The Lid on the Pot

Anyone who practices Qigong usually focuses on the body and on what can be felt of the Qi: warmth in the hands, tingling, a flow that starts to move. Emotions get far less attention. Yet body and mind are one. When you work on your body, you also work on your mind, whether you notice it or not.

You can become completely absorbed in the practice. There are moments when the mind falls quiet and you feel deeply at peace. That is one of the most beautiful things the practice can give you. Yet beneath that stillness, there is often more going on.

What rises to the surface

Where the practice touches a blockage and loosens it, there is often a stored emotion. Something that was once too big to carry split off and locked the Qi in place there. When that Qi starts moving again, the feeling is released too, and it wants to be fully felt.

That is exactly what is often overlooked. Páng Míng’s (庞明) translated texts do describe how strong emotions can come up during silent practice, sometimes with involuntary laughing or crying. The instruction is to neither encourage nor discourage them, but to be present with them like a mirror. Yet the emphasis in the Chinese tradition lies above all on regulation: keeping emotions stable and not letting them get out of hand. Consciously feeling what surfaces gets far less attention.

The lid on the pot

That is when the stillness you find in the practice can start to act as a lid. A pot on the fire does not empty because you put a lid on it. The heat remains, the pressure builds, and sooner or later the lid starts to rattle. You feel calm, while beneath that calm lies something that still wants to be felt.

The psychologist John Welwood called this spiritual bypassing: using spiritual insights and practices to sidestep unresolved emotions. I have caught myself doing it too, and I suspect that everyone who walks this path runs into it somewhere.

Bringing home

The American philosopher Ken Wilber distinguishes two movements in a human life: waking up and cleaning up. Waking up is the recognition of what you truly are, beyond the story and the person. Cleaning up, or as I prefer to call it, bringing home, is the welcoming back of everything that has split off over the course of a life.

In Zhineng Qigong, Jīng (精), Qì (气) and Shén (神) come together again: body (essence), energy (Qi) and consciousness. The practice makes the system strong and open enough to truly feel. And feeling brings home what had wandered off on its own.

Bringing home does not have to be a big thing. You can walk around all day with a lousy feeling and be bothered by it the whole day. You can also let that lousy feeling in completely, without wanting to change anything about it. Look at it, stay with it, feel it fully. Sometimes that takes only a few seconds, and the rest of the day feels a lot lighter.

After the practice

When everything feels very still after practicing, you can take a moment to notice what that stillness feels like. It can feel like peace, but just as easily like a numbed not-feeling that lies like a lid on another emotion. If you look at it a little longer, you sometimes discover a piece of sorrow beneath it. That too can then be there completely, for as long as it takes.

In my book Beyond the Practice I describe in more depth how Qigong carries both movements, waking up and bringing home. Chapter 3 is about fully feeling split-off parts. In chapter 22 you will find a simple exercise to try it yourself.