The Way of Blockages
Over the last couple of years it has been pointed out that I have gained an annoying glitch in my swings, both in Energy Gates and in Paul’s Taoist Neigong set.
Energy Gates Qigong is one of my favourite sets and I have been studying it for around 20 years with reasonable success and a number of instances of the sublime. So this news was very disheartening and a massive annoyance to me, not least because I couldn’t even feel the problem.
It was first pointed out in the 2023 round of recertifications into the new Energy Arts 8-level structure. This was an especially busy year for me, lots of big events and life challenges, which ‘stretched’ me pretty thin.
This allowed me to make excuses to myself, that once I had regathered myself and life had calmed down, then my practice would get back on track and should be able to sort out that ‘little’ glitch.
Fast forward to 2024 Neigong teacher training and the glitch was there again, or rather still there, meaning all the practice I thought I had done to work it out had had little effect.
This then required me to fully focus on this one thing within the swings, to strip the whole movement down to its most basic parts and, slowly and honestly, rebuild it anew, with the help and guidance of Paul Cavel through a few private lessons.
This enabled me to identify the problem in my body, where it happened, what was going on with my mind, etc. It took a number of months of solid focus on this one element, not allowing myself to move forward until I had each layer as best as I could.
It has been through this process that my swing is really starting to come alive in ways it never did before, due to the material I have been practising and developing in my body over the last decade or so.
However, without needing to revisit, strip back and rebuild my swings I wouldn’t have this depth and quality that I am now exploring in this qigong form. An added bonus is that this practice is informing all the other internal arts I practice as well, reaffirming the wisdom in the ‘learning spiral’ methodology.
The perceived wisdom is that blockages are bad and need to be worked out of the bodies, physical and energetic, so the natural and healthy flow of our existence can manifest itself unhindered.
I can’t help but feel that the tension and restriction (the blockage) I experienced has caused, or more accurately, necessitated me to grow and develop, through the challenge it represents and the process of working it out.
I see ‘blockages’, in the broadest sense of the word, as actually being a part of me. Therefore, who I am and what I am made of, physically and energetically, allows the potential for that particular blockage to exist in my system. If my system was robust and ‘healthy’ in the right way, then the blockage would be less able and less likely to take hold.
In this way any blockages I have are necessarily a part of me and a part of who I am in the moment. They are also very individual to me and could be seen to set the path down which I must explore.
This cultivates an attitude of Acceptance towards these issues, removing the adversarial quality within my relationship with them. It also begins to really embrace the Water methodology towards my blockages and their releasing or dissolving: I don’t attack or work at them with the goal of getting rid of them, but rather accept their nature and relax my being around them, so my energy matrix creates ‘space’ for the blockage to not-be-possible in my new form.
Therefore, through the process of releasing or dissolving a blockage fully, my system needs to adjust into the new Me-without-the-blockage. This adjustment is not only to the new and improved Me, but will alter my energy matrix to remove the void and to be better able to withstand that particular blockage from gaining a foothold again.
In this way the tension, restriction, contractions and blockages we have can be seen as the challenges that give us focus, to become better versions of ourselves.
I guess this is also true in emotional and mental realms, as well as all the other energetic bodies. However, we can access all of these through our physicality because they are all somehow manifest within our bodies.
This is very much just ‘one blind man’s perspective on the proverbial elephant’. That said, Qigong, Tai Chi, Bagua and Meditation, etc, are a decent set of tools with which we can all weed out and discover these anomalies in our own systems, realign our energy matrices, and work at consolidating the next, healthier versions of ourselves.
Constant and regular practice is the embodiment of this constant process of individual improvement, or change, on our many levels and it is that practice that aligns us with the only universal constant… that of Change.