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March 28, 2005
How Qigong and Kettlebell practices complement each other
I'm asked all the time: as a qigong practitioner, do you use kettlebells and if so, why and how? And kettlebell practitioners ask me the reverse: would qigong be a good complement to my kettlebell practice and if so, why and how?
What advantages does qigong offer the kettlebell practitioner? The advantages are in the areas of: joint health, flexibility, breathing, relaxation and detoxification.
While kettlebell practice will strengthen many of the major joints in the body, I’ve never come across any discipline of any kind anywhere that offers remotely the subtlety, complexity, variety and range of therapeutic joint work you will encounter in qigong practice. High-level qigong practitioners revere the joints as “spiritual gates” essential to all aspects of human health.
Human beings are the first “self-domesticated” animals. (More on this topic in next week’s entry.) Qigong aims at bringing back the “wild” to our bodies, while simultaneously cultivating and refining our sensibilities. Part of our “wildness” is the ability to be highly efficient in the use of our energy and strength. Kettlebells strengthen us magnificently, but can also leave us overly tight and knotted up, without compensatory relaxation and internal energy generation techniques. I have found that qigong practice superbly releases many of those stiffnesses and knots my body can take on from kettlebell use.
Qigong puts the limbs and torso through a constant series of expansions and contractions, creating elastic strength, an excellent stretch and the ability to release quickly out of tension.
Iron shirt-like qigong practice teaches forms of compressed breathing that help generate more power in the grind moves of kettlebell use. Regular qigong “natural” breathing helps with endurance for the dynamic kettlebell exercises.
Strength and health are not synonymous.
I know of many “outwardly” strong people, including kettlebell practitioners, who have succumbed to cancer, heart attacks, flu’s and pneumonia. Qigong, through its detoxification and activation of the lymph system — and through its balancing of the nervous system and meridian energy system — will complement hardstyle strength practices like kettlebells by fortifying and safeguarding your supply lines.
You will be less vulnerable as a human being when you possess not only “external” strength but “internal” strength.
I am not sure if kettlebell exercise is going to strengthen your kidneys, liver, spleen and other key organ systems (it obviously will help the heart and lungs). I can pretty well guarantee, though, that qigong will.
What’s the most powerful engine in the world going to be worth with filthy oil and lousy gas? With defective spark plugs? A crimped or leaking fuel line? A blocked exhaust?
Napoleon is famous for remarking that an army “marches on its stomach.” Destroy or weaken the base camp, disrupt or cut off the supply lines and watch what starts to happen to all those tough guys on the front lines…
In a later issue, I will revisit this topic to discuss the advantages kettlebells bring to a qigong practitioner.
Check out John Du Cane’s Qigong resources here
Posted by james at 6:05 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2005
"Excuse me, but did you know your car is on fire?" - Qigong to avoid flare-ups
When I first came to Minnesota I was dirt poor and scraping nickels from the sidewalk. My first car was the mother-of-all-beaters: a massive, shoddy, faded-green boat once known as a Buick Century. I think it was about three hundred years old.
At an intersection one sunny day, a woman pulled up beside me, rolled down her window and asked: "Excuse me, but did you know your car is on fire?"
"No, I didn’t," I thanked her politely and leant over and out of the passenger window to take a look. Sure enough, dirty yellow flames were flickering up from the bottom of the car.
Turned out the old beast’s engine was smeared with leaking oil, which had finally decided to crackle into life.
I felt strangely relaxed watching those flames creeping up the side of my car door. Amazing, really. And fortunately, the fire died down as quickly as it had flared up and I am here still to tell you the story.
I think about this story quite a lot as a good metaphor for what we don’t do to take care of our bodies. Internal negligence, that sense of obliviousness to the need to stay clean internally, often precedes minor if not massive physical flare ups.
If you don’t use good internal detox procedures you are asking for it sooner or later.
While most forms of qigong help you detox, here’s a “bone-marrow-washing” Qigong technique that is simple and effective:
In a standing qigong position, raise the hands above the head, drawing in fresh energy. Hold the palms over the top of the head and imagine a waterfall of purifying water slowly washing down the front of your body all the way out below the feet, cleansing it of all debris and toxins. Repeat at least three times. Then repeat for the back of your body and then finish by sending the purifying waterfall through the center of your body.
Check out John Du Cane’s Qigong resources here
Posted by james at 4:10 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
How external qigong healing helped a badly burned teenager
A couple of weeks ago, a good friend of mine's teenage daughter got crazy-drunk and in a fit of depression decided to kill herself. In her drunkenness, she chose a particularly horrific method.
The young girl poured lamp oil over her forehead, ears, neck, shoulders and arms, then set fire to herself. Lamp oil burns slowly, cooks deeply. By the time, the poor young thing came to her senses (and a friend put the fire out with the aid of a shower curtain), she had done herself some serious damage.
My friend emailed me and asked if I would stop by the Burn Unit and do some qigong healing on her daughter, who is waiting for a skin graft operation(s) as we speak. I had recently attended an Advanced Pranic Healing Course with Stephen Co, which had tremendous crossover with external qi healing. In this course they taught specific methods to heal wounds and burns with intention and color. So I decided to include elements of their process also.
One thing you can practically guarantee with external qi healing is a reduction in the levels of overall pain and an enhanced sense of well being. There is a good chance that the body may also rid itself of toxins and regenerate cells.
I worked off her body for about an hour, doing sweeping movements combined with color-projections over the burned areas, plus holding the hands just off major energy centers.
How did it go? Despite being initially in severe discomfort and barely being able to sleep, she quite quickly went into a trance-like state with a light smile on her face and stayed that way for the whole session. When we were done, and she “woke up”, she said she felt great.
Hard to know, at this point, how much else happened for her, but if her body’s healing capability was improved even five percent I’ll take it! I will be going back to give her more sessions.
Would you like to be able to induce a trance-like self-healing state in someone?
Try this qigong healing method with a partner some time: have them lie down. Sit on their left side. Place your right hand a couple of inches off the center of their forehead, place your left hand a couple of inches off their breastbone. Pulse the right hand just off the forehead gently about twenty times, then hold it in place just above the forehead. Repeat with the right hand over the breastbone area. Now breathe into your right hand and exhale out of your left hand for about two minutes. Then, stop paying attention to your breath and oscillate your attention backwards and forwards from one hand to the other (another couple of minutes.)
Bring the right hand down to the breastbone and cup both hands so they face and send energy in to the heart center. After a minute or so, draw both palms up slowly from the breastbone area, with the right palm circling toward the top of the head, left hand toward the feet. Repeat three times, imagining you are enveloping them in a golden canopy.
The more you practice qigong methods for yourself, the more you will develop a natural capacity to help others feel better, suffer less pain and perhaps heal faster. And believe me, few things feel better in life than sharing your energy with another in this way.
Check out John Du Cane’s Qigong resources here.
Posted by james at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 7, 2005
How to surprise your body into better health with qigong
When I first started to practice Qigong and Tai Chi in the Seventies, I was very intense and overly serious. I looked down my nose at people who insisted on referring to their Qigong and Tai Chi practice as "play". I knew better… this was a serious business for serious people who seriously wanted to get seriously enlightened. Fortunately qigong practice by its nature started to "lighten me up" and take me out of my uptight, "technique-your-way-to-God" approach to life.
One excellent way qigong uses to kick seriousness in the butt, is surprise. Surprise is a key element in adapting the body for more radiant health. Fresh movement and sudden jolts provide an excitement and stimulus that the organism naturally craves. All newborn animals, including the human, respond to surprise as an essential part of their natural growth. Play is by its nature a series of orchestrated surprises. Play ignites the sense of fun leading to an energized, motivated, pleasurable experience of life.
Seriousness, by its nature, constricts us into stuck tension. Qigong expands us into playfulness. One popular qigong method for activating this playfulness is Spontaneous Qigong:
Begin by standing completely still. Calm down, drop the mind. Get out of your own way and allow any movement that shows up in your body to express itself. Anything can happen: you can end up rolling around on the floor, running on the spot, throwing your legs around in impossible gymnastics, or you may simply gyrate around slowly… whatever… just make no attempt to control or guide the movement with your conscious mind. Let your innate healing intelligence take over and surprise you out of your habitual body-patterns.
Check out John Du Cane's Qigong resources here.
Posted by james at 7:24 AM | Comments (0)