One of the things that I most love about Qi Gong and Taoist philosophy is the underlying belief that my intelligence, any single person’s intelligence is stored in the physical body, in 5 key organs to be precise. This immediately takes me out of my head and forces me to focus on what is going on inside my body. I have a lot of experience, which I come by honestly, of living disconnected from what was happening within my own body. Dissociation has its utility, in that it helped me survive the sexual, emotional, and physical abuse I experienced as a child. As an adult, though, I found it kept me from fully enjoying and experiencing my life.
My first personal insight into this ability to disconnect from my physical body (because it actually wasn’t obvious to me) happened early on in my herbal training, when I was asked to assess my Ayurvedic dosha type. I didn’t know how to answer some of the most basic questions about my own physical reactions – did I have a sharp or no appetite, what kinds of foods did I like best, how was my sleep. Every time I tried out an answer in my head, it felt like I was talking about someone else. I had no idea what my own skin and sensory perceptions felt like, and it was quite a shock to me.
It is why I love practicing qi gong and why I teach it to others as part of my herbal practice. Because qi gong taught me how to feel and to occupy not just my body, but the richness and depth of my inner spaces. It is a never ending process that keeps getting more fulfilling, grounding, and magical as time goes by. One of the best parts about qi gong is that it offers you a structure, a framework to use when swimming around in your inner space. That structure is the 5 key organs or shen as they are typically called – the liver, the spleen, the lungs, the kidneys, and the heart.
The shen represent the 5 natural elements that comprise our bodies – wood, earth, metal, water, and fire. Each organ represents one of our 5 senses and corresponds to a specific element and season, among other things. For example, liver is represented by the wood element and corresponds to sight and the spring season. The spleen corresponds to the earth element, the sense of taste, and is the midpoint of the year. The lungs relate to the season of fall, the sense of smell, and the metal element. The sense of hearing is associated with the kidneys, the water element, and winter. Last but not least, the heart corresponds to the fire element, summer, and the sense of touch.
What I especially love is that the five elements or phases also takes into account my emotional and spiritual aspects too. The emotional and spiritual aspects of me are not separated and apart from my physical functioning, but are actually integrated into the full picture. The 5 shen or spirits are referred to as the body gods, meaning that they not only represent the intelligence of the body, but also our own internal connection to God or source. The practices are designed to strengthen the body, as our physical container for our soul, to allow us to express and experience our worldly, and hopefully spiritual destiny. Each organ or shen is the gross manifestation of a larger function or purpose of the mind/body/spirit like digestion, as well as houses our capacity for virtue.
Actually, not just our capacity for virtue, but our capacity for the other, less pretty, side of that virtue. For example, anger and frustration can be stored in the liver, but also our capacity for creativity, vision, and kindness. In the spleen lies our capacity for worry, as well as deep trust. The lungs hold our capacity for grief, as well as courage and integrity. The kidneys house fear, as well as gentleness and deep wisdom. And the heart represents our capacity for unconditional love, as well as impatience, intolerance, and cruelty. We all have the capacity to choose either end of the emotional scale, as well as all of the places on the continuum in between those extremes.
Each organ’s function is present everywhere in the body, in every cell, not only in that specific organ. The five elements represent specific stages of the creative life cycle, and any phase of the cycle can be in excess or in depletion. Each cycle flows into the next and it can be a fluid process when in harmony. We can all get stuck at different phases and may need some assistance in reestablishing that sense of flow though. Which is where qi gong comes in because it allows me to decide where I am noticing stuckness or depletion and then offers different tools to address that issue so that my inner space is changed. These five phases are:
Gestation and Birth/Water – This is the stage where something is being nourished and nurtured in its gestation stage – it is the germination phase – think of being born and when the water breaks triggering birth.
Growth and Expansion /Liver – The birth phase where something is expanding and growing. Think of new plant buds springing through the earth and flowering.
Expansion/Fire – The stage where expansion peaks and is at it’s height.
Refinement/Metal – This phase is the where you distill down the essence, or the gold of what you are trying to create – this is the refinement stage where you get rid of what doesn’t work and keep what does.
Digestion/Earth – This is the center point and we transition through earth between every cycle to help us ground and digest each successive stage.
The fifth element or phase, Earth, provides a grounding point between each of these phases. This is our time to digest what we have experienced and integrate it. It is in the transition stage that we most often experience discomfort or difficulty adjusting to the next phase of the cycle, when literally we may be having a hard time digesting the changes that are occurring within us as well as outside of us. An example of this is when someone literally gets sick with a cold or flu or develops allergies or health issues during the change of season.
There is a qi gong practice that I like that Mantak Chia teaches. My husband learned it from him and taught it to me. I find it very effective. It is a process where you delete the negative emotion or tension stored in each organ, as well as in the brain, cleaning the software (the organs) and the hard drive (the brain). You use the healing sound for that organ to bring in fresh prenatal energy to the organ and exhale anything you are holding onto in that organ. So it helps release any excesses while at the same time it replenished the organ as well.
I often use these meditations to strengthen my kidneys. The kidneys not only store fear, but also shock and trauma. It is the fight of flight response that can physically manifest as anxiety or a racing heart. I have found that my childhood was not always kind to my kidneys, which means that as an adult I try to be extra loving and kind to them. My favorite meditation is to simply sit and smile at my kidneys in total acceptance and love. I can often feel them relax, as if there was a little bit of tension they were holding on to that they can now release. But it isn’t just my kidneys that relax but my whole body seems to release any stored tension.
The kidneys rule the reproductive organs, so I will often take a moment to smile at my uterus and ovaries, especially if I am feeling pain during my menstrual cycle. Recently when I was smiling at my kidneys they answered back with a glowingly radiant purple bluish black color that was quite spectacular, like I was smiling from the inside out. Physically after engaging in these practices, I sleep well, I feel calm and peaceful, I do not experience anxiety, and when something shocking (like an emotional shock, loud noise, or watching or reading something upseting) happens the effects don’t linger. This is one example of many I could share of the positive benefits of qi gong. Above all, and perhaps the most satisfying, is that I know what it feels like to be deeply and fully present in my body.
