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January 23, 2006
Where the Nose Goes, the Attention Goes
Turn your head to look at something and your attention will generally follow. Do this on a crowded city street and you may bump into someone. Do this in your own home and you can find yourself walking into the furniture. Do it while driving your car and you may unconsciously start steering in the direction you have turned your head.
Qigong for internal martial arts will often encourage us to maintain a 180-degree soft focus gaze, so we remain aware and present of our entire surroundings, ready to respond to a sudden challenge from any direction.
A way to ensure we keep this gaze in place is to consciously align your nose with your navel. When the navel moves, the nose comes with it. Turn your head and the waist will turn with it.
This nose-navel alignment can have a profound impact on the energetic power of your whole-body movement. Give it a try, if you are not already.
Of course, there are plenty of times when we need to be able to swivel our heads any which way and I recommend you also practice neck rotations (of the kind found on my Qigong Recharge program) to counterbalance the internal martial art habit of keeping the head aligned with the waist.
In fact I remember way back my friend Ken Cohen commenting to me about how very tight he found many tai chi practitioners necks to be, as a result of this alignment training. A daily practice of twenty to fifty of each of the neck rotations could be a good way to have your cake and eat it too, in this department.
See all of John Du Cane’s qigong resources.
Posted by james at January 23, 2006 6:22 AM