Visualization, Imagination, or Mind Body Connection in Qigong Practice

As student’s start to progress in their qigong journey, and start to experience some interesting things as they practice, a common question they ask is: “How do I know if this energy I am experiencing is just my imagination, or if it is real”. It’s a simple question, and an important one to ask. The answer goes right to the heart of what it means to develop true “Gong” or skill with energy. This article will explore the difference between visualization, imagination, awareness, and intention, and the role that each of these play in a developing a true mind body connection in our qigong practice.

Working with energy is a subtle thing to begin with. We are tuning in to things that we may not have previously paid much attention to, and in addition to this most of the people around us probably haven’t paid much attention to these things either, so we don’t have a strong common system of shared language to use when we describe these things to begin with. This makes communication about the experiences more difficult that it would be for other more mundane activities, and can lead people to be unsure of what it is that they may or may not be experiencing as they develop in their qigong practice.

So how do we go about bridging this gap from not having an understanding or experience with energy, to being clear and confident in perceiving and working with it? There are many different aspects to this, we will look at a few of them which are interrelated with each other, in the hopes of demystifying them and overcoming some common pitfalls so that they can be used in useful ways.

Awareness in Qigong

This is the natural first step. To simply turn our attention to details that we may not have noticed or focused on before. For example, if you clap your hands together vigorously for a minute or so, and then hold them close together but not touching, if you put your attention on it, you may discover some interesting sensations between and around your hands. You may not have noticed these sensations before, or if you have, you may not have paid a lot of attention to understanding them and their details.

The same applies as you do different moving qigong exercises. The movements stimulate the energy within and around your body. The energy would have been stimulated at other times when you have moved in similar ways, but you may not have noticed before because you weren’t focusing on them. When you do start to have this focus and awareness, how do you describe them? Different people may describe the same things in different ways, and in addition to this, as you continue to develop within your practice, what happens with the energy may also change. Some of these sensations may be easy to describe, others more difficult.

Visualization in Qigong

This brings us to our next tool, visualization. Some of the energy we sense may be very tactile, some of it may be visual, other aspects of the energy may fall into some other sensory category, and often they will involve multiple senses or fall somewhere in between. So how do we describe this when communicating with others, or even internally for our conceptual understanding?

Vision is often the strongest and most clearly defined sense for many people, so we often resort to visual descriptions or ‘maps’ of things that we experience as a way to simplify, codify, and understand our experience. Thus visualization can be helpful to us to articulate in more detail concepts or experience with energy, both for ourselves and others.

Imagination in Qigong

We have a tendency to find what we are looking for, and conversely can easily miss things that are there, simply because we had not conceived to look for them. The spark of imagination is sometimes essential to opening us up to new understanding of our experience. When you first discover the maps of the meridians, or the locations of the dantien, or something describing some other aspect of your energy, it gives you a spark to ‘imagine’ these things in yourself. You can then pay attention within yourself to see what you can discover occurring in these areas. You can find out if your actual experience corroborates the theoretical model, with the ‘imagination’ telling you where and what to look for in the first place.

Without these pointers, it is very easy to continue unaware of many aspects of the energy functioning within your body. Imagination also interacts strongly with our next tool – intention.

Intention in Qigong

The mind and the body are never truly separate. Our mind directs the functions of our body, including the activity of our energy. So as we think about, observe, become aware of, and ‘imagine’ different aspects of our energy, we also direct changes within our energy. Intention is very important in our qigong practice, without it we are passive observers of our energy state, with it we become active in directing change within us.

When we engage our intention effectively, instead of just being aware of our energy, we can focus on how we want our energy to be, rather than just how it is at that moment in time. If energy is stagnant, we can use our intention to encourage it to flow. Where energy is weak or deficient, we can encourage the energy to increase and become strong. When we start to become skilled at using our intention along with the other tools we have referred to here of awareness, visualization, and imagination, we are ready to form a true Mind/Body connection which will be of practical value to us.

True Mind Body Connection in Qigong

When we have a true mind body connection we are able to clearly sense the energy within us and direct its action. We have confidence in what we are experiencing and can identify changes in our energy. Working with our energy becomes as real and as tangible as any other kind of exercise – pushups, running, stretching. We can perceive the effects on our energy as they happen. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the mind and body are never truly separate, but this is a deeper, clearer connection that gives you a conscious awareness of the relationship, and insights into how you can direct the energy that flows through you.

When you have achieved this, you are ready to truly begin to practice qigong, as you are now able to work directly with your energy. Prior to this, you are using parts to try to make the connection. You may be using physical stimulation, imagination, and so on to bridge the gap and form that strong link. These efforts are worthwhile and what will lead you to the connection. But your perception and skill with your energy will be patchy until the link is formed. Sometimes it will work, and other times not so much. But once the connection is formed, true energy skill can be developed.

You may find it useful to watch this vlog I recorded on this same subject at this point. I make a useful analogy about this connection in the vlog which was easier to talk about and demonstrate on video than to write about. This will help you to solidify your understanding of this concept.

Common Pitfalls Using Your Mind in Qigong

From the discussion above, and also from the example in the vlog, I hope you can see that all of the tools we have mentioned: awareness, visualization, imagination, and intention, have an important and useful role to play in developing a true mind body connection that will allow you to develop skill with your energy (qi).

Unfortunately the relationship between these tools is often not well understood, giving them a bad reputation with some qigong teachers. There are some common pitfalls to avoid if you want to use all of these well in developing your skill with energy.

Some teachers advise against paying any attention to energy sensations within your body. Their fear is that as you focus on the sensations, you may stimulate the activity in your body which causes these sensations to increase in an unhealthy and unbalanced way. As discusses earlier, your awareness of the energy will definitely affect it. The question is whether there is benefit in having a conscious influence over the energy in your body, or if this is somehow too dangerous. If you want to have true skill with energy, you need to develop conscious awareness of it, or it will be very difficult to direct it effectively, but it is important to not become too fixated on these sensations to the degree that you do not pay proper attention to the normal sensations and functioning of your body. It is also important to not try to enhance or develop any sensations of energy too strongly or too quickly, as this can cause harm in much the same way as lifting weights which are too heavy for you can cause you harm when you are new to using them for exercise. It is better to let the strength of your energy develop little by little as a natural outcome of your practice.

Some teachers advise against all visualization or imagination. There are a few risks with this. One is that when you visualize or imagine, what you create in your mind may not match the reality of what is going on with your energy, leading you to direct your energy incorrectly. Another is that if you ‘imagine’ too much, this can prevent you from connecting to the reality of what is occurring within you. Continuing to ‘imagine’ will stop you from making the true mind/body connection that you seek, and you may delude yourself about what you are actually accomplishing with your practice. The third is that in modern society, because we are so thought based in our activities, our energy tends to naturally accumulate in our heads. Adding further visualization or imagination to this can lead to further excess of energy in the head with its accompanying problems, and further disconnect the mind and body. The solution to this is to always check in with your physical experience of your practice. Use visualization and imagination as guides to understand and direct your energy, but always connect this to your physical sensations and experience.

This flows into the next pitfall with the use of intention. Our mind will direct our energy. If we use our intention strongly it can even direct our energy in ways that it is not healthy for it to go. If you have the wrong concept of what you are wishing to achieve with your energy, you can ‘force’ it to go somewhere that it should not, causing harm. This leads some teachers to recommend against using any intention in working with your energy, they suggest to just let it flow wherever it ‘wants’ to go.

There can be great beauty in a natural landscape where the plants and animals just go wherever they want to. But equally, if we just let the plants in our garden do whatever they want, we will usually find that it quickly becomes overgrown with weeds, and may not achieve the results that we want. We often need to intentionally prune a fruit tree to receive the greatest yield of fruit, rather than letting it grow however it likes. Similarly, if there is a bad or unhealthy pattern set up in the energy, if we simply let the energy go wherever it ‘wants’ to, often the unhealthy pattern will simply be reinforced, rather than improved. There is great value in conscious cultivation and conscious direction of our energy.

Now all of the parts come together. To consciously cultivate and direct our energy we must have some awareness of it. We must also have some idea of how we want it to be, or of what might make it healthier, this usually involves some level of visualization or imagination for us to understand what we want to direct it towards. We can then use intention to gently lead rather than force our energy towards a healthy outcome. If we continue to check in with what we can sense through our awareness, and have good models to understand what healthy energy should ‘look’ like, all of these tools will combine in a healthy way to develop our health, vitality, wellbeing, and skill with energy.

Conclusion

I hope that this article has given you some useful insights into the roles that awareness, visualization, imagination, and intention play in developing a true mind body connection and skill with energy. With practice you will come to have confidence in being able to distinguish between energy that is purely ‘imagined’ and energy that is guided and directed within you through this mind body connection.

I also hope that the discussion of common pitfalls can help you to avoid some of the risks of using these tools to develop your energy skills and gain confidence in their use. For the most part, qigong practice is very safe, and most people will practice without any issues or problems. But if you have any concerns about directing your energy within your practice, it is most helpful to have someone you can ask questions of if you need to, to help you know what is healthy and when you may possibly need to change something in your practice. You can find this kind of support in the Long White Cloud Qigong online courses, and we also have plans for some further opportunities for this kind of support and mentoring that we hope to be able to offer in the not too distant future. So if you are interested in that, make sure that you are subscribed to our newsletter for future updates. In the meantime, we would love to have you on one of our supervised online courses. You can find information about course start dates here.

Yours in qi!

John Munro

Founder – Long White Cloud Qigong