Building From the Ground Up, and Coming Home Again

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

I am not an architect. But we have built our home from the ground up. 

It is not the first custom home we have built. The first time, the plans were not fully our own. This time we began with a few clear ideas and then had to find, step by step, how to translate them into walls, light, and space. We wanted a house that responds to the people who live in it — to what we want and need to keep growing. The ceilings rise high. The lines are simple. There is room for the spirit to expand.

The same thing has been happening with True Better You.

A clear vision, and then letting go

I have brought several business ideas into reality. Some were successful. Some were not. In the end, every one of them helped me know myself better. I learned where I lacked skills and where I lacked clarity. And each time, I learned to let go of needing to be right.

Sometimes that meant correcting the course. Sometimes it meant dropping an idea or a project completely — especially once it was clear what its function had been. Underneath was always the same question: Is this in alignment with my deepest sense of being at home?

It is interesting how often we deviate from our true intention. But it doesn't matter. In the very moment we realize it, we can come back.

When it gets foggy

Some people are very clear and seem to go straight forward. When I am clear, I love to move with that clarity too.

But sometimes I hit a foggy area inside. In the past, the fog made me nervous, and the nervousness wanted me to act: fix something, decide something, send something. Now I am learning something different. When it is foggy, I keep chanting n̈, and I don't act out of nervousness.

n̈ is the sound of my purest self. The moment I hear it, what I am looking for is already here. I am growing more stable in it, and I am not so scared anymore. Clarity reveals itself step by step, and when it comes, I move.

An endpoint that is a new beginning

For our community, I had a very clear picture of where we were going — an endpoint. And it turned out to be a new beginning. From there it keeps growing. We call it digging the well, going deeper, together.

This month we are working with Yuan — the threads that hold us. Needing to be right is one of those threads. So is holding onto a plan after it has done its work. Letting go of them doesn't mean losing the vision. It means letting the vision breathe.

Grandmaster Pang Ming, the founder of Zhineng Qigong, describes how everything comes into form and dissolves again:

"The two existences of hunyuan qi will interchange under certain conditions. Material substance can dissolve into invisible hunyuan qi, and hunyuan qi can condense and take visible form. The universe is the hunyuan entirety formed by the transformation and evolution of these two existences."

And then he adds something I love. It is not a closed circle:

"The hunyuan qi theory of Zhineng Qigong is a developing theory, neither a return to the origin nor a closed circle, but an ascending spiral."

That is what I see in our house, in every business I have built and let go, and in our community. Things gather and grow complex. They dissolve. And they come round again, a little higher.

A question to carry

What have you built, or begun, that wants to grow beyond your plan?

And where is it foggy right now? Maybe that is not a place to push through — but a place to sit, listen, and let clarity come.

Every morning a group gathers to chant n̈ together — daily, 8–9am ET. No teaching, no performance.

We come as we are. We come for what we truly are.

And we stay conscious in it.

→ Join the Daily n̈-Tone Session

With Mingjue LOVE,
Simone

With gratitude to Grandmaster Pang Ming, Teacher Dao Xin (Wei), and Teacher Xu, whose teaching this rests on.