Breathing From the Centre of the Earth
This exercise deepens your connection with the earth’s energy, cultivating grounding, stability, and an expanded sense of awareness. By rooting your attention into the ground and synchronising breath with movement, you enhance Qi circulation and strengthen your energetic foundation. This practice helps to stabilise emotions, increase vitality, and harmonise the body’s energy with the natural rhythms of the earth.
Practice Guide
The exercise is provided in the video below.
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A written description of this exercise is provided at the “Exercise Files” tab.
This practice can be integrated into daily Qigong routines or used whenever you feel ungrounded, scattered, or in need of deeper connection with the earth’s support.
After you have completed the exercise, stand with your arms by your side, sensing internally the result of the exercise. Note down in your course journal the experience you had.
What is happening here? How does it work? You should be able to feel the energy moving through your body as you do this exercise. You can feel it as a moving lightness, or as tingling, or as something similar to a mild electric current.
Moving energy like this through the body is a very healthy thing to do and very good for well-being. The exercise makes energy move through energy pathways that are not ordinarily used in the body during normal activities (unless something like this kind of breathing is included in that activity), and so the cells receive nourishment from another source. This takes pressure off the heart and circulation system, eases muscle tension that has its root in the normal energy pathways, and generally increases the amount of energy in the body.
After a while, and with some practice, you will become very good at taking your attention beyond your physical body and down into the earth. After time you will also be able to feel the layers of the earth below you: you will be able to feel the moistness of the upper layers of the earth, the hardness of the middle layers, any layers of subterranean water, and then the heat as you get closer to the core.
By taking our attention down into the earth beyond our physical body, we are extending our energy body beyond its normal confines in the physical body. As the energy body is a part of our being, albeit unlimited, we can receive feeling through it, and therefore share in perception that is beyond our physical confines.
Becoming good at this practice at this also enables one to send one’s energy body anywhere – into other people, into events, even into the future. It sounds fantastic, but it works.
