I am interested in Qi Gong but don’t know where to start. Could anyone recommend some basic beginner Qi Gong exercises? I am mainly looking to increase my vitality.
Thank you very much.
Try this post for starters:
There is other content about qigong on this forum.
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There’s a wealth free on youtube, and it’s all the same after a while. Spell it qigong as one word and I think you get more Chinese and fewer westernized results.
This video has a good high level intro into what things are for a foundational orientation.
Mantal Chia is very good and had many books and youtube training videos including many playlists for complete subjects.
His “Basic Training” playlist:
If all you did was bingewatch Mantak Chia and follow along you’d be golden. After a point you’d just be able to practice to the level you’re comfortable with and not watch much more.
Book wise, the first two links here:
Your first main milestone is learning to run the microcosmic orbit. With that alone and the knowledge under it, you are set for life.
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If there are any acupuncture practitioners near you, they may have qi gong classes sometimes these are free or not expensive evening/weekend classes.
Technically my understanding is that Qi Gong is the foundation of all traditional Chinese medicine.
Simple movements involve stomping, conjuring a giant energy ball and tossing that into the air, and moving your arms about in graceful movements as if you were stirring the air like a cauldron for a magic spell.
I haven’t done Qi Gong for awhile but went to some weekly community classes for that years ago they were good.
Sounds like you are talking here about tai chi, which is a health exercise coming out of the marital art Tai Chi Chuan, not qigong per se, though the martial art uses qigong practically.
Qigong just means [life force] energy training, so there’s lots of ways to do that.
Qigong does have both moving and still forms of training. Personally I only do the still forms. Running the microcosmic orbit is a still form.
… a bit more about different categories of qi training where a few people input here:
https://forum.becomealivinggod.com/t/true-chi-quong-mastery/43524
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Well it could be the Qi Gong classes I went to they were using Tai Chi techniques, but they didn’t say that they claimed it was Qi Gong.
Did they at least get you to where you can find your lower Dan tian?
Because “moving your arms about in graceful movements” is not qigong, that’s dancing: you need to add the mental direction to your qi to move it and be actually doing energy training.
“Energy follows mind.”
Ok thank you very much. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.
I like this explanation of the Yi Jin Jing excersizes
Gave a good place to start off with how to go about where and how to start physically doing Qi Gong excersizes for me at least.
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If you are interested in qigong then I highly recommend Anthony Korahais’ 5-Phase Routine. It can be done in less than 15 minutes and acts as a safety mechanism that protects you from deviations caused by incorrect practice. My favorite part is that it doesn’t contradict with any other qigong style (you can literally plug in any qigong exercise you see on youtube into the 5PR and enhance the benefits of them).
I might write a guide on how to practice it one day but for now you can learn it for $10 from his book on amazon (Sorry! Something went wrong!)
And here’s more information on it:
P.S. I personally don’t recommend practicing the Microcosmic Orbit on your own until you are sensitive to qi energy (or at least able to feel it). This allows you to feel any internal injuries you might get before they become serious.
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Also: stand with your knees slightly bent, chin a little “in” i.e. towards your neck, lower back protruding as if you were about to sit. That’s a basic/standard posture.
Now raise your arms with bent elbows, hands at the sides of your faces with the palms forward and walk around opening and closing your hands.
Then stop, returning to the posture, raise your left hand bringing the palm in front of you, turn your upper body to the left (keep your hand in front of your face), then return in the “normal” direction. Lower your arm while turning your hand so that the palm is forward, meanwhile raise your right arm and let your palms face each other. Now look at your right palm, basically almost like your hands are mirror, turn to the right etc.
3 repetitions; then rotate 3 times your shoulders clockwise and counterclockwise.
These are some exercises from Paul Lam’s warming up.
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So just to confirm, it is basically like the middle pillar energy circulation, but just for the torso, correct? The instructions I read said to inhale through the perineum, up the back, and then to exhale from the shoulders down the front of the torso. Is all of this correct?
The Precious Eight, also known as the 8 Pieces of Brocade. It’s a popular moving Wu Dan form with some simple variations.
Don’t bother with the microcosmic order in the beginning. It’s not necessary. Learning to properly regulate the breath is more important.
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No, I’m not certain but I think Kabbalah is a different system, it doesn’t deal will with the mechanics of the meridians and relies too heavily on a limited kind of symbolism to get the job done. It doesn’t seem to be an adequate or complete energy system and rather than mix and match, given everything I need is in qigong, I don’t worry about other systems.
As @DarkestKnight said, you have to build up - I mentioned the microcosmic orbit as a good milestone, because it needs you to get the fundamentals of breathing and reading your own energy first, if you can run it you have all that and so you’re golden. These are really quite simple and you can probably already do it and just hadn’t noticed. Once you have that if there’s only one qigong exercise you could do for the rest of your life I’d say the microcosmic orbit was it.
To run the microcosmic orbit means you know:
- How to cultivate (breathe in) qi from the cosmos
- How to collect and concentrate that qi in lower dan tian and feel it
- How to mentally find and read the main points on the du mai meridians
- How to move your qi from point to point through these meridians
Well that’s not quite what I do. I do:
- Full body breathing to Lower Dan tian first. x9
- Breathe normally and run that collected energy through the microcosmic orbit from lower dan tian down to hui yin, then up and around. x3 - x9 It runs as fast or slow as it likes.
- I may continue to cultivate while running the orbit, breathing it into lower dan tian usually.
I do this at the start of every ritual and meditation I do.
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Just tried it. Quite remarkable how the circulation “zones you in”. It is much more of an “active” feeling that I thought it would be.
I’m guessing most of the time our chi just gets randomly dispersed.
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Yes, and there were specific movements that teacher led not as in dancing but everyone practicing same movements as a group.
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Not exactly… It resides not in the body, but in the qi body which consists of the organs and meridians. It may not disperse itself all that evenly depending on your lifestyle but it will try to stay balanced.
It’s worth knowing that qi is considered sentient and intelligent, and when not directed tends to go where it’s needed, kind of like water finding it’s level.
E.g., This is a problem if it thinks it’s needed where it’s really not, like, say the kidneys because you are afraid and stressed often… but you don’t really want a buildup of qi in the kidneys long term as this is an imbalance that can lead to sickness. Emotions can generate qi in the qi body and vice versa, and this can manifest down into the physical. This, in qigong, is the mechanism for all disease: dysregulation and imbalance in the qi body.
But it can also get habituated into an area, so that if you are actively trying to change the qi in an area after it’s been a certain way for a long time, you might have to repeat a few times to get it settled. Similarly “new qi” being given to an area can flow away and dissipate and need to be repeatedly put there to keep it in place and let it get settled into that new norm.
This makes practice quite forgiving, but at the same time it needs some consistency to make bigger more permanent changes.
Finally, when working with qi, bring up feelings of joy and love, party because they relax you, and any tension in the muscles partially blocks the flow of qi, and partly because it responds to that feeling very strongly and easily, so you get bigger effects faster.
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So too much chi is the cause of disease, not a lack of chi. Thats interesting. I would have assumed it to be the opposite.
Will it most likely cause inflammation, or is it much more general than that?
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It’s both and more. Imbalance of qi is the cause of disease. That can be too much, too little, or the wrong kind of qi, too yang too yin, or elementally imbalanced for the associated organs and their related meridians.
No inflammation is a manifestation in the physical body, which is not the qi body. Imbalanced qi will cause different effects and how that manifests physically depends on where and how.
You would have to read the qi, but generally, inflammation is hot and may be too yang. But it blocks qi so the qi amount could be normal or weak, it’s just too darn yang (hot) for the area. To fix this you can add yin qi or remove yang qi.
But inflammation from arthritis often feels cold and windy, so in this case you can remove the wind and add warm qi to balance it back to normal.
You have to be dynamic and read the individual situation before making a decision on treatment.
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tai chi is the movement without the internal energy, its like doing boxing or a sport. QIGONG is the actual art. I followed a mornign stretch for two weeks, that healed my back, knees and hips…I’ll link below.
