Feeling the Qi

Having passed through all that theory, it is time to get practical.

The following exercise is designed to introduce you to working with guided flows of energy in the body.

These exercises requires no physical effort — only focused attention and observation.

A Note on Posture:

We start this set of exercises with a laying down position, comfortably on the floor, laying on your back, facing up, with your hands by the side of your body, palms facing up. This is the posture known in yoga as shavasana. You might chose to use a yoga mat, or carpet, or any comfortable floor-laying prop. Some people may find placing a pillow underneath their knees will make it more comfortable for the lower back, but this is optional. A pillow under the head is another option.Whatever is comfortable for you.

This laying down position is used as the starting point because it is the best position to use to introduce us to the feeling of Qi in the body.  But it comes with a risk – the risk is that there is the danger of falling asleep. Many people fall asleep easily when they are laying down, because our bodies are conditioned to sleep laying down.

If you do fall asleep, then you are no longer doing the exercise, and you will have to repeat it, perhaps at a time when you are not likely to fall asleep, such as first thing in the morning.

The laying down position is used at the outset (with the risk of falling asleep in mind) because it is the easiest way to feel the Qi at first. Ultimately, however, we want to be able to do this exercise sitting, standing or walking.

Practice Guide

• During these exercises, we breathe in and out through the nose. Our lips are closed, but our teeth are apart, the jaw relaxed. The eyes are closed.

• This first exercise is guided via an audio recording, because you will be laying down on the floor, with your eyes closed.

Please start the audio recording now…

A written description of the exercise is provided at the Exercise Files tab.

After you have completed the exercise, please take a moment to sit quiety, and take note of how you feel in your body. Write down your experience in your Course Journal.

Here’s some more information about the exercise we have just completed.

How/ Why Does This Exercise Work?

When we feel the lightness of the breath spreading to different parts of the body, what is moving (what we are feeling) is actually Qi or Prana – the life-force energy inherent in nature. It is abundant in the air around us, and although carried in the air, can be split off from its carrier once in the body by our minds. And then our thought can guide it within the body.  This is a fundamental principle of all martial arts – that the fundamental energy of nature can be commanded by intention and attention: first we feel it, then we desire it to do something (intention), and then we watch while it does that which we have said (attention).

This energy is constantly coming into the body with every breath, however, we ordinarily do not notice it because it happens beneath the level of our awareness.

This exercise teaches us to put our conscious minds towards the feeling of Qi – to attend to it. Our attention acts as an amplifier of Qi – when we attend to it, it amplifies it so that we can then feel it. When we feel it, we can begin to work with it, and that’s where the fun begins!

The Qi follows the command of the mind. So when you intend to breathe out through the soles of the feet, the Qi simply does it. When this happens, it utilises Qi pathways that are already in the body. When we attend to the flow of energy in this way, we are actually increasing the flow of energy through these pathways, and stripping stuck energy away from the tissues and cells that lay in the path. So you may have noticed during the exercise the muscles relaxing as the flow went through – this is a sign of stuck energy (stuck energy holds muscles tight) being forced to leave, resulting in a better flow of energy. 

• Practice Note: The direction of flow has different effects in the body. The downward flow (breathing out through the feet) has a grounding effect – calming and softening. The upward flow (breathing from the soles up and out through the fingers) is more energising and uplifting. Feel free to do more breaths in the particular direction that you need to balance how you are feeling. People who are over anxious or stressed will benefit from more downward-flow breathing; people who are depressed will benefit from more upward-flow breathing.

Summing up

If you have gone through the above exercises, and have been able to feel any of the effects mentioned, for example:

• Full-body breathing – being able to feel the “lightness of the breath” throughout the whole body; or
• Feeling the “lightness of the breath” going out through the soles of your feet, or entering through the soles of your feet, and are able to feel the difference in feeling that the different directions produce; or
• skin breathing – breathing that lightness in-and-out through the skin – then…

Congratulations! You have felt the feeling of Qi in your body.

Obviously it is physically impossible to breathe in and out through one’s feet, or through one’s skin; but to the degree that you are able to nevertheless feel this phenomenon occurring through these exercises, you will have taken your identity to a part of yourself that is beyond the constraints of physicality. You have just begun to interact with yourself metaphysically. That is pretty exciting.

These exercises are movements of the energy body – they are not movements of the physical body.

If you can feel this occurring, as these exercises are designed to do, then you will be directly interacting with your energy body. In doing this, you will have discovered that your physical body feels more exterior, more like an outer garment than all-that-there-is of you.

Through these exercises you begin to perceive that there is a deeper part of yourself, something more subtle within you, that you can interact with and control, something that is more essentially yourself. This is what I mean when saying that a ‘shifting of identity’ takes place. That which we ordinarily identify with (the physical body) is felt to be exterior to a deeper, more essential part of ourselves, that we are suddenly in connection to and can work with. We realise that there is more to us than what we ordinarily are aware of – a deeper aspect to us that is beyond physical constraints, that we can interact with and utilise.

(Image by Houston Physicist – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64854222)

This has some important consequences.

One consequence of this shifting of identification is an initiation of healing that comes from release of blockages in the physical body. Because we have removed our identification away from the physical body – the physical body feels exterior to the real “I” – the ordinary tightnesses of the physical body that we usually hold are suddenly perceived as foreign to us, as not really belonging to the real I, so we surrender them naturally.  They seem to lose the platform on which they are held. Releasing these stubbornly held tightnesses means that energy flow within the body improves. It is like a rock in a river has been removed.

The energy body, like any other part of our body or mind, needs to be exercised to grow stronger. When we do these exercises above (and the other exercises that may be found in this Course), we are strengthening the energy body.

When the energy body is strengthened, there is a flow-on effect for physical health. Health can be viewed as essentially a series of internal processes. The body contains all the information it needs to heal itself. If I cut myself, certain processes have to take place to heal the wound; if I have a virus, then certain internal processes become initiated to beat the invaders. The speed with which these processes occur depend on the amount and ease of flow of our deeper internal energy. If the amount of energy within is depleted, or diverted to too many other processes, the physical processes required for health take longer to complete. But if there is an abundance of internal energy, and few diversions or blockages, then the processes that are required for health take place as required.

Strengthening our energy body also has consequences for our potential as human beings. The energy body is the nexus point between our spiritual and physical being; when we strengthen our energy body, more of our spiritual power can flow into our physical body, and our physical body becomes used to handling ever larger flows of spiritual current.

There are certain aspects of our potential that require larger flows of energy in order to function. To use a modern analogy, it is like there are some “apps” within our being that can only begin to function, once the “battery power” of our being is beyond a certain threshold. Aspects of our potential such as clairvoyance, for example, require larger internal flows of energy to take place.