There are two excellent articles written by one of my classmates here about Taoism and how, in the west, we often don't get the whole story. Everything is over-simplified and yet abstracted and all the practical points for beginners are missing.

http://www.wudangtaoistarts.com/articles-1/yu-huang-xin-yin-miao-jing/

http://www.wudangtaoistarts.com/articles-1/a-commentary-on-practice/

There is an interesting parallel between what is written in the second article and what Sifu Brinker always says about practice. A lot of what we do you can only learn through direct experience and repetition, reading and talking about it will not help you to achieve mastery.

Something that my teacher here talks about is that experiences of Qi (chi) come from our bodies, not our minds. We need to train our bodies to be healthy, strong, and sensitive before we can start to feel our own Qi on a deep level. If people have these intense visions and feelings without the foundation of physical practice, it is often just an illusion created by the mind to entertain us. The first step is to train your body. The rest comes later. Many people want to skip the 'hard stuff' and go right to the mystical, magical type of training but as we all know, you can't build a house with no foundation.

Anyways, check out these articles for an interesting perspective that's different from what we generally have access to in the west.