2021 Year in Review

This post is part of an annual tradition of reviewing developments and general goings on within Long White Cloud Qigong and our broader qigong community at large. It serves a useful purpose to review the events of the year and recognize what has been accomplished, as well as to plot the course ahead, so that people can know what to look forward to in the coming year.

Well… what an unusual year it has been again! As the global pandemic continues to drag on, one thing that continues to stand out to me from the events of the last couple of years is how while we are all dealing with the same worldwide situation, our experience of this situation and its impact on each of us can and has been quite different. This is due to a variety of factors – the degree to which the pandemic has directly affected the health of ourselves and others close to us, the different government interventions and restrictions in different parts of the world, our own personal circumstances including our living situation, our work and other activities that may have been affected, and of course our overall attitude and approach to dealing with all of this.

For myself, a combination of factors has led to 2021 being a particularly difficult year, with Auckland where I am living moving in and out of lockdowns multiple times during the year – the most recent lockdown continuing for almost 4 months. These ongoing restrictions and the resulting uncertainty significantly impacting myself and family member’s daily lives and plans for the future. One of the most prominent ways that it has affected myself has been the restrictions on in-person interaction, and the ability to move freely. I know that similar restrictions have had an impact on many people in many parts of the world to a greater or lesser degree, and that different parts of the world are further along the path towards reopening and re-establishing normal in-person interactions, but certainly for myself – I really miss being able to teach and practice qigong together in-person, as well as all those other normal in-person interactions that would usually form a part of daily life.

Fortunately we live in an age where through technology (the internet), we are still able to engage and interact with each other in quite rich ways, and this has allowed for some good developments and teaching within Long White Cloud Qigong in 2021. So with that said – lets take a look at the year’s developments, and also what we may be able to look forward to in 2022.

Courses

During 2021 we ran the Small Universe Qigong 200 hour instructor certification program three times, with groups starting in February and June, and a new group that started in October and is currently partway through the program. It has been wonderful to share these practices with so many people around the world, and also to hear back from many of them as they in turn have started to share the practices with others in their community around them.

We have also had the first group of students complete the Inner Fire Qigong 200 hour instructor certification program. These dynamic practices bring a new dimension and perspective to your qigong practice, developing the more yang qualities of your energy and activating your inner fire.

These practices are challenging though, so congratulations to all those who have completed the program!

Of course with the current situation in the world, all of these courses have been delivered online, but I also look forward to being able to teach these courses in person again when the situation permits.

Community

Fresh graduates joining our ranks has led to the number of Long White Cloud Qigong instructors around the world growing to now over 250, with instructors on every habitable continent in the world (we just need an instructor in Antarctica to be able to remove the ‘habitable’ qualifier from that statement, any volunteers!!?!????). With more instructors around the world, there is more opportunity for instructors to meet up with each other, and it has been really nice during the year to hear about instructors that have met up in their local area, or when they have been travelling and gone to somewhere that another Long White Cloud Qigong instructor lives.

We have also continued to develop our online Qigong Instructor Community, with regular monthly meetup and q&a sessions which are a great way for instructors to share experiences and support one another, as well as to receive ongoing guidance in their qigong practice and teaching.

Also during the month of November we ran a special event on the Long White Cloud Qigong Instagram account introducing members of our community. It was great to be able to share photos of so many of our instructors and a little bit about them and their qigong journey. An inspiration to many I am sure. We have received a lot of positive feedback from this event, so its likely that we will do something similar again in the future for instructors who did not participate this time.

Collaborations

During 2021 Long White Cloud Qigong participated in several collaborations sharing qigong through other organizations. If you read last year’s annual review you might recall that it mentioned that during 2020 Katie Brindle founded HayouFit, and that they were doing a lot to promote qigong to the world. Well, another year on and HayouFit is still going strong, and I have collaborated with them several times during 2021 running qigong sessions to share with their growing audience.

I have also presented a professional development session for INFTA – the International Nature and Forest Therapy Alliance. INFTA is a professional body for Forest Therapy Guides, who help people to reconnect to nature for their health and wellbeing through guided experiences. There is a clear synergy between Forest Therapy and Qigong practice, and INFTA is actively bringing qigong into the way that they do their work. They also have some exciting research which they are working on that may include qigong practice within in.

In 2021 I also presented a shared workshop in collaboration with RunZen, a UK based organization bringing mindfulness to running. It is great to share how qigong practice can offer benefits within the context of different activities, and I look forward to further collaborations with RunZen and perhaps also with other organizations applying qigong to their disciplines and activities in the future!

Newsletters and Vlogs

With the strange circumstances of 2021, I have not been as active in writing articles and recording vlogs as I otherwise might have been. Still there have been a few interesting ones during the year that you might like to go back and look at if you missed them. Some of the topics included:

• Should you play music when practicing Qigong?
• Is there such a thing as good and bad energy?
• Emptying your cup
• Qigong Skeptics and Superstition
• Wuji Posture for the Hands
• In the Zone vs Zoning Out

This is just a selection, you can see all the articles here, and all of the vlogs on the Qi Life youtube channel here.

Looking forward to 2022

Syllabus Development

Making the Inner Fire Qigong 200 hour instructor certification program available was one of the big achievements of 2021, and while we have run the course once this year, due to the number of people waiting for it to be released we only made it available to previous graduates of other Long White Cloud Qigong courses, 2022 will be the first time that this program is available to an open audience. So that is exciting to be making training in these dynamic practices more widely available. They really do bring a new dimension and perspective to your qigong practice, and have many therapeutic benefits as well as helping people to be able to reach their peak performance. The first enrolment for the Inner Fire Qigong program starts on 30^th January 2022 and you can find all of the details here.

We will of course also continue to run the Small Universe Qigong program, and we look forward to sharing these practices with a growing community in 2022. The first enrolment for Small Universe Qigong will start on 6^th of March 2022, and you can find the details here.

In addition to running these two comprehensive programs, I will also be hard at work on preparing the Elemental Alchemy Qigong 200 hour instructor certification program throughout 2022. The Elemental Alchemy program works with practices that help us to understand and harmonize ourselves with some of the most fundamental patterns of change and flow within our own energy and within the universe as a whole. Specifically the practices help us to explore the qualities of and connect to the states of Wuji (primordial and formless), Taiji (yin and yang), and Wuxing (the five elements or five phases). Understanding and experiencing these states helps us to balance and harmonize our energy within ourselves, and also between ourselves and others and the environment around us. This has broad application to help us to live more vibrantly and harmoniously with our physical body, our emotions, our stage of life, our relationships, our physical environment, the seasons, and more. These practices form the Sage’s path, because while as with other qigong practices there are many direct physical and energetic benefit to the practices, the broader benefit and focus is on our understanding of and relationship with the constantly changing patterns of the world around us.

You can see there is a lot to distil down into the 200 hour Elemental Alchemy program so that the material can be presented in such a way that it gives the participants both a solid theoretical knowledge of these principles and practices as well as a solid practical experiential understanding of them. Each of these comprehensive certification programs takes a huge amount of work to put together, so… I am hoping that the program may be available towards the end of 2022. If its not ready by then, my hope would be that it might be early 2023… Its definitely something to look forward to, and we will keep you updated on progress as it becomes close to being ready for enrolment.

Retreats, Workshops, Live Classes

I am very much looking forward to being able to offer live workshops, retreats, classes, and even intensive residential trainings again in the future. At this stage it is hard to say whether this is going to be viable in 2022, but there are some small glimmers of hope that it could be. A few things need to come together to be able to do this, including restrictions in different parts of the world lining up to allow people to plan ahead and travel with confidence for these types of events. We will certainly be watching the situation with restrictions closely to see if and when we may be able to plan some of these events, and will certainly let you know as soon as any plans come together!

Community Building

A lot of our community building in the coming year is likely to continue to be online. We have some really productive discussions in our monthly meetup and q&a sessions. It has also been really nice to hear of Long White Cloud Qigong instructors collaborating together online, and even meeting up in person when the opportunity presents. We look forward to more of this going forwards. For now a lot of these meetups are likely to be informal, but we hope in the future to also be able to have organized meetups of Long White Cloud Qigong instructors in different parts of the world.

We are also looking forward to continuing to be more active on Instagram, as this seems to be a good platform for connecting people together.

Miscellaneous

Looking back to the 2020 year in review, there were a few things mentioned in there that have not eventuated. In particular there was mention of continuing with regular live streaming qigong sessions, and also short courses on the application of qigong to different common issues. These are still things that we would like to offer in the future, but knowing the amount of work it has taken to offer the Inner Fire Qigong program, and the work ahead to get the Elemental Alchemy Qigong program ready, we don’t currently have a timeline for these. It is possible that we may begin to offer some of these in 2022, or they may need to wait until the next year, as preparing and running the comprehensive instructor certification courses is our priority for now.

Conclusion

We’re still in the midst of some interesting times. The way these are impacting each of us as individuals and in different parts of the world is often quite different. But still for many of us it is a time when we may be limited to a greater or lesser degree in our ability to go about some of our activities the way we normally would. With these restrictions, in many ways it is much like a winter of sorts – a time to turn our attention inwards, a time for reflection, a time for working on ourselves, a time for new learning and new ideas, and a time for preparation to put those ideas and learning into action in the coming spring.

We don’t know how much longer these unusual times will last, and what ups and downs there may be along the way, but we can make the best use of these times that we can while they last. Continuing to develop your own qigong learning and practice is a great way to spend some of this time. We are fortunate to have the technology to be able to productively move forward with this learning online, and while this situation continues Long White Cloud Qigong will continue to offer as much high quality, in depth qigong training online as we are able to – while looking forward towards when we are able to offer in person training and practice again as well.

There have been some significant developments and achievements in 2021, and we look forward to more in 2022! ????