Moving the Chi?

Hi Robin,

I used to be in the same boat as you when I first started. I was an engineer by training. Math, science and physics were how I understood the world. I would endlessly annoy my teachers every time they mentioned chi. I would always try to translate chi into terms that I could understand. Chi doesn’t exist! When you say chi, it’s probably just a metaphor for something else. You must have meant balance or momentum or angles or … something.

But over the last 15 years I slowly came to the conclusion that chi is real.

In Bruce’s system, faith isn’t that useful. As a student, believing in chi doesn’t help you all that much. It is helpful to have an open mind (which you seem to already have). It is very useful to be able to concretely feel chi. So you have some way of knowing if you are doing it correctly, or if you aren’t doing it at all.

All the different parts of Bruce’s system are based on slowly increasing your awareness of chi. To slowly build your ability to feel chi. As your ability to feel chi increases, then you can attempt more and more advanced techniques.

Since you’re at the beginning stages, there is no way to know if your creating balls of chi. I’d advise you to put those kinds of techniques on the back burner and come back to them later. I’d recommend you start studying the Dragon and Tiger chi gung set that Bruce teaches. He’s released two books and some online courses. I’ve found D&T to be one of the easiest way to start getting a concrete feeling of chi.

Hope this helps,
Janak

Hi Robbin,

Gaining our own direct experience is always the best, and we do this by trusting an instructor. Our trust or faith in the instructor is not a blind faith, but through a combination of reading and hearing of the incredibly intimate knowledge of the body and the confidence a Master speaks of chi, we develop some confidence they aren’t lying. There are various logical reasons we can use to indicate the existence of phenomena that seems hidden to us at present. In Buddhist psychology this understanding is called an ‘inferential cognizer’. We use signs indicating the existence of something to realize its existence. For example, smoke billowing from a chimney indicates a fire though we don’t see the fire directly.

There are many subtle hidden objects that can only be understood initially through inferential cognizers (indirect cognition of a phenomena). For example, there are many people that think lucid dreaming and astral projection are mumbo jumbo, yet if we read or speak with people who have such experiences we develop confidence in the existence of such things. Then, by following basic instructions for cultivating our own experience we come to have such experiences directly.

What it really boils down to for me is this: we can spend our energy and time doubting the existence of such things, meanwhile, those who trust and practice gain access to all the benefits.

We definitely need to use our logic and common sense when approaching such subjects, but there is a great danger that people wasting their life in useless cynicism trying to protect themselves from something. Their doubt has gone from ‘maybe its true, maybe its not’ to ‘definitely it isn’t true’. Their trying to protect themselves from being bamboozled and wasting their life. But if we trust to an extent and apply ourselves, we see the truth for ourselves. If we do not have the patience to go slow and follow the instructions, it is uncertain if we will gain experience, nevermind consistent stable experience.

Patience and Trust are the greatest friends. I just had an instruction today where I assumed we would get into Cloud Hands. I’m in no rush, it was just a general assumption. The reality was, we only got as far as checking and refining the incredible subtleties of the alignments for standing chi hung, and we didn’t even get as far as the shoulders and head!! It may seem ridiculous to some people to spend a whole hour just examining and refining positioning of feet, knees, tail bone, lower back, kwa and such. My patience and trust allowed clarification that released a huge amount of tension through subtleties of incorrect structure.

yours,
james