Qigong and Wiggling

Good sleep is so valuable.

I know I enthusiastically extoll the healing power of qigong. I could go on about how qigong helps with longevity and spiritual awakening. 

Yet if you are exhausted, you might say, “Who cares about enlightenment, I just want to sleep!”

Qigong can be a valuable part of your get-to-sleep and get-back-to-sleep tool box. 

You might say – when I’m sleepless in the middle of the night, that’s the last time I want to put in all the concentration of qigong.

Qigong is not all stillness and concentration. In the big scheme of things, it’s about mastering our alignment with the never-ending dance of yin and yang. It’s about activating flow.

I’ve created a third qigong video about sleep, and this is the most wiggly of them all. I share some movements for loosening the joints and most especially the spine so that you can more readily fall asleep.

I thought I’d say a little more about qigong and wiggling. The more official name for it is spontaneous qigong. It is the art of listening to how your body wants to move.   

What makes spontaneous qigong different from regular old wiggling? The difference is our attention. With each qigong breath, we bring awareness to the flow of universal energy. We are not just letting our own bodies unwind, we are following how the healing universal qi wants to move through us. Each wiggle becomes a healing movement.

Sometimes we get so busy with our days that it’s only in the night we are able to notice important messages from our body and emotions. My friend called his sleeplessness “night school,” a time for him to learn something he wasn’t able to notice during the day. 

In that sense, wakefulness in the night can be a gift. I offer this latest practice video as a resource for wiggling through it. 

Sweet dreams!

emily