Standing Series

As you explore layers of relaxation through standing qigong, you’ll hit a point where everything starts to feel fluid, as if you’ve dug down deep enough to find a rich aquifer, filled with nourishing water. We describe the experience with words like “sinking” and “soaking” the mind into the body, and that’s literally what’s happening. Remember the qigong expression, “your mind moves your chi and your chi moves your blood”? When they say “blood”, they mean all the fluids in the body. When you truly start to fuse your mind and your body, your insides start to feel more wet, fluid, and connected. ...

You can encourage your body to relax just by paying attention to it the right way. Using standing qigong, you can build up a relaxation feedback loop between your feeling awareness and the body’s natural ability to soften when circulation improves. The qigong expression, drawn from Chinese medicine, is, “your mind moves your chi and your chi moves your blood”. In the first lesson on standing qigong, we worked on creating a buffer between “real life” and “practice time” with five minutes of settling in. Now we want to move a little deeper into the body and explore how increased you can trigger relaxation with increased feeling awareness. ...

Do you include a “settling-in” phase each time you practice? If not, you’re wasting time and energy resolving issues from your day when you could be going deeper into your practice. A settling-in phase acts as a buffer between your busy day and the place you’d like your practice to take you. Standing qigong is one of the best buffers between “real life” and “practice time”. You could jump right into your tai chi form, but you’d need to do 10 or 15 minutes of “cold” tai chi, with no warm-up, to arrive at the same place, ready to practice, after 5 minutes of standing and settling in. ...

As you’re sitting here reading this, I want you to try something. I want you to push yourself back away from your desk, let your arms hang by your sides, close your eyes and see how many fingers you can feel. Go ahead, try it. Now do the same thing again, but stand up and count your toes instead. Could you feel more fingers or toes? Chances are you have much greater feeling access to your fingers. But how does the sensation of feeling a finger compare to the clarity of a thought you just had or an image you can generate in your head? If thoughts and images are much clearer than feeling sensations in your body, you might have a problem. ...