Hello, this is qi gong Master Mikel Steenrod with Water Mountain Virtual.

For today’s talk,
why don’t we take a look at qi and how it’s affected by burdens,
and what you can do about the burdens that you carry
with your qi?

Let’s start off this conversation by first
defining what a burden is.
A burden is any psychological
or emotional
weight that you happen to be carrying, that’s been placed upon your shoulders
by somebody else, or that you have chosen to pick up off the ground and
carry yourself.
So what do I mean by that?
Let’s deal with a couple of examples.
First let’s say you’re driving through traffic,
and somebody cuts you off.
You’re not harmed by the process,
but you’re offended by their actions
and you start to fume over it;
in that you could sit back and say, “It’s fine.”
But the reality is, let’s say you carry it for an hour
or two hours with you.
You even talk to other people about it,
and perhaps you sit there and fume over it, even the next day.
Let’s take another instance of what a burden can be.
Let’s say that you are treated poorly
while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store.
Perhaps a person is standing too closely to you.
Perhaps they make sounds which you interpret as being judgments of you
that could be a burden as well.
Let’s say you have a bill that comes due from your electrical company, perhaps,
and it has an additional surcharge on it.
You look at that surcharge and realize it’s simply a profit soaking on the
part of the electrical company,
and that angers you, and you carry it with you
for let’s say, a week or two weeks.
It still just gnaws at the back of your mind.
All of these are examples of burdens.  I’m sure you have them in your life.
They occur on a regular basis.

Why is it problematic, if it’s normal within life, for these things to occur,
for a burden to be an issue?
Well, each one of these things is like a weight that you choose to pick up and
carry with you.
Does this weight exist?
Yes, this weight exists.
Do you have a need to carry this for an extended period of time?
For example,
getting cut off in traffic?
How long did that event last?
Did it impact you at all?
Like, physically, were you harmed in some fashion?
Emotionally?
Perhaps you were harmed.
But how long do you want to carry that object with you?
And by itself
perhaps this one weight that you carry, this one burden, is not a large
issue.
But you add to it, the slight within the
shopping line while you’re waiting for the cashier.
You add to it the injustice that you experience
from the
electrical company.
And suddenly, instead of one of these, you have three of these that you happen
to be carrying around.
Now, just by gut instinct, you can look at that and go, well, perhaps it’s not
healthy to be carrying that amount of stuff around with me, especially when I
have no particular need to carry that stuff with me.
It’s not an ever present threat.
There’s not a lot that I can do about any of these events unwinding.
So why is this a problem?
Well, it takes energy and effort to carry around that many burdens doesn’t
it?
We chew that energy up, and we no longer have it available for things
that we might want to do that are more pleasant
and for just feeling good about ourselves. When it comes to qi,
these
burdens
consume a certain quantity of qi.
There’s no doubt about it.
Every activity, mental, physical, emotional,
that you undertake uses a certain amount of qi.
In fact, your mental activities use more qi than your physical activities do.
And so these burdens are primarily in what? They’re within your mind.
They’re in your emotions.
And so we’re carrying around some of the most expensive
of things that we can possibly carry when we decide to carry these burdens
with us.
Now
what can qi gong do about that?
It’s obvious that if I allow myself to carry, let’s say, three burdens, five burdens,
ten burdens, twenty burdens,
suddenly I’m really struggling to get through the day, and I’m really feeling
as if I had been victimized, because I have all this energy being drained out
of me by my environment, by my surroundings.
Well, what qigong allows us to do is to restore the natural pattern of
energy within the body.
But now, what does that mean?
It means that the energy
…the implication…
is that the energy that is being held by these burdens
can be put back into a normal flow that we need for health
and for a normal function within a given day.
So instead of being consumed, carrying around
these weights, imagine twenty of these, all of a sudden,
instead of being consumed, carrying around these weights, it is now
available for me to live a life that I choose to live and to live in a way and
a feeling and in a thinking process
that is favorable to me.
So
qi gong
releases the energy
that is used to hold a burden.
And by doing so, we set down the burden.
All we have to do is pull the energy out of that burdening process, and the
burdening process can’t function
and will shut down.
And that’s the reason that qi gung, by itself, can release burdens from you.
Now
what happens to a burden that you hold on for a long period of time, or
that came from traumatic
events?
The truth is that qi gong might cause some improvement in those long held,
deeply held burdens,
but is really not the tool to do that type of really in depth, serious work.
That will require you to do more extensive mind training, or
perhaps even talk therapy.
And that can help you release that energy and gain greater strength to
live the life that is really pleasant for you, and really that you want to
bring into your sphere of action.
You’d sit back and go, ok, so what would my life be like without these burdens,
how would I live it,
and how would I set out to choose my direction?
So that’s part of a certain control
over how you are going to exist
and how you are going to feel throughout any set of given days.
And we do that by what, restoring
normal balance within the qi system
and robbing the robbers
of the energy that they have taken from us.
Again, very in depth
burdens.
Very things that have sunk down to your very most primal layers are not going
to be released by qi gong.
Qi gong will release more surface components.
You can oftentimes see this in your practice, where as you begin to
practise, let’s say, with a group, because a group, you can see it
sometimes more clearly than you can with yourself.
The group will,
if allowed to, spend a certain period of time talking about their day,
a certain period of time talking about normal events.
And this can seem a distraction, and it is, in some ways a distraction from,
let’s say,
a curriculum or a hardend practice routine.
But what else is it?
Well, it’s part of the de-burdening process.
Many times a person has to release the things that they are carrying on their surface,
at least in order to focus into their qi gong.
We have to keep in mind that
we live in a different time
than when many qi gongs were created, which were periods, while they had
serious stressors, did not have ever present …
non-stop, grinding stressors like we do within modern
society.
And so the hardened Confucian approaches for qi gong was…basically
the discipline of qi gong was enforced through a rigorous discipline.
It’s not really appropriate.
It doesn’t fit the need structure that we have currently.
The current need requires us to release a certain amount of our burdening so we have enough resource available to even do the qi gong.

Well, I hope this talk was interesting to you.
Ay, and if you have any questions or comments, please place them in the comment box down below.

Thank you very much.