“Is it better to structure your practice to stay with one energy gate, such as the crown, until you feel some dissolving happening there, or should you just keep moving through the gates week by week moving onto another gate?” Excellent questions like this one keep pouring in. Thank you for sharing your practice experiences with me. I know other folks who read the blog really appreciate it too. I love hearing from you guys, especially when your questions are grounded in exploration, practice and thoughtful reflection.
Thanks to everyone who reached out with questions about the first standing audio practice in the Energy Gates Dissolving series. I want to share some of the questions with you here. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions or comments or think there is anything the needs clarification. Hopefully we can approach this series together as an ongoing learning process! What’s the Difference between Outer Dissolving, Downward Dissolving, and Sinking?
When you set out to develop your internal energy using standing postures, there are two main ways you can go about it: by feel or by form. Now, there will be a lot of overlap in these two broad approaches, like aligning your body with gravity without collapsing internally and progressively releasing and relaxing as you stand, but when it comes to the role of the mind, form and feel can be very different.
Next month, we’ll be starting a new Energy Gates course at Brookline Tai Chi, focused on Outer Dissolving and working through the Gates of the body. When you work on dissolving the gates, you will inevitably be fighting the urge to: visualize instead of feel “chase” energetic releases, untethered from the physical body wonder if you are really feeling anything at all
In this episode of Qigong Radio, I’ll give my recommendations for avoiding these pitfalls and for setting up the conditions for actual energetic resolution.
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?
Dan standing in New Mexico, not Vancouver (yet!). Do you live in or near Vancouver? Are you willing to travel to refine your Energy Gates practice? At the behest of a few eager Vancouver locals, I wanted to reach out and see if any of our Northwest-oriented readers would be interested in a spring 2014 Energy Gates seminar. Date and exact location haven’t been nailed down yet, but if there’s enough demand, I would love to come out and do some Energy Gates with you.
You know how you can be banging your head against a wall, trying to figure something out? Then, you sleep on it, take a shower, or go for a walk and suddenly a solution pops into your head. Have you ever wondered why this happens or how it works? So have I…and I don’t know HOW it works, but I do know that we are practicing the exact same skill in qigong.
I was thrilled to receive such a positive response to my last post on Standing Qigong. And it wasn’t just support, even though I confessed that now I have to climb back up the mountain on the way to 2-hour sessions again. You guys asked really great questions about standing qigong. Instead of answering them in the comments of the last post, I decided to turn the questions into a post of their own.
