You may be one of the lucky ones. Or you may just be crazy. If you practice diligently you will find that after some unknowable period of time you may indeed feel some hard-to-explain sensations, especially in your hands.
Here’s a little advice on how to deal with this and still not have to rearrange your entire life:
1. Don’t congratulate yourself. Don’t criticize yourself. You probably are not the Messiah returning nor are you dumb because “this took so long”. Remember, in the Qigong world, energy is normal and that’s extraordinary enough. Just accept it as gracefully as you can and go on. (more…)
Is there mind without consciousness? If you say yes you will be wrong. If you say no you will be wrong. How is this? Because you have give the answer too soon without having walked through the forest from one end to another.
We fool ourselves on this quite a bit. People often say such things as, “Words just get in the way. They are so much rubbish.” But they have never really examined how very difficult it is to think without words. You may imagine pictures and scenes to your heart’s content, but can you really think without the use of words? (more…)
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September 20, 2009: Santa Cruz, California:
The Academy of Martial Arts
A wide range of people and training came together to spend a few hours learning a very special approach to the practice of Qigong. Acupuncturists, nurses, Qigong teachers and people completely new to the art all convened on the Academy of Martial Arts to spend time together and to learn what seems a simple art of breathing. (more…)
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Such a nice phrase, really a compliment we bestow on those who seem to us to be emblematic of perfect health. But is our picture clear, or as foggy as snow on an old black and white tv? (more…)
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I’m moving soon. My landlady’s response to the news was the classic Buddhist/Taoist maxim, “well, after all, the only predictable thing in life is change.” We all know this, but somehow it keeps surprising us. The Chinese were masters of change. The I Ching (or classic of changes) is probably the most well known example of this mastery, but graceful observance of change is at the heart of all Chinese arts including medicine and qigong. The ancient Chinese were so attuned to seasonal change that they developed an entire set of qigong exercises based on two week seasonal adjustments called “qi nodes.” The practice was to do the new posture at the beginning of each two-week period to harmonize with subtle external shifts in the qi. (more…)
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We begin our new seminar series with three Qigong workshops. These are hands on sessions for learning take-away skills. The first, September 20, Sunday at 1:00 will be a four hour session on the basics of Qigong body control. If you are in the Northern California area and want information call 831 475 1429. CEUs are available as are discounts for students in the health professions.
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Ancient writings say “Nature is self correcting.” At first blush this sounds poetic but hard to comprehend. Nature is so difficult to fathom, so impossible to simplify, so far beyond prediction. But ultimately the ancient writings are correct. When we stand back from our fears and our desires we see that Nature resolves everything in its own course. And what does that mean? It’s more than a nice philosophy, it validates the most basic observation humans ever made, namely that Nature has a direction, a hidden organizing principle. Nature continually returns to its own essence, it continually resolves itself and all the problems it creates. (more…)
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I’ve been reading a book by Michael S. Behe entitled “Darwin’s Black Box, The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution“. David Berlinski, who authored the wonderful A Tour of the Calculus, states that understanding the defense of Darwin necessitates knowing the material in this book and I humbly agree.
This challenge is the exact opposite of the so-called “Intelligent Design” lobby. The biochemistry of life, so it seems, precludes many of the basic assumptions of Darwinian evolution. The critique comes strictly from science itself, as it should. Even that old egomaniac, Watson, is made to look, shall we say, evasive regarding the monolith of problems and questions brought up by the latest discoveries in the field of microbiology. (more…)
For me the best thing about Qigong is that I can do it. It’s always there and I always get better when I practice. I don’t even like to call it practice because that reminds me of playing the violin (which I was embarrassingly bad at).
But Qigong is different for me. Every single time I do it something moves a little, and in the right direction.
I think I’ve tried just about every exercise, machine, routine, anything. But there’s always something about the book or equipment or whatever when it arrives. I think about the people on tv who’ve lost the weight or tightened up and I keep thinking that it won’t work for most viewers and the people who makes these things don’t care. They expect their stuff to not work. They want it in your closet because then they can sell you another one. It’s like selling you your own hopes and dreams but without a warranty except those fake “money back” guarantees which they know you will never do out of just embarrassment if nothing else. (more…)
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Our whole site is built around the ancient Qigong method known as Blossoms in the Spring. We asked the co-author of the new book on Blossoms to share her experiences as an acupuncturist, her insights into Qigong and her view of medicine, East and West.
HARMONY: Is there anything you might like to say at the start ?
NARRYE: I’m kind of hot right now about the tendency in this culture to make everything a workout, to drive towards getting to some goal. I’m trying to make people aware of the disadvantage of being always attached to a specific outcome, rather than an involvement in the process.
HARMONY: Can you go into a little more detail? (more…)
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What have I seen in Qigong classes? I’ve seen the wrinkled brows of the confused slowly smooth out with an internal experience of comprehension as though their mind’s eyes were seeing a code deciphered. I’ve seen shoulders slip off their invisible sandbags. One elder student had not played the violin for two years then reports one day that he is playing again, shoulder pain suddenly gone. I’ve seen the beginning of incipient self-knowlege, body knowledge grow not from the mechanistic movements of someone distressed and unenthusiastically following his PT’s instructions but accompanied with a sense of self-exploration that goes beyond determination. (more…)
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Here’s the rule we were talking about: Stillness engenders movement and movement creates stillness. Stillness itself is considered yin and movement is yang. But as the yin/yang symbol (known as the Taiji Tu) shows, when stillness reaches an extreme it starts to turn over to movement (like the moon waning after fullness). (more…)
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