"have you reached a stage where your qi has sunken to the dantien?can you feel the qi circle through the meridians? can you heal the sick?"

Someone asked this question on emptyflower. Comments anyone?

I just felt qi gurgle in my throat!

now I need an altoid.

that's a bunch of horseshit!

Dude, I'm pretty sure it's just bile... and I don't appreciate the implication.

Visualization is important in the traditional internal arts as well as qigong; but too many of its modern practitioners get carried away with the mental aspect and forget about the physical side.

Unfortunately, the internal arts tend to attract a large percentage of people who are either looking to be "healed" in some way or who are too intellectual for their own good.

Conversely, it is also true that you have to be able to visualize stopping a punch or hitting an opponent to be able to do so to the best of your ability -- Intention -- once you've mastered all the tedious physical skills that such activities imply.

Perhaps I should visualize that the discussions on this board will always be intelligent and, if I kick my heels together three times while holding the qi in the tan-tien, that this will happen... :-}

More basic questions might be:

What does Qi circulation feel like?

How do you feel Qi in your dantian?

What do meridians feel like?

I find this interesting: We have miles of blood vessels in our bodies (that can actually be seen) with thick fluid pumping through them constantly. With all this movement of blood through this vast network of vessels (some quite large) you cannot "feel" the circulatory system at work.

No one has ever found a meridian or seen qi, yet many people claim to be able to "feel" this invisible energy flowing through channels that can't be seen.

I think qi is a valid concept as a means to describe the world. It is mostly used to describe stuff which is difficult to explain in modern scientific laguage.
Sinking qi into the dantian migth just be a label for a complex bodily process, involving, for example, relaxing your body enough that you can "feel" your breathing movement in the spot where the dantian is thought to be.
If "qi" is useful to describe a mental or physical (or esoteric ) process, so that others can profit from it, then why not? Sometimes I don't see the point of religiously replacing "sinking the qi" with "maintaining proper body alignment" or "ground path" all the time.

Its an invasion of the cyber-qi-nuts again.

If your qi sank and you can feel it, i think it means you swallowed

I have sometimes, when I have some idle time to kill, argued with folks who claim to feel qi. My basic position is any first year medical student will laugh in your face if you tell them that. And my basic position is a part of a broader Brian Doctrine which states modern, legitimate science should be driving the development of Chinese martial arts; not some medieval theory of body humors. (note the qualifier "legit science", not some b.s. somebody read in Dr. Feelgoods Guide to Cosmic Vitamin Therapy)

But turning to a narrower issue of do these folks actually believe there is this gas/fluid/brew running through some undetectable channels in their body; I think many time the answer is yes, they do think that. And they have convinced themselves of it.

Let me tell a true story. Back when I was a public defender we represented a guy who murdered his girlfriend. When I first met the guy, early in the case, he basically admitted to me that he did it. I did not actually represent the guy, one of the senior public defenders did, but I would see the defendant and talk with him from time to time when I did appear for him on some minor aspect of the murder case.

And it was amazing to me. What happened over about a two year period (his case went on and on) was I saw him over those two years convince himself that he did not murder his girlfriend. It was not a case of him deciding "well I am going to start bullshit**g the public defender" (which is common enough) but what really happened is he successfully bullshit*d himself into believing something that was absurd; i.e. that his friend did the murder, not him.

Many martial arts students do the same thing. I think it is a reflection of the power of the human mind that a person can convince themselves of just about anything...including shooting cheeee out your fingertips.

Take care,
Dr. Brian
p.s. I should finish the story and the moral; when the guy's case did come to trial the jury did not share his self-delusion that his friend murdered the girl. He was convicted and sent to Chino. In a similiar vein, when the "qi faithful" meet up with "qi non-believers"...well you can guess how the story ends.

Qi=Mc2

Hey Chris, where have you been. Everyone at Shenwu thinks that you died. Good to see that you are still alive.

Brian,
the chinese were using full surgical techniques before acupuncture, acupressure, qigong treatments etc. Taking peoples organs out and washing them, or cutting bits away (like modern western medicine now). So to switch there must have been a good reason. same as there is a good reason for walking the circle in bagua or practicing xing yi nei gong before doing xingyi. most western medicine is based on mouldy bread how is that for advanced. For me the western medicine you tout has been on the wrong track since the death of the greek civilisation. Also you have a lot to say on medicine considering you are a lawyer. But then again you guys have a lot to say on any subject right.

Qui, shut the •••• up. You don't even know who you're talking to. Dumb ass.

Brian, are you proposing that acupuncture is a fraudulent practice?

Qui is real...real stupid.

My Qi sunk too far. Now my penis is 2 inches.... from the ground.

Is there a Shenwu Qi lab yet?

"Is there a Shenwu Qi lab yet?"

We have the ultimate place to test Qi power, we call it the mat.

There is all kinds of energy in the human body. I think many people, usually martial artists, get hung up on the mystical aspects of chi instead of being amazed that ancient people could describe what happens in the human body. People who spend a lot of time in nature will probably appreciate the ancient way of thinking compared to some of you city boys who were born on concrete.

I'm a registered nurse with 30 years experience so I'm pretty well indoctrined in western sciences. I'm also a Zen Shiatsu therapist who uses the "model" of meridians in my work. I went to acupuncture school but liked the shiatsu so much, and was getting such good results, that I dropped acupuncture. Chinese medicine was too intellectual while the Japanese shiatsu just cut out a lot of BS and got to the point, no pun intended.

Tim, you can "feel" the circulatory system at work. Hold your arms above your head for a while then drop them and you'll feel the blood rushing in. Or occlude an artery (radial and ulna arteries for example) by pressing on them, then release.

I've had two Reiki practitioners touch me and experienced definite (really strong) rushes of energy through my body that were not consistent with any western nerve pathways. I also had a shiatsu student from Haiti who could tell me with 100% accuracy which part of her body I was directing my attention as I held my hands on her abdomen. She almost slapped me once!

I can't see the wind nor electricity, but I can certainly feel both!

Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., a medical anthropologist (and shaman), in his book Shaman, Healer, Sage, relates a story of a shaman in Peru who, when asked how he knew which points to press on the back of a lady with back pain, stated that he could see "rivers of energy." Dr. Villoldo had the shaman draw the rivers of energy on his own body (with lipstick) and took pictures. Upon returning home, he compared the pictures to charts of Chinese meridians and they were exactly the same. The shaman had never heard of meridians or Chinese medicine!

There's too much we can't explain right now but perhaps we shouldn't laugh too hard or we may be backtracking later. I have physicians for patients; one a chief of orthopedic surgery (and black belt) is always trying to explain what I do in western medicine terms. Sometimes she can, other times she says, "I'll give you that one."

As a faculty member at an acupuncture school, I would often volunteer for free needling from students. Hey, it was a chance to lie down! None helped a year long case of bilateral tennis elbow. The only thing left in western medicine was surgery. Then a Korean student, who happened to be family trained, and was having to go back to school in the US in order to pass the exams, knocked out the pain in one elbow in one treatment and in the other after two treatments. I've never had a problem since, in spite of working out with kettlebells and doing lot's of pushups.

Western medicine is not a science; it just employs the sciences. If a physicist were to attend a medical conference he would laugh at how far behind western medicine is in comparision to the sciences. Western medicine wouldn't even acknowledge the existence of the cell phone if it weren't for the fact that it can be held in one's hands.

Kenneth, you asked if I thought acupuncture was a fraudulent practice. My Taiwanese ex-wife was in the second batch of people licensed as Certified Acupuncturist in the state of California. She went to the Oriental College of Medicine in San Diego where she taught after she graduated. And all this happened when we were still married so I became familiar with the area because she and I used to talk quite a bit about it. Plus my best hung gar friend was a workers comp attorney and he followed the licensing of acupuncturists pretty closely because once they got legitimatized, at least in the eyes of the Workers Comp Board then he could start hustling clients through the soon to be licensed acupuncturists.

The direct answer to your question; acupuncture can be helpful in certain cases for certain problems. But the theory behind it is nonsense, absolute utter nonsense. [Please, for the space heads lurking on this board do not fill my email box with death threats or long winded defenses of chi, charkas, UFO sightings or stories about how you learned mysterious chi gong from a Tibetan shaman who learned it directly from Bigfoot up in Nevada City.]

Acupuncture is in the same position that medieval European herb medicine was in. By chance some of the remedies work (proof that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn eventualy..and it is sometimes filled with chi!) but the theory as to why they work is absurd. Herbal remedies do not work, as 12th century Europeans thought, because they effect the humors in the body. They work because of certain chemical reactions which are well known to any first year chemistry student.

The last serious scholarly paper I read on acupuncture, maintained that the effects of acupuncture were a result of nerve stimulation which triggered chemical changes in the body. The chi idea was mentioned as background then laughed out of the study.

So that is my stance on that. For the space cadets, I would make one comment and one question. I turn 46 in about a week and in the course of looking back over my life I notice in the United States a big reaction against science and a craving for what I will call pseudoscience weirdness. Now my question; why? Do the space cadets fear science, find it too hard, not romantic enough or what?

The reason I ask is I am working on my masters thesis called The California Counter-Enlightenment or Science vs. Bullsh*t, Which Will Win Out.

Take care,
Herr Doktor Brian
Swami to the Stars