Formosa Neijia

Below is a post I wrote about an interview with Bruce Kumar Frantzis that was posted in the Taoist Water Tradition Yahoo group. If his material interests you, then I suggest that you subscribe to this list. I put my reaction to the article here because it’s applicable to learning neigong in general, but especially [...]

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My best advice for people hoping one day to pursue the path to experiencing qi  is to find the best instruction they can on a basic qigong practice like the eight brocades or five animal frolics and practice that everyday. I firmly believe that my recent breakthrough with qi came after spending significant time doing [...]

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The first thing they rarely have is an actual technique — let alone several that are discussed at length. I used to read lots of books about neigong and Taoist meditation, but after several years I became frustrated because they didn’t seem to be saying much of anything. They talked ABOUT stuff but they never [...]

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This blog both chronicles my research into martial arts here in Taiwan and my personal journey in studying this stuff. Due to the latter, I will sometimes just write about what I am experiencing in my personal practice.
With that in mind, my personal journey into neigong has completely changed what I think about everything [...]

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One of the main reasons to practice qigong for older men is to restore the hormonal balance that deteriorates as you age. In other words, they need to ramp up the testosterone that their bodies are producing.
Mingmen (kidney) breathing gets the lower back moving around and massages the adrenal glands. The dantian rotations are perfect [...]

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From some of the things I’ve heard over the years, I get the impression that Sun’s taiji and his other arts are very simplistic. But looking at some other recently released materials, I wonder if there isn’t more to the story. Consider this article by Bradford Tyrey that quotes a lecture by Sun Jian-yun:
Nurturing the [...]

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The following is a great story told by xingyiquan and kettlebell expert Steve Cotter over at his blog. It’s one of the clearest explanations of the roles of external exercise, qigong, and meditation in training that I’ve seen.
 

Master Kao began to expound on the proper relationship between external exercise, qi gong and meditation. [...]

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The following is a really long and informative comment written by Jose de Freitas on TCM and qigong. I didn’t want it to stay in the comment section because I’ve closed those posts to any further comments, but I didn’t want to delete Jose’s contribution either. It took him a lot of effort to write [...]

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See part one here. I’m going to go ahead and put this up. It will be my last post on the topic (I hope).
This partially explains why my numerous attempts to steer conversations about qi into the broader context of Chinese culture have largely failed. The skeptics almost never speak Chinese and they know little [...]

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I cringe every time I read “I believe in qi” or “I don’t believe in qi.” It just seems so strange to me.
You see, I don’t believe in qi — I don’t have to because I’ve experienced it. So it’s an experience for me, not some abstract belief.
As I’ve made perfectly clear in several articles, [...]

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