Why standing still is sometimes the only way to make progress.
It’s strange – I’ve learned such a great deal from books : science, maths, engineering, gardening, keeping goldfish, house repairs, analytical psychology, all sorts of stuff really from the sublime to the ridiculous, but when it comes to qigong, I seem to be struggling. The thing is this: if I want to learn about the structure of the atom, I can pick up any science book and expect there to be a decent amount of agreement. I mean the information ought to be the same because facts are facts aren’t they? The only difference between one book and the next should be in the style of presentation.
This isn’t the case with qigong. Indeed, with qigong there seems to be very little cross-correlation at all. I’m finding the terms used by one author are completely different to those used by another – the impression being that qigong is whatever each author wants it to be. I know there are many different styles of qigong, and different ways of translating the terminology from the original Chinese, but they’re all working with the same basic stuff (this mysterious qi stuff) aren’t they? And they’re applying it to the same basic thing (a human body). But how does it get in? How does it move? Where does it go? Where does it come from? Does it come in through your feet and out through your hands? Up your perineum and out the top of your head? Or does it come in at all points at the same time? Does it come in at all? You’d think one of those books would have made it clear by now, but they haven’t and I’m getting myself in to a right muddle.
This leads me to suspect either all these qigong authors have a great deal of genuine knowledge but are incapable of expressing it – or they actually know nothing at all of any real substance and are simply pedalling myths. Of the many qigong books I own, all purchased after reading the glowing reviews on Amazon, very few can hold my attention and I generally end up tossing them aside with the feeling that I’ve been conned. One or two have even found their way into the recycling bin.
But hold on: I practice qigong, don’t I? Well, yes, but the qigong I do bears no resemblance to the stuff in the books with all the fancy titles. These titles sound so seductive it makes me wonder if I’m really doing qigong at all. But that’s the trick I suppose – you make the programme sound special, you hint at “secret” teachings, and you claim to have been taught by a wise old man whose name you mention in reverential tones. You call yourself his deciple. You talk of his lineage like he’s some kind of royalty.
And you sell books.
And credulous idiots like me buy them.
It all seems so complicated though, and I’m struggling with this because I have it in my head that all true things usually turn out to be very simple. I also have it my head that qigong is an important life-skill, like swimming or riding a bike, and none of these shysters will deflect me from that belief. We should all have a working knowledge of it. Understanding what qigong is and how it works has become something of a personal quest, but although I practice it diligently I’m nowhere nearer an understanding of it than I was when I began, some three years ago.
I do the Eight Brocades and a thing called Zhan Zhuang (pronounced Jam Jong), which is also known as post standing or standing meditation. I do this every day – well most days. Sometimes I fancy a change and I do a set called the Shibashi instead, or sometimes another one called the Yi Jin Ching, but the latter two aren’t as easy to remember, so mostly I stick with the Eight Brocades, and Zhan Zhuang. I learned these at my local Tai Chi class, where the word Chi, incidentally, is rarely mentioned, and where we call our instructor by his first name, rather than Sifu or Sensei, like they do in fancier places that charge the earth and make you dress up in silk pyjamas.
So,… yes,… it seems I know a bit about qigong after all – perhaps more the doing of it than the understanding, but still,… at least I know something, don’t I?
Has it changed my life though? Has it made me psychic? Have I ever gone off on a mind blowing astral journey? Can I project Chi out of my hands and knock people over with it? Do I possess super-human strength? Can I launch someone across the room by the slightest touch of my hand? Can I set fire to balls of newspaper, hurl pins through glass plate, push chopsticks through tables or bend a spear with its point to my throat?…
Erm,… don’t be stupid
Why do you persist with it then? You’re clearly wasting your time. Well, I do it because I feel better when I’ve done it. It’s that simple. And I feel good enough to want to do it again, tomorrow.
Oh,… I don’t know. The universe is an infinitely big place, and our minds seem to want to expand to encompass the whole complex mess of it – whilst actually being tethered by a very mundane reality that we’ve invented along the way: decades of commuting, day-job, supermarkets, leaking gutters, mowing grass, getting the car serviced and MOT’d, dealing with computer viruses, computer crashes, chocolate stains on the sofa, cup rings on the hearth,… blah di blah di blah.
This leads to tension – all of it self inflicted because if we could maybe throttle back and dissolve both ends of this polarity of attachment we could simply enjoy living a bit more. You can’t throttle back? The world feels like sandpaper against your skin all the time? Sure, you’re in a bad way, but then aren’t we all? It feels like there’s something missing? Yes,… I think there’s a name for this condition: it’s called being human.
So maybe you turn to alcohol, drugs, sex,… whatever lightens the load for a more than a millisecond. If you’re lucky you turn to mind-body techniques – like meditation, before the other three have had the chance to get a hold on you and ruin your life. And sure enough meditation works well. Slowly you start to see the world differently – you achieve a kind of detachment – but sometimes you don’t have the time or the privacy to meditate because unless you choose to live like a hermit you’re always going to be disturbed by someone.
So then you discover qigong. You can do it anywhere, if you don’t mind the funny looks or the wisecracks from your family. But qigong doesn’t need a zen like calmness to get going with it. You just do the moves, get into the feeling of them, and the Zen-like calmness comes on its own. It’s easy. And it works every time. You sit down afterwards and you feel a tingly kind of calm, a tingly kind of warmth suffusing your entire being, and the drip-drip-drip of that leaking gutter suddenly seems so trivial you wonder why you were ever bothered about it. And the most important thing is sitting quietly while you enjoy this feeling. And sometimes, just for a moment, you catch a glimpse of something moving shadow-like through the back of your mind,…
That’s yourself. Remember that person?
The Eight Brocades is just a set of moves, coupled with a kind of synchronised breathing, and the Zhan Zhuang? Well that’s literally standing still with your arms curved up in front of you as if you were holding a giant ball. You breathe deeply while you’re doing it, breathe down into the Dantien. I still can’t do this for more than ten minutes, though I’m supposed to be aiming for twenty. At the end of it you feel warm and calm and tingly. You feel like you’ve gone from being a lump of stone to a soft cushion and you can sink down into yourself for a while instead of ricocheting off like before.
So is that it then? Well, I think so. It’s good enough for me anyway. I guess you don’t have to understand a thing in order to simply use it. Sometime the google box draws me over to the qigong forums and I read all the stuff these kids are talking about, like how it would be “kewl to nok sumon over with chi”, and you want to say oh, for heaven’s sake young-un, grow up. I’m going to forget all the fancy qigong books with all the fancy titles for a bit, maybe even sling a few more of them into the recycling bin, because they’re leading me on a merry dance, while explaining nothing at all – and I’m going to do the simple stuff – the eight brocades and the standing meditation.
If in doubt – if the world seems to be moving too fast and, it’s making no sense, just stand still for a bit and everything will be all right again.
