Qigong For Troubled Times

What is is this mysterious, miraculous, and marvelous practice called qigong? What are we doing when we do qigong? What is its roots and how can it help us with our modern day problems and concerns? How can it help us in troubled and challenging times? In a sense, we are stepping out of our mundane, limited sense of reality and opening ourselves up to a richer, wider and deeper form of experience. We are allowing what is infinite to be contained by what is so finite: our own bodies. When we do our practice, our form, our breathing, our visualizations, our movements – we align ourselves with our own origin, our own divine birthright. We are allowing ourselves to become “empty vessels,” ready to be filled with the energy of the universe itself.

It is always a good idea to work on your immune system, yet even more at this time. I will give you some special points on your body to massage, which will help support and build your immune system.

This is a lovely practice for bringing in golden healing light to anywhere you have disease, pain, stress, or toxicity in your body and to release it all into the air as black smoke. We also go a little further to experience yourself enveloped in a luminous egg of golden light and how to then turn that light outwards and send healing qi and light out into the world, to anyone you know who is sick or in pain or anyone else in the whole planet who is suffering from the current pandemic.

The more deeply grounded and rooted we are in the earth, the stronger and more emotionally and energetically balanced we will become. Wen you are grounded and rooted deeply into the earth, the easier it will be to recover from stresses and the challenges of life, especially in this extremely challenging time.

This is a practice of gathering elemental qi from the sun, the earth and each of the four directions. We can then use this gathered qi for making us stronger, more healthy and more highly functioning human beings.

One of the ways the ancient Daoists described Dao itself is that of the Great Mother. In this session we will open a deep connection to the source of all life, here symbolized by the Great Mother. We will experience ourselves as being connected on a very deep level to the source of all life, the Great Mother. In the second part of the practice we will experience ourselves as mothers, whether we are female or male. We will experience ourselves as giving birth to our new and true selves (Zhen Ren), letting go of anything that holds us back or keeps us from shining forth as the radiant, healthy and powerful being that we truly are.

It is by connecting our own sense of being to nature in a very real way that we can strengthen our own qi body and feel more at peace in our hearts and mind. Yes you can do qigong with trees! Trees have a kind of energy and even intelligence that we can tap into to strengthen our own qi. Here are several ways to practice qigong with trees.

Each of our five major organs — liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidney/adrenals — have various attributes associated with them, in what in Daoism is called "wu xing" or five transformational phases. This includes the color, season, direction, element, as well as positive and negative energetic qualities. This practice is an internal qigong practice to balance, strengthen and detoxify each organ, thereby boosting your whole energetic and emotional system.

This is a very ancient practice, the Xiao Tian Zhou, sometimes called the Microcosmic Orbit. What many students don’t know however, is that there is a very specific way to set up the orbit. In this session I will teach how to open up 12 important energy gates or qi cavities in your body. Only when they are all open will you be able to successfully circulate your qi up your du mai, which runs up your back, and down your ren mai, which runs down the front of your body. This is a somewhat advanced practice, but I wanted to include something for the folks who are already familiar with qigong practice.

This is a lovely short qigong form from the sacred Daoist Wudang Mountains. In it we embrace the yin energy of the moon and the yang energy of the sun. We create the sacred lotus flower mudra in front of our celestial (third) eye, and then become dragons soaring into the sky. This form is a way to go from being a hidden dragon (wo long) to becoming a flying dragon (fei long)!