27 September 2005

Chi Kung

This is an exchange between Kevin Grey and myself in the comments of the Frederick Leboyer post below.

Are you implying that Chi Kung and drastic water fasts are in any way related?
The poor fellow may well have stopped his Tai Chi practice of forms/push hands etc., but surely Chi Kung was there from the beginning in the warm ups and postures?

No I'm not implying that chi kung was responsible for his death, although I'm certain that if he was still studying with John Kells he'd still be alive. I'm not even sure he was still studying with his chi kung teacher - I suspect not. The last time I saw him was in 1993 - he phoned me out of the blue (I hadn't seen him for at least 3 years) and said he wanted to see me so I invited him around for a meal. When he arrived I was struck by just how much weaker he was than when he was (heavily) into his Tai Chi. I also sussed that he had come to resolve our relationship in his favour and prove to himself the superiority of his chi kung over my Tai Chi. Unfortunately for him I was then at the height of my weight-training, plus I'd been pushing-hands daily with my teacher for at least a year, so my energy was far stronger and better than his and his attempts were futile - I inadvertently kept him on the back foot and he eventually left somewhat disappointed and bemused. At the time I remember thinking it had been a victory of iron over chi kung. Two years previously I had asked my teacher how I could get stronger and had intimated that chi kung may be the answer. He had scoffed and directed me towards the weights (he had a room at the back full of weights machines). He had never had much sympathy or patience for chi. He had always claimed that it is not important, a conclusion he had come to after studying and working on it for years with Chinese and Tibetan teachers of the highest quality: a figment of Chinese culture not really relevant or useful for a Westerner whose natural energy is far more immediate and engaging than chi anyway. The warm-up exercises we always did simply to warm-up and never as chi kung. I'm not even convinced that they are chi kung. And they were always dropped as soon as the student got through the Short Form anyway. Whenever students used to say how much they enjoyed the warm-up exercises John would always stress that they are not really that important and it was far better to concentrate on the Tai Chi which was all about interacting with others (which of course was precisely why many students preferred the warm-ups). The Tai Chi was certainly never taught as chi kung, the emphasis was always on active yielding, softness, and putting the other first - all concepts alien to the development of chi. In the classes my teacher was always at pains to point out that the energy that's important is spirit and not chi. And for John it was spirit and not shen - his concept of spirit is quite different from the Chinese as well. The thing about spirit is that it cuts through everything immediately to the quick. Concepts and theories are frazzled by it, including chi. In fact there is something so immediate about spirit that it is previous. Now John doesn't even mention spirit. For him it is all heart now. The most important qualities of heart energy are softness and lightness. Softness is an entering acceptance, it is the quality that allows the truth of the statement Everything Touches. Lightness is just the humour of the situation: a delightful and playful irreverence that stimulates the world to dance with you.

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