There’s an expression making the rounds lately among beginning Qigong practitioners. Some times you will hear, “Wow, he just like dumped his negative qi all over me.” In a society like ours where some of these ideas are very new there is going to be a lot of slop-over at first. There’s no way around that. There will also be some wonderfully intuitive insights. I recently heard someone mention that her horse trainer tells her to guide the horse, “with your qi.” In a case like this the word intent (yi) might be a better one; but qi is perfectly fine.
The important thing is not to confuse Judeo-Christian concepts like right and wrong with polarized concepts like yin and yang. Yin may mean”female” but it never means bad, or evil. It’s like electricity, you can light your house with it or electrocute yourself but there is no moral aspect to the electricity, of qi for that matter. In Chinese medicine we might be diagnoses as qi deficient, that’s not the same as deficient qi: and neither of these is bad, negative or dark. Again, as in the case of electricity, most current is “negative” but there is no moral or pschological aspect to this whatsoever.
It’s important for Qigong practitioners to not engage in that modern pastime of blaming everyone else for your problems. The weirdo in the corner might indeed have problems but it’s not his qi which is distrubing you, it’s him. And, more often, it’s you disturbing yourself. There was a common expression in the Seventies “That guy has bad vibes.” At least it didn’t pretend toward accuracy. It was a personal reaciton, a perfectly valid thing to have. But let’s not use a 3000 year old concept for an icky feeling up our backs. Even if it is near Holloween.