CORRECT QIGONG

 by Phillip Starr

There's a LOT of qigong programs offered nowadays. If you look around a little, it's not too difficult to find one. But many qigong students and instructors alike have flawed forms of qigong. In China, qigong is thought to be very mysterious and difficult to learn, and to gain any skill with it require lots of practice for a LONG time. And this approach is, I believe, flawed.

If a student is told that something is going to be difficult and will require a long time to acquire skill, that's what he/she will believe, and it will be so. Certainly, there are some (qigong) skills that do require a great deal of practice but this isn't at all true for the acquisition of some basic skills. I can teach a student to acquire a number of basic skills in less than five minutes! For real. The secret lies in HOW IT IS PRESENTED by the teacher! I had a lot of fun in China when some of my students heard that I practice qigong; I told them that the aforementioned approach to it (mysterious and very difficult) was all wrong ...unless a teacher simply wanted to retain students for obvious reasons. Their eyes widened when a laowai (foreigner) told them this. And then I would teach them some basic qigong. Virtually 100% of them succeeded.

As for WHAT many qigong instructors teach, and it is often flawed. Simply standing in certain postures or making some special movements doesn't beget skill in qigong at all. One must practice certain form(s) of breathing that assist in “massaging” certain internal tissues and even some viscera. Learning how to control and manipulate certain muscles (some of them are not obvious at all) is crucial to advanced practice of qigong.

One of the very first principles that I teach my qigong students is that yi (your mind, idea, intention, will, imagination...) controls the movement of qi. Where your yi goes, your qi goes. That is the CENTRAL PRINCIPLE of all qigong as well as all of the neijia (“internal schools” of gong-fu, which are taijiquan, xingyiquan, and baguazhang). Without a firm understanding and application of that principle, all the qigong in the world is of no use. So, certain mental exercises (visualization/s) are essential, particularly when first learning a given form of qigong.

But simply standing/sitting in a static posture or waving the arms and hands around means nothing. It's just a shell of what is to be done. Even in China most people who practice qigong for health have no understanding of how to breathe or direct the yi. But they seemed to be happy with what they were doing (although it was empty), so I left them alone. They wouldn't have listened to a foreigner who wanted to correct them, anyway...

There are no “magical” forms of qigong that bequeath superhuman powers to their practitioners. Some teachers hold certain forms of qigong as special “secrets” so that “bad people” don't learn them. All that sort of thing is just so much silliness. Qigong requires dedicated, regular practice just as do martial arts. However, some advanced forms of qigong aren't presented to novices because they very well might damage their health by trying to engage in them before they're ready.