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I would like to start with a series that focuses on the foundations of qigong. Most have heard or read about certain principles attributed to qigong like the three regulations also known as the three intentful corrections, the three adjustments, or the three focal points which serve as the foundation for all forms of qigong. It does not matter if you are practicing a simple arm swing movement or a very esoteric form that you learned from a 115 year old master on Huashan the starting point is the same. You bring mindful attention to the body, breath, and mind, this then allows for you to create the Heavenly elixir within which starts the process of health and wellbeing that qigong is so known for. The beauty of getting intimate with the three regulations is that you can bring this practice with you where ever you go. When your at work it might be hard to just all of a sudden start practicing the five animal frolics. Your coworkers might think you are having a nervous breakdown instead of actually getting rid of your excess tension and stress. On the other hand when you bring conscious awareness to the body, breath, and mind as in the three adjustments you are able to practice any where at any time because its all done internally. There are no outward movements with the three adjustments besides maybe the expansion and contraction of your abdomen and slight postural adjustments but nothing that would warrant your coworkers calling security on you. In this foundational series I would also like to discuss the five principles for an effortlessly effective body that is written about by Peter & Laura Ralston in their wonderful book Zen BodyBeing: An Enlightened Approach to Physical Skill, Grace, and Power. When I stumbled on this book at my local shop I didnt realize how much it would effect my qigong practice for the positive. I thought it would maybe have some nuggets of information in it that would make me say ah thats interesting which it did but it also had so much more. The five principles they discuss in the book are relaxing, feeling the whole body, moving from the center, being grounded, being calm. Some of you who have taken Tai Chi might be familiar with some of these principles like relaxing (fang song gong) and moving from the center (dan tian) but in the book Peter Ralston asks that you put your prior knowledge down and investigate these principles with a beginners mind. In the book he asks to not take his word for it but to truly investigate and question these principles in every aspect of our lives, not just during a formal practice session. Over the following series I would like to discuss the three regulations and the five principles for an effortlessly effective body in depth. These principles can and should be integrated into every aspect of our lives. We should not just be intellectually familiar with these principles we should have a felt sense of them in our bodies. When you are washing the dishes be aware of the three intentful corrections. When your exercising on the elliptical put your intention on relaxing. When your doing your daily qigong wellness workout put your awareness in your body, feel the whole body. When I first started practicing qigong I blew over the principles that I read about and heard from my instructor not because I didnt think they where important but more so because I thought the movements were where all the magic was. Once I had been practicing for a while is when I realized that these principles allow you to deepen your understanding of the movements that we all seem to get infatuated with in the beginning.
knees. This is allows for any extra weight you were holding in your knee caps to be transferred to the ground. This is a very slight movement, it is almost more of a felt sense but it is a actual movement. The benefits of bring more awareness to how your knees move and where they should be place is priceless for the long term health of this extremely important joint. Tilt your pelvis to flatten your back. Gently rotate your pelvis forward on the hips so your lower back flattens out. A lot of people have a tendency to strain this movement. Dont. It is a gentle tilt and as your lower back muscles loosen along with your hip joint you will be able to relax into the movement more. Benefits of gently rolling the hips forward are elongation of the spine and aided awareness of the lower abdomen (DanTian) and Kidneys (Ming Men). Lifting the back, sinking the chest. Moving from your pelvis, bring awareness to your midriff (the area between your pelvis and ribs) and lift this area elongating the lower back to avoid compression of your core. Lift your mid-back and upper back while at the same time separating the shoulder blades allowing your arms to hang loosely at your sides. Your middle fingers should touch the side seams of your pants. Allow space under your armpits about the size of golf balls. At the same time of lifting your back sink your chest and abdomen. This can be difficult at first because we hold a lot of tension between our throat and solar plexus. It might seem like more of a felt sense in the beginning but after steady practice your chest and abdomen actually sink and loosen. Benefits of lifting the back sinking the chest are separation between vertebra which allows a breathing space between vertebrae and better electrical andqi flow to and from the brain. Sinking the chest/abdomen brings better circulation to the the internal organs by relaxing the tension in the front of the body. A key benefit to lifting the back sinking the chest is stimulation/opening of the Small Heavenly Circulation (Xiao Zhou Tian). Which is a classic qigong exercise in china where qi flows up the back channel (du mai) of the body and down the front channel (ren mai) which help to balance the energy of the twelve organ meridian system. Sink the shoulders, suspend the head. Let your shoulders drop straight down. We hold a lot of tension and anxiety in our shoulders. This has become such a chronic condition in our day and age that if you could just remember to always sink your shoulders you would relieve a lot of the tensions you experience in your upper body. When you consistently have your shoulder raised this causes your ribs to lift and your breathing to become shallow. This then sets into motion a whole host of tensions from your mid back all the way up to your head. Lift the crown of your head as if suspended from above by a string. At the same time your chin pulls in slightly and your Occiput (Jade Pillow) opens to allow more qi flow up the back channel to the top of your head. Remember to also raise the tip of your tongue to your upper palate (where the L sound is when you say look) so the qi can descend down from the crown through your front channel to your lower abdomen (Dan Tian). You can utilize what has been presented here in any mode of qigong from standing, sitting, and lying down. When you are sitting keep all the alignments for your body the same as standing. Just place your hands in either your lap or resting on your knees. Same with lying down keep all of your alignments the same and your hands resting at your sides. Remember the key points of feet parallel and shoulder width apart, knees directly over the feet, tilt your pelvis, lift your back
sink your chest, and sink your shoulders suspend the head. At first this may take anywhere from five to ten minutes to accomplish in detail but over time as you practice regulating the body you will be able to adjust your posture in a few seconds. Allowing you to optimize your alignments anywhere at anytime. In part two of the Regulating the Body we will explore in detail Fang Song Gong (relaxing) from the head down to the toes. After working with your posture and settling into your alignments for a few minutes your are ready to begin the art of letting go. There are numerous ways to practice relaxing and if you have one that already works for you by all means keep on that path. It takes time to soften a habitually tense body/mind so perseverance is the key. Practice relaxing (Fang Song Gong) all the time in what ever situation your in, from your daily practice to your daily life. The affects are cumulative. The more you do it the deeper you go. Like I stated in the last post on Regulating the Body I work from my feet up to my head on alignments and then I smoothly flow down my body relaxing it inch by inch. When I first started practicing I would only be able to relax chunks of my body because my awareness was not smooth enough to penetrate the minute details and tensions that I had stored in my body/mind. After awhile though my awareness smoothed out and my attention increased and I was able to feel a deeper relaxation. Remember perseverance is the key, dont get frustrated you might feel like your forcing it at first but your actually just letting go. Also like I explained in Regulating the Body part 1Qigong relaxing is more of a sinking and expanding feeling not a collapsing feeling like you experience when you plop down in a chair after a long day at work. Here we go. After reaching the top of your head with your alignments switch your attention to relaxing downward. Starting at the very crown of your head (Bai Hui) the sensation should spread to all areas of your head from the front, sides, and back. Feel all the tension in your head flowing down into your neck. Feel your neck relaxing on all sides. Your shoulders, arms, upper chest and back are relaxing feel all the tension draining downward. Feel your abdomen lower back relaxing. Feel your pelvis, hips and thighs relaxing. Feel your knees especially behind your knees relaxing. Your calves and ankles are relaxing downward. Feel your feet relaxing, feel all the tension draining out your feet. Repeat from the top of your head as many times as you wish. Perseverance is the key This is the path I take for relaxing after adjusting my structural alignments. You can go as fast or slow as your awareness can handle with still having the ability to relax. Some days I breeze through the sequence and I feel relaxed and lighter, other days I go painstakingly slow and relax every nook and cranny on my body. Which gives me moments of deep relaxation. One thing I have learned over the years is when it comes to relaxing just go with how you feel in that moment. If you try to hard to relax you will just tense up more. So if one day you skim through your body and get minor relaxation dont stress about it maybe the next day you can spend a greater amount of time on relaxing and you might release some deeper held tensions that have been there for years. Play with relaxing, dont turn it into a chore have fun with it. In the next post in this series we will be discussing Regulating the Breath, see you then.
between yin and yang. It is neither this nor thatit is no thing (nothing)(5). Qigong meditation is often referred to as Wuji meditation. It is static Qigong. Once movement happens, yin and yang separate from within Wuji to create Taiji. The Wuji point described above is our center. When we meditate on this point we sense the movement of Qi through the body. The Wuji point is a spiritual point of focus, a biological point of Qi generation, and a structural reference point for posture and balance. The Three Treasures The Three Treasures are Shen, Qi, and Jing. Shen is spirit and is associated with the spritual realm of our existence. Qi is essential energy or the life force and is associated with with our minds or our heart/minds. Jing is our essence and is associated with earth, and reproduction. There is much that can be said about The Three Treasures. It is a basic concept that builds upon itself and can be quite intricate in the end. I dont expect to reference this concept in my exploration of Qigong any more than what I have defined here. But for the advanced practitioner there is much to learn and to benefit from. I hope this serves as a decent primer for the following posts on the subject of Qigong. I am sure I havent covered all the components of Qigong, but I hope I have covered enough so that any further explanations can be dealt with in text. Typically, the more I look at this subject and consider the art, the more I learn, and the more I am reminded I need to learn. But in the end the best way to learn is to let the art teach you. Just do it.
rising and falling of my lower abdomen my concentration has improved substantially and it has allowed me to accomplish more in less time because of my increased attention span. 2. It has helped settle my mind. It has allowed me to have a place to return to when the waves of my thoughts get to choppy. By bringing my attention back to my body and breath I have been able to give my mind a rest form the repeated thought patterns that we experience through out the day. This in turn has opened up a space to allow stillness to shine through. Regulating the Mind is more about allowing the mind to be as it is then actually doing something. When you learned regulating the body and breath they where something tangible to grasp onto. While regulating the mind is about letting go, effortlessness, allowing your thoughts to come and go as they are. The lesson I learned was by keeping my attention on my body and breath my mind regulated by itself but when I tried to regulate my mind through my mind it just fought back. Play with it, see what happens for you. See if by allowing your thoughts to just be if they calm down for you and see if your thoughts resist when you try and force them to calm down with more thoughts. This is last post on the three regulations in this series. I would now like to turn the focus to the five principles for an effortlessly effective body that is written about by Peter & Laura Ralston in their wonderful book Zen Body-Being: An Enlightened Approach to Physical Skill, Grace, and Power. These principles take a lot of what we learned in the last few post to a deeper level and help us integrate them more into our daily lives. Until then practice, practice, practice.
3) Moving from the Center 4) Being Grounded 5) Being Calm Looking at these principles from a more investigative angle and applying them in your practice and life will help you to gain mastery of your body consciousness. These principles are meant to be applied in every aspect of our lives they are not just something you do during practice. Its when you are able to be these five principle in your day to day life that the true power of them shine. Like the title of the book mentions you take a more Zen approach to these principles. These principles are a mindset that allow you to have better mental control, enhanced feelingawareness , and balance. All of these together help you have a better experience of being in your body.
Five Principles-Relaxation
Relaxation is the first principle in this series on effective body being. From my experience it is the key to the rest of the principles. Im not sure if this is why Peter Ralston put relaxation as the first principle or not but relaxation truly makes the other principles easier to grasp. Feeling the whole body is almost impossible from a tense standpoint. Not only are you blocking out chunks of your own body from your awareness you are also creating a perpetual tension feedback loop with your nervous system that never ends. Until you consciously choose to relax your body/mind you will constantly struggle with feeling your whole body. Moving from your center becomes increasingly easier from a relaxed state. When your body is tense your movements are rigid and uncoordinated but once your able to deeply relax your movements become fluid. Your able to move with ease. Being grounded comes from letting all your energy sink into your dantien and the ground below you. When your tense especially in your upper body most of your energy is stuck in your head, shoulders, and chest. This then makes being grounded almost impossible. You become top heavy. By relaxing your body from the top of the head down your are able to sink your Qi and ground your body and mind. When you have a tense body you have a tense mind and vice versa. Being able to relax allows you to be calm which is the last principle of an effective body being. Within the art of relaxing Peter Ralston talks about going through three stages of relaxation. From gross to subtle. During the first stage you send an intention to relax like dropping your shoulders or releasing a grip. This is more of a surface or gross relaxation. It feels good but unless you hold your attention on relaxing longer this stage is only fleeting. Once your able to hold your attention longer on relaxing you start to pass through the second stage of relaxation. In this stage your tissues start to relax deeper and your nervous system will react with an even deeper sense of letting go that spreads over your whole body. When your in this deeper stage of relaxation your mind clears and your sensitivity is heightened. Everything you do at this stage is done more effectively. You have better speed, balance, and range of motion with your body
when your in stage two of relaxing. Going through to stage three requires requires letting go for longer periods of time, even continually. When you relax in this stage youre relaxing your muscles to the core. To the point where unconscious tension will not creep back in. Your nervous system will be fully unwound and dramatically quicker. At this last stage of relaxation you will have also relaxed your mind which in turn changes attitudes, moods, emotions, and thought processes. Going through these stages allow us to deepen our relaxation to a point where we become more graceful in any activity. Relearning how to relax is possibly the best technique we can learn for our Qigong and life. It all starts with letting go. If you are stuck in a habitually tensed body and mind everything else in your life will be stuck and tense. Just by bringing our intention to relaxing our body and minds we can unlock abilities in our bodies that we havent seen since we were children. Our minds will be more free to interpret each situation we are in from an understanding of openness and curiosity. Relaxing the body and mind are one in the same. Once one is deeply relaxed so is the other.
They are not the end result in themselves. This all starts with patience. After putting in the time is when you notice that your able to replicate these experiences more often. But remember it all starts with practice and patience. From these two aspects arise all other phenomenon. From the very beginning just allow the practice to unfold naturally. By allowing it to just happen from the start you will notice a profound effect in your body and mind. Relaxation will deepen significantly. Once that happens your Qi starts flowing more and your channels start opening up. Everyone is different. Remembering that this is a natural gradual process that shouldnt be forced.
area that is tense and let your energy drop to the next lower area until you are at your feet. If you are sensitive you will feel the chi drop and if not just know that it is possible and this method works. If you want to become very strong and healthy, then this method of sinking chi is particularly useful. That is why for example when practicing internal martial arts, the first focus is not on outer dissolving but is on sinking chi. What this does is condenses the chi of the body and makes it more heavy. We generally think of someone weighing 300 pounds will be dramatically stronger and more powerful than somebody who weighs 100. The purpose of the first method sinking your chi is by internally opening your chi downward so that if youre 100 pounds your strength can start equaling the strength of somebody whos 150, 200, or 300 pounds normally, or even more. I described this in my book, The Power of Internal Martial Arts and Chi. It is as though someone who has a normal body, lets say is made of just tin, hits someone whose body energy is more like led. In this case the tin crumbles, regardless of whether its bigger than them or not. This basic method of sinking of chi is a very important practice as we move into spring. You want to clear your body of old stagnant energy. You want to release that energy into the earth. You want to start the spring feeling fresh and invigorated. Now this version of sinking chi, sets the stage for the next method of outer dissolving. It is important to say here that neither method is better or worse. They both are useful depending on the circumstances. You may find areas in your body are tight or may feel that your energy is blocked for some unknown reason. That is when you should use the next method of sinking chi, the Taoist method of outer dissolving. The outer dissolving method of sinking chi is likened to the process of how ice dissolves to water and then water dissolves to gas. You start from the top of your head and go from point to point stopping at any blockages and dissolving that blockage internally from ice to water and then water to gas outward. It takes practice to learn this but once you have it in your system it is highly effective. Outer dissolving is not necessarily for developing physical strength, where I would say basic sinking is more efficient. Rather it is goes beyond blockages that are just physical and works with your emotional and mental energy bodies. Outer dissolving is more useful if you have a specific physical problem in an area of your body or if you have general disease. For example, if you have chronic fatigue syndrome or if you had liver problems, heart problems or any physiological problems then with Outer Dissolving you can target specific systems or areas. If the energy of your internal organs is disturbed this often causes your emotions to be disturbed as well. When this happens your emotional stability and balance is almost always effected. In this case, dissolving is going to be more powerful because it will help you clear your emotional
blockages as well as your physical blockages. However, if you dont have health issues, as I mentioned then sinking can be more useful in terms of just developing physical strength and power. This is a really important subject and this is just a brief overview of the topic. So I hope this was a helpful introduction to the two ways to sink your Chi. Please leave a comment below or ask any further questions
Using Qigong & Taiji Quan To Boost Balance Part One Of Five
One of the initial benefits that students realize from practicing Qigong or Tai Chi is the improvement of balance. One of the first subjects we cover in our curriculum is the 5 essential beliefs of balance. A few of these 5 principles are as follows : 1. Arrangement of the legs 3. Opposite limbs cooperate 5. Only move the insubstantial. These 5 elements not only apply to our Qigong and Tai Chi forms but they also apply to how we should move about through our day to day lives. Our top middle of head cooperates with the sky above, meanwhile, center between legs cooperates with the earth below. With these two opposites cooperating our backbone remains long and healthy. Though a straightforward concept this one principle can have an immediate and extreme effect on your physical balance. Bai Hui and Hui Yin are the acupoints at the very ends (top and bottom) of this vertical line. In our Tai Chi and Qi Gong classes we refer to Bai Hui acupoint as the top middle of head and Hui Yin as the center between legs. When Hui Yin seeks the earth below and simultaneously Bai Hui rises to the sky above, our backbone is long and healthy. With our backbone lengthened our vertebrae are loosened and we lessen the possibilities for diseases and injuries to manifest in our spine due to tension and anxiety building up and resident in our spine. As we move thru our daily lives we wish to feel as if Hui Yin looks for the earth and Bai Hui rises to the sky so that our spine remains long and in a good, cosy position. In this position we may be able to release any tension now living in our backbone and forestall any new stress from taking hold there. Furhtermore, this line must always remain vertical. To remain in balance we never wish to tilt our backbone forward, back or left or right. You can see how this applies with the frequently used tip to lift with your legs not your back. When you lift with your legs, your backbone remains straight. If you bend over forward to choose something up your vertical line has been damaged. Your backbone is tilted and is in a position awfully vulnerable to becoming injured from the strain of lifting. So as you move thru your daily life do not forget to keep that vertical line inside.
Exploring Meditation
A reader asks, Can the people who have a natural talent to quiet their thoughts and clean their mind, not by effort and struggling, but only through insight, point the way for others? I feel they can, or I wouldnt be writing this column, though each person has to awaken meditation, or whatever name one gives it, for oneself. Meditation is an effortless state of awareness that comes into being when the observer is negated. Meditation, as Im using the word, is the highest action that the human being is capable. Ending the observer through passively observing, in the mirror of nature, the movement of thoughts and emotions as they arise, has become essential for individual health and human survival and development. The reader avers, as soon as you try to put this experience into words, your real experience and insight start fading away and the thought invades back into the mind. Thats true, but words arent the problem. Does a poet lose his or her insight because s/he writes beautiful poetry? One can indeed lose insight by writing or speaking, but only if one makes the words more important than the thing, out of a desire to capture the experience or for some other motivation. As long as one is enquiring, asking questions within oneself, insight is not lost. But is there really an observation in which there is no observer? Yes, its not only possible, but also essential for the brain simply to observe, holistically, without the thought-made entity I. Though its difficult, one simply has to observe the observer into stillness. In doing so, the deep habit of thought splitting off from itself as the I ends, at least temporarily. Then there is just observationthat is, meditation. Because the human brain has operated for so long in terms of symbols words, images, concepts, etc. we have to constantly relearn that the word is not the thing and the map is not the territory. My self is not only an illusion; its a redundancy. Why do we accept the premise of the self? If we start from the idea of a separate self we will always end up with division and conflict. The me is an emotionally experienced separation and stockpile made by thought that seems to have permanence. For most people, the feeling of myself lasts a lifetime, with no true break. But for people who awaken meditation, the continuity of the self ceases, at least for some timeless moments or minutes. But isnt it the I that has the desire to meditate? The urge doesnt come from the me, but from the feeling of imbalance and disharmony. Just as the body, if one listens to it, tells one when to rest, the mind, if one pays attention, tells one when to be quiet and simply observe. Doing so provides even deeper rest for the brain than sleep.
Of course our motivations, as the cognitive and emotional spurs of thought, are very subtle. Thats why daily questioning and skepticism of ones motives are essential. If you observe yourself, youll notice that the mind is always separating itself from its own content. What is this observer that always seems to be separate from what it is observing? Nothing but thought splitting itself off from itself. Its difficult to observe the movement of ones own mind indoors, though its necessary to be mindful in relationship. But theres intrinsic interest watching nature, even just from the backyard, and that watchfulness naturally extends to self-awareness. Meditation begins the moment that one sees, at a gut level, that where the mind is concerned, the observer and the observed are part of the same movement! In that moment separation instantly evaporates, and one truly sees a bird, or a person, as if for the first time. The reader still asks: How does one negate the observer? How implies a method, and the first thing is to be finished with all methods. Beyond that, all I can say is question and experiment with observation. It isnt a matter of avoiding judgments, evaluations, or reactions. One simply sets aside conscious analysis, and observes everything outwardly and inwardly as it arises, with the understanding that judgments are part of the entire field of thought/emotion. Judgments and evaluations are secondary, self-perpetuating reactions, and when one observes them as such, as part of the whole movement of thought, they fall away without one doing anything. When the observer dissolves, there is just the movement of thoughts and emotions as they arise. Observing without the observer, the mind falls silent, and one sees and feels many things, and touches the hem of God.