Posted in Balance, Qigong, qigong practice by Dr. Bruce
If you do much reading on qigong, you’ll eventually run across the idea of “hard” versus “soft” qigong.
Each has teachers that prefer it and each has its place in the overall scheme of qigong practices. I’ll offer my opinion on these two, but first I’d like to clarify what they mean.
The simplest way to describe hard qigong is to say that it focuses on strengthening the body in various ways. There are exercises for strengthening muscles, ligaments and tendons as well as improving endurance and stamina. Hard qigong is especially popular with martial artists and others who rely on physical strength in their pursuits.
Soft qigong is more focused on the internal aspects of health. It includes exercises for stretching, deepening breathing, massaging and balancing the internal organs and even psychic development. It supports a healthy life and increases longevity. People of a more contemplative nature tend to like soft qigong better.
So you can see that each of these have a place in the ‘world’ of qigong. And depending on your personal goals, one or the other may be more appropriate.
However, if you had to make a choice between them, I’d recommend soft qigong. The reason is simple. By emphasizing health and longevity you are improving the overall quality of your life. And soft qigong offers an outstanding complement to the more ‘external’ disciplines such as martial arts, etc.
This isn’t just my opinion either. I recall visiting with a very highly trained kung fu (gungfu) master in the San Francisco area many years ago. He’d spent most of his then 50 years of practice focusing the harder, more external arts.
The conversation turned to the hard vs. soft question and he said, “I now wish that I’d spent more time doing the internal practices. After all these years emphasizing the external arts, my body and health have suffered.”
This means that if you practice hard qigong, you must practice soft qigong to heal and balance yourself. But if you practice only soft qigong, you may or may not want to practice the more external forms.
Be well,
Dr. Bruce
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Posted in Balance, Qigong by Dr. Bruce
The promise of this web site, “Helping you increase your balance, energy and focus…” reminds me that not everyone thinks about these ideas the same way. And since I want you to have the best possible experience here, I’d like to go over the practical implications of the concepts promised in this statement.
Let’s start with balance.
If you ask someone to describe what balance looks like, you’ll get a variety of answers. One of the most common is the “scales of justice” picture you’ve probably seen:
At first glance, you might look at this picture and think, yes, it does represent balance. After all, both sides are balanced and even with each other.
But there’s a problem with this viewpoint when applied to balance in our daily lives. Can you see what it is?
Go to the head of the class if you said that this image shows a static balance, while the events in our lives are always moving and shifting.
In fact, this kind of static “balance” is anything but balanced. Life is dynamic, not static. Therefore, real balance requires a much more resilient, dynamic response to life.
True Balance
A more accurate representation of living balance is the following image:
This is the Oriental symbol called the taijidu (grand ultimate symbol). There are many things to notice in this simple diagram.
For example, the two different colored areas within the circle are represented as moving, shifting. They represent yang and yin, the complementary opposites seen in every aspect of life. Here are some examples of these complementary opposites:
- Day / Night
- Summer / Winter
- Male / Female
- Sunshine / Shadow
- Sky / Earth
- Young / Old
- Hot / Cold
One thing to notice about each of these pairs is that you cannot have one without the other. If everything were the same temperature, you’d never know what hot or cold is. If there were only one gender, you’d never have children. Without sunshine you couldn’t have shadows.
Another interesting feature of this diagram is the little spot of the opposite color right in the midst of the larger swirl of both colors. This represents the fact that each of the complementary opposites carries the seed of its opposite qualities.
The easiest way to understand this is to note that the original meaning of yang and yin were the sunny and shady side of a mountain, respectively. In the morning, the eastern-facing side of the mountain catches the sun, and the western side is shady. But in the evening, the western side is sunny, while the eastern side is in the shade.
Every complementary pair of opposites is like that, constantly shifting from one phase to another. Even men and women change as they age – post menopausal women tend to have more testosterone when their estrogen goes down, therefore having more male qualities than before. Andropausal men tend to mellow and become more yielding and relaxed as their testosterone levels lower.
You can see from all this that balance isn’t just some static state, but rather requires us to be flexible, adaptable and to go with the flow of events. And qigong practice is an outstanding way to condition ourselves to be more responsive to events and therefore more balanced.
Next time we’ll look at the concept of “energy” as it relates to qigong.
Be well,
Dr. Bruce
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