Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
This last weekend I had the opportunity to take a class on the wood element in Taoism, which specifically focused on learning how to work with the ligaments and tendons of the body. It was an intense class, where we spent a lot of time doing qi gong (moving meditation) around tensing and releasing the ligaments and tendons. What I found most fascinating though was the internal work that happened around these activities.
When I do moving meditation, sometimes the focus is on just doing the movement and fully immersing yourself in the experiences that come up as you do the movement. The focus on movement is essential because you are moving your body in incredibly sophisticated and subtle ways. For example, a slight sensation of kneeling down can involve the tensing and releasing of ligaments in your feet. Likewise, straightening and folding your arms can involve a similar experience of moving the ligaments.
When you think of moving an arm or a leg, you may not necessarily think of the ligament and tendons. Or if you do, it may not occur to you that you could simply move your arm or leg with the ligaments alone. Learning this kind of awareness of how your body moves can teach you a lot about your body and has some useful long term health benefits because of how you ultimately can massage your internal organs through such movements.
The internal work aspect (beyond the physical and qi benefits) can also come in the form of emotions and thoughts that are released through doing such work. For instance, as I tensed and released my ligaments, I felt a sense of sadness arise around recent events. I continued doing the qi gong practice and found that the sadness washed over me and then was released. Along with it came some important realizations about those events and about the changes I am making in my life. I found that embracing the experience of the emotion during the practice lead to the realization, and for me that was worth it.
Another exercise we did involved creating an energy ball. Now I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes as you read that and thinking, “Don’t you already know how to that Taylor?” I do, but remember my maxim, “Challenge what you know by discovering what you can learn.”
I did the qi ball exercise and what I found fascinating is how we used it draw qi inward and then radiate it outward spherically through the body, pulsing the body with the qi. Standard energy ball exercises really don’t do that step and it helped me appreciate how going back to the basics with anything you do, can really open you to discovering something new about an activity you might otherwise take for granted.
I came through this last weekend feeling really cleared out emotionally, mentally, and physically. Doing the qi gong with other people, even virtually, felt good because I was connecting with community. And doing the internal work nicely synced up with the beginning of my latest month with the elemental balancing work and helped me work through some powerful realizations I was having around attachment to judgments.
When you end up doing an activity such as qi gong, what you discover is how multi-layered it can be, especially as you become present with the activities. This is one of the reasons I encourage adding some type of moving meditation practice to your magical work. You end up releasing a lot of what you would otherwise hold onto, which in turn will hold you back.
