You Are Being Bombarded By Noise!
By Paul Cavel
You are being bombarded by noise – unrelenting distractions in the form of notifications, news and marketing – that diminish peace of mind. It’s no wonder why stress is the number one cause of disease with 90 percent of illnesses and diseases being linked to chronic stress (according to NASD).
You need a way to release accumulated stress before it becomes locked in your system, and more importantly, stay grounded in order to deal with the influences that can otherwise cause stress spikes in the first place.
Physical Versus Mental Tension
Before the post-industrial age of the late 20th century, most jobs – not to mention daily chores – involved a certain amount of physical labour. The regular, large motions required to do these jobs and routine tasks definitely created physical strain and tension. This wasn’t so problematic because these kinds of movements require the body to increase the volume and circulation of blood. Where blood flows, the body becomes strong, and can repair and heal itself.
Today many more people work in offices or use devices in some form, which requires performing repetitive, micro-movements, often while looking at a screen. Modern work environments are not typically designed for comfort or the health of the people who use them, but rather to increase profit for the owners or investors. Bad posture and repetitive micro-movements put a heavy load on the nervous system, causing the body to contract and tense, particularly in the small muscles of the head and neck, as well as the shoulders, arms and hands. I have watched the state of people’s posture, suppleness of their flesh and ability to be present – even for short periods – decline drastically in nearly 30 years of teaching.
When you couple all this with growing pressure on people in the form of competition, lack of sleep, chemical-laced products literally infiltrating all aspects of homes and offices, and the constant barrage of marketing, it is no wonder people begin to feel lethargic and move their bodies very little by comparison to just 50, even 25 years ago. Many people get almost no real exercise in a day.
This situation creates stagnancy in the body and its vital fluids, and does not allow the body, even during periods of rest, to significantly unload the physical and especially mental tension that has accumulated over the weeks, months and even years. In time, the heart weakens, and circulation of blood, interstitial fluid and lymph, a major player in the immune system, is diminished. Blood will circulate throughout the body whether or not you move, but lymph and interstitial fluid absolutely require movement. All of this reduces the ability of the body to fight off illness and disease, while diminishing healthy cell growth and repair. If left unaddressed, the result can be premature ageing, lethargy and an inability to take care of oneself without the assistance of pharmaceuticals and other medical interventions. These treatments always have a cost to the body-mind in some way or another in the form of so-called “side effects”. (Consider that drugs only have effects, desired or not!)
External versus Internal Exercise
A key part of the answer to this problem is, of course, more physical exercise. I am fond of saying that there are good forms of exercise and better forms of exercises; that is external versus internal forms.
Sports, jogging, some forms of cross-training, martial arts, etc. will certainly move your blood, and help keep your body fit and flexible to a degree, but not necessarily healthy. Quite often people damage their bodies while performing these kinds of activities, which can cause setbacks to workout sustainability. Professional sports teams literally release weekly injury reports to keep fans up to date on the status of their favourite players. Injuries present vulnerabilities because many athletes and active types, driven by their mind’s expectations or associations with certain identities, get back to training before they are fully healed. The ideas they have about being some kind of modern-day warrior or strong superhuman influence the length of time they can allow themselves to rest or miss out. That and many people do not become aware there is an issue until the discomfort and pain becomes so great that they cannot manage or ignore it any longer.
Internal Energy Arts FOR HEALTH
There is, however, a branch of exercise that is very different in approach and application that is suitable for all ages and the range of people, from very sickly and weak to extremely healthy and fit. Of course I am referring to internal energy arts, which were developed in ancient times to condition the body and mind in ways that release tension, and promote healing, relaxation and vitality in body and mind.
Although not a quick-fix, internal arts like tai chi and qigong (also chi gung) can slowly transform your state of health through systematic and progressive techniques that foster resiliency and inner strength: the awareness of yourself that gives you the power to know who you are, what you are truly capable of, and the ability to follow your own path in accordance with that ever-evolving reality. This is the crux of all preventative medicine – not getting into trouble in the first place. The beauty is that many aspects of energy arts practice, unlike most forms of external exercise, can also be trained to help you heal when you experience an injury, contract an illness, or suddenly come under a heavy emotional or mental load.
Gentle, Slow-motion Self-therapy
In the Water Method, internal energy exercises are derived from neigong (or “internal-energetic power development”) techniques and are typically practised through, gentle, slow and repetitive movements to enable several critical components of health and well-being to be woven together.
First, internal energy arts are designed to allow your mind to penetrate your body. They train you to FEEL what is happening inside you. This yields two important benefits:
Knowing what is going on inside yourself in any given moment, so you can realistically choose exercises in accordance with your requirements.
Recognising when an illness is coming on or a part of your body is not functioning optimally, so you can take action to nip its progression in the bud before a serious illness or disease can take hold, or an injury takes place.
Energy arts tune you into and allow you to manipulate an array of internal functions of your body, so you can fine-tune and balance your body’s systems, such as the cardiovascular, nervous and immune systems.
Energy arts allow the body to deeply relax during exercise, which enables the ability to release both surface-level and even deeply bound, accumulated tension from the body, nerves and mind. Stress is a fact of life, so you need methods to release it. Just sitting and practising mindfulness is not usually enough.
Energy arts directly target the energy channels, qi and blood of the body to open up and clear them out, which increases qi and blood circulation that can be used for carrying out your daily activities as well as healing yourself from all types of trauma – whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual in nature.
Training energy arts requires focus, so worries and unnecessary mental chatter are naturally pushed aside – without the need for high-intensity, aerobic* workouts. Even getting a few minutes of relief when you feel under pressure can allow you to breathe better and gain perspective, which can help you ground and head off further stress spikes. With ongoing and regular practice, you can slowly increase the length of time you can remain focused and concentrate. This skill can then be applied to any other activity in which you engage.
* There are also aerobic forms of internal energy exercises that can make the body fit and physically strong, but these are not often recommended in the beginning as they make all the above points more difficult to achieve. But once your foundation in neigong is in place, you can more easily make the jump to aerobic exercise while remaining firmly rooted in internal techniques.
Multiplying Effects for Efficient Use of Your Time
Internal energy arts focus both on the external form, i.e. visible body motion, and the internal systems of the body, i.e. the unseen magic of the vital organs that are responsible for creating and sustaining positive health changes.
The external form work becomes the container and can either be focused on a small body part, e.g. learning a specific adjustment to the way you move, or the whole body, e.g. integrating various pieces into one coherent motion.
The more precisely you train while remaining relaxed, the more effective the internal (neigong) techniques can be when added.
The better each internal-energetic component has been honed, the more you get when you combine the components together.
When the components are combined, the synergy of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because each component amplifies all others, yielding maximum results in the shortest amount of time.
For example, you might start by learning and practising neigong component A to release tension from your shoulders, arms, wrists, hands and fingers. Next you might learn component B to loosen up your hips, back and spine. Later you might learn component C to stretch your legs. If you were to spend five minutes on each component per day, you would, no doubt, experience some positive results.
Once you have gained proficiency in all three components, you can combine them together and, in as little as five minutes, produce an even better result. This is possible because more of the body and mind become engaged and must sync together in some fashion, which moves more blood and qi than any one aspect could do alone.
What Are Internals?
The inner aspects of arts like qigong, tai chi and bagua – that which you cannot see – are what generate the bulk of the health benefits, not form movements per se. Internals are various methods of engaging the body on a very deep level.
Here are just a few examples:
Techniques for massaging the major blood vessels to upgrade the cardiovascular system, which thereby, can lower or regulate blood pressure.
Other techniques target the joints, opening them up and activating the production of synovial fluid, which thereby, can help the joints to move better, and reduce the damage or risk of osteoarthritis.
Still other techniques release tension around the eyes and in the nerves themselves, which reduces stress and enables deep relaxation.
Many techniques have more general and broad-ranging effects, such as refined motions that gently yet firmly squeeze and release the lymph nodes directly, enabling the body to pump more lymph fluid. Lymph is a key component of the immune system, aiding the body in dealing with foreign invaders.
Slow Build for Sustainable Results
The bombardment of people across the world with (mostly) unnecessary noise, fear tactics and distractions is trending upwards and does not show any signs of slowing down. The Water Method has been used for millennia by millions of people to deal with stress and grow their resiliency in body, mind and qi.
Making time for self-care is the best form of medicine, and it always will be. Exercise, movement is a key part of self-care. Rather than going in full steam ahead, like most forms of external exercise, internal exercises are learned and developed over time. Their gentle, repetitive, slow-motion methodology allows a practitioner to become familiar with the movements, while progressively adding in refined internal (neigong) techniques. You have the time to observe how your body, energy and mind are affected at each step, and to establish a comfortable routine that is well within your capacity.
Once you become used to short sessions of around 10 minutes of training, it takes almost no effort to increase it to 12 minutes. Without forcing their system, many internal arts practitioners find they can easily grow their practice to 15, 20, 30 minutes or more per day, which is a small investment for a big return in the form of better sleep, fewer ailments, less pain, and greater flexibility, energy and vitality in body, mind and spirit.
Learn more about the Water Method and get started training internal energy arts with me in my low-cost Membership programme.: