I recently received this breathing question and I thought it was worth sharing with everyone here as a post. (Don’t forget, you can send me your practice questions!) I’m really confused! I took a Yang Style Tai Chi course and at the end of the class we would do Qigong. He said “We will do diaphragmatic breathing. As you breath in draw the navel into the spine, as you exhale release and let the belly relax but don’t collapse.
We tend to think about our energy level like the money we have in the bank. You wake up in the morning, look in your energetic wallet and say, “I’ve got a lot of energy today” or “Man, I need 7 cups of coffee.” Or, to put it another way, thanks to this New Yorker cartoon:
In qigong, we think about “having energy” a little bit differently. Often, it’s not just how much or how little, but how well is your energy circulating?
The biggest question people ask me about standing qigong, especially when they hear about the 2-hour project, is “what do you do, just stand there?” There is actually a really delicate balance between “doing” and “feeling” when you stand. You learn lots of different techniques, like breathing, sinking, dissolving, and pulsing, but how you apply them internally when you are holding a static posture is a tricky topic. If you rev your engine too much – activating strong diaphragmatic breathing the entire time, for example – then you miss the potential stillness in the posture.
I was talking to a friend last night about standing qigong and different meditation traditions that we had both tried. When we say “meditation” in this context, we were including all practices like breathing for relaxation, Tai Chi, qigong, and sitting practices too. Part of what I’d like to hear from you (see below) is how you define “meditation” in a way that’s practical and part of your everyday life.
As Nate and I were discussing specific breathing challenges in qigong and Tai Chi, he started to explain the way he had learned to work with breathing and movement in his yoga training. It’s fascinating to compare strategies for working with the mind-body connection across different systems, and while this is by no means a definitive exploration of similarities and differences, I think you’ll see that there are two distinct approaches.
In this Inner Form office hours clip, Nate asked me about a specific issue on breathing in the Marriage of Heaven and Earth qigong. If your main focus is Tai Chi, then I would recommend that you pretty much ignore breathing as you practice, but you should focus on opening up the body enough to facilitate deep, even, smooth breathing. In the following clips, we look at how opening up the body will lead to deeper breathing, what stages you will go through in this process, and finally, I show him a specific technique for keeping the deep internal connections loose as he does the Marriage of Heaven and Earth qigong.
The Wall Test is one of my favorite “breathing hacks” – a simple, fast exercise you can do to get feedback on how well you are breathing. Check out this instruction in this video and try it for yourself:
This breathing exercise is taken from a live breathing class I taught last week. In the class, we looked at several different facets of training your breathing, including: The difference between nerves, fluids, and chi when you practice.
Join me for “To Breathe or Not To Breathe”, a webinar where we will explore the challenges and big payoffs that come from doing your breathing practice correctly. Perhaps more than any other technique, cultivating a breathing practice presents an interesting training paradox: how do you change something your body does automatically 20,000 times a day, that is so intertwined with your mind, emotions, and internal energy?
In this webinar, I will take you through the major issues around developing your breathing practice, whether your goal is to smooth out your breath (and thereby your nerves), increase your breathing capacity to have more energy, or use breathing as a gateway practice to relaxation and meditation.
