Summer Qigong’s
A time for strengthening heart and small intestine

This time of year is high yang energy and Traditional Chinese Medicine associates this season with the Heart* meridian. The heart is a yin organ, its yang counterpart being the small intestine and so we will be looking at specific qigong’s related to the heart.

Each major yin organ has associations with both harmful and positive emotions. In qigong the harmful emotions associated with the heart is shock, and surprisingly the emotion joy.

This could be because joy can be expressed as giddiness, excitability, talkativeness and is the opposite of the Chinese ideal of the sage.

Or it could yet again be another issue of translation. Xi is the transliteration of the Chinese word for joy and according to the Chinese medical scholars Kiiko Matsumoto and Stephen Birch, “in a medical context xi accurately refers more to the notion of problems caused by overeating”, thus ‘joy’ disperses and scatters the qi. It can create an uneven pulse and make one prone to cardiac problems.
(Kenneth Cohen, The Way of Qigong, p 235, 1999 edition)

We will be focussing on five qigongs, again taken from the Shibashi, to both learn the Shibashi at a deeper level, and to promote a healthy heart and healthy living.

The positive emotion associated with heart is order.

Summer…a time of fire, so drink plenty of water.

We visualise with the colour red and we will be looking at the qigongs:

Opening the Chest
Painting the Rainbow
Parting the Clouds
Rowing Boat
Scooping Sea, Looking at the Sky.

Students are recommended to buy ‘The Theory and Practice of Taiji Qigong’ by Chris Jarmey and utilise Mark Peters’ free online Shibashi youtube videos

or

email taiji@myphone.coop for more detailed video tutorials and printable handouts.

*Capitals are used to distinguish meridian from organ.