Building techniques in layers

Over time as you learn new techniques, you can start to add them to your repertoire of skills to perform as needed. As you sense each situation you go through in life, be it in public daily life, or alone in practice, you can reach for whichever technique, or set of techniques is needed to deal with each blockage or difficulty you come across.

One person talks of it as there being 3 stages of chi kung, where the first is learning the basic building blocks, then learning how to apply them, then integrating them into your own personal conditions and life situation (its talked of in part of this video on healing chi kung.)

There is also a very approximate timeline of development in chi kung someone made, that talks of three types of practice: feeling, controlling and knowing energy (from a page on chi kung mastery).


I think you can probably compare it to learning to use a new computer program. Like for Word you can learn how to change fonts, set styles, add bullet points etc, If you are learning to use it during a training course you might practice on each area for a while before moving on. Then eventually you will be using it in real life and picking and choosing which features to use as you go, in real time.

Also you will be doing that in real life situations, maybe with time pressures for a boss, or with a need to format an unusual request with text flowing round a picture etc. Like with your golden elixir practice you may come across an individual that stresses you out or that brings out negative emotions in you, and you need to learn how to apply your practice while around that individual, and bend your techniques to suit the situations.

For me the three phases seem to be a lot more interconnected. So you might start off by sensing a particular area to work on, trying a technique and sensing it working, then applying it over and over as you practice with it and make progress on that area. While simultaneously you might work on it at times during your daily life as it comes to your attention, and you're then integrating it onto your life and circumstances. You might also come across another area where you feel the technique might help, and start integrating it more by applying it there too.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A short summary of a journey along the way of golden elixir

I first came towards golden elixir when I got a book and video series as a present. It was about Qigong in general, internal alchemy being a branch of chi kung that I came to later on. The book was 'Stand Still - Be Fit, the way of energy'. I got it partly because I'd been trying out some meditation exercises for the first time, and also as I was into regular fitness at the time - my parents thought it would make for a funny present. Jump forward 25 years and I'm still interested in this area, although my practice has changed a lot since then. Originally I was a lot more focused on the physical side of things whereas now I'm more focused towards the spiritual end of the spectrum. In between times I've been interested in Tibetan Buddhism, Eckankar, Reiki healing, popular psychology and complementary therapies, and elements from these have all rolled in together with Qigong practice for me now. I've only had one Qigong teacher who I took classes with for...
Read more

Internal alchemy for beginners

One of the classic goals of alchemy was to turn lead into gold. In golden elixir practice you're doing the same thing but with your own energy, feelings, thoughts and body. So you want to cultivate as much positive energy, feelings etc in yourself, and remove as much negatives as you can. Also you want to be able to turn the negatives into positives. One way to think of doing this is to think in terms of magnets, and how if you hold one magnet in the correct position, you can use it to push away another magnet without touching it. Similarly you can build up a positive feeling in yourself and use it to push away a negative one. We do this is small ways without thinking much about it, like when something irritates us a little but we quickly shrug it off. We can, however, be more conscious about this process and turn it into something of an art form. The basics of which are: - sensing the 'lead', or becoming aware of something that is bad or could be improved - bringing in a p...
Read more