Filling the Organs with Qi
This practice is designed to nourish and energise the internal organs by directing Qi into them. By consciously breathing Qi into each organ, we enhance their function, vitality, and balance, ensuring a smooth and harmonious flow of energy throughout the body.
This exercise assumes that you have already become established in “full-body breathing”, as described in Section 2, Lesson 7, whereby you can feel the “lightness of the breath” filling various parts of the body.
Here we take that kind of focus and apply it specifically to the organs, combined with the inner smile as above in Lesson 2 of this section.
Targeted breathing in this manner is a way to charge the organs with energy. You might ask – why do we need to specifically bring energy into individual organs if we can just fill the whole body with energy, as we did in “full-body breathing”? Surely that would also benefit the organs. Yes, however, there is an advantage to energising specific organs as opposed to a whole body focus (apart from merely building the mind-body connection).
To explain, here is an analogy. Imagine you owned a company and the company was running along fine. Then suddenly, you received a huge investment of money into the company. The company would surely be advantaged by simply dividing all that new cash into every department equally. But, on the other hand, there might be a strategic advantage by not dividing up all the extra funds equally. The company might grow stronger if a larger amount was placed into advancing a particular department, for example, just the marketing department.
The idea is that, sometimes it is better, for the whole body, to energise a particular organ rather than the whole body at once.
Practice Guide
The exercise is provided in the video below.
[INSERT VIDEO]
Written instructions for the exercise are provided at the Exercise Files tab.
After you have finished the exercise, sit for a few moments to reflect on how you feel. Write your experience into your Course Journal.
The video contains the short form of the exercise, which includes the Yang organs only. Feel free to expand the exercise to include the Yin organs too in your own practice.