Qigong and the Tai Chi Axis

Resting the tongue and teeth: In most qigong practices, allow your teeth to come together without clenching. Rest the tongue on the roof of the mouth. This is believed to help join two important meridian systems in your body – the Ren Mai and Du Mai, or the main yin and yang channels of the center-front and center-back body. As another general guideline for practice, we can look to a few passages from one of Daoism’s central texts, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), written over 2,500 years ago.4 These ancient ideas can offer some useful insights into the benefits of qigong practice for us today. What is rooted is easy to nourish. Qigong encourages us to stay rooted, to receive sustenance and energy; otherwise, we feel ungrounded, unstable and imbalanced in our lives. What is recent is easy to correct. Qigong enables us to become present. When we are lost in the past or stuck planning for the future, we lose our ability to be adaptable, open and responsive to the fluid, changing nature of experience. What is brittle is easy to break. Qigong fosters suppleness and hydration in the body, like a well-watered tree’s limbs. In this way, we do not snap with stiffness or dry out as quickly as we age. What is small is easy to scatter. Qigong helps us stay open to a larger life. By teaching us that we can align ourselves with nature, which is vast, infinite and mysterious, we can remember that sometimes our small life worries and problems can often prevent us from seeing the larger picture of all the beauty, mystery and power of life moving through us at any moment in time. (Location 394)

Prevent trouble before it arises. As a preventative medicine, qigong suggests that if we implement strategies and align with our natural rhythms and cycles, we can stay reasonably healthy and well. Put things in order before they exist. If you are healthy now, begin now, rather than wait until you are sick to begin practicing qigong. This will ensure greater long-term health. The giant pine tree grows from a tiny sprout. Qigong is not a solution for all illnesses and ailments. Though the effects can be immediate, and qigong can support recovery from certain conditions, the longterm benefits of qigong are most valuable when practiced patiently, regularly and consistently. The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet. Qigong asks that we begin from where we are; from where we are, we can choose to travel great distances to live a full and nourished life. (Location 408)

Standing Qigong Posture (Zhan Zhuang), or Emptiness Stance (Wuji) (Location 479)

Remember: Emptiness Stance is the stance of potential and possibility. Keep the body soft so that you can be open to receive what may come in, to fill your experience. (Location 594)

The first is that qigong supports us best when we lean away from extremes. (Location 3156)

The second thing I have learned is that qigong has enabled me to feel a deep respect for nature and therefore for my own body. It has allowed me to cultivate greater awareness of myself and my relationship with the natural world. This perspective has helped me and my students remember that all that is around us is also always within us. Knowing that my elemental make-up is mirrored in the natural world makes me feel that I can stand firmly with my feet on the earth and my head toward the heavens. It opens me up to the feeling of the tai chi axis, present and aligned. The tai chi axis is how each of us may physically begin to experience the wholeness and Oneness of tai chi – understood to be the Supreme Ultimate or Great Pole. Understanding the essence of tai chi is difficult. Most simply put, tai chi is the potential and space of wuji that gives rise to the harmonious movement of yin and yang, in turn generating the Five Elements. Yet the Five Elements also create yin and yang, which give rise to Wuji. In essence, everything is one and the same. It is part of the Dao, which the Dao De Jing describes as what “cannot be seen” and “cannot be heard” yet “cannot be exhausted by use.”2 The Dao is the Way. (Location 3169)

This brings me to the third and perhaps most important thing I have learned: We are all part of something more than just ourselves, which is fluid and always changing. I believe that this is the Dao. The famous Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian described how the Dao “shifts with the times and changes in response to things . . .The general drift of its teaching is simple and easy to hold on to: much is achieved with little effort.” (Location 3184)

This resistance may undermine the very essence of the Dao, which is wuwei – the effortless effort that allows us to flow the way the river flows. (Location 3191)

Note: Reminds me of Pavan, wuwei

It is how the 7,000 forms alive today may continue to grow and be created out of the formlessness and Oneness of the Dao. (Location 3198)

Note: 7000 forms Reinforces my intuition that I’m not going to learn more than a few, diminishgin returns