With Qigong, Every Day is Different

Daily Practice – Qigong – Consecutive Day 1, October 24, 2019

Used Guigen Qigong for 35 minutes.

• Knees weak and balance hard. Sinking attention into Huang helped. Started at 50/50, but pulled back some. Squatting felt like collapsing. Heat emitted during Earth. Water slipped into yang quickly. Felt strong, but was probably too yang. Resolved to check on Kidney and yin during sitting meditation. Metal felt weak and thin, like I was a giant flamingo in a high wind. Wood was sludgy, and resentful. Reaching felt like too much (this was when I pulled back the 50/50). Fire felt loose and disorienting, like I was drunk. Twisting was crackly in the body. Lots of skin sensitivity by the end; inflated, warm. Qi was definitely moving. Sense of bubbly in the tissue.

Standing Meditation for 25 minutes.

• Needed to emphasize buttoning up. Stiffness kept body from harmonizing muscle groups. Nasal passages burned at first, indicating dryness in Lung System. Exhale was like exhaustion. Breathing in required force. Body kept shifting and undulating. Hard to use the 6 rings in the legs. In the middle of the time, started to ground and improve. Breathing got better. Focus started to stabilize. Heat rose. Feet started to get warm and spread out. Float was easier. By the end, float in upper half of the body was collapsing and the legs felt thinner. Knees starting to weaken. Very sleepy throughout.

Sitting Meditation for 30 minutes.

• Time flew by. Posture was a bit easier than with standing, but there was weakness in the lumbar. Breathing started out constricted by discomfort in the ribcage. Tension in the Kua made pelvis tilt off, and compromised the base. Float of the upper body kept tipping. Lots of tension rising in shoulders and neck, like a yoke. Mind chained to lower workings. Sense of SELF in superposition was there but, blocked by rubble. Wished at the end that I could take more time, but I’d already taken an hour and a half and I felt so sleepy.

Some background

Nearly every day I practice some small amount of Qi work, through breathing, alignment and intent, but setting aside time to do it properly, with a set program that can deepen my experience and quality, has been intermittent. Day 1 is about trying to get back to that consistency. My sitting meditation needs help to step up to a new level, and if I can get my qigong to heal the body more, I might be able to enter into Neidan practice, which is my current target.

That last time I was consistent was many years ago, and I had achieved a pronounced level of ability. But, I manifested health problems that seemed to undercut my progress, and I let my practice drift in favor of rest and perhaps a certain amount of confused sulking. It eventually become clear to me through study and exploration that what I thought was just Qi work was actually yang Qi work, or just wrong. To the degree that I was doing everything else correctly, I had allowed my internal definition of Qi to emphasize the yang side of Qi — namely, sensations of movement in the tissues, heat emission, brightness and clarity of the internal sight, intense awareness, and the definite response from my clients of feeling change when I practiced Medical Qigong on them.

After my daily practice subsided and I stoped taking Medical Qigong clients, my studies showed that the medical symptoms I was manifesting had to do with yin qi vacuity. Basically, I had burned off a lot of yin without replacing it, and my body was suffering. I couldn’t understand at the time how I could have such pronounced Qi results, while having done it wrong, but the glaring flaw seemed to have to do with yang. Yin and yang were out of balance, and if yang is emphasized, yin can become vacuous. Clearly, I’d emphasized too much yang. So, what was yin?

A few years of re-reading my original sources, or looking for new sources eventually led me to a small passage in an unreliable, but poignant source (I won’t reference here, to be respectful), who wrote of an intense yin experience in which he lost time and heard a loud rushing oscillation sound, like hearing a helicopter land nearby. I remembered such experiences in my own practice from many years before, when I was just beginning. This evolved into recognizing the yin signs of practicing on mountains or in caves, and to the strange example I witnessed in a video of a master practitioner who could push a piece of wood through another piece of wood. The experience wasn’t of strength; there wasn’t any apparent pressure on the stick — it appeared to slide through quickly. Also, it didn’t create a whole for itself; others weren’t able to pull the stick back out. And the same thing didn’t work on formica. The wood had to be touching other wood. These things suggested to me that something not quick physical was happening. It was as though the wood was temporarily phasing, so it could pass through something else of the same type, and when the master stopped it, the stick phased back into synch, and simply became the wood through which it had passed. According to particle physics, that’s possible, but no one’s quite figured out how to do it. Things aren’t solid; they’re made of molecules that float in a magnetic field that pushes at each other, and one solid tends not to be able to pass through the space of another solid because of those fields. Phasing is a word that implies the physics don’t interact strictly according to each other’s rules without the object leaving the physical universe all together. If it were possible to add a quality to an object that adjusted the phasing, then such a thing would be possible.

I concluded from all these things that yin had to do with the magnetic side of the universe, and I delved into studies about Zero Point Energy (ZPE), which is a sort of ripple of energetic activity that occurs at a level so low (essentially cold) that scientists found it impossible for a while to extract the energy in any way. They could tell that some activity was rippling there, but they couldn’t make it do work on any device. Eventually, Hal Putoff figured out how to make it do a little work, and this is often referred to as “free energy,” because you can extract it from the vacuum of space without having to us up any kind of fuel. He figured out that you could put two pieces of material extremely near to each other, but not touching, that were themselves so magnetically dense that they formed a kind of trough through which the fabric of reality flowed less. It’s still there, but it has to be channeled in from the open ends. That channelling, and that differential between in-between the plates and the outside was enough to make a little work happen, which was expressed electrically and captured. He patented it, and it’s how many of us can have security cards that radiate a small id signal so we can wave it over a sensor and get access, but never have to change the battery in the card.

Armed with a growing sensitivity to an aspect of reality that was less about activity and more about structure, order, categorization, relationships, and rules, I began to grow in my understanding of what qi might be. I restudied Bruce Kumar Frantzis’ advanced Water Method writings, and started to pick up on how the yin and yang are both referred to and described experientially. More and more I came to understand that when consciousness tries to do anything, it’s already emerging out of yin to become more yang. Relatively, consciousness is already intensely yang, but when it tries to take action, it becomes more so. When it comes into contact with the Natural Universe, it sort of runs into a wall of yin. Both have both yin and yang, or they wouldn’t exist, but there’s a weird difference to them that causes them to have trouble interacting, or stabilizing that interaction. Like trying to pick up an oiled water balloon, the more pressure you exert, the more it slips away from you. Pressure in the hand trying pick it up, here would be tending to the yang side, and the water balloon would represent something that’s tending toward the yin side. The trying was already where I was going wrong, and my very own yin was slipping out of my grasp.

Practicing Qi work focusing only on yang or yin would prove problematic, but I knew that my weakness in feeling yin was going to keep tripping me up, so I returned to regular meditation, this time intensifying my focus on yin. Letting go was slow. Eventually, I found that trying to let go was, itself, trying and therefore still too yang. When I stopped trying, and just intending to let go, I had to sit and wait. There was a lot of distraction I had to deal with. Finally, my consciousness slowed down enough to notice that not letting go meant I was hanging on, or clutching in some way. I observed the part that resisted or fought, and instead of trying to force a letting go, I just observed it. I began to gain insight into what part of me was actually “doing” that, and allowed the distraction of thoughts about why. What was the origin of this behavior? What feeds it? What urge does it serve? It turns out that such thinking isn’t strictly necessary, but it was my process at the time. Gaining insight, I started to change. Essentially, the part of me that was clasping started to need it less, and so it stopped clasping. A metaphor might be that instead of trying to cut the wires on a machine that was clamping down, or even to find the button to turn it off, I discovered that the machine used to serve a purpose, and doesn’t anymore. Somehow, the machine ceased to be mine, and the clamping ceased to occur.

Another way to describe what started to happen to me was that I intended to absorb more yin, or be more yin, or balance toward yin, and held that intent while I sat in proper posture, and breathed as well as I knew how, and just waited. While waiting, I discovered that I wasn’t actually me; that there were aspects I was sensing as ME that weren’t true expressions of ME. I didn’t want them, and they weren’t ME, but they were habituated, somehow, so they kept happening. By observing them and intending, they faded. In their place, sometimes something else emerged, but often there was nothing specific. More like the sensation of a hole that led to a much larger sense of myself that I didn’t need to explore, so much as allow. The new ME, or perhaps more TRUE ME, needed to express itself out into my life, or the habit would come back and have to be released again in meditation. In a way, the meditation had to continue into daily life, so that the living result that had been built on the habit of clinging had to also stop, and if I depended in any way on that behavior, that dependence had to also be reevaluation. I was touching on a deep structural beam of who I was, and either discovering it wasn’t needed to keep me up, or that it needed to change its nature. Over time, I has sort of propped it up by nailing wood over cracks, wrapping it in duct tape, or propping up another support. The more yin-like meditation was more like replacing the strut with something stronger, or just removing it and letting whatever it was holding up fall into rubble. If it wasn’t me anyway, I should just clean the rubble up and say, ” good riddance.” So it wasn’t just about insights or realizations during meditation. It was about feeling different about who and what I am during meditation and then noticing how my life doesn’t fit right anymore. To complete the work, I had to adjust the life, or allow the life to shift.

After a long time, I started to carry the sensation of letting go with me during my day. I didn’t have to go deep into meditation for a long time to sense that I was clinging in some way, and I’d just immediately phase into a more expanded sense of myself that didn’t cling. I didn’t “try to let go,” so much as simply remember that I was more than this, and that grasping wasn’t necessary. I’m describing how the meditation served to progress into a different way of being in daily life, but I don’t mean to imply that I let go of everything all the time. There was a lot that I could sense as holding, clinging or trying that I couldn’t seem to let go of. Something in me wasn’t changing yet. Anger, for instance got more manageable, and I didn’t flare up as often, but flare ups would still happen.

Along the way, time was passing and the symptoms seemed to travel around my body with the seasons. I learned recently that any attempt to do strength training is essentially a pushing of Qi into the muscular structure, and that muscle tissue is one of the least conductive to Qi. Therefore strength work has a tendency to push the body toward blood stasis. I didn’t understand that, and over the years I kept trying to improve my health by getting a regular physical practice in. I’d do that by pushing myself in walking or jogging, and doing strength training. I didn’t understand then, but can now look back and see the patterns of progress in the one side of my work being compromised by another lifestyle choice, and the back and forth of good with seeming ill health. Stiffness and pain was starting to work its way into my joints, and I suffered more and more from trouble sleeping and dehydration. I’m trying to be honest, in the hopes of showing how there can be progress with problems. My poor little heart keeps getting broken that I’m trying so hard and doing what I learn I should do and even enjoying some good, and then finding something else going wrong. It can feel at the time like a cruel joke, or like its all actually futile. But, something in me doesn’t settle well into futility or carnality, so despite the lapses, I always come back to trying.

My most pronounced and consistent physical symptoms fall in the Chinese Medical Theory into the category of Spleen Qi Vacuity, and the digestive system emits heat often, which indicates too much yang or not enough yin. As part of my progress, I started doing regular distance Medical Qigong treatment with the very capable Jacob Chinn of chinnchinesesmedicine.com. In addition to the Qi work with him, he advised me in learning about the daily life aspect of Spleen and its Earth Element. I could better support the change and healing if I extended the work into my lifestyle, but there was of course much resistance and habit to work through. I learned that Earth involves the quality of understanding that things progress in a piecemeal fashion, with great respect for cycles of activity and rest, and a thorough appreciation for the way things work together. Cooking a recipe requires that you first gather all the things that you’ll need together, and doing that requires attention to quality. Measuring, cutting and preparing has to happen. The recipe is itself an element — a plan that has proven successful, and that you feel excited about. Actually doing everything involves touching, smelling, tasting, watching, listening for the bubbling, or sizzling or the ding of a timer. There is evidence to suggest that cooking with consciousness and love improves its quality. When you finally eat, you’re eating something you’ve gone through all this to prepare, and you tend to digest it better because of that. The whole thing is charged even more if you grow or tend to the food during its infancy, and harvest yourself. All this is part of the Earth Element. By contrast, the way I lived my life could be seen to be drastically imbalanced away from Earth. I wanted everything already prepared, and I didn’t even like to pay attention to what I was eating as I ate. Taking this out of the realm of food and the same could be true. I pounded at work and problems as though to overcome them, and disliked them the whole while. I often wanted to try on my own first, rather than ask for help, or study past knowledge and methods. There were some saving graces. I was still gregarious. I loved being with my friends, being at home, and cuddling close to those people and things that feel supportive. I do my part in those situations, and I don’t rush them; I let them play out. I learned that I had to approach life with much more sensitivity to what level of energy I had at any point in time, and not push past that, while making my daily life more about the gathering and preparing of what I would use and take in. I needed to take care of my home and car and relationships, but acknowledging and honoring the step-by-step aspect of things, and the cycles of activity and rest. I needed to finish what I started, but not necessarily in one sitting. I needed to start things by studying, and planning and gathering. And I needed to enjoy the processes. I found the most poignant resistance in me was my fear of letting people down. By this point, my daily energy was low, and the demands on my time high. I was moody, and suffered sudden exhaustion and emotional overwhelm in the middle of the day. I knew that the expectations I had cultivated on myself by those I cared about was that I would do whatever it took and I was afraid that honoring my own weakness would mean letting people down. I had to go to everyone and tell them to expect less, and talk with me when they were disappointed. I had to experience those moments when they were let down. I wasn’t wrong about hat. It was heartbreaking, and I couldn’t just go back to pushing. All of these are ways in which my life had to change.

A few years ago, I decided that I might be ready to start doing some Qigong again — that my sense of Qi might have balanced enough now so that I could detect both yang and yin and adjust on the fly to maintain balance. If I sensed Qi flow, that would usually be hitting my yang sense, and I would immediately try to reach for the yin sense. If I felt stagnation, or a lack of Qi, I would start first by reaching for my yin sense, and try to construct a channel of yin flow from a yang source, and also try to keep the flow careful, so that the Qi I received was balanced. I would also try to sense what particular balance of Qi was appropriate in each part of my body or life. The Heart system, for instance, likes yang, so I often found that the easiest organ to support. The Lung system likes a balance far more toward the yin spectrum, and has been a lifelong challenge for me. My most pronounced and consistent physical symptoms fall in the Chinese Medical Theory into the category of Spleen Qi Vacuity, and the digestive system was emitting heat often, which indicates too much yang or not enough yin.

I began to force myself into a daily meditation. I was noticing that a lot of problems were arising that indicated stiffness and water-logging in the body. This is actually a sign of yin that doesn’t have enough yang, so I started to hope that this meant I’d made progress. I decided that I could afford a little rebalancing toward yang. Forcing myself to do something equals adding yang. The problem now was low Qi in general in the body. Its as though I know something would be a good idea for me, and I want it, but when it comes tie to do it, the will power doesn’t seem to be there, and everything resists. I don’t just mean I was mopey; I mean even life seemed to get in the way. Timing would suddenly change, and everyone in my life would need me to break with my schedule, or stay up late. The more I tried to start a new habit, the more life seemed to try to keep things the same. In Taoism and Chinese Medical Theory, there’s no such thing as excess yin; only yin without sufficient yang. But, I started to think this could be described as the outcomes of yin excess. It isn’t official, and it isn’t strictly true, but I needed a kind of quick indicator of how to adjust my practice to symptoms, and when lifestyle, timing, the weird vicissitudes of fate, my body, and my habits and cravings all seemed to get in the way of change, I decided I was now too yin, and relying too much on what is already, and not enough on activity and participation in life. If the body becomes too yin, essentially it starts to transform in the way it does when you die. Things dissolve, dissipate, and chemical reactions lose their umph. Gaseous exchange becomes less thorough, and hormonal reactions loose their balance.

So, I forced myself into a daily meditation, getting up at 4 am and doing at least a half hour every day. After many months, it was no longer always at 4 am, but I kept up the meditation, and on Day 1 of my qigong regularity, I was at 661 consecutive meditations. Sometimes, I was doing standing meditation, sometimes qigong, sometimes Taiji, or walking Bagua. Almost always there was a portion that was sitting. Also, I had to adjust my technique each day within the meditation to try to address whatever balancing activity the day needed. For the most part, I need to just sit, breath and intend, and allow yin to drip, drip, drip back into balance. Sometimes it felt like a waterfall pouring, or a wellspring filling me up. Often it felt like an oiled water balloon, and instead of grabbing it, I’d just sort of star at it and wish it could come to me. Sometimes, my meditation was chakra-related, building a clearer sense of self, and a better understanding of what I was doing in my life right now. Often, I was filled with life and memories and fighting fights I’d lost or ignored during my days, playing out fantasies to satisfy my ego, or just plain being confused. I’d have weeks of seemingly no progress during meditation and in life, and I’d just remind myself that regular meditation was already progress and that sometimes yin demands that you wait at the door to honor it. Often, I felt the need for additional qigong work with movement.

Recently I’ve been feeling just as I did before I started the daily meditation, that I needed something more and I knew how to do it, but I just wasn’t doing it. I needed to “come home,” to my body and my qigong. I needed to move the Qi; sort of get the gyro spun up, and THEN sit in meditation. I needed both, and I was concerned that my life, once again, is fighting me adding anything. My body hurts almost all the time, and I am in-between jobs, having been let go of a lucrative and longer term job. I have been driving for Uber to pay the bills, and that involves long hours in relative inactivity, which is hurting my legs and back. It involved bad options for eating, which exacerbated by Spleen Qi Deficiency. And it involved a kind of constant hyper-alertness to avoid accidents and keep myself and my passengers safe, that is hard to counter act with a mere half hour of meditation every day. I’m tired in mind and body often, which compromises the effectiveness of the meditation, and I would sometimes push the car alertness with caffeine, which compromises the depth of my sleep or the acceptance of yin during meditation. All in all, it seemed like I was waiting for a good time and months were going by. I tried to start doing Daoyin, which helped, but without the qigong practice, it just pushed Qi into places that were already stagnant, and caused more discomfort, rather than healed. I needed regularity, and I needed to allow my life to adjust to the changes in me, again.

So, I came to yesterday; a firm decision to start adding at least 1/2 hour of qigong every day to the meditation. I took the time. I did the Guigen Qigong I learned from Dr. Suzanne Freedman, may she rest in peace. I intended to acknowledge my exhaustion and low Qi by doing a 50/50 balance (rather than the normal 70/30) or lower, to keep from overdoing it, which I often do when I’m trying to start something up. I did the Earth and Lung portions 3 times, and did the others just the once. The whole set took me about 35 minutes. After that, I did standing meditation, which I intended to start easily at 10 minutes, but which spread out into 25 minutes. My legs and knees have been giving me trouble, so I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand for more than 10 minutes, but I wanted to do as much of it as I could endure. The standing practice is a powerful way of supercharging all change. It’s basically a lot of yang, just to keep standing in proper posture, and if you can match that to a lot of yin intent, it gets a lot of good going. In the past, I was putting too much yang in my standing, and the result would be lots of heating up of the body. I’d sweat profusely. I had to stand on towels and practice in my underwear. I thought that I was manifesting some of the higher Qi results described in some of my texts. Sadly, I was just pushing Qi into my system with intense focus and will, which served only to strengthen the ego and block off consciousness from sinking blissfully into the tissues.

This time, I felt that I knew how to use the standing and manage the qigong. I was more ready to put in the time, and let time pass without expecting results. I can “Earth” this more now, and I intend to.

Which brings me to the actual logging of the practice above.

Internal Pathogens – Lung/Sorrow in Medical Qigong

Dear Friends,

Under what conditions might a person look to the Lung for the cause and ultimate solution of a malady? Continuing my habit of representing the body in terms of its levels, the physical, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual, one can generally look on each of these levels for characteristics related to problems with filtering, and stringent control of dissemination.

The Lung according to Chinese Medicine harvests from Heaven Qi that portion that’s sufficiently suitable to the person to be readily used by the body. Inhaling introduces ambient air from your external environment more closely into the internal environment of the self, and the air is considered to belong largely to Heaven Qi. The higher the elevation from whence a person inhales their air, the greater is the concentration of Heaven Qi being breathed. The Lung distills this Heaven Qi in the air, filtering out those aspects that are unsuitable to the healthy maintenance of the body, passively transferring it’s harvest to the bloodstream. The exhalation removes some of what was filtered out of the inhalation and can also remove turbid qi transferred to it from the body.

The Western scientific notion that the lungs filter air merely for any oxygen they can get is shy of the Chinese notion of harvesting qi suitable to the person. Likewise the notion that the body emits a few gaseous byproducts into the air for exhalation is a less complex version of the Chinese notion that turbid qi of all kinds can be removed by expelling the breath. One person may choke while another thrives though they both breath the same air; so extreme can be the difference between what each person finds suitable to their health in the air’s qi. For the former, the air contains too little qi suitable to his or her health. For the latter there’s plenty of qi appropriate to health.

The harvesting function of the Lung affords us along with its bounty one of the most common ailments from which we suffer; what we commonly call the “Cold,” but what I’ll call from now on the “Western Cold” to distinguish it from the Chinese Medical diagnosis of Cold. The “Western Cold” is a collection of symptoms that can often be attributed to the clogging of our filtering or respiratory system. As the Lung filters what it doesn’t harvest, the body’s immune system must clear that filtered material back out of the body if exhalation doesn’t do it, and where the filtering outstrips the clearing, a “Western Cold” can develop. Runny nose, sore throat, weakness or labored breathing and cough can represent a Lung weakened under the strain of its own filtered mess.

In Chinese Medicine, each organ is said to have an opening and an exit somewhere in the body. The nose and to a lesser extent the throat are connected to the Lung in function; classical texts describe the Lung as “open[ing] to the nose.” Its exit is through the Large Intestine to which it’s linked in Zangfu Organ Theory and Five Element or Phase Theory. This connection to the Large Intestine won’t be dealt with in this article.

Chinese Medicine assigns a prognosis according to why the filtering outstrips the clearing. If the condition came about because the environment was suddenly far too difficult to filter readily, that might count as a Wind condition, which displays sudden onset severe deterioration of the Lung functioning. If on the other hand it has come about slowly over time, inching its way to illness as it were, this might be considered a Qi Deficiency condition, revealed by weak cough with clear thin sputum, shortness of breath, a soft weak voice, physical and mental exhaustion and a pale face. What differentiates the onset of these two conditions in the body isn’t the speed of their onset, as Qi Deficiency can happen quickly and reaction to Wind invasion can be delayed, but rather in the location of the chief pathogenic factor. If the body’s defenses are stable and strong, but the environment has so severely shifted that even this state of strength can’t readily shift the external qi into usable internal form, then the shift in environment is described as the cause, and the diagnosis involves External Wind Invasion. If on the other hand the internal environment weakens to the point where even one’s usually nutritive environment can no longer be adequately harvested to nourish the internal environment, then the internal shift is described as the cause, and the diagnosis usually involves some kind of Qi Deficiency.

At this point it would be useful to point out that the Lung is considered in Chinese Medicine to be a relatively Yin organ, compared to the body’s general state and the functioning of other organs. Its main use in the body is in its capacity to take in air—an inward motion from the outside is thought of as Yin motion—and passively filter out and concentrate qi from it—both the passivity of its function and the concentration of a nutritive substance are Yin functions. I say that the filtration is passive because the transfer of qi occurs in direct response to the condition or state of the blood or body, and a body deficient in Heaven Qi will tend to draw more of it from the air than one that is suffused with Heaven Qi. Rather than the Lung aggressively grabbing its qi and then and pushing it into the body, the harvesting function is a byproduct of the ideal structure by which transference, a process in Western science called diffusion, is facilitated. Thus the harvesting can be considered to be a passive function. It’s interesting to note that Heaven Qi, a substance thought of as largely Yang in nature is ingested by the body through a relatively Yin organ, supporting the Chinese Medicine focus on Yin Yang harmony in all healthy functions.

Because the Lung is relatively Yin in function, it thrives on a relatively Yin environment, or on Yin Qi. A Yin environment may be considered to be one in which things are cool, soft and receptive, shaded from direct light, moist or watery, and nutritive, solid or concentrated in some way. Just how cool, soft, shady, moist or solid something has to be to support the Lung depends on the person, the time of day, and many other factors, and is one of the things that distinguishes whether one person chokes and the other thrives on any given block of air. One should note also that the Lung’s interaction with Heaven Qi alone, the Heaven Qi being Yang in nature, isn’t inclined to provide the Lung with the Yin Qi on which it thrives. Yin Qi must therefore be provided by the body in which the Lung resides, and the Lung is dependent on the body’s support in this way, just as the body is dependent on the Lung for its harvest of Heaven Qi, to which much of the body, being too internal, has no access. On the other hand, the body often maintains an internal temperature that exceeds that of the surrounding environment (here I’m considering how much of the planet has an average annual temperature lower than the body’s typical internal temperature, and also the vast amount of human history spent dealing with Ice Ages), and the Lung’s inhalation of a relatively cooler substance cools the Lung relative to the body, and thus provides some Yin influence. Balance in both interactions is key to health, as even the Lung requires some warmth to stay alive but not so much warmth that its functioning is impaired.

Western science has admitted to something like the body-to-Lung dependency by describing the lungs as the evolutionary step, or intelligent design that allowed animals to develop into large multi-cellular beings. Cells naturally allow a certain amount of diffusion across their borders to interchange gases with their environments, but when cells cluster together in communities of multi-cellular beings, at some point cells deeper inside the community don’t have enough access to the environment to survive by ordinary diffusion. The development of a lung-like sac to centralize a vast amount of diffusion and a circulatory system that made such diffused material available to the cells in the interior of the community made it possible for organisms to grow as large as the sac could support. Our own lung capacity as humans is quite a bit greater than we usually need in ordinary day-to-day activities. It’s said in many scientific texts that the surface area inside the lungs that’s exposed to air when inhaled, if placed side by side on a flat surface rather than in the many clusters of alveoli contained in the lungs, would cover the surface of a tennis court.

In diagnosis of pathology, often worse than the aforementioned Qi Deficiency to the Lung is a Yin Qi Deficiency, described in symptoms by a severe dry hacking cough either with no sputum or small amounts of very sticky sputum, night sweats, dry, itchy throat and low grade fever. Notice the dryness of the cough and throat, and the heat referred to in night sweating and fever. The Yin Qi Deficiency is when the Lung can’t maintain its own tendency toward cool, soft, receptive, shaded, moist and solid conditions against the heat of the body, either in general or against some nearby heat producing organ, such as the Brain, Heart or Liver. The deficiency isn’t only of qi but of the particular type of qi on which the Lung thrives and its malady then exhibits relatively more severe symptoms due to its incongruence with the surrounding body. Qi Deficiency is a disharmony of the Lung with the external environment. Yin Qi Deficiency is a disharmony of the Lung with both the external and internal environment.

In the conditions of Deficiency, both Qi and Yin Qi, the problem isn’t necessarily with a buildup of mess but with a weakening of the entire mechanism, as with poor support from the body or due to interference from another part of the body. Treating this condition with Qigong requires at least that intention be directed at tonifying or nourishing Lung. When Wind is to blame intention must be directed at least toward clearing or purging, because a buildup of mess, considered in Chinese Medicine as Excess, is part of the problem. If you can determine that your discomfort or illness is due to the Lung and that one or more of these situations applies to you, modify whatever Qigong form you use to serve in this capacity or look to a form that directly addresses the Lung system.

In the Qigong that I teach, Guigen Qigong created by Dr. Xu Yuantao of Beijing, China the fourth cycle or form is directed at the Lung its meridian system and the Large Intestine with it’s meridian system. The inward movement along the Yang aspect of the arm can tonify either Yin or Yang depending on intention, as can the outward movement along the Yin aspect of the arm. Inward direct movement is Yin in nature, but the qi of the hand can focus in a Yang way, emitting qi into the meridian or a Yin way, drawing qi into the arm through the meridian’s access to the external environment as though sucking through a straw. The motions can be tonifying by drawing qi in or envisioning light entering the meridians and organs, or purging by pushing qi out along the meridian or envisioning the attention and hand dredging the meridian and organ systems of its turbid qi. The breath can and should be used to augment the intension, breathing in White light to tonify, which is associated with Metal and the Lung and Large Intestine, and exhaling turbid qi to purge. Be careful to focus only on either purging or tonifying at any one time, since when purging is needed you don’t want to strengthen the current condition and when tonifying is needed you don’t want to further weaken the condition. When in doubt, do neither and just regulate, which would be to do the Guigen unmodified and as taught.

Medical Qigong also assumes that the Lung controls the dissemination of qi to the body as a whole. When the body has difficulty filling up with qi this state can be attributed to the action of the Lung. The Lung might be said to have its hands firmly on the body’s purse strings of qi. Whereas the Liver might serve as a bouncer at the door, the Lung is the man in the back room handing out paychecks, and it may dock everyone’s pay when anyone has misbehaved.

In this capacity, it can be confusing how the Lung differentiates from other organs in their handling of qi. For instance, the Liver is said to be responsible for the smooth flow of qi in the body as a whole, and it’s influence can be to restrain the flow of qi. The Spleen is said to be responsible for the ability of the body to retain qi in the body, and its influence can be felt in how it holds qi tightly or allows it to leak out of the body. The Kidney, as the body’s battery, is responsible for storing and meting out the body’s Jing, its pre-qi substance, and its influence can be felt in the degree to which it reserves transformation of Jing into qi. All of these organs exemplify a capacity to limit the body’s total qi level. The Lung is distinct in that its influence is on the body’s ability to get relatively unprocessed qi from Heaven, and when the Lung is crossed in some way, it simply relaxes its function, thus either diminishing the amount of Yang Qi available to the body or exposing the body to pathogenic invasion from the environment. Whereas the Liver may slow the flow of qi already in the body, the Spleen may leak it, and the Kidney refrain from adding to it from its storehouse of Jing, the Lung simply slows or stops the transference of readily available qi from the environment into the internal environment of the body and Self.

But why? How do we cross our Lung, evoking this passive aggressive revolt? What aspect of our character or soul does the Lung express in its functioning and how does it measure regress against the intentions of the soul?

My philosophy assumes that the soul can’t function in the environment of the sensate universe without the form that we take, and that the aspects of the form embody aspects of the functioning of the soul or of the transformation necessary to manifesting the soul in form. The Lung, being a relatively passive aspect of the self, acts less as an executioner of the soul’s intention and more as a template by which other functions can be readily measured.

Imagine that you were in a bunker on the front lines of a war back in the days when we didn’t have radios. Getting your orders from the generals further away from the front lines was a tedious and long process of sending people by foot or horse away from the battle, having the generals consider and reconsider the plan and then causing those new plans to travel back to the front lines where they can be executed. Since you can’t know what is happening all across the various fronts or theaters of the war, you rely on the instruction from the Generals as to how you might best serve the war in holding, advancing or retreating from the line. How you choose to execute those instructions is up to you because you know better than the Generals the current conditions before you. The Generals, therefore, issue “general” guidelines and trust you to do the best you can to bring about those ends.

The Lung represents you in this metaphor, and the Generals might be considered the Larger Self or the soul. The soul has or had an intention for living this life, and as life is limited, those intentions have certain urgency. The person who defies the soul’s intentions or wastes time disconnects from his or her soul and this weakens the person’s life force. The consequences of this disconnect can be slow to manifest or be realized by the person. The Lung serves as a captain on the front lines of this effort with a plan in hand and exerts a subtle fluctuation of power or fuel to the body’s efforts based on how closely it follows the plan.

To learn to address the functioning and flaws of the Lung, it must be considered that the plan needs to be periodically updated via a messenger sent to the “Generals,” the Larger Self or soul. This means that the pattern that’s imprinted on the Lung, the Lung being passive in nature, is only a template of the soul’s design and not automatically an interactive, constantly updated expression of it. In order to be updated and current, the Lung must communicate with the soul, and in the human body this is facilitated by relatively Yin conditions: lowering of the body temperature, slowing of its processes, calmer deeper breathing, shade or darkness, rest and stationary or sedentary physicality. Sleep, in other words, or at least deep rest offers the Lung its opportunity to reconvene with the soul and update its operating protocols. Meditation is an activity that can be directed toward providing this same effect, and advanced practitioners have been known to go without sleep for long periods of time without apparent loss of health.

As we move in our exploration of the Lung from its physical functioning to its more esoteric aspects, it’s useful to consider this relationship with the rest of the self and with the soul. The Lung filters and harvests the intentions of the soul, inwardly, as it does the Heaven Qi from the environment, externally. The Lung makes the soul’s intention manifest by augmenting the body’s supply of Heaven Qi externally when it acts in compliance with that intention internally, and by limiting its interaction with Heaven Qi externally when it experiences disconnect from the soul and its intention, internally. Just as the person can starve the Lung of intimacy with the soul, the Lung can and does starve the person of intimacy with its nourishing qi, and in equal measure. The Lung administrates the soul intentions passively by keeping its hands on the purse strings of qi in the body. The person nourishes or depletes his or her Lung power by providing it with or depriving it of conditions in which it can commune with the soul.

In Taoist disciplines, the aspirant cultivates the capacity to commune internally and execute externally with each breath, completing a cycle of focus into the center and back out into the sensate universe regularly. This requires the cultivation of the capacity to pay attention generally and on cue. It also requires cultivating the capacity to rest all aspects of the self deeply and completely into stillness on cue. These cues are linked to the breath by various breathing exercises, expanding the direction of attention further inward and outward in balance to each other. The inhale is cued by a shifting of attention toward the sensate universe and the exhale by a shifting inward toward stillness, but the opposite can also be practiced, depending on the goal.

Alternately, one can practice not both with each breath but only one for a time, inexorably deepening one direction. Meditating for a time with breathing exercises directed at stillness and quiet cultivates connection with the soul. Directing the meditation session and breathing exercises toward vitality and clear, unfiltered sensation of the environment cultivates connectivity with the universe outside of the self. At the extreme of the external focus is said to be a sensation that all things partake in the self and thus that the self is all things. At the extreme of internal focus is said to be the sensation that the self pervades all things, all space and time and that therefore all things are the self. Consciousness is described as a cyclical relationship between the self and other that culminates in union of the two into something beyond either called the Tao. Of note to the subject of this article should be the central position of breathing and therefore of the Lung to these exercises.

We’ve explored the physical Lung. In what way might the Lung relate to illness on the emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual levels? As clarified before, the Lung isn’t in charge, but rather the passive enforcer of policy given to it by the soul. Its enforcement likewise is passive in that it withholds activity when something strays from the path. The soul doesn’t leave an imprint of its entirety on the Lung; such capacity can’t even be contained by the activities of a person in an entire lifetime, let alone in one moment by the Lung. Rather, the Lung harvests only a portion of the soul’s intent relevant to current conditions when the Lung communicates with the soul. Before I move on, I just want to mention that if the Lung is deprived of communication with the soul for a time, its imprint can either diminish or become outdated compared to current life conditions. The Lung can sometimes sue for an outcome dictated by its imprint, even though that imprint is no longer valid. When you deprive the Lung of its regular check-in, you increase the chances that it will fall into disharmony with the rest of your body and your life in general. As has been explained, where the person strays from the path outlined by the imprint on the Lung, the Lung’s function is diminished, and the person’s total level of qi is thus limited.

Emotionally, this limitation is experienced as sadness or sorrow. Sorrow resonates in the physical body as lethargy, weakness in the limbs, labored breathing, overwhelm of the eyes, including what’s called the third eye or Yintang point, and convulsions. Sadness resonates also in the mental body as intense memory recall of limited information and dulled recall of all other information, limited sensory registration in the moment or processing of current circumstances, a tendency to interpret new information for its kinship with the internal obsession, and internal representation of the self in negative terms.

The purpose in life of the emotion that is sadness or sorrow is to highlight the fact that something that should have been better valued is no longer available to the self. A person who should have been better appreciated, thing protected or course that should have been taken is now in the past. The failure to value this event when it was present has resulted in an imbalance in its absence. Had it been appropriately and fully valued or enfolded as an experience when it was present, its absence would have been appreciated for its value, also. Instead, its absence is experienced as a diminishment of the perceived self, and the past event must be appropriately valued in order to restore balance. The valuing must now be based on internal recall of the presence of the event.

The Self is not actually diminished. Only the perception of the self is. Just as the Lung weakens the body by starving it of Heaven Qi, the Lung/Emotion weakens the person by starving him or her of connectivity with his or her source of True Self. The perceived diminishment of the Self is the result of believing oneself to be cut off from the soul or god. If you believe that you can be cut off from god, then you are, as god won’t violate your free will. You have chosen to diminish yourself by estranging your self view from the True Self and you must choose the conditions under which you’ll accept again the connection.

Healing this state, sadness or sorrow, requires time be set aside to consider what has been lost and appreciate it for all its good. In addition to time devoted to valuing the event, space must be made appropriate to appreciating it. A healthy healing would involve revisiting places that were significant to the event and handling, and interacting with, things somehow connected to the memory. The space and time devoted to the formerly unappreciated event fills the perceived hole in the Self and heals the rift that was caused by poorly appreciating it when it was present. When the sorrow subsides, the Lung has deemed that the person is more in line with the perceived self and may return to a higher state of qi. Symbolically, the great sigh after a good cry signals the Lung is restoring a higher general state of qi.

A more direct route to healing this state is to recognize that its impossible to be cut off from the True Self and that it is only perception that makes it seem so. By sinking into the well of energy, forgiveness and love that emanates eternally from the True Self, soul or god, the sense of well-being is restored. One can choose to better value the event if it, or anything like it ever comes into life again, and thus diminish the chances of the malady reoccurring. One can opt to be better cognizant of the call of the soul to pay attention to and appreciate this or that, and thus stay in alignment with its intentions. This kind of healing is common for those who claim to be able to have their sins forgiven by a god merely by confessing them. In that belief structure, recognizing the mistake and asking forgiveness is akin to reconnecting with the True Self and is sufficient to restore balance. Again, the disconnect was perceived and not real, so the solution must be believed to be effective.

Mentally, the limitation of qi is particularly severe, because the Lung is starving the body of Heaven Qi, which is Yang in nature. The mind thrives on Yang Qi and is quickly affected, its function ebbing when the Lung disapproves and flowing where it approves. If the mind is considering something that should be better valued, the mind learns to focus on this subject through ready supply of qi, but where the mind is denying what the Lung feels is important, it finds itself suddenly weak and ineffectual. Lung malady is experienced in the mind as morose obsession with a subject that is somehow failing to live up to one’s expectations. The condition is particularly severe if it is the perceived self that fails to live up. People who believe that they are in the wrong profession and are under appreciated are particularly susceptible to Lung/Mind malady, for instance.

Expectations play a key role in this dynamic. Expectations are the mind’s version of the Lung template of the soul’s intention. When the new plans come in from “the Generals” the mind represents them to itself in potential outcomes or activities, either of the world or of the self. We picture things coming into our lives that look just so and sound like so, or we picture ourselves seeming one way or another and sounding this way or that. We experience a future echo of how that will feel in the body—another mind-created internal representation. The mind is involved in comparing and measuring actual sensory data to its internal representations or expected results. Where they differ, the mind can quickly contribute to the limiting action of the Lungs on the dissemination of qi to the body. It’s important, therefore, that one’s expectations are accurate representations of the soul’s intent, and further that they be well balanced with the possibility of being manifested in the world. An inaccurate or unlikely expectation can cause a great deal of unnecessary and wasteful sorrow.

Healing of the mental disturbance that is Lung/Mind again, needs space and time. The mind will heal quickly if its steeped again in the original intension of the soul. If the mind mistook the original intention, it can quickly discover that by reconvening. If it didn’t, then the mind must have time and space in which to replay the course of events and measure more accurately each step along the way. Once it has identified events that adequately account for the current state as it perceives the self and the outer world, it will be able to release the obsession of reconsidering and reengage interaction with the world. In fact it will be eager to do so, to redeem itself by better representing the initial intention.

In Western society the pace of life is often so speedy that adequate time isn’t given to the mind to fully process events. Some people whose natures make them particularly mentally active are even more affected by this discrepancy between activity and contemplation. Much time seems to be devoted in the West to understand why we have such headaches, why we seem emotionally unstable, why we are so often confused or seem cut off from our sense of our own souls or god. I submit that we have valued activity over contemplation to our own detriment. I don’t suggest that life should be all contemplation, but rather that a balance must be sought between our level of activity in daily life and the space and time we give to our mind to do its part for us. Absent this balance we will continue to experience a kind of low level constant hum of disappointment and misery that is Lung malady. We’ll continue to see a high incidence of asthma and Lung and nasal-related allergies to our environment. We’ll deal with continuing suicides from depression and our addiction to stimulants will only worsen.

Psychically, the limitation of the Lung filters new opportunity when what is already in the life is poorly appreciated. Our psychic selves, a poorly understood phenomenon, are those aspects of ourselves that go out into the sensate universe and manifest conditions or choices for the Self that are aligned to the Self. A healthy psychic body is exemplified by a life that challenges the Self to grow only to that extent that it’s ready and equipped to do, and brings ideal opportunities to do so. An unhealthy psychic body is measured by how the life and conditions surrounding the self are disconnected from a person’s own highest good. Those who are ill from Lung/Psychic problems find themselves bereft of change or opportunity to grow in their lives. Sometimes, even when proper appreciation has been restored, the Lung/Psychic activity takes longer to bring new opportunities, deeming it necessary to provide time and space to build new habits. Alternately, the Lung/Psychic may harvest or bring into the person’s life repeated examples of past opportunities that were poorly assimilated. When a person feels that they’re unconsciously recreating the same unpleasant situation over and over, the Lung may by disciplining the self to better appreciate some misunderstood piece.

Healing the psychic level of the Lung, once you’ve identified there is a problem there, is once again accomplished through the appropriate application of space and time. Keep in mind that the Lung is a relatively passive entity, and that usually some rest will help. People whose lives have seemed to slow down unpleasantly are failing to appreciate their current circumstances. Slower passage of events or fewer new events allows a fuller inspection and appreciation of the present. If you’re in-between jobs, you’re able to get much more rest and to schedule your day more around the ebb and flow only of your own dynamics. If you’re in-between lovers, you have great opportunity to discover what you’re like without the confusion that interactivity and compromise requires. Look to developing your capacity to appreciate each thing that comes into your life fully and completely before its gone again, and “newness” will be measured by your own creativity and capacity to appreciate, rather than by the rate at which new things pass in front of you.

On the other hand, it’s worth considering that a little Yang can go a long way with the Lung. Just as the Heaven Qi can cool the Lung pleasantly relative to the heat of the body, an action or two may be just what the doctor ordered when life seems too cluttered with sameness. If you’re stewing in the same old same old, it might be that your character has tended too much toward the Yin and receptive, and you need to take new action. Perhaps you’re just waiting for life to happen to you or expecting that the same old behavior will somehow magically spawn new results. Perhaps in the past it has. Look to the level and nature of your own activity and try spicing it up just a little. Remember that the Lung is a Yin organ, so drastic action may have a negative consequence, even if it does relieve the boredom. Yet action could help, because the Lung could sit all day in contemplation of the spirit and be happy and content. “Life isn’t a sitting meditation, it’s a moving experience.”¹

Since I’ve described the Lung as the organ that imprints instruction from the soul, the spiritual aspect of disharmony of the Lungs must be considered from a higher perspective. The Lung reflects the absolute necessity that the person on the ground, so to speak, or the ego borne out of life, stay closely connected to the intentions of the Soul. The soul imprints its visions and goals for this life on the Lung/Spirit through visions, intuition and deep contemplation. The Lung then enforces these intentions in the course of daily life. Where the course of daily life diverts from or rebels against these intentions an implicit agreement has been breeched. The life given to the body or person by the soul isn’t being appreciated, and an implicit promise to use the limited time well has been broken.

Illness of the Lung/Spirit is experienced as a fog or confusion as to by what design we should guide our lives or choices. When you don’t know what to do or what would be most meaningful to you in major choices, or you find yourself often in situations that are dissonant to your highest good, then you are suffering illness of Lung/Spirit. The malady may also be experienced as an inconsolable loneliness even in the midst of loving company and a nourishing environment. The loneliness is the perceived absence of the nourishing soul or divine source of vitality. The further we stray from our soul’s intent, the weaker we become in guidance from the soul. If I fail to listen to my navigator and choose turns and byways against his or her advice, eventually his or her roadmap may fail to contain accurate guidance for my location.

The Lung/Spirit is healed by time spent in such a way as to highlight the Self to the Self. Experience must be created that mirrors the deeper self to the Self. Experience the pure dynamic of the Self. This means either time spent alone, so that you’re the dominant influence on your experience, or time spent steeped in things that are true to the Self, as in people and environments that have a good track record of being pure expressions of your deeper self. Draw closer around you those things that radiate your deepest truth and act in accordance with them in all things, and the Lung/Spirit will heal readily. Go back to the family or to the land of your birth, or the conditions under which you experienced most of your training to reconvene with the basis of how you came to be. Indulge in your friends and ask them to reiterate to you the best self that they see in you. Wear your comfy clothes. Practice your first and most basic exercises.

There’s a concept in physics called coherence used to describe the way light begins to act as though it is a conscious whole under certain conditions. Another useful physics concept is that of constructive wave interference. The above suggested activity affects an increase in coherence of a person’s sense of their self or their soul by aligning oneself with it wholly for a time. It also allows for constructive interference in that the perceived sense of self is augmented in those ways in which it overlaps the True Self. The wave that is the energy of Self is augmented and its greater amplitude becomes easier for the person to read and retain. The Lung/Spirit gets a clearer imprint.

As with the previous consideration of Yang being used to heal the Yin Lung, another healing method for Lung/Spirit is the more Yang activity of commitment. Put simply, spirit is strengthened generally by making a promise and then keeping it, regardless of the difficulty involved. Even a promise made and kept that was easy to keep feeds the spirit. Where Lung/Spirit has been injured an appropriate promise or commitment can go a long way toward putting a person on the road to recovery. Identify what aspect of the Self has been sacrificed or denied and make a promise that restores that Self to you. Then, keep it.

Your friend in the Tao,

Lihai Sherman, CMQ

Qigong Instructor

I Qi You

 

 

 

© Copyright I Qi You, May, 2007

Footnote 1: from Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman

Further research:

Lungs ‘best in late afternoon’, BBCNews, Tuesday, October 26, 2004
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3951797.stm)

Psychospiritual Aspects of Traditional Chinese Medicine, by Francesca Diebschlag, BAc Bphil, MBAcC Mrchm, PlanetHerbs Online, Copyright Francesca Diebschlag, 1997
(http://www.planetherbs.com/articles/psych_tcm.html)