I’m sure you’ve spent time looking around YouTube for qigong and tai chi videos. According to their website, people upload 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute! No doubt you’ve seen some crazy stuff. So how do you sift through all of it and more importantly, are there any qigong videos on YouTube worth watching? The good news is, of course there are. And I’ve put together a list of 5 good ones to get you started. ...
The Three Swings from Energy Gates are some of the most challenging exercises to do well in the entire Energy Arts curriculum. You have to relax, maintain good alignment, and coordinate stepping and turning while moving faster than most other qigong exercises. Let’s talk a little bit about why the Three Swings are important and what you need to integrate to do them well. Getting Started with the Three Swings In the Tai Chi Classics, it says, “the motion should be rooted in the feet, released through the legs, controlled by the waist and manifested through the fingers.” Think of practicing the swings as a way to test this concept. You will get much clearer feedback from the swings about how the motion you generate from the feet travels out to your fingertips than you will from solo form practice. ...
There is no other book I return to more for my qigong practice than Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body by Bruce Frantzis. It’s the one I consistently recommend to students and anyone who emails the school to inquire about starting a qigong practice before they have access to a teacher. Here’s how to get the most out of it, whether or not you have someone who can give you regular feedback on your practice: ...
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. ...
Stability and flow seem to be at odds with each other. Stability can mean rigidity, or at least, it seems to conjure up something fixed, sturdy, and unmoving. Flow isn’t any of those things. It’s fluid and changing. So how does Energy Arts Senior Instructor Craig Barnes blend the two so seamlessly? Recently, Craig taught a workshop about awakening energetic sensitivity, drawn from principles of Dragon and Tiger Qigong. We worked a lot on the opening of the set. The goal was to “fill up your chi” before you start doing the movements, so that the body is awake and engaged and each movement is more alive and more 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. ...
So, I know I’m writing this on vacation where the most pressing decision we make each day is whether to hike, kayak, or swim, but I’m going to go ahead anyway and recommend that you practice twice a day. Here’s why… What I Learned from a Month-Long Tai Chi Intensive After a month in England, practicing 10 hours a day at the Short Form Instructor Training this summer, I have a renewed appreciation for daily practice rhythm. At the training, there were three distinct types of training sessions we would go through each day. In the mornings, we would practice in our groups. Most of the day, from 10am to 5pm was reserved for class time with Bruce. In the evenings, we would be free to practice again, ideally training the pieces of what we did in class that day. ...
This post is the first in a series of student practice questions that I’d like to answer on the blog. The question is, “given that I know and practice several different qigong sets and the tai chi form, how do I organize them into a coherent practice?” For my answer, check out this video, where I will either explain how learning which sets to practice, in what order, is like learning to taste wine, or I will actually drink the bottle of wine. You’ll have to watch the video to find out which one. ...