Simple Chi Kung_ Exercises for Awakening the Life-Force Energy - Mantak Chia [14]
Purge impurities, toxins, and pathogens from the body. Chi Kung cleanses the system so that cells replicate and repair with optimal efficiency.
Tonify the chi and infuse the body with life-force energy. This creates a surplus of healing energy within the system, which in turn leads to greater vitality.
Circulate the chi, clearing blocked or stagnant energy so that life force flows through the body. When there is good circulation of energy, pain and tension are alleviated. As chi moves, it becomes clearer and healthier.
These events are not just concepts, but actual experiences within the body. The Chi Kung practitioner learns to actually sense energy moving in the body and learns how to enhance it. He or she is able to detect when chi is blocked, turbid, deficient, excess, or generally out of balance, and can utilize Chi Kung as self-healing therapy to restore harmony. My students often ask if I ever get sick. My response is, “Yes, all the time . . . but, it’s usually for just a few seconds.” And it’s true! When you can feel an imbalance in your energy system, it is a prephysical manifestation. It’s much easier to correct an energetic imbalance then a physical imbalance. So after a few minutes of deep breathing, some healing sounds, some gentle Chi Kung movements, the imbalance is gone. Like magic!
PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
Typically in the West we are trained to specialize, to segregate, and to compartmentalize. For example, if you have a physical injury, you see a doctor. If you have mental or emotional challenges, you visit a psychologist. If you have spiritual concerns, you seek the advice of a pastor, priest, or rabbi. This is how it has worked in our culture since the rise of modern medicine. There is great benefit from this system and it allows for great improvements in many specific areas.
The downfall of this paradigm is that we become fragmented. In reality, we are not segregated into the body, mind, and spirit. Just because you put up a fence between you and your neighbor doesn’t mean that the earth is divided underneath.
From the Eastern perspective, the body, mind, and spirit are a continuum, and the integrative whole is more important than the separate parts. Take water, for example. It can be in three different states; solid (ice), liquid (water), or gas (steam). Yet in each of these states, it is still H2O at the fundamental level. The same applies for us: the physical body is the densest form of energy, like ice; the mind and the emotions are more liquid, like water; and the spirit is like mist, more evanescent. But at the fundamental level, we are entirely composed of energy.
Eastern medicine has always described how each of these aspects of our being—the body, mind, and spirit—influence each other. For example, negative emotional energy and stress have a negative influence on the health of the body. Poor health, on the other hand, will have a negative influence on emotions and the mind. The relationship is reciprocal; the energy of the body, mind, and spirit are part of one continuous cycle.
We are more than all our separate parts; more than organs, tissue, and muscles; more than emotions, thoughts, and feelings; more than our religious beliefs and cultural ideologies. We are the unity of all of these seemingly separate facets. One reason why people are so unhappy and unsatisfied, according to Eastern medicine, is that they feel disconnected, disjointed, and out of touch with this knowledge of wholeness.
As it stands now, our Western health care model revolves around people having pain and getting sick. If no one gets sick, nobody gets paid. Where conventional medicine differs from Eastern medicine is that it is passive rather than dynamically proactive. Doctors give you things to take and do procedures to you. In contrast, Eastern medicine