Advanced seminar – a student’s report

Day 4

Today I walked in slow motion, i.e. I stayed with a slow fellow and tried to review my walk from all sides. Basically I reviewed the body position, movement, meridian stretching and breathing. Finally I was a little surprised that slow motion walk is also tiring like the fast one if all elements are correctly applied. It is always about pushing the envelope, about how to move as fast as possible with as little air as possible. Playing around this edge is what makes the progress.

In qi gong practitioners’ opinion humans are nowadays somehow overventilating. Apparently the qi is best produced if we have enough CO2 in the blood (some say we need about 6% of it which means the rest of 94% are other dissolved gases like O2 and N). I think this is why everywhere in the practice we need to reduce the breath speed while increasing the usage to the most capacity of our lungs. The more time the air stays inside us, the more qi we get.

The rest of the day went as usual, with some nice session of questions and answers, most notably about why do we do this practice, how many kind of out of body experiences exists, how many types of immortals there are and what is the difference between them. Also we discussed about buddhism and taoism approaches and about when in life we should we go to practice for dan and when to practice for the immortal fetus.

The evening was rainy so no more ping heng gong outside, however we reviewed and got feedback about our practice of the first 5 forms.