Feeling versus Visualising
By Paul Cavel
When learning any internal energy art, such as qigong, tai chi or bagua, there is a major hurdle that must be overcome to create sustainable, long-term training results: feeling instead of visualising. I’ve watched how this has become more and more difficult for students over the last 30 years of teaching, as screens and devices are more integral to our realities than ever.
To start most internal arts techniques are done as physical practices rather than as mental projections. Visualising something that you are in fact trying to embody does not help you make headway in this case. Instead you must feel how techniques actually affect you in body, mind and qi. This can change over time, from day to day and even moment to moment. Your ability to feel, to distinguish between the various sensations ignited in your body on ever-more subtle levels, is precisely what guides you along your path and enables later stages of development. Your feeling awareness (kinaesthetic sense) can become more refined as you understand and can respond to the messages being sent by your body to your brain. This, in turn, establishes the mind-body trust required to pull off complex neigong techniques, where the mind and qi completely merge together and become one (see my post I Chu Dzuo versus Chi Chu Dzuo.)
Analysis versus Direct Perception
When we are introduced to a new movement, we assimilate data points by observation; that is by watching the motion being performed, usually while listening to instructions. When we subsequently try the exercise for ourselves, the default is therefore to engage the analytical and conceptual modalities of our mind; that is to rely on the senses that were activated in the first place. When these modalities are active visualisations often accompany them as a result of conditioning from growing up in hyper-visual cultures.
Ideally you want to let go of this mode of operating as soon as possible and seek to enter into the next, which involves your proprioception and engagement of your kinaesthetic or feeling sense. This feeling awareness provides direct feedback about what is happening to you while training in any given movement. Of course, initially, you need the analytical process to understand what it is that you are trying to accomplish (e.g. an arm or leg motion, body turn, close-open or combination of these), but soon the analytical process becomes a point of disconnection and actually inhibits your ability to take the technique deeper into the body. This is because analysis diminishes your ability to feel your body and instead keeps you in your mundane thinking, the ego’s loyal servant.
Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body!
When you engage your kinaesthetic, feeling sense, the door opens to direct perception. Direct perception is the age-old, tried and true method of bypassing thinking, visualising and making up stories in your head via your ego’s musings. Direct perception allows you to be present to what is actually happening during practice.
The hyper use of media and information technology has conditioned us to be quite good at visualising, and not only that but to be satisfied, even temporarily happy, by engaging this mode of operation. However, visualisations are not an accurate basis for making judgments when it comes to neigong (and certainly not to the bigger decisions in life). Visualising alone will not bring you any closer to health benefits or to helping you achieve the goals that led you to take up training in the first place. And visualisations are not enough to manifest real change in and of themselves, otherwise most people would be fit, rich and happy without a care in the world!
When your mind sinks into and penetrates your body, and feels movement directly, especially internal motion, you can make the fine adjustments necessary to improve your technique and reap sustainable rewards for your effort. So try to go beyond visualising and break the habit sooner rather than later, before you build in a glass ceiling and prevent your longer-term development.
Clues You Might Be Visualising
Here are some clues you might be visualising:
Closing your eyes during movement.
Spacing out or drifting off into some fairyland or to-do list.
Analysing your movement rather than feeling it.
Disconnecting from the sense of your physical body.
Losing your presence and awareness.
Simply focus and feel every time you move. You are not only practising a form with internal content, but also how to feel deeply into your body and become continuously present while you train. Direct perception is a highly qualitative use of the kinaesthetic, feeling sense, which can only be developed with dedicated and sustained practice. But the ability to become aware of what is happening inside you and directly perceive how well your body’s systems are functioning – without ambiguity – is a true gift to yourself. You then have the potential to use that awareness and muster your power to create positive change.
In addition to many hours of training, direct perception also requires honesty. Unless you are completely truthful with yourself, your ego can too easily charge the fact of the matter – either positively or negatively, depending on your personal disposition. Either way it is a distortion of reality and, from that point, you can lead yourself off into a detour of the mind’s hopes, dreams, fears or flaws. When you do this, you will most certainly disconnect from the here and now, where all healing, all progress, all letting go takes place.
When You Practise
Become present,
Open up your awareness,
Feel your body,
Focus your mind’s intent and
Concentrate on what you are doing in the moment, leaving everything else aside.
More practice while regularly dissociating will yield inferior results to less practice while being more awake. This is just one of the reasons why Taoists say:
“Less Is More”.
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