Of all the benefits attributed to Qigong, the health benefits are in some ways the most obvious and straightforward.  Leaving aside any of the more exotic explanations for the moment, as sequences or sets of exercises, often performed slowly and mostly physiologically sound, they can encourage otherwise inactive people to get moving and start enjoying the known and widely proven benefits of a more active lifestyle, such as improvements in strength, stamina, flexibility, co-ordination, balance, circulation, bone-density, lung capacity and overall experience of well-being.

 

The same might be said of a daily walk around the block but Qigong exercises have added advantages in that:

 

* they can be performed indoors in privacy and in a very small space, 

 

* they stretch and work specific parts of the body as well as providing an overall

   workout,

 

* when performed in a class or group setting they can have added social benefits,

 

* they can provide an excellent warm up prior to that walk around the block!

 

Some Qigong sets may be very suitable for older people or people recovering from illness or injury.  Some may be fun for children to do in school as part of their PE lessons.  Others maybe physically quite challenging and require a certain level of fitness and flexibility before embarking on them.  Some may require considerable practice and expert guidance in order to master them, notably the Nei Gong exercises used in martial arts training systems. 

 

There are many different Qigong exercises and it is important to look for those which best suit your own needs and capabilities.

 

Any Qigong sets which break UK best practice with regard to health and safety, such as anything which involves twisting the knees in unnatural ways or putting excessive strain on the neck, lower back or pelvic floor. 

 

For example, the Yi Ching Jing, also known as the Muscle Tendon Changing Classic, can be very extreme (especially if performed wrongly or over-enthusiastically) and is particularly unsuitable for older people, people with back problems and anyone unaccustomed to a fairly demanding regular exercise regime.  Please beware of the current wave of teachers (often Chinese) claiming that this is ideal exercise for the elderly.

 

 

 

In addition to the obvious physical benefits of any safe form of exercise, there are various other theories of how Qigong brings about improved physical well-being.  Most Qigong practitioners, and others, believe that improvements in health are a result of rebalancing the flow of energy or Chi (Qi)  through the body's meridians or energy channels.

 

 

It is these energy channels which Acupuncturists attempt to unblock  - by the insertion of needles into the body, or by the application of heat or pressure - in order to allow the chi to flow more freely through the body.  Illness is thought to be a result of blockages or "stagnant chi" or other imbalances in the chi flow.

 

It is also widely believed that this flow can be directed within one's own body, and possibly the bodies of others, by the conscious will.  This clearly has parallels with various other disciplines and practices, such as Reiki healing, the "laying on of hands" and the direction of the flow of "Prana" through the chakra centres in Kundalini Yoga.

 

See also "Chi: does it exist and, if so, what is it?"

 

 

Any stuff about how you can seriously damage yourself by directing your chi in the wrong way.  Some Qigong "masters" are really into this as a scare story and claim that you need to be trained for many years and shouldn't practice unsupervised in case you injure yourself by causing disturbances in your chi.  Whether or not you are happy to pay vast sums of money for this kind supervision, look at it this way - if you can move energy down your arm by stroking it with your other hand, and this can be done wrongly without expert guidance, then presumably you risk the direst consequences every time you have an unsupervised bath or shower and wash a potentially vulnerable limb!  If it is also possible to injure yourself by standing for a few minutes a day in Zhang Zhong posture (over and above getting a  bit of back ache from leaning instead of standing up straight) then it must be very dangerous to stand around at a bus stop for more than five minutes.  (Perhaps transport planners need to know this as an urgent incentive for keeping trains and buses on time.)   Personally, I would consider that you are in more danger from passing traffic and muggers than from anything you could inadvertantly do to yourself by standing still. 

 

 

 

In my personal opinion, I feel that we have yet to fully appreciate the capacity of the human mind to enable the body to heal itself.  I have considered this for many years and it seems to me that there are certain key ingredients involved in a successful healing - and this applies as much to conventional medicine as to "alternative" or "complementary" practices such as Qigong.

 

In a nutshell, if you believe its good for you, it more than likely will be.

 

More specifically, the key ingredients can be summarised by the five vowels, a, e, i, o and u which stand for:

 

 

 

If you expect to get better, you intend to get better, you believe that you will get better and focus all of your attention on getting better, the likelihood is that you will at least increase the probabillity that you will get better. 

 

On the other hand, if you have ever phoned in sick when you were not really all that ill when you phoned, you may have discovered how a few hours of seriously playing the role of an ill person to assuage the guilt of skiving off work can make you feel genuinely awful and thus help to justify your absence and ease your conscience.

 

Interestingly, if your predominant thoughts are of fighting this terrible illness, your attention is largely focussed on the illness rather than recovery and therefore this may be a less effective strategy than visualising yourself as healed and well.  (In a similar manner, focussing on getting out of debt tends to lock the attention on the word "debt".  It can be far more useful to refocus the attention on wealth, abundance and feelings of gratitude for what you already have.  This is the basis of so-called "abundance theory" and, whatever you think of it, it seems to work for many people so it's probably worth giving it a try.)

 

In essence, what you put your attention on tends to grow and become your reality.  This is an accepted principle in the field of psychotherapy.  More surprisingly perhaps, it was given a lot of credence by quantum physicists, who observed that the outcome of an experiment is influenced by the presence and expectations of an observer.  (Whether or not you agree with the Copenhagen interpretation of the double slit experiments, there is still much food for thought here).  Remember this next time you have an argument with a photocopier.

 

In terms of your expectations, a positive outlook can have a direct effect on your immune system and possibly other bodily functions.  Many of you may have seen the TV series in which a female doctor investigated alternative therapies and came across a case in which dozens of people went into hospital for a knee operation.  Half of them actually had the operation, the other half had an incision made and later duly stitched up but, unbeknown to them, no actual repair done to the knee.  Both groups subsequently enjoyed an equal degree of recovery from their original knee problems.  This doesn't mean that it was all trickery: surely it calls for a reappraisal of how the human mind can influence physiological processes.

 

It is also clear from this that health professionals and others need to be very careful about the language they use with their clients, for example, focussing on the vast majority who make a full recovery rather than the less fortunate few.  The media currently tends to have this back to front, since scare stories sell better than hope stories.  It also means that we ourselves need to be very careful about the language we use in our heads or when speaking to others about ourselves.  

 

In general, it may be helpful to avoid too much reference to illness and keep our attention on wellness.

 

So far, this is all fairly obvious, which brings us to the subject of obviousness, which comes down to a question of belief.  People tend to get better if they believe they will get better, but why do any of us hold a particular belief?

 

If you believe something because other people said it was true (your parents, religious leaders, the media) this is faith.  If you believe it because it has been experiementally verified by thousands of scientist across the globe, this is still a kind of faith in a way because scientific concensus only reflects our current level of understanding of how things are and it is always possible that new experiments or new interpretations of existing data can turn things upside down.  Apparently Isaac Asimov once said that great discoveries don't normally start with someone crying "Eureka" but with someone scratching their head and muttering "That's funny..." (New Scientist 14th August 2008 - Book reviews)

 

On the other hand, if you believe something as a result of your own direct experience, this is possibly more reliable, though you would have to be pretty sure that your experience was not a result of hallucination or hypnotic suggestion and that's not always as easy as it sounds.  There are some things, however, which seem blindingly obvious to most people.  Once you have burned your finger on a cooking pot once in your life, it seems pretty obvious that touching hot things is not a particularly sensible thing to do.  Obviousness, therefore, is a state of belief deeper than faith and it can fundamentally affect the way we look at the world, the way we live our lives and the way we recover from illness.

 

It becomes obvious that the human mind potentially has the power to heal itself and the body when one recognises one thing: unity.

 

Now this will take a bit of explaining, and if you're really interested, you can go straight to the section on "spiritual" Qigong.  Basically, it's the awareness of the universe as a single entity and the recognition of one's own mind as continuous with, not separate from, that one, indivisible whole.

 

If this seems a bit far-fetched then study the writings of such people as Albert Einstein, Irwin Schroedinger, Max Plank and others (See "Words of the Wise").

 

In Qigong, the concepts of pre-birth chi and post-birth chi describe this nicely, as does the philosophy represented by the Tai Chi Symbol.  Logically, if one's own mind is continuous with that of the universe that gave rise to it, then by clearing out a few misconceptions and stepping back from our own little ego a bit, it may begin to become obvious that we can have rather more influence over our health and our destiny than we previously suspected.

 

 

To be charitable in my interpretation of their behaviour, some people appear to like to increase the recognition of obviousness by the prices they charge for their services.  After all, if it costs a couple of thousand pounds to learn a sequence of seven simple movements, then obviously it must be good stuff, mustn't it?  Maybe, but might it have been equally effective if it had cost you fifty quid?

 

Does this sound a bit cynical?  If expectations etc are so powerful, why don't I focus exclusively on the amazing power of Qigong to bring about miracle healings, and on the amazing gurus who facilitate such miracles and must therefore be revered and respected?

 

Well because most "gurus" tend to turn out to be very dodgy in one way or another and I have more respect for my students than I have for them.  I expect my students to keep their feet firmly on the ground and question everything that I or others tell them; while I in turn endeavour to keep a reasonably open mind, study as widely as possible and share any new discoveries I make with them as topics for discussion and debate. 

 

Yes, I do believe there can be miracles, things I can't yet quite explain and which cause me to look on in awe and simply be thankful.  To me the universe itself is a miracle.  I have never understood why people need exotic events that defy the laws of nature when those very laws, and life itself, are the greatest miracles of all (though I daresay we haven't discovered them all yet - which is probably just as well because we can still enjoy the process of exploration and discovery that is one of the great joys of life.)