Cultivating Flowers
in Your Qi Garden
(Or, A Little Ladleful)
This one is pretty recent -- I wrote it March 12th.
I wrote it while working at Spring Forest Qigong.
As always, I encourage you to learn that Qigong. I can't say enough about how beautiful, and how profound, it is.
What I wrote was for the annual Master of Qi Conference, for 2022; I'd encourage you to join that at least once, too, even online, as it's been held these last couple years.
If you've read enough of what I've shared on this website, you'll know the subject of Masters comes up again and again; that, too, I can't say enough about. I will continue to say more.
Master of Qi is one way you can meet some of the most extraordinary people I've had the pleasure of meeting, working with, and getting to know, many of them Spring Forest Qigong Masters.
I'll rein myself in a bit -- wind up the ever-endless yarn I'm ever-eager to spin and which, in turn, is ever-ready to spin me dervish-like into ascending flights of poetic rhapsody.
But before getting to the point, I do want to leave this bread-crumb for those lost in the wilds of my lofty Lotfian prose, as the Illustrious Leper Imp once named it.
I used to think Masters were perfect -- gods, almost.
Maybe you'll laugh, but it's the truth.
When I finally met Master Jim Nance in person and saw he sort of hobbled and limped, afterwards I went home and cried.
Not so much that my illusions were shattered; no, I just felt so much for him.
I hadn't realized, Masters are people, too, and they have pain, and suffering, just like the rest of us.
That was a revelation, and it was a revelation with layers that I continue (and continue) to peel back.
I've gotten to the heart of it, I'd say, but I still haven't gotten to the heart of it.
As I told another Qigong Master who, to my astonishment, dropped a fiery F-bomb in my presence -- Thank you for showing me your human side.
It's so easy to see, and feel, their divine side, not so easy to see, or feel, their human side.
It's disturbed the sleep of many a disciple, and crumbled many a clay idol.
For me?
Nah -- it makes me love them more.
How can a dead reed make such a sound?
What is important -- the reed or the sound?
Anyway.
By the time I wrote this, I was just about ready to leave Spring Forest Qigong -- my soul had been knocking on the door of my thoughts for some time already -- an unexpected guest, and in that sense, a bit of a burden. But that guest, I always let in, even, or especially, if she comes knocking in the middle of a dark night.
She's never failed to entertain, or to edify, or to leave a divine fragrance as an echo of her stay (whatever Franklin may have had to say about dead fish).
Anyway.
There was a lot going on at the office at the time, and I was told, "Hey, we still need a theme for this year's Master of Qi. What have you got?"
Me?
Spring Forest Qigong had really hit it big in the preceding year -- I'd never seen anything like it, in terms of the calls and emails and appointments we were getting; so, I hadn't done much other than do my best to field as many of those requests as possible.
Creativity?
No time for that.
Yet... when I finally sat down to come up with something, it was healing. It was like I'd wandered back into the desert, away from the living well, and come back, slid the lid off the top, and dipped a little ladle in for a long-forgotten taste.
Didn't realize how thirsty I'd been! Why'd I ever leave in the first place?
So -- I said, OK, here's what I think about the theme. My reflections. YOU take it and make something with it.
In the end, I also wrote some of that "something," too, but I'm just sharing a few drops of that long-awaited ladleful here.
08 April 2022
Over a hundred fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau retreated to a pond in the woods because he “wished to live deliberately, ... to suck out all the marrow of life” – to cultivate, while basking in his unsullied Self in the stillness of Nature, “the finest qualities of [his] nature, [which] like the bloom on fruits can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.”
As he later reflected in his writing on his time at the pond, “the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground,” whereas “most men... are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.”
As Spring Forest Qigong students in the Taoist tradition, we needn’t retire from the world to cultivate the fruits and flowers of our higher nature; we can join light and air with earth and toil, reaping the harvest of efforts sown while fully in the world, while enjoying repose in the midst of labor.
To say it more plainly – as Master Lin has continued to refine his understanding and explication of Spring Forest Qigong, his expression (especially in the last year) of what exactly it is we’re doing with this Qigong has centered on the concept of “cultivating a Qi Field.”
Qi is not just energy, but energy with consciousness and intelligence.
The body has Qi within it and it has Qi around it – a conscious information-field.
As we not only practice Qigong movements and meditations, but cultivate positive emotions (joy, gratitude, happiness, peace, contentment) and cultivate the expression of unconditional love, kindness, forgiveness in all our words, all our thoughts, all our actions, moment by moment we gather finer and sweeter particles of Qi, generate, purify, and refine the Qi Field around us, and so not only harmonize, purify, and strengthen our own Qi for self-healing, but create a more healing, harmonizing presence in the world.
The implications of this are many, broad, and subtle; yet, it begins simply and humbly with the actions we take in the silent introspection afforded by our daily Qigong practice – our self-cultivation. Seeds germinate in darkness.
If everything is a form of Qi, and we are all connected – what we cultivate in ourselves, we cultivate in the world.
This gives new meaning to the old words, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” and sheds new light on Thoreau again, who noted that “characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect: ‘Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.’”
