy keeps moving as a survival strategy. Attention jumps. Sleep is disturbed. Sexual or emotional energy escalates. The body is saying, “It’s not safe yet.”

This is why many people never pass this stage. Passing it requires patience without payoff, practice without fireworks, trust without proof, repetition without novelty, and rest without crumbling. Most spiritual systems reward insight, intensity, and charisma. Internal alchemy quietly asks a different question:

Can you stay when nothing is happening?

When people do pass this stage, they may find their sleep improving, anxiety levels dropping, sexuality calming, emotional reactions lessening, and feelings of urgency fading. Their attention and focus will deepen naturally. All of these can happen not because something was achieved, but because something stopped leaking.

That’s why people who’ve passed this stage seem steadier and less reactive. There’s less drama and more being in the present. They’re no longer running on borrowed energy.

Laying the Foundation asks the body to stop surviving and start inhabiting. For most of us, that transition is the hardest work there is.

—Patrick