Admittedly, understanding Hunyuan is difficult, even for a practitioner and advocate.  We often think we understand, and probably do on a surface level, but in reality we haven't begun to grasp it.  Looking to the writings and gathered words of Grandmaster Feng doesn't make it any easier, as his explanations are often arcane and mysterious.  I don't think he intended it that way, nor do I think he was just a bad communicator.  Rather, like much of Taoist thought, it's deep and mysterious and not very accommodating to words and logic.

The referenced essay below by Thomas Dyhr is long and rambling, and also a bit arcane and mysterious in places.  In reality I don't know that it does any better at explaining Hunyuan, but it offers a different take on it.  In that light I share it:  
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"Hunyuan is a Daoist term which is difficult to translate, but which can best be imagined as the nucleus of a human cell. The chromatin, the genetic code which moves chaotically, that is spontaneously, is like prenatal chaos – the “primary mass”, the cosmic primordial ocean. In this prenatal and chaotic state the chromosomes are invisible, intangible. When cells begin to divide themselves, two energetic poles are created, and the previous “chaotic” chromatin begins to spiral toward the poles until the poles have gathered enough energy to produce a single cell. Hunyuan depicts this moment where the primary mass, or the “absolute highest” (Taiji), creates the polarity and appears in various forms only to ultimately return once again to the whole. Hunyuan is the sacred process of the creation of a form which is created from the void. Thus, what is typical of Hunyuan is that these processes flow in an extraordinarily circular manner."  The Rest

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The following from Richard Rohr showed up in my email today.  As it so totally speaks my mind, I offer it without further comment:

"Being part of the cosmic dance can only be known experientially. That’s why I teach centering prayer and contemplation and try to use meaningful religious rituals and practices: to lead you to a place of nakedness and vulnerability where your ego identity falls away, where your explanations don’t mean anything, where your superiority doesn’t matter.

You have to sit there in your naked who-ness. If God wants to get to you, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive within you, these liminal moments are when God has the very best chance.

As we 'tune our hearts' to greater perception, we’ll begin to experience God almost like a force field, to borrow a metaphor from physics. We’re all already inside this force field, whether we know it or not, alongside Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and every race and nationality. God doesn’t stop or begin at the Mexico/U.S. border, the Israel/Palestine border, the border between North and South Korea, or any such line in the sand. The divine force field is all-encompassing.

When you see people protecting their small tribes and self-constructed identities as if they were lasting or inherently meaningful, you know that they’ve not yet experienced substantial reality. When you allow the flow of substantial reality through your life, you are a catholic person in the truest sense of the word, a universal person living beyond these tiny boundaries that human beings love to create. As Paul puts it, 'Our citizenship is in heaven'(Philippians 3:20).

As I grow older, faith for me has become a daily readiness to allow and to trust the force field, knowing that it is good, that it’s totally on my side, and that I’m already inside of it. How else can I really be at peace?"

Amen.  
​​Namaste.

In recent times I have known more and more people struggling with extreme health challenges, primarily cancer.  I don't know what to think about this.  I know we live in a poisoned world.  I know that regardless of our various health practices, we may still succumb to the poison.  I know that sometimes extreme illness doesn't have anything to do with environmental poison, or much of anything else that we can pinpoint.  Sometimes it just happens.  I know there is not much we can do about that.

I believe in positive thinking and intentional living.  I also believe in truth-in-training, which carries over to truth-in-living.  We have to be prepared for anything, and we can't deny the worst if we are staring it down.  We of course should never give up, and should fight the good fight if we have to.  We should stand with, hold, honor, and support those who are facing these challenges.  On the other hand, if we are healthy, still functioning, living another day, we should celebrate that every day that we get.

There is no guarantee that living a healthy life will protect us from the poisonous world or mysterious and rare genetic illnesses.  But it certainly helps with the quality of life.  Likewise, healing our planet and reversing negative trends may be a long-shot, but we should take it anyway.  Further, one may not believe in the efficacy of prayer, but it has a place in the process and it doesn't hurt.  If life is more journey than destination, these things still matter.

A crucial part, maybe the crucial part, of intentional living is conquering fear.  For it is fear itself, not the object of fear, that is to be conquered.  This, like all things, is done in the moment.  Fear resides in the future.  Breath resides in the moment, as does peace and life.  Find the relationship between them and abide there.  Smile.  Be nice.  I'm not sure we can do much else.

The way of the warrior is lonely.  Anything else is likely not Budo.  The warrior is surrounded by friends, and perhaps even many of those are themselves warriors on a similar path.  But they are each in a very substantial way traveling alone, for that is the true nature of this way.  There is no reliable map or template.  We discover the way as it unfolds before us.  It unfolds because we let go of everything, so there is nothing left of what was, the perfect potential for what will be.  We let go by dying daily, submitting to the training, to endless hours of honing, sharpening, refining; searching, finding, losing, searching again.  After a certain time and level of commitment, life itself becomes our foremost teacher.  And while it pays off, we rarely pause to acknowledge that, always working to further improve, to take it to the next level, to do without doing a thing.

Budo is a spiritual path, an energetic path, a physical path.  It is a natural path, absorbing and merging with nature.  It is a healing path, a yogic path, a mysterious path.  Formal initiation is not a requirement, but one won't stick it out if he/she isn't called from a deeper source.  It is a personal path, and it's no path at all.  It's a choice.