The Spiraling Energy Body Qigong set is one of the toughest in the Energy Arts system, so I asked Energy Arts Instructor Isaac Kamins to tell us about his experiences with this practice. In this episode of Qigong Radio, Isaac explains how as a teenager he came to appreciate the counter-intuitive approach that the internal martial arts take to fighting and how the energetic sensitivity he has developed doing Spiraling Energy Body qigong has influenced how he interacts with other people and the world around him, far beyond the martial arts.
If you’ve learned many different meditation, qigong, breathing, and movement practices over the years, you may be faced with the problem of trying to decide what to practice each day. In this episode of Qigong Radio, I’ll show you a framework for thinking about your different modes of practice and show you the single most important goal of an energy arts practice, regardless of the mode or specific techniques. Specifically, we’ll look at:
When you relax into the turning of the waist and feel how it connects to the legs, you begin a process of rooting while moving that creates a dynamic and springy stability. Kind of a paradox, right? You feel like a giant spring, anchored to the floor even though you’re moving around, that is constantly being wound up and then released. The key to cultivating this connection is how you relax through your turning, so let’s start off by getting clear on what we mean when we say relaxation.
The most popular discussion topic in the Inner Form coaching section for April was the question of how to integrate qigong and meditation. The original poster asked, “What are the benefits of doing qigong prior to meditation? I would think that doing qigong before meditation would help to have a deeper meditation practice and vice versa? Is this true ? Does it depend on the set or practice you are doing?
When learning qigong or Tai Chi, people are often either more tuned into to energy or to their physical bodies. In this episode of Qigong Radio, I asked my first qigong and Tai Chi teacher, Energy Arts Senior Instructor and founder of Brookline Tai Chi, Bill Ryan to explain why this is. More importantly, Bill teaches you how to navigate the experiences of developing your internal energy, regardless of how you first become aware of them.
We talk a lot about the health benefits of Tai Chi and qigong, or the way they create mental and emotional relaxation, but if you really had to distill all these benefits down to one common thread, you could say that the smoother your mind, body, and energy get, the more you are truly making progress in your practice. In this hour-long webinar, we’ve used the transition between two qigong courses at Brookline Tai Chi as an excuse to look at the issue of smoothness.
One thing that’s been on my mind since Bruce was here teaching a Push Hands Intensive is what it means to follow instructions in your training. He basically laid out a year or longer curriculum during a week. What do you come away with? What should you practice? How do you reconcile “downloading” a whole curriculum at once vs. really upacking it and learning to use it over the next year.
One of the most fascinating connections between your mind and your body is the way that the actual physical movements that you make affect your awareness. When your movements are linear and jerky, your mind stops and starts too, essentially gapping out. If you can move in a smooth circular way, your mind tends to stay calmer too. Or at least, you can calm your mind through circular movement. The next level of “
