Formosa Neijia

This is a brief overview of qigong from Michael Udel, who posted this in this thread at EF. I’m a bit surprised at how good an overview it is. I’m putting it on the blog because I want to archive it and because doing so means I don’t have to write an overview myself.  

I should say just briefly that my training is taking me into areas that a few years ago I would have scoffed at. But I’m now realizing that qigong and the qi paradigm, in particular, are really the way to go for explaining how this stuff works at an appropriate level (still not for beginners IMO). Yes, I realize that several of you who know me just had your eyes shoot out of your head. Yes, I just said something positive about the qi paradigm. Haha. Let’s just say that there is a lot more for me to learn.

Internal Martial Arts, like Taiji, Bagua, and Xing Yi are “moving step qigong” (thanks to Sifu Stier for the phrase) in and of themselves. The postures and movements are designed to promote the flow of qi in the body via the muscle-meridian system, and the postures align the body physically in ways that allow for the positive and negative polarity of Heaven and Earth to “connect” via the human body. The enhanced “electrical connection”, however brief, allows for the continuous flow of qi between Heaven and Earth to pass through a person (to a greater extent than when sitting on a sofa slurping brewskies), thereby supplying him with more qi and also promoting the circuit of qi in his body to be more aligned with the greater circuit of the Cosmos, which promotes the daily intake and release of qi required for optimum health.
 
Considering your requirements and the fact you are studying Wing Chun, you should look at the available styles of qigong as either martial arts based or health based. Martial arts based qigong are relatively more vigorous and have an immediately beneficial effect on martial arts practice, especially when the style of qigong has been designed to accompany the style of martial art being practiced. These so-called martial styles of qigong provide relatively more direct benefits to the martial art by enhancing the qi flow patterns associated with the physical requirements of the martial art, and they also tend to give more “polarized” qi to the practitioner that is easier to collect and compress at the dan tien, and is also more likely to be “unbalanced” and cause you to stay up at night if you practice too late.  
 
All so-called complete martial arts systems, namely the Internal Martial Arts, contain a qigong system of a physically vigorous style of qigong whose postures should be practiced and learned with the same precision as the physical postures of the martial art itself, which takes considerable time and requires just as much supervision.  These systems should also contain a meditative or quiescent styel of qigong, which can often be one of the last things learned by today’s student fortunate enough to have a teacher who can teach a complete system. While significant benefits can be obtained from the basic set of martial arts based qigong, it is only the beginning, however many students do not choose to progress in the qigong past this point.  
 
Other so-called “health” or “medical” qigong often are much easier to learn physically and give more balanced benefits not specifically designed to assist in a particular style of qigong. Also, the type of qi acquired in some of these styles of qigong is either more balanced between yin and yang and/or less potent than martial systems, and a bit less risky and less likely to keep one up at night or cause deviations due to incorrect practice.
 
“Deviations” are significant obstructions to the normal flow of qi in the body caused by incorrect qigong or meditation practice. They can be corrected by a teacher directly through energy manipulation, through remedial exercises, or simply by fixing your errors and continuing with the right stuff. “Medical’ or “health” qigong systems are usually less likely to cause deviations, and usually require less supervision than martial systems.  Also, “medical” and “health” qigong are often newer and frequently don’t contain a meditative component.  They are also frequently “stripped down” versions of older martial, Taoist, and Buddhist qigong systems with many of the best things taken out for safety reasons.