Learning and Refinement
One of my teachers once said to me that there are only 2 styles of qigong: Do Nothing and Do Something. Needless to say, this felt reductionist, challenging and a little too simplistic, but something about the idea stuck and each time the idea returned there was a little more clarity, a little more insight. Let me try to explain some of what I have gained from reflecting on this:
This is the second in a series of articles written for The Clinician, the journal of the association of Acupuncture Clinicians, you can find out more about the association via aac-org.uk/
Do Nothing / Do Something
Do Nothing is just that, it’s the ability to do nothing… This is the concept of Wu Wei or non action, and in Qigong terms it is the skill that we refine through standing and seated meditation practices. It could be expressed as the ability to allow things to happen and not waste our qi on them.
Do Something is what we do when we are not doing nothing… we are engaging our qi in some way in order to create an outcome of some kind, or maybe in avoiding doing something else.
Most people will engage with Qigong as a practice that is done, in other words as a ‘Do Something’ practice, but in order to really understand the practice we need to better understand the importance of not doing, or wúwéi (无为).
It would be very easy at this point to dive into a broad range of philosophical discussions around the concept of wúwéi, but instead I would like to point at three considerations that feel relevant and hopefully prove thought provoking.
The Importance of Awareness
Without awareness, Do Nothing is just ignoring stuff and reverting to laziness. Awareness is actually the key that unlocks the power of wúwéi.
Within Qigong, as I’m sure is also the case within Acupuncture, there are many frameworks, philosophies and techniques that we can learn. In all honesty, there is probably so much to learn that we would struggle to fit into a single lifetime, but even if we learned everything, this would not make us a better practitioner, it would simply make us a Qigong Database, or worse, one of those people who spends time vomiting their knowledge over anyone who was willing to listen.
The understanding only becomes relevant when we are able to hold it in a way that helps us to be skilful with our qi. All of the forms, philosophies and techniques serve a purpose: they all serve to make us more aware, they offer us perspectives and options in order to invite us into being more skillful with our qi. If, for example, we take time to understand the interaction of the 5 elements, we become more aware of the interaction of Yin and Yang, the natural cycles and the interdependency of things. It helps us to understand how things work, it ultimately helps us to understand how we can interact with things in a minimal, but effective way in order to avoid problems.
So, in order to develop the skill of not doing, we need to first develop our awareness.
Taking time to allow things to be
There’s an obvious difference between judgement and awareness. In one we impose a framework of understanding on a situation in order to predict or force an outcome, in the other situation we hold a more humble, more curious position in which we can see things playing out, but we don’t feel the need to impose ourselves on the situation.
In the first scenario we are using our qi in order to reinforce and control, in the second scenario we are more interested in being skillful with our qi. Thanks to the work of Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée, I recently came across this passage from chapter 9 of the Lingshu (this is taken from the book, Aspects of Spirit):
Stay quiet in a peaceful place, observe the signs of the coming and going of the spirits (shén wǎng lái 神往來). Close windows and doors, so that Hun and Po do not dissipate (bù sǎn 不散). Concentrate your mind (zhuān yì 專意), unify your spirit (yī shén 一神) so that essences and qi (jīng qì 精氣) distribute themselves correctly
When no human noise reaches the ears, the essences (jīng 精) are gathered; and thus the spirits (shén 神), being in unity (oneness), the will (zhì 志) is present in the needle, The needle is inserted in the surface area and remains a while, manipulated with delicacy and at the surface in order to move the spirits. As soon as the qi arrives, stop.
While we don’t use needles in qigong, the idea remains the same. If we are able to allow things the time to be, we can observe how a small intervention will allow qi to flow. This is not Do Nothing, but it is working with an awareness of not engaging in Do Something when it is not necessary.
Refining practice
The final perspective I’d like to share is embodied in the Zhineng Qigong practice known as lā qì (拉氣). In this practice we open the space between the hands, then we compress the space between the hands. It can be used in many, many ways and is arguably the basis for all Do Something qigong practices, but I’d like to pick out just one of its important applications here:
We need to expand our understanding and build our knowledge by listening to others (the open of the hands) in order to have something to refine (closing the hands). Without the ability to take on new information, the practice of lā qì only serves to intrench us in our current paradigm. This refinement of new understanding and knowledge gives us many benefits, but key among them are:
- Pulling ideas together in order to build a more coherent and complete understanding
- Embedding the understanding into our lived experience
- Providing us with the ability to express it in a way that is clear, concise and thought provoking.
Just like the teacher who told me that there are only two types of Qigong, sometimes there is so much to learn from a simple statement or action, but it requires a certain level of gōng fu (or skill) to do it well. We are all on a journey that helps us to become more effective in our work. Let’s not forget that complexity can help us, but simplicity helps others.