When you settle into your practice each day, you should always give yourself a couple of minutes to just feel and see where your body, your energy, and your awareness are. In one sense, each practice session is about bringing the rhythms of each of those into harmony. That’s why Tai Chi and qigong can be so powerfully restorative. So, if you take a couple of minutes to just “settle in,”
In this video, we’re talking about building up the skill of Outer Dissolving in your standing qigong practice. When you start out, it pays to follow a recipe - a set of instructions that lead through a certain procedure physically, energetically, and with your mind. However, there are times you want to break away from the recipe and times you’ll want to reflect on your experience verbally – but there are good and bad ways to do both.
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?
If you read last week’s post on standing qigong and the Energy Gates book, or better yet, you can stand comfortably “just feeling” for 15-20 minutes, you’re probably ready to embark on the downward dissolving process. This week, I want to help you get started. I recorded a guided practice mp3 to get you through the first workout in the Energy Gates series: Feeling the Gate at the Crown of the Head.
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.
Last month, we discussed the sense of progress you can sometimes struggle with in your practice. At the time, I mentioned that I’ve been working up to a two-hour standing session, which is a very structured practice goal. Today, I wanted to report back about what I’ve been experiencing in standing qigong and show you how to shift your sense of the time that passes when you stand. The structure of adding one minute to the length of the stand each day is seems like it should make for a very linear sense of time when you practice.
I get the question all the time, or at least it’s always implied, “When am I going to get it?” Or, “how do I know if I’m getting good at this?” Now, let’s unpack a little bit of what’s behind this question and then I want to share some different ways that I think you can answer this question on your own, without even asking your teacher. Practice Goals I’m on a training trip this weekend out in New Mexico with Robert Tangora.
