Overview of Qi Gong Basics, by Lee Holden
Hello Middlebury College students, faculty, and staff.
Here’s a brief introduction to this ancient art.
I started doing Qi Gong about twenty-seven years ago when I was in college at UC Berkeley. It helped with stress, studying, and schoolwork. And it inspired me, and gave me a boost of creativity.
It also initiated my recovery from a varsity soccer injury and deepened my major in Psychology. It’s a multidimensional art.
Qi Gong is about 4-5,000 years old, and it sprung forth out of Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine is wonderful: it’s preventative, it’s natural, it gives us tools and resources to ignite that healing power within us.
One of the best things about Qi Gong in modern life is that it’s effective for clearing stress and recharging.
So that’s what I’m going to show you in these videos first and foremost: some introductory exercises to see if you can feel this energy, this Qi, moving through you.
And second, at the end, we’ll do some flowing movements, and it will be meditative, relaxing, and hopefully very inspiring for you.
Qi (pronounced Chi) means energy. It’s the animating power in your body. Gong means to work with. So Qi Gong can be described as “working with, in a skillful way, the internal energy that we all have within”.
Qi Gong originated by watching nature. It was called The Art of Effortless Power.
If you think about the way a river runs down the mountain, it’s fluid, it’s graceful, it’s powerful. And at the same time if you run your fingers through water, it’s soft and gentle. So Qi Gong blends internal strength and power with fluidity and flow.
So let’s begin our practice together.
https://sites.middlebury.edu/wholebody/
Energize (10 minutes)
Relax and Clear Stress (20 minutes)
Text is from Overview of Qi Gong Basics (30 minutes)