Chi Kung for Making Babies
/Year after year, day after day, I hear people expressing enthusiasm for qigong. I suppose we could say I share their enthusiasm, after all, I've spent many, many years practicing qigong every single day. The problem is that qigong is not an enthusiastic tradition.
After something on the order of 30,000 hours of practice all I can say is, I don't know anything. (According to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory, I have accumulated enough experience to have mastered qigong three times!)
To me, the practice of qigong is about becoming a baby. It is about returning to innocence. It is about discarding knowledge for the simple reason that babies have it all, already.
Healing? No one knows what causes healing. If your life is causing you stress or pain, return to simplicity. Start from the beginning. Qigong is a series of movement strategies to coax you back, back to the beginning of the process, or the project, or the job, back to the movement, back to the original inspiration which started to take shape in your body. Qigong is a process of unraveling, it is a type of forgetting. Is it medicine? I dare say it is not. Can it result in healing? I think it can.
Discovery? Yes, you will make discoveries along the way, but then you must discard them. If you build them up into a system of levels and achievements, treat those levels the way any 2 year old would treat a castle made of wood blocks. Cast them asunder. Because orthodoxy must have a way to renew itself or its qi will become stale.
Forms? Forms take you back to before you were born. They are a way to dance in your ancestor's body. They collect the width, and breadth, the boundaries of movement knowledge. They are empty. Honor that emptiness.
If you write about your discoveries, have the child-like humility to memorize them, and then eat them.
In two years of writing this blog I have not recommended a single book about how to do qigong. This is not because I'm an asshole. It's because by the time these books are printed the qi is already stale. Babies like to chew on books. I've yet to find one that tasted the way a book should taste.
After something on the order of 30,000 hours of practice all I can say is, I don't know anything. (According to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory, I have accumulated enough experience to have mastered qigong three times!)
To me, the practice of qigong is about becoming a baby. It is about returning to innocence. It is about discarding knowledge for the simple reason that babies have it all, already.
Healing? No one knows what causes healing. If your life is causing you stress or pain, return to simplicity. Start from the beginning. Qigong is a series of movement strategies to coax you back, back to the beginning of the process, or the project, or the job, back to the movement, back to the original inspiration which started to take shape in your body. Qigong is a process of unraveling, it is a type of forgetting. Is it medicine? I dare say it is not. Can it result in healing? I think it can.
Discovery? Yes, you will make discoveries along the way, but then you must discard them. If you build them up into a system of levels and achievements, treat those levels the way any 2 year old would treat a castle made of wood blocks. Cast them asunder. Because orthodoxy must have a way to renew itself or its qi will become stale.
Forms? Forms take you back to before you were born. They are a way to dance in your ancestor's body. They collect the width, and breadth, the boundaries of movement knowledge. They are empty. Honor that emptiness.
If you write about your discoveries, have the child-like humility to memorize them, and then eat them.
In two years of writing this blog I have not recommended a single book about how to do qigong. This is not because I'm an asshole. It's because by the time these books are printed the qi is already stale. Babies like to chew on books. I've yet to find one that tasted the way a book should taste.
