Why Qi Gong?

Introduction:

Hi! This is Master Mikel Steenrod with Water Mountain Virtual. I want to spend a few moments talking to you about qi gong. There are thousands of systems of qi gong that have been practiced across many centuries, and their emphases can vary. But the qi gong that I teach in many of my courses is corrective. It’s designed to fix things that have gradually gone wrong within your system.

And when you can sit back and go, well, I’m healthy, and that’s fantastic. What it corrects are the imbalances that are created by day-to-day life and your workaday life.

The Impact of Work on Your Health:

One of the things that I point out to students is that work, in general, does not have your best interests at heart. What it cares about is that you produce in exchange for, typically, in this era, cash. And so you put in your hours, whether those are at a desk or digging a hole, and then you get a certain reward of capital at the end of that time.

Work does not care what the cost of that is on you, other than its impact on your ability to continue producing. What that means is that you need to spend time providing yourself with your own care. And so when we hear “self-care,” sometimes people that are outside of the realm of self-care will poo-poo it, thinking of it as being a spa. And certainly, self-care could be a spa. But self-care is really about sitting back and going, well, if I don’t take care of myself, work certainly is not going to take care of me.

The Role of Qi Gong:

So we look at these meta-methods that have been handed to us across the centuries, and we see that they are able to restore ourselves back to our pre-work condition. Now, work can impact you emotionally—there can be the stresses of it. There can be the daily grind that slowly wears you down. There can be aggressive encounters that occur.

Your body could get worn out. You could be doing things that are damaging to your back, knees, or wrists—any one of those particular things. Qi gong came about to restore the normal within the body. It does that by rebalancing this thing called qi, or the energy system of the body.

You may or may not believe in that. You may be a strong proponent of it. You may be strongly against it. But the one underlying fact is very simple: You need a corrective in your life to restore you back to a normal that you enjoy. This allows you to live your life more on your own terms and not be walking around unhealthy, in pain, stressed, and incapable of dealing with the rest of the world because you’ve used so much of yourself up trying to live this production life.

How Qi Gong Works:

What qi gong does is it takes parts of your body that have become overused or underused and redistributes resources across those parts. For example, let’s say I’m sitting there typing all the time. Qi goes where the mind goes. Right now, if I’m just sitting there typing, what am I really? I’m my eyeballs, I’m my hands, and I’m my arms.

Qi will go to support those tissues because it wants you to be able to do your very best with those tissues. But over time, it will pull qi from other parts of the body and actually tend to overcharge these areas as well. What that results in are areas…

Let’s say it’s like your house, and you’re hanging out in your living room all the time. Well, imagine if, as you hung out in your living room, the living room is the only part of your house that got any power, water, heat, cooling, whatever it happens to be, and the rest of the house was just allowed to go to pot. It would decay. The living room would actually get a little bit too much over time because the qi system can overdo things as well.

With qi gong, we are using physical postures to redistribute the qi, for example, that’s overcharging your arms. It also goes to parts of your body that have been starved in that process of production.

Psychological Benefits of Qi Gong:

If we look at the psychological toll, we are forced in artificial circumstances to think in certain ways and to have emotions in a certain spectrum. And those also have impacts on who we are as individuals. You get used to being one thing all the time. So you get used to being a crisis manager or a crisis source. You get used to being angry to achieve your ends, or submissive to achieve your ends.

As we rebalance the energy, we also tend to rebalance the emotions. Now, if that polarization is tremendous—if you become tremendously emotionally biased in a particular direction—that’s going to be a long path. Qi gong allows you to do that.

Why Practice Qi Gong?

When we look at, well, why would I want to do qi gong? The thing that you have to sit back and consider is that the normal human being—what we call the natural form of the human being—has a pretty equal distribution of resources, both internally within the mind, within the heart (for your emotion), and also within the body. We have a relatively equal distribution with small polarizations that pop up as we need them.

In those parts of your “unused house” that haven’t been used in a while, well, it needs some love and caring in order for it to be maintained and in order for it to grow. The same thing applies to your own life. When you’re looking at burnout within a particular thing, burnout comes from consistent imbalance over time and the failure to meet fundamental needs. When you correct those imbalances and meet those fundamental needs, you get many more productive years—years where you don’t have to drive yourself to do something you don’t want to do, or offset the stressors of what you’re doing with drugs, alcohol, or other self-destructive behaviors.

The Long-Term Impact:

You have available to yourself another resource, and that resource can be qi gong. Qi gong is about getting you back from the exterior world and allowing yourself to distribute those resources in a way that’s productive.

You can sit back and ask yourself, well, what if I don’t work anymore? The problem is that the qi system gets habituated. When the qi system is habituated, even a task that you did 20, 30 years ago, the energy will still be distributed. Your internal resources will still be distributed in the same way. People that have lived their lives like that will tell you those stories quite frequently.

Perhaps you’re fortunate, and you have other balances in your life. You can take a look and see whether or not qi gong will provide you with some additional tools. Most people, I would say, need the qi gong tools quite seriously in order to get themselves back—to have a self that’s for them and not for producing or meeting an exterior goal that has absolutely nothing to do with them.

Getting Started:

These are some brief words about why you would want to do qi gong and even a little bit about how qi gong works. Please feel free to take the free course that’s available on this website and see what it means to bring some liveliness and activity back in.

Qi gong is so potent that just doing it for an hour or two hours per week can offset an entire week—40 hours, 60 hours, 80 hours, whatever it happens to be for you—and allow your body to rebalance. Now, if you’re looking at erasing the decay of many years, it’s going to take you a little while. But you can start actually today. Just try a free course, okay?

Closing:

Thank you very much. If you have any questions, you’re welcome to direct them via customer service or by one of the forums. Thank you.