Thoughts on Qigong

Michael Babin, copyright, 2003

First Published in TONGREN, Volume 10, No.1, Spring, 2003, in Canada

I once had an e-mail message from someone who had visited my website, asking me to describe what qi felt like. More specifically, he wanted to know if it was the pleasant feeling of warmth and magnetic repulsion/attraction that he sometimes experienced when training. I wrote back to him that this (along with trembling, feelings of warmth,tingling of the skin and other sensory phenomena) was a common manifestation of such training but that it was also important not to confuse the symptoms of the flow of intrinsic energy with qi itself. In the same way, the heat in an electrical wire is a by-product of the flow of electricity through the copper or aluminum and not the electricity itself.

Qi has many aspects/manifestations. It is the air we breathe and the goodness (or absence of goodness) in what we eat, drink, feel and think. It is also“ jen qi” ("humane qi"), the energy generated by healthy interaction between people. A middle-aged westerner, like myself, is tempted to think of this manifestation of qi as the "good vibrations" produced when training in a group setting with people you respect and like.

Qigong - whether a taijiquan slow form or any of the seemingly endless therapeutic sets now available - can be a marvelous self-healing method but it is hardly a quick-fix for any emotional and/or physical problems. Strengthening the body in various ways, removing chronic tension from the spine, the muscles, the fascia and the connective tissues; and learning to breath slowly and deeply will also help quiet the mind and, in the long-term, create an environment conducive to beneficial change. More profound healing is available but this is usually accomplished with the help and supervision of a competent qigong doctor.

And now for the bad news .... any kind of positive long-term change can only be fueled by a general overhaul in your lifestyle. It is unrealistic to believe that you can continue to smoke, eat the nutritional equivalent of garbage, abuse alcohol and/or drugs, get too-little sleep, endure or provoke abusive relationships, work in an environment that stifles your body and spirit and somehow counter-act all of that by doing a ten minute short form or fifteen minutes of standing qigong once per day.

It is like getting headaches everyday from staring at a computer screen all day at work and taking aspirins to kill the pain. At some point it should start making sense to attack the root cause of the problem instead of just coping with the symptoms.

Eventually, in part through your training, you may "awaken" to understanding that what you are doing is harming you. Every way - no matter how seemingly small or insignificant - in which you positively change the balance of your lifestyle and your attitudes, contributes to the process of maturing, and can gently accelerate the process of change. There is a price though, as many of us think we want to get rid of our "bad habits" but then discover that the process of change can be frightening and disorienting.

Radical change can mean the loss of attitudes/habits that define you as you are. It can also mean the loss of relationships as people react badly or uneasily to how you are changing. We may consciously think that we want to improve ourselves or get rid of bad habits and then subconsciously resist doing so or "grieve" for the fact that we have lost interest in our old ways of behaving. Sadly, it is always easier to make the same mistakes over and over. ("Oh, look there's another pile of dog poop on the road in front of me. I'd better avoid it!" ...SQUISH ... "How did my foot get in there again?")

So don't be surprised, as your qigong training starts to sink-in, that you find yourself wanting to quit smoking in a way that you have never experienced before, or that you don't get the same number of flus or colds in the winter, or that it seems gross to eat fried or fatty foods, or that you find yourself less stressed by certain things that used to drive you up-the-wall.

Competent and long-term qigong practice can make this "refinement" happen for a variety of reasons; some of which are impossible to analyze empirically, some of which make sense from a traditional Chinese perspective and some of which make sense from a western perspective. My own gut feeling is that "sung" (usually translated into English as "deep relaxation") provides a
fertile environment that encourages both physiological and attitudinal shifts in the practitioner - a speeding-up of the maturation process, so-to-speak.

Sadly, for those just starting to explore qigong, there is as much controversy in this discipline as there is in any other. While the experts rarely agree on the details of their methods, the better ones do agree on common principles and are individually good examples of whatever they practice - emotionally and physically sound human beings with families and lives outside of what they teach. In other words, find someone who looks as if "they practise what they preach" and also benefit from that practise. After all, do you want to be treated by the equivalent of a western family doctor who sits behind his desk, overweight, reeking of alcohol, with nicotine-stained fingers and tells you while coughing "You have to lose weight and get a healthier lifestyle!"

Having said that, it is also important to remember that those who teach us are human and have their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Don't put your qigong and taiji teachers on a pedestal -especially if they encourage you to do so!

Oh, and it's better to learn one or two competent methods and practice them regularly for the long-term than it is to constantly change your curriculum or become a "weekend workshop junkie". True competence comes from understanding and practicing a few core methods.

The author has been learning the Chinese martial arts and Yang-style taijiquan since 1975 and teaching the latter since 1985. He has also studied and teaches pa-kua chang and, more recently, Sun-style taijiquan. His main teachers were Shirley and Steven Choi, Alan Weiss and Erle Montaigue. Michael is the author of over 80 published articles on taijiquan and the martial arts as well as two books: TAI CHI CHUAN: THE MARTIAL SIDE and POWER TAIJI (with Erle Montaigue) published by Paladin Press in 1992 and 1995. His website address is: http://www.angelfire.com/mb/taiji/