What do you want from your qigong practice? Why do you it? What is it that you want to experience, develop or gain by putting your time and effort into practicing qigong?
Maybe these are not questions that you have asked yourself as directly as this before, but there will be a reason, or even several reasons why you are drawn to and practice qigong. And it is well worthwhile to spend some time thinking about this to understand your own motivations, as this will help you to focus your efforts more effectively towards whatever it is that you want.
For some people it may be that they have a specific health issue that they would like to improve through their qigong practice, or perhaps something more general but still health focused, like to have more energy, process difficult emotions, or to be able to relax more easily. Others might have specific goals of improving physical performance, or concentration. Still others might see qigong as a way to gain a greater understanding of themselves and their interaction with the world around them. Or to put this in loftier terms – to explore and experience the wonders of the universe!
Maybe one or several of these motivations resonate with you? Or perhaps you have some other reason for your practice. It could be as simple as that you practice for the pure enjoyment of it, or for the connection you experience with other people through your practice. These are all good motivations, and it is really up to you to choose what motivates and inspires you.
Following on from this, how well does your qigong practice serve you in reaching your aims?
There are a couple of different approaches or mindsets that I often see in the way that people approach qigong. Both are valid and have merit, but when taken to an extreme end up limiting the way someone understands and practices qigong, and prevent them from experiencing the full beauty, wonder, and power that a truly living qigong practice can bring.
In this article I will discuss each of these mindsets, including both the positive beneficial aspects of them and the ways that they can limit our experience of qigong. I will then propose a third ‘middle way’ that allows us to draw from the merits of each of these approaches while avoiding the downsides that can occur if we become too tied to either of them.
The Traditionalist
The first mindset I will discuss is that of the traditionalist. The person who views qigong as an ancient art that they gain the most from by trying to perform the practices as closely as possible to the way that some predecessor did them. This could be their immediate teacher, or some mythological figure from hundreds of years ago.
There is a lot of merit to this approach. Qigong has a rich history with origins dating back thousands of years, and its traditions and practices give us the benefit of knowledge and wisdom which has been developed by countless generations of practitioners. There are many little details contained within qigong practices that are often not immediately obvious to a qigong novice. It often takes a significant amount of time and effort to even start to notice some of these details, let alone understand their purpose and how they contribute to the overall effect of a practice. Spending time closely observing the way a skilled senior practitioner does a practice and then seeing if you can embody those same details and qualities within your practice gives you an opportunity to experience the effect of those nuances for yourself – even if you don’t understand all the ‘whys’ straight away. This process of observing and imitating allows meaning and understanding to rise to the surface over time, and can unveil deeper truths that are difficult to communicate through conscious verbal communication.
Where this approach or mind set becomes restrictive, is when practitioners focus so much on the external details and trappings of a practice, that they no longer look for the essence which is underneath. They fixate so much on doing movements in a particular way or order, or even on peripheral things like the clothes that should be worn and so on, that they run the risk of the practice becoming an empty shell. All the externally observable parts are there, but the thing of real value, the thing that makes it alive is missing.
This approach puts the emphasis on the wrong things, and people who follow it tend to end up mythologizing the practices – always looking for something that will help them to do the practices in a more historically accurate way, perhaps getting caught up in cultural traditions surrounding the practice. Because they put so much effort into replicating these peripheral aspects of the practices, they tend to see them as something that can never be done well enough – because of course it is impossible to fully replicate what was done by another unique individual in a different time and place. This mindset inherently implies that their practice will always be in some way deficient and inferior to that of those who went before.
It is a very limiting way to think about your practice, and implies that with each successive generation the practices will become less and less authentic, and less and less effective. Especially when you realise that we actually have a very limited understanding of exactly what and how people in previous generations practiced. Until recently we had some written references, and sometimes some rudimentary drawings, but hardly enough to fully put together the full picture of a practice. Other than that, most of what was passed on was in the form of an oral, and physically demonstrated tradition. In very recent generations, since the time of film and video, we now sometimes have much richer documentation of practices. We can observe many more details when we see the practices done in motion, and perhaps hear someone talking about them as well. But there is still much that will be missing from this objective documentation. There are often so many subtleties within a practice, that it is impossible to fully document them all within a video recording.
Some years ago I had quite close contact with a particular kung fu style. The grandmaster of the style had at that point largely retired from teaching, only making appearances on very rare occasions. So it was left to his remaining senior students to continue to teach it. I had contact with several of these senior students, and while there was certainly many aspects of commonality between them, there were also many aspects of the kung fu style that they taught quite differently from each other – and… they each insisted that theirs was the correct way as it was originally taught by the grandmaster, and the other senior students were doing it wrong…
Now this occurred after the time of the invention of video recordings (I’m not that old that I would have been mixing with these sorts of people before that time!), so there were also at least some video recordings of the grandmaster performing and teaching the style. By referring to these videos, and also from my own contact directly with the grandmaster, I gained my own view of what was going on. Certainly there were some aspects of the style that were being taught more true to ‘original’ by some of the senior students, which could be verified by referring to documentary video evidence. But then there were also other aspects of the style that were perhaps harder to convey in a video recording that were being carried through by others of the senior students.
In a sense they were all correct that they were doing the style in the way that they had been taught! But each of them had focused on different details and nuances within the style, and then reshaped it according to their own ‘lens’ of perception and understanding. This is of course a natural process and a big part of why there are now thousands of different qigong and kung fu styles. Even when students of the same teacher try their best to do things in exactly the way they have been shown, they inevitably change and shape the practice according to their own abilities, needs, and environment.
This isn’t a bad thing! It leads to so much diversity and richness within the practice, meaning there is great variety that we can choose from to learn from others’ experience and find practices that are most effective, beneficial and enjoyable for ourselves! Even when people try their best to do things in the exactly ‘historically’ correct way, they will inevitably change and adapt the practice. I have seen it with my own eyes within a single generation of practitioners, one style dividing into at least five sub variants (each of which think theres is the most correct), and this in the age of video where there is documentary footage available for reference!
Ironically, the grandmaster was much more accepting of this variation than the senior students. I recall one time viewing a video of one of his early students doing a particular kung fu form. There was one particular movement in the form that this student repeatedly did very differently from any of the other senior students, and differently from how I had seen the grandmaster do it as well. I questioned the grandmaster about this, and he said “that’s just him”, and it didn’t seem to bother the grandmaster at all that he was doing the movement differently. From memory this particular student really liked to kick a lot, and doing the movement in this way set him up well with the option of kicking should he choose to – so for him it was the ‘right’ way to do the movement, while it may not have been for others.
If a traditionalist approach is followed too strongly, at best the practice becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, with all of the inherent distortions. This may still yield something of value, but by not embracing this natural process of change and adaptation, it will often weaken and dilute the effectiveness of the practice, and not benefit from all the new insight and expression that each generation of practitioners could bring to the practice. The practice tends to enter a diminishing and weakening spiral, rather than continuing in a strengthening and expanding spiral.
There are some other risks inherent in this traditionalist approach as well. Not only may valuable aspects of a practice fail to be passed down, but people may actually copy things that are actively harmful to them. I recall reading the account of someone visiting another teacher and noticing that all the students in the class had an unusual shaking motion as they performed different movements. The visitor asked the teacher in private after the class why the students were moving in that way. The teacher had a neurological disorder that he hadn’t told the students about and they were just copying him…
In addition to this, a too strongly held traditionalist approach may prevent practitioners from adapting practices to their needs, possibly causing them to continue to try to do movements or other aspects of the practice that are harmful to them, or meaning that they think they cannot continue with the practice – causing them to miss out on the value they could derive from the essence of the practice if they continued with it in a modified form which suited their needs. A traditionalist approach may also imply that someone needs to take on cultural or religious beliefs, which aren’t actually essential to the practice and which clash with their own culture or belief system, in order to fully embrace the practice. This again acts as a barrier to understanding and makes the value and essence of the practice inaccessible.
The Free Spirit
The free spirit focuses first and foremost on their own experience of a practice, and the energy and connection with nature within it. They are not concerned with tradition or doing things the way they have been done before by others, they just want to explore and experience for themselves, relying primarily on their own awareness, impulses, and instincts.
Again there is a lot of merit and potential value within this approach. Qi, or energy is at the core of qigong. It’s right there in the name – qi translating as energy, and gong translating as work or skill. So the whole underlying purpose of qigong is to work with our energy and develop skill with it. So really focusing on our own energy and the energy around us within our practice is very useful – it helps us to tune in more clearly to what we are actually doing within our practice, the very essence of the practice if you will. And doing this through your own senses and your own awareness means that you are interacting directly with this energy, not constrained or restricted by dogma or tradition. In this way they are able to directly assess for themselves the effect of practices on them, and this open-minded approach can even lead to them discovering valuable new insights for themselves which go beyond what may have been contained within a particular practice.
However, as with traditionalists, it is quite common for free spirits to take this mindset beyond where it is useful into territory where it can actually get in the way of learning and experiencing qigong more fully, and even to a point where they expose themselves to potential danger within their practice.
Some free spirits take an approach of just doing ‘whatever feels good’, and may even not take any real interest in learning the details of how to do practices, some of which may have been developed from the experience of many generations of practitioners over thousands of years. While there is nothing wrong with feeling good, and doing your practice in a pleasurable way, to have this as your only guide can be very limiting or even dangerous.
I’ll use a few analogies to demonstrate this.
Imagine you are on a journey and decide that you just want to travel by yourself without any guidance. You want to discover everything for yourself and not be influenced by the paths that others have taken. Not only do you choose not to use any of the established roads, you also decide not to take any maps with you either.
Certainly there can be much of value to be discovered by getting “off the beaten track”, and experiencing things that others might hurry past, and the process can be very enjoyable. But at the same time, if you have a destination you would like to get to, it is probably going to take a lot, lot longer for you to get there. In addition to this without a map it is much more likely that you will find yourself getting stuck without food or water, or possibly encountering some hazard that you are not prepared for, that could easily have been avoided.
Perhaps an even better analogy would be going out on the ocean. It is easy to get caught up in the beauty of the water and its movement. A free spirit might be so captivated by the movement of the water, the ripples, the waves, the light glinting of it, that they just splash around and don’t really go anywhere. They may be blissfully unaware of all the potential wonders there are to explore by traversing the ocean, or perhaps even exploring below its depths. They also are far more likely to not notice the deeper currents within the ocean until they are swept away by them…
Just one more analogy. This time a more constructive one. I have known a fairly successful visual artist for many years now. He truly is a free spirit in many ways. I well recall early in his career as he experimented with using different mediums and materials to express his creative vision. So many times he had an idea that was quite interesting and appealing, and he went ahead with creating it. Putting many days of work into an individual piece, but without understanding the characteristics of the materials he was working with, so in a short time his artwork would degrade and no longer be usable (unintentionally). He is now still a successful artist, so all was not lost and things worked out ok in the end, but he could have saved himself so much time and effort and money, and so many more of his early career artworks would still be around today if he had just put a little more focus on understanding his materials – doing some research on them, and maybe asking advice from others experienced in using them.
So while for a free spirit ‘rules’ and structure can seem restrictive and confining, when applied well they actually support and empower the creative impulse, allowing even more full expression, experience, exploration, and discovery!
The Middle Path – A Principles Based Approach
I have painted a picture of some of the extremes and pitfalls that can occur when someone follows the approach of either the traditionalist or the free spirit. But as mentioned above, both approaches have their value and merit, it is just when taken too far that they become limiting or dangerous.
So how can we avoid these extremes so that we can get the most out of our qigong practice? I think the third way, or the middle path, is to take a principles based approach to our study and practice of qigong. By doing this we can benefit from the application of both the traditionalist and free spirit approach in a way that makes our qigong practice truly alive. This will help us to bring our focus to the true essence of the practice, and allow us to direct our efforts more effectively towards whatever our motivations are for practicing.
We can take a moderated traditionalist approach, digging deep into the history and philosophy of qigong and related practices such as kung fu and Chinese medicine. We can practice diligently seeking to pick up the details and nuances of the practices from senior practitioners who are well versed in its traditions. But at the same time, we can always be seeking to understand the principles behind the practice, recognizing that this is what is truly important.
In this way all of the tradition and structure we learn can support us in applying the practice to ourselves and our purposes, rather than restricting or limiting us. We can benefit greatly from the wisdom and experience of all those who have gone before us, with freedom to adapt or modify practices to our personal needs. We may even find the principles that we learn from a traditionalist approach empower us to “go beyond” what is contained in the original practices and discover new things of particular relevance to ourselves.
We can also benefit from the free spirit approach recognizing our own ability to sense and experience the wonders of life and the universe for ourselves. Delight in the freedom of exploration and discovery, always being true to ourselves and our own inner guidance – while being able to avoid pitfalls and dangers that we otherwise might not be aware of by heeding the warnings and cautions of those who have explored this same territory with their own sense of wonder before us.
Supplementing our free exploration with an understanding of useful principles that others have discovered can also allow us to navigate more skillfully and understand and experience far more than we might by simply drifting with the current, or paddling in circles.
Finding a harmony between the traditionalist and free spirit approach truly brings our practice to life. I think deep behind the viewpoints of those who go to the extremes with either of these approaches is a sense of unreality about qigong. The extreme traditionalist thinks of qigong as something from the distant past, that could only be understood by those of previous generations. It becomes a fantasy of sorts to try but never fully succeed in re-enacting these traditions from a mythological past. On the other hand the extreme free spirit can think that there aren’t any real definable principles that govern how energy works, it is all whatever you believe or whatever you feel. Again, essentially that it is not ‘real’, but only whatever you choose to imagine.
When we constantly seek to discover and understand principles within our qigong practice, it makes it very real, definable, learnable, and applicable within our lives. It doesn’t mean that you have to understand every aspect of everything that you do. There may be many parts of the practices that you don’t understand – to begin with. It simply means that you have more to learn, more to discover, as you uncover more and more understanding of principles through your diligent practice. But it also doesn’t mean that we don’t understand anything of how qigong works, and the more that we do understand, the more we will be able to use it effectively within our lives towards whatever purposes and motivations we have for our qigong practice.
Taking a Principles Based Approach to Qigong
So how can we take a principles based approach to our practice? Well it helps if you have been taught in a way that has made at least some principles behind the practices that you do clear and easy for you to understand, and if you have been encouraged to seek out and understand more as you continue to practice.
If that hasn’t been your experience in learning qigong so far, maybe now is a good time to start to bring this empowering approach to your practice. If you have a teacher, a good starting point could be to start to ask a few questions about how the practices you have been learning actually work, what are the principles behind them? Don’t necessarily expect to get all of your questions answered at once, sometimes a teacher may want to wait until you are ready to explain some principles, but often they will be happy to start to explain at least some of the inner workings of their practices as soon as a student shows enough interest and initiative to ask.
If you don’t have a teacher available to you to ask such questions to, or they are not forthcoming with answers that you can understand, another approach can be to simply contemplate your practice with an enquiring mind. There is so much embedded within the practices that is there to be discovered for those who care to look. You could think of this as where the intersection between the traditionalist and free spirit approaches really meets. By doing the practices as you have learned them, and then really observing what you notice within your own body, mind, and energy, it is likely that you will start to be able to distill at least some of the most pertinent principles from that practice. You could even take this approach a bit further and try changing or adjusting one detail of the practice at a time, and then notice how this changes the effect within you. The traditionalists might gasp in horror, while the free spirits would cheer you on in this endeavour! Little by little more of the underlying principles will come to the surface of your understanding, and you will be empowered to take more control over the direction of your qigong journey.
Something else that can be really valuable in distilling the underlying principles from qigong practices, is to be able to compare different practices with each other. Recognizing what is the same or similar between two practices, and then also what is different, and how the practices have different effects, is a good starting point for then being able to identify the underlying principles that are causing these differing effects. So if you are already familiar with a few different qigong practices, simply bringing this noticing and comparing mindset to your practice may be enough to start to understand more of the principles. If you are familiar with only one type of qigong practice, maybe taking the opportunity to learn a new practice will not only broaden your repertoire of practices, but also give you further insight into the practices you already know.
And finally if you really want to dig deep into the process of understanding the underlying principles behind qigong practices, then you might want to seek out a teacher who naturally brings this approach to the way they teach qigong. Having someone with knowledge and experience who can guide you in this process is really helpful to begin with. They will be able to give you many practical examples of different principles that you will encounter, so that you can understand them for yourself from your own experience. Once you have this experience, over time it will become easier and easier for you to apply this same way of thinking to every practice that you encounter. Your practice will become truly alive as you understand the “whys” and “hows” of it, and you will be able to shape your practice to most effectively achieve your desired purposes. You will no longer be just copying and hoping, and neither will you be exploring aimlessly without direction. Your practice will be filled with meaning, and you will be able to more purposefully use your practice to move towards your desired destination.
John Munro
Long White Cloud Qigong
(John will be talking about this topic in an upcoming interview on the NQA’s “Qi Talks” with Vicki Dello Joio. You can tune in to that here.)