What I went to find

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

When I decided to go to China, something moved through me that I wasn't expecting.

Not excitement. Not readiness. Intensity. A whole wave of it — including a specific thought that arrived the moment after I committed:

I am not good enough.

I noticed it. I didn't agree with it or disagree. But I noticed how fast it came — how practiced it was — as if it had been waiting for exactly this moment to make its case.

I went anyway.

One thing I have suffered in this lifetime is that I was easily influenced.

Not because I am weak. Because I learned early that standing in what was true to me came with a cost. As a child, when I stood up for what I felt was right — what was genuinely mine — I was punished. I ended up in painful situations I could not control and could not escape. So I learned, somewhere below the level of decision, to bend. To be reasonable. To fill myself with what was expected rather than what was true.

That pattern has been with me for a long time. Long enough that I stopped recognizing it as a pattern and started calling it myself.

This China trip is, among other things, about finally dissolving that.

Something has already been shifting.

Since deciding to go, I have become more focused. Quieter. My personality can be frantic — quick, nervous, always moving. I know that about myself. But underneath that personality, there is something that has always been there, waiting patiently: a truer, stiller self. Lately that self is more present. Things are beginning to merge rather than scatter. Wisdom is arriving differently — not through thinking harder, but through a kind of opening.

For two years now I have been holding a daily N-tone space — one hour every morning. A small, dedicated group shows up with me every day. Those who come are truly sincere in making a change in their life. The field we have built together, even on the quietest mornings, is genuinely strong. The field presence is palpable. It has brought more peace and flow into my life than almost anything else I have practiced.

In that time, together with Teacher Ping — Ping Dietrich-Shi — I co-created an introduction course, an immersion course, and a workshop with Teacher Xie to make this method more accessible. Not because we had mastered it. Because we were in it together — learning, practicing, and sharing what the teaching offers, so that others could have a place to understand and explore it too. Theory and practice held side by side. People supporting each other in figuring it out. That kind of learning together has its own quality.

The N-tone method was received by Dr. Pang Ming in deep meditation. He described it as a shortcut — a direct path to knowing the True Self. He kept it with only a handful of close teachers because of its intensity. Teacher Xu is among those few. He spent months and years — sometimes between two and eight months each year — in the mountains practicing this method alone.

Once I decided to organize and translate for Teacher Xu's course, it felt as if I was already in his field. I am very curious what will happen once I am in his direct presence.

What draws me there is precisely this: he has not just studied the method — he has lived inside it for months at a time, in the mountains, away from everything ordinary. Something is transmitted through a person who has done that. Something that cannot arrive through a course or a transcript or a translation. I want to be near that transmission and let it land in the body directly.

What I am going toward is the Ru-Ding state — the deep, thought-free stillness the teaching describes as the necessary gateway to real change. In this state, the body enters self-regulation. Blockages release automatically. Psychological injuries from the past are cleansed. Not gradually. Simply, in the field, automatically — as if the qi was always waiting for enough space to do what it already knows how to do.

The teaching is specific about what this state is not: we do not merge with the qi of illness, or with the feeling of pain, or with the stories about what is wrong. We focus on each N-tone, and the body qi rises to a higher level. The qi of the illness, the old pattern, the learned bending — has no chance.

My intention going in is not complicated, even if it is bold:

To find inner peace that does not depend on outer conditions. To move through whatever arises — including pain — without being capsized. To enter a deep, free, peaceful state and understand from there what is really going on. To discern what my true function actually is.

And underneath all of that — to finally know myself clearly enough that I am no longer easily moved off my own ground.

Grandmaster Pang Ming wrote about the Mingjue Entirety state as something experienced in the body — not as an idea, not as a philosophy, but as a lived field of pure consciousness that is clear, peaceful, and whole. When practitioners enter it together, something forms between them that no single mind could generate alone.

This is what I am going toward. Not to acquire something new. To settle into what has always been there — underneath the frantic personality, underneath the "not good enough," underneath the learned bending.

The field knows.

I am going to find out what I know when I am fully inside it.

With Mingjue LOVE and warmth — from the field,

Simone

N-tone method: received by Dr. Pang Ming in deep meditation. Transmitted through Teacher Xu and a small number of close teachers. Courses co-created with Teacher Ping — Ping Dietrich-Shi — at ZhinengQigong.de. Daily practice held at True Better You — truebetteryou.com. Grandmaster Pang Ming, Hunyuan Entirety Theory. Teacher Wei Qi Feng — Mingjue Gongfu Year Courses, including Mingjue Gongfu 2026 — Becoming a Conscious Creator.