Qi Gong for Engineers

What is Qi Gong?

Qi Gong is short for Qi Gong Fu, which loosely translated, means “the intense, difficult study of Qi”.

As a friend of mine put it, its the “Art” in the “Martial Arts”. So Qi Gong refers to the internal energy and resources parts of the martial arts, vs. Gong Fu (Kung Fu) which refers more to the martial pieces.

Of course, that doesn’t help much, because the real question is then:

What is Qi?

There is nothing mysterious about Qi. You have experienced Qi. Every human being has, its just that most people have never been given a name for the innumerable sensations that happen to you as you go about your day.

The first thing to understand is that Qi is not a specific thing. Its really a catch all term to refer to all the the natural resources of your body. The cheeseburger you ate for lunch? Think of that as “food Qi”. The air you just breathed? Think of that as “Oxygen Qi”. Your body has certain resources, and it can move those resources around as needed.

Even more interesting, with some training, you can bring those resources under your conscious control in that you can direct those resources where needed, and you can sense where those resources are and what they are doing. Everyone can do this, its just a matter of practice in the same way that playing a lot of video games might improve your eye-hand coordination.

What is Tonic Qi Gong?

If you accept that your body has these resources, you know everything you need to know to understand Tonic Qi Gong at the beginning levels. Tonic Qi Gong is based on a simple idea:

It is a good thing to evenly distribute your natural resources around your body in order to make sure that every portion of your body has adequate access to those resources.

So Tonic Qi Gong (and Tai Chi, which is pretty much the same thing) consists of a set of certain postures coupled with visualizations to help you evenly distribute your Qi around your body. Everyone has pretty much the same body, so standing in certain ways or moving your body in certain ways will encourage your body to move Qi in certain ways. Add 3000 years of trail and error by the Chinese and you have a set of very simple exercises that will improve your health and make you feel better.

A classic Qi Gong exercise is standing with your knees slightly bent, forming your hands into loose fists and swinging them forward together. If you do this for 5 minutes every morning, it will substantially improve your health and you’ll wake up faster. Its sort of obvious how this works, as just this simple exercise forces a certain amount of gentle muscle movement and circulation over your whole body.

Beyond Tonic Qi Gong, Leaving Mechanical Medicine Behind

After you do Tonic Qi Gong for awhile, certain things start to happen to you:

• Your body’s systems start to improve. In my case, I eat about 25% smaller portions then I used to. Basically, my body is now more efficient at digesting food then it used to be. I’m also slowly gaining muscle and losing fat.
• You start to be able to sense Qi as it moves around your body.
• You start to be able to consciously control your own Qi.
• You start to realize that Qi is more then just food and oxygen.
• You realize that there are forms of Qi that extend beyond the physical body.

That’s kind of a weird moment. You start to refer to Qi as “energy” when talking to other people because that’s how it feels to you. Yet at the same time, the sensations of Qi are something you’ve always felt, you just didn’t have any terminology for describing it before. That’s the point where you start to leave the mechanical view of Western medicine behind, because it no longer jives with your personal experience.

Applications of Qi Gong start to occur naturally to you after that. A typical experience would be something like this: You’re doing some sort of Tonic Qi Gong posture where you have to hold your arms up for quite awhile. After a bit, your arms start to hurt. Your instructor tells you that instead of pulling your mind away from your arms (because they hurt), to put your mind “into” your arms.

You do that, and they stop hurting. Basically, while its perfectly natural to pull your mind away from pain, in this instance that makes things worse, because by pulling your mind away you are also pulling resources away from your arms. So your arm hurts more. You come to realize that there are two kinds of pain signals from your body. “I’m hungry.” and “I’m injured.” If your body is hungry for Qi, what it really wants is for you to pay more attention to it not less.

This insight goes a long way to relieving lots of the aches and pains we all suffer. For me, they are mostly a momentary issue. If a part of my body complains, I pay it a bit of attention and it feels better. I’ve also noticed that everyone really knows little bits of Qi Gong already from living in our own bodies. If your arm hurts, you rub it to make it feel better. You’ve learned over the years that it works, so you do it.

So you start to wonder. Can I make others feel better with my Qi Gong knowledge? The answer is yes, but that’s beyond Tonic Qi Gong, that’s Therapeutic Qi Gong.

Therapeutic Qi Gong & External Forms of Qi

Therapeutic Qi Gong is simple matter manipulating someone else’s Qi in order to correct some problem. This can be done either through certain physical maneuvers like the low-level tonic systems do, or directly once you learn methods of affecting other peoples Qi. To apply it though, you have to be able to sense other people’s Qi so you know what treatments to apply. That’s where the “voodoo” factor comes in for most people. Having someone sense your Qi, and then manipulate it is a very weird experience.

Except, really, everyone can already sense other peoples Qi. When my wife was injured by accidentally breathing some chlorine gas, if I put my hand anywhere near her lungs, I would get then intense sensation of freezing cold. Of course, that was my wife who I had developed extra sensitivity too. Most married couples have experienced sensing other peoples Qi. The only difference between me and most other people is just that I’ve spent more time training my sensitivity. It doesn’t require any extra “sense”, its not ESP, its quite frankly the same sense of touch everyone has.

But what am I “feeling”? Frankly, no one knows, but the prevailing theory is that Qi is related to electricity somehow. If you’ve ever played with one of those plasma balls lamps in a store, you’ve noticed that you can feel electric charges. Similarly, if you’ve ever walked close to a very high power electric line, you could sense that as well. From personal experience of playing with one of those plasma ball lamps, it seems that the external forms of Qi (beyond food and oxygen) somehow relate to electricity.

Which throws a new light on Tonic Qi Gong, because tense muscles don’t conduct electricity as well as relaxed muscles. By holding your body in certain positions in Tonic Qi Gong, you are forcing your bodies electricity to take certain paths at the expense of others. It also shouldn’t be overly surprising that you might have a certain amount of control over the flow of electricity in your body, and that the body’s electricity might be used by the body in various ways that we don’t yet understand. We probably will someday, just not yet.

This also explains how someone can manipulate someone else’s Qi. Perhaps a Qi practitioner is simply generating electromagnetic fields of a certain frequency or shape in an effort to change the shape of someone else’s electromagnetic fields. No voodoo needed!

So as a Qi Gong healer, I’m not practicing voodoo, just electrical engineering!

Which, it turns out, is what I am…