Qigong helps you regulate the circulate of vitality via 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 power” or “life vitality,” and gong, which suggests “practiced talent.”
According to Chinese medication, chi is synonymous with life, and its most important attribute is motion.
When chi strikes via your physique in a relaxed and regular method, you’re feeling wholesome, balanced, and vibrant. But 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.
In order to really feel good, you need to help a wholesome circulate of chi, and there are a lot of totally different ways in which qigong helps you do that.
The hottest kinds of qigong contain gradual, mild actions that focus the thoughts and loosen up the physique as a type of transferring 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.
But qigong is not at all times gradual and mild.
There is a faculty of qigong referred to as Jinjing Gong that entails lengthy stretches of “shaking.” When you observe Jinjing Gong, you bounce up and down in place, vocalize with grunts and moans, and sometimes slap or faucet particular channels and organs within the physique.
If you are brand-new to the strategy, you will nearly positively really feel self-conscious the primary few occasions you strive it. But the useful results could be really transformative, as Jinjing Gong is believed to assist your physique discharge stress and trauma. In his e-book, 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 probably traumatic occasions, whereas the human inclination is to suppress this primal response.
Interestingly, after working towards qigong for some time, many individuals discover that even the slower qigong practices can induce mild tremors within the physique, just like the shaking you would possibly expertise when lifting heavy weights. This is seen as a very good signal that caught chi is beginning to transfer and rigidity is being launched.