Qi-full happy child

Warm my heart with your giggles

Teach me to wiggle

By LTQ

                                                                                     from Chantilly Lace by The Big Bopper

Maybe you’ve been around three-year-olds. Have you noticed that they are always kind of dancing? Their waking lives often consist mostly of wiggling and giggling.

When we learn qigong, we learn simple movements. They clear the qi pathways in us. Soon we are moving with more freedom, and we begin to notice the feeling that qi is moving us.  Like all feelings, it is a physical state reflecting the mind, and a state of mind reflecting the physical state.

My teacher often talks about returning to our original nature. When I think about my original nature on one level, I think about being three years old and rolling on the ground like a log on warm summer days, jumping in huge piles of leaves in fall, and cold winter days spent playing endlessly in the snow. But mostly I think about running, wiggling, and enjoying the moment. We have a qigong form called Return to Spring. The first time I learned it, it made me feel like that again. I was hooked.

When we let it, qi will warm us and bring us into a state of wiggle. If we advance far enough in our practice, we can wiggle with abandon like a three-year-old. But this is very advanced stuff. In my mind, you know you’ve gotten there when you giggle while you wiggle.

I don’t mean to minimize the subtleties of qi or the forms. They are nothing to be sniffed at. But sometimes thinking of qigong, what with its, at first glance, exotic name and ancient history, we forget about the core profundity of just wiggling and giggling. It does, after all, make the world go round. And if that’s not qi at work, what is?

Or maybe let’s put it this way – the inner giggle manifests the outer wiggle. Or is it the other way around? I forget.

Mike Kornely