5 Reasons to Practice QiGong
Qigong Hand, Chris Vellrath
I was recently asked why someone should take up the practice of Qigong…what are the benefits? So I’d like to share my top 5 reasons to practice Qigong, but for starters just a quick little background on my experience with the practice.
I first learned about Qigong 15+ years ago. I was studying some internal arts and some Tai Chi and I came across these standing Qigong practices - postures and movements as a way to develop internal power, help the health of the body, clean out the energetic pathways, and have the organs working properly.
So I began doing practices and it pretty intense - I would build up a lot of energy - but then I would often feel like I was over-stimulated. I was just learning from books at the time. I didn't really have any teachers helping me out so I was just studying what I could find. So I did the practices and some of them were helpful, seemed to produce a lot of Qi, but then I would find myself overheated, so unfortunately I couldn't keep up the daily practice. Hence, the benefits of having proper instruction with a qualified teacher.
Years later, I met some very adept teachers and I was able to work with them directly - and I started to learn a different style of Qigong based on an ancient system. What I found was that working with them directly helped to erase and eradicate some massive errors that I had developed - and my progress grew quickly.
Here’s what happened. First and foremost I began to develop emotional stability. The practice forces us to discipline ourselves. For most people, it is difficult just to remain still. But when we do, it exposes the pain we have been avoiding through constant motion and distraction.
There's a lot of internal movement that's happening in the standing practice, but the stillness trains the body to be disciplined and it starts to discipline the mind and the emotions as well. This settling of emotions, this ability to be grounded, will have tremendous benefits in all areas of your life.
Another advantage is we become really strong. It develops our body's internal power but it also develops our muscles, our bones, and our ligaments in a way that we don't get actually from other practices. This translates into more dense bone structure, more flexibility, openness in the joints, and a supple power that we develop - we become tremendously strong and powerful.
The third benefit is that our bodies begin to align, the structure of our skeleton begins to align, and what this can do for us is to relieve compression in the joints - which over time will cause many problems. Many people develop osteoporosis and other physical issues through poor posture. When we have poor posture that means poor blood flow, poor blood circulation, and it also inhibits the qi flow - the subtle energy flowing through the body.
These postures actually correct that which improves our overall health. But the fourth benefit to the practice is that our longevity increases and quality of our lives gets better as well. I've had a number of students who initially came complaining about shoulder problems, upper back problems, lower back problems, and all sorts of physical ailments…many of them have been disappearing in just a few weeks to a couple months of practice. I'm not making any promises or anything here, but the proof is in the pudding.
Lastly, with the correct discipline - which means you show up every day, you practice every day, and put this into your daily habits - and what starts to happen is you learn about this principle we call “Song”. Song is often called releasing but it's deeper than what we often think about as relaxation. This process isn't just about letting things go, but over time as we Song more and more, it starts to generate power inside us. We experience that to generate power, we have to release, we have to Song. We're taught and reinforced in our culture that to generate power we have to force things, we have to try harder, we have to control situations and people, and we have to manipulate, striving and clawing for everything that we want. But this goes against every principle that we learn in Qigong. Developing Song is an entirely new way of operating and it's one of the most basic principles in Qigong.
