Qigong helps you regulate the flow of energy by means of your physique, which instantly impacts how you’re feeling each bodily and emotionally. The phrase qigong actually interprets to qi or chi, which means “very important pressure” or “life power,” and gong, which suggests “practiced talent.”
In keeping with Chinese language drugs, chi is synonymous with life, and its most important attribute is motion.
When chi strikes by means of your physique in a peaceful and regular manner, you’re feeling wholesome, balanced, and vibrant. However when chi is caught, you’re feeling bodily and emotional ache; when chi is erratic, you’re feeling moody and unstable; and when chi is sluggish, you’re feeling torpid and heavy.
With a purpose to really feel good, you need to help a wholesome movement of chi, and there are a lot of totally different ways in which qigong helps you do that.
The preferred kinds of qigong contain gradual, mild actions that focus the thoughts and chill out the physique as a type of shifting meditation. The breath naturally turns into deep and gradual when utilizing these practices because the sympathetic nervous system turns down its stress response and the parasympathetic nervous system activates.
However qigong is not all the time gradual and mild.
There’s a faculty of qigong referred to as Jinjing Gong that includes lengthy stretches of “shaking.” While you follow Jinjing Gong, you bounce up and down in place, vocalize with grunts and moans, and infrequently slap or faucet particular channels and organs within the physique.
When you’re brand-new to the tactic, you will nearly undoubtedly really feel self-conscious the primary few occasions you attempt it. However the useful results will be actually transformative, as Jinjing Gong is believed to assist your physique discharge stress and trauma. In his guide, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., discusses how animals naturally “shake off” stress after doubtlessly traumatic occasions, whereas the human inclination is to suppress this primal response.
Curiously, after practising qigong for some time, many individuals discover that even the slower qigong practices can induce mild tremors within the physique, much like the shaking you would possibly expertise when lifting heavy weights. That is seen as signal that caught chi is beginning to transfer and rigidity is being launched.