It’s easy to miss the real point of health, wellness and spiritual practices.
The practices themselves are often so appealing and make us feel so good it’s easy to think they’re the point.
You’ve spent all this time learning a practice, surely that’s the important thing?
It’s not.
So what is QiGong?
QiGong can be defined as working with life energy or life’s breath.
Using this definition, you can mount a good case that pretty much everything is QiGong.
There is not one moment of your life that you’re not working with your life energy. Building it, depleting, enhancing it, ignoring, numbing it, refining it… it’s all working with your life energy.
It’s the quality of our work with our life force that’s the real key to consider. This is where QiGong forms come in - they teach us to work more effectively and consciously with our life energy, teach us to enhance and build it.
The form points to the 'real' QiGong
But they are just forms. They are just practice. A form is a great laboratory for practicing QiGong. But the real ‘doing’ of QiGong is in every day life.
If you’re not translating the consciousness and awareness you’re practicing in your form into your everyday life, then you’re not doing the real QiGong.
The ‘real QiGong’ is simply in how you live.
One of my favourite philosophers (a Yogi), Sri Aurobindo, said it something like this (paraphrase here, couldn’t track down the actual quote):
A man doing Yoga every day for 20 years without his heart in it, will attain far less than a man tilling the fields everyday with his heart it.
What are you training yourself in?
Doing QiGong for a short amount of time a day is one thing. It’s important.
But ask yourself what you’re practicing, what you’re training yourself to do, and look at how you’re translating that into your everyday life.
The ‘real QiGong’ is about your character, how aware you are with yourself, your family, your co-workers, your clients, your partner.
Everything is QiGong training. There is not any activity, thought, interaction etc that does not have an impact on your life energy. On the quality of the life breath in you.
If in your form your awareness is focussed and clear and the other 90% of your day you’re distracted and unclear, then what are you training yourself in?
Don’t just practice in your form, but practice in your life.
Everything is QiGong.
It’s the quality of your forms, both formal and informal that matter.
What are you training yourself in?
love it