Qigong

As a Tai Chi teacher trying to educate people about relaxation, I come across some pretty common misconceptions. Which of the following two ways is how you think about your personal energy levels? Your answer will determine how well you can achieve whole body relaxation: Couch Potato Model of Relaxation -- How many people try to bust their butts during the day only to come home and completely crash at night? Maybe you play this out during the week and crash on the weekends? I call this cycle the Couch Potato Model of Relaxation. You have to become one with the cushions of your couch to recharge your batteries. This is a fundamental misconception about the nature of work and rest being like an on/off switch. Energy on a Dimmer Switch -- In tai chi and chi gung, we actually value the ability to seamlessly shift between high and low energy output, like a light on a dimmer switch. This is in direct contrast to the Couch Potato Model of Relaxation that alternates between complete crashes (the light is turned off) with the short, quick bursts of high energy (the light is turned on). In the Dimmer Switch Model, relaxation has a form. In the Couch Potato Model, it is formless, floppy, and disconnected. In order to smoothly shift the gears of your energy level between complete relaxation and high output performance, you need to build an energetic matrix that supports this process. One of the best ways to build up your energy matrix is through a standing chi gung practice. ...

If I’m going to practice several types of qigong and maybe some tai chi, does it matter what order I do things in? Or if I do one longer practice vs two shorter ones during the day?

In class the other day, a student asked me what kind of chi gung (qigong) we study. She said a friend of hers had been learning a different form and they wanted to compare notes. This is always an interesting conversation, because the term “qigong” covers a lot of different forms of exercise. Literally, it means “energy development” or “energy cultivation”. The chief aim of any qigong practice is to develop your natural energy levels, making your energy, or chi, smoother, increasing your capacity to move it through your system or using it for specific applications, like martial arts or meditation. ...

I learned everything I know about practicing qigong from my wife. Or I should say, from watching my wife make magic in the kitchen! If you saw us cooking together, you’d see her doing everything right and me doing everything wrong. When I started to practice qigong the way she cooks, my whole qigong world changed. Let me tell you how. ...

We’re running a little experiment at Brookline Tai Chi to see if providing students with practice reminders, ahead of time , will make them more comfortable starting the Gods Playing in the Clouds chi gung class this summer. Read about the course here. The set is made up of six, repetitive spherical movements and I think, if students have a chance to practice the basic shapes before the class starts, they will be much more comfortable and ready to learn the nuances of the internal work that goes into these basic shapes. ...

When we started asking our students at Brookline Tai Chi about their home practice, we got a really interesting range of habits and preferences. Since then, we’ve been trying out different tools to help spark more home practice. Stepping back for a minute, I’d really like to know more about why you practice. Take a minute drop me a line (filing out the form below is private and goes right to me, no one else). ...

Every time I circle back to extended periods of posture-holding, I find all kinds of new layers in my practice. Lately, I’ve been holding Single Whip. I was shooting some other videos and I thought, “why not see what happens over those 30 minutes”. I had a mic on, so whenever I changed focus or felt some big internal shift, I made a comment. The end result, condensed down to 3:30, includes minute markers for each of the changes. ...

This one is for the Energy Arts Certified Instructors. The new EA website allows you to change the details of your instructor profile when you have a registered account. I think having accurate and updated information is helpful, especially if you decide to become an active contributor on the forum.

Can you learn qigong, or any movement art, online? This is a burning question for me right now. My immediate reaction is “NO!”. However, I believe there is a significant role for supplemental online material in the overall learning process, even for movement arts. Here’s why it’s a bad idea to learn movement online: Learning movement is a kinesthetic experience, not a visual one – you have to feel where you are in space and you certainly can’t get that from staring at a screen You need feedback – when you are learning something new, you need refinement and guidance, usually hands-on Some things need to be felt on another person – we get into this all the time with more subtle qigong principles and there is no way around feeling what’s going on in the instructor’s body to learn what you are trying to do in your own Those are my big 3 “No way!” reasons you can’t learn qigong online. Or I should say, the reason why online learning shouldn’t be your sole way of learning this stuff. Let’s look at it from a different point of view. ...

Last week I got back from two weeks in the UK doing an instructor training with Bruce Frantzis on Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body, the core chi gung set in his program. We’re right back into the swing of classes now, but I wanted to post a little review before too much time passes. The Energy Gates set is made up of six different exercises – they run the gamut from standing still holding a simple posture, to vigorous shifting, turning, and swinging. The range of skills and movements you can practice with them sets the foundation for all of the other work done in more sophisticated chi gung sets as well as in tai chi and ba gua. ...