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June 13, 2005
How to Inhabit Your Body: Qigong as "Conscious Stretching"
Have you ever looked at a person and felt they were essentially "absent"? Not really inhabiting their body as a conscious presence? Almost dead to the world? Mystics from all spiritual traditions claim that ninety nine percent of humanity is "asleep". To all intents and purposes, zombies.
On the other hand, have you been around other people who seem to light up their environment, emanating a sense of conscious presence?
An ancient Chinese term for qigong was dao-yin, sometime translated as “guided stretching” or “guiding the energy and stretching the limbs”. I think another good translation would be “conscious stretching” to convey the power of qigong to help us fully inhabit our bodies.
Strange, but for a culture that appears to worship the body, most of us relate to our bodies like absentee landlords.
In class with my students, I compare the conscious movements of qigong with what you’ll see in a normal Aerobics class: a kind of mindless flailing around, like a bunch of drunks in a noodle factory. Or that travesty known as Tae Bo, which looks like a bunch of over-amped mechanized dolls let loose by a blind toymaker.
Most qigong is easy to learn but hard to practice. The outward movements are more or less simple. Even the instructions and methods for moving energy internally are not that complicated, really.
But the constant practice of being attentive to the inner quality of your movement, to being totally present within your body, that’s another story. It’s a lifetime of constant refinement, of subtle adjustments and dedicated cultivation.
And the older you get, the more you need a discipline like qigong to truly stay alive and conscious in your otherwise decaying carcass.
One of the absolute secrets to consciously inhabiting a vibrant body is to maintain open, healthy joints.
And to do that, I don’t care who you are, you had better be moving around a lot, and in many, many different ways.
If you get locked in to one type of exercise, one kind of movement pattern, or essentially no movement to speak of, you’re a health-disaster waiting to happen.
I don’t consider that any discipline on the planet offers a greater range and subtlety of joint-work than qigong.
If you want to experience first hand the amazing variety and impact of qigong for joint health, flexibility and mobility, then I strongly recommend you attend the upcoming Unlock! Workshop Pavel, myself and Steve Maxwell are putting on. Not only will you get a goldmine of my own favorite qigong techniques garnered from thirty years of qigong research, but you’ll learn from two other “Masters of Conscious Stretching”, Pavel and Steve.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by james at June 13, 2005 6:14 AM