The Bill Moyers qigong episode

Here is a clip from the old Bill Moyers episode:

Best essay on qigong and internal merging with external

This blog post is the best essay I’ve found on qigong and how neijia, from a qigong-centric point of view, should merge internal with external. It is really about prana and yoga, but to me that’s a very meaningless distinction. Indeed, that it’s not explicitly about qigong or taijiquan or neijia actually gives it more [...]

Regulating the sympathetic nervous system

This part of the ANS controls the “fight or flight” responses. It can produce body reactions such as increasing blood flow to the skeletal muscles as much as 1200%! Whoa. I would think zhan zhuang is more about calming the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system (controls “rest and digest”). However these systems are [...]

Reductionism vs. intangibles - it’s all about the nervous system

Another great analogy Yayama makes in his book Qi Healing is concerning reductionism in a mechanistic, scientific way vs. intangibles explained through some other mechanism of understanding.
Car - can take apart and look at all the component pieces and understand how each one works and put the system back together and understand it as the [...]

Marketing qigong based on yoga’s success

From a marketer’s point of view, the only thing that would bring any of the qigong and TCM knowledge back to the future is changing consumer demand, driven by a real or perceived need. Most likely that means demand driven by patients’ needs (because neijia hobbyists are few, but everyone needs to be concerned with [...]

Neijia losing qigong and tcm concepts

If ( a big if) the best ima folks of old achieved this kind of “autopilot” qigong mastery at the same time they achieved perfect biomechanics, techniques and “no mind” flow, no wonder people thought they were so powerful. It’s hard for me to believe one could achieve that without at least some theoretical knowledge [...]

After microcosmic orbit

I’ve been doing a lot of study on qigong lately and there seems to be a clear consensus that people (at least men) should open the downward channel first (down the front for men) because

it’s more difficult than opening the upward channel (up the spine for men),
only opening the upward puts [...]

Qi hugging

I seem to have all the signs of “qi hugging”. They say not to get attached to these feelings and they are just from blockages getting released, but getting some good flow going is addictive. It makes me want to improve my posture more than before, when the motivation was based on muscle relaxation. Also, [...]

Yoga and qigong: relationship of chakras to dantians

I’m getting more interested in the similarity of yoga and qigong. It’s interesting that some of the concepts are very similar but don’t quite match up. For example, there are seven chakras that seem to have some relationship to the 3 main dantians.
1. Upper dantian - could be the crown chakra, the third eye chakra, [...]

World Tai Chi and Qigong Day

I don’t know anything about it but today is World Tai Chi and Qigong Day.