Coming into the "Zone" through Qigong

The first step qigong teaches is body awareness, this inner relaxed alartness that you see in masters of qigong, taichi and internal martial arts. In sports, we learn the concentrated body awareness. When we become unaware or in our head, it’s easy to sustain injuries. But concentrated focus does not last long. We usually forget the body awareness and get in our head right after sports. I used to be a dancer, practicing everyday and also performing. I had very good balance and elegance of movement, but I got many injuries in and out of dancing. It’s not due to lack of balance or bad motor movements. It is the lack of the relaxed, sustained awareness. This is what qigong brings into us. This relaxed, sustained awareness will prevent future build-up of stress on our organs and injuries on our body.

When you are constantly in the sustained relaxed state, your vital energy can flow more easily, bringing blood and nutrients to all the areas that need healing. This is the beginning of our self-healing process. Then we learn to bring a slight focus, still relaxed, to our energy centers, so we can begin to gather and store energy, build up our energy level and our immune system.

This is also “the zone” many athletes, writers and artists, even scientists talk about, this relaxed openness, sustained alertness. This is the present state. When we are in our head, we are often in the past or the future. Being in the state allows us to be open to the flow of cosmic energy into our body, carrying new information, wisdom that heightens our creativity. To systematically opening our energy channels and points so we are more connected to the cosmis is part of our personal and spiritual development in qigong.