I am Master Mike Steenrod with Water Mountain Virtual.
What we’re going to do today is an answer question that I’m quite
commonly asked
and that is, “How does qi work in the body, and how does it create
positive results?”
Well, for the most part, every cell in your body, whether that’s
muscle, connective tissue, bone, your brain,
those in your organs,
requires a certain amount of qi to operate.
And tha…let’s call that 100 units.
That is a
arbitrary
unit of measure that I have just created for the sake of illustration.
But let’s say you have your little cell.
It needs to be filled with 100 units of qi to operate
at full function.
So we’re not talking about 120 per cent or 130 per cent, but its
normal intended function requires 100 units of qi.
I have a little box here.
This happens to be a container of protective shoe booties.
And let’s say that the box is a cell.
If I take
qi, these booties,
out of the box.
With each
unit that’s pulled out of this box,
there is a decline in cell function so that a cell stops behaving
as it should.
And actually,
with time, will start to decay.
Now, what impact, or how do we experience that loss ourselves.
For the most part, we look at decline of function as an issue
of aging.
So your, as your muscle tissues no longer perform as well as they
once did, primarily because of qi, we look at that as well,
you’re aging.
And the reality is it’s an issue of qi. It’s the issue of
nutrition, and it’s an issue of self care
that determines whether or not that muscle fiber behaves in the
fashion that it should be behaving in.
Now, if we experience the decay of the cells within our liver,
for example, liver function will steadily decline and
will eventually become visible on blood tests.
And even with imaging of the liver itself. What we see is a
liver that has gotten older,
or another way of saying that, is that the cells have started to
perform
worse and worse.
Now,
one of the questions I oftentimes get is,
what’s the exact ratio?
How much
qi can I afford to have drop
before there is a drop in cell function?
The reality is that the human body is a remarkable instrument
that’s designed to function
in all sorts of harsh environments. When
in reality, it probably shouldn’t,
it keeps going.
However,
that function,
our ability to continually move forward,
is not the same thing
as optimal performance.
Optimal performance.
The best performance of that particular cell, 100 units of qi
within that cell, occurs
when there is 100 units of qi within that cell.
When there are 99 units of qi within that cell.
We know that it declines.
We don’t know the precise amount, but it doesn’t decline to 99 per
cent function.
Many times it declines much more than that.
So a 99 units a qi could,
hypothetically,
cause a five percent drop in function.
What that implies is that simply restoring the quantity of qi
within the body, within that cell,
will boost it
instantly five percent.
One unit of qi, you get a five percent gain.
And where is it going?
It’s going back to the intended normal for that cell.
On the other hand, let’s say we remove eighty percent of the
units from a cell.
We don’t necessarily get an eighty percent decline.
The body does have reserves.
It has things that it can reroute.
It has things it can tap into- let’s call it the body’s rainy
day fund-
for short periods of time that will allow it to function at
better than twenty percent.
So perhaps it’ll function at thirty percent, forty percent,
maybe even fifty percent, depending on how you have
your reserves.
That’s not a place that you want to be.
But it is a statement of the tremendous resilience
of the human body, the tremendous ability for us to keep going as
an organism.
Again, not the place you want to be, but you can certainly
tolerate it for short periods of time.
Are there long term consequences to this?
Yes, there are.
Aging,
in gradual, or sometimes sudden decay of the tissues, or failure
of the tissues.
The tissues are much more likely to be injured
or experience disease.
If
the qi level within the individual cells have dropped.
Is it difficult
to rebuild
that qi?
It depends actually on how long the deficiency
has been going.
Many times, when a cell is deficient, it can be because the
energy is not being properly distributed.
So let’s say you have a house. It has plenty of electricity coming
into it, but for some reason,
the lights in your
back bedroom are not turning on.
Well, does that have anything to do with the amount of electricity
coming into the house?
No, it does not.
It has to deal with the distribution
of electricity in the house.
So that’s why one of the functions of qi gong, which is
learning to manipulate the qi within the body,
one of those functions is to
distribute
the qi throughout the body. That’s so that that back bedroom is now
usable. It has lights. It can fully function.
People want to be there.
They don’t have to claw their way around in the darkness trying to
find their way.
And so one of the purposes of qi gong is distribution.
Now, if we take our house analogy again,
and we look at the amount of electricity coming in; if there
is not sufficient electricity coming in, then you will have
what? Failures throughout the entire house, usually random.
We see this in cities in the summers, with rolling brown outs
where the power grid is poor, there’s not sufficient input into
that system.
And realistically, for a power grid, there may not be the
ability to even move about the amount of energy that needs to be
moved about to support
that organism of the city.
And so what does qi gong do?
Well, chi kung,
for the most part, is distribution,
and acquisition, or building, of qi within the qi system.
The reward of having
plentiful qi input,
and of having it correctly distributed,
is that your cells function
at their peak.
And to the outside world, you are a strong, healthy individual
that shows minimal signs of aging.
You will be able to proceed
into later life, barring tragedy,
with a fully intact body, functioning
as somebody who is much
younger than you are.
We look at the difference between youth
and being senior.
The big differences, we look at youth as that, well, what do they
have?
They have available to them
the ability to move around, do a wide variety of things.
If they experience
an injury, they can come back from it quickly.
They’re capable of tolerating certain traumas that you can no
longer tolerate
later in life.
But what if I said to you,
you can do that later in life, simply, if you maintain the qi?
That’s true.
You can, in fact, do that.
You can, in fact,
live as if your tissues were young,
simply by restoring the youthful state to them.
And a major portion of that
is, of course,
qi. Sometimes people ask,
“Well what’s the other major portion?”
Well, nutrition.
So you have qi. You have nutrition.
And this allows the tissues to behave
at their true
peak, to fulfill that capability.
Ok.
Thank you very much.
I hope you found
this examination of a common qi gong question to be enticing,
to perhaps open up some more questions for you.
And you can always address that in the comments or forums section.
Thank you very much.