what qi actually feels like

do this before you read anything else. it takes forty seconds.

hold both hands up in front of your chest, palms facing each other, fingers loosely curved, about the width of a grapefruit apart. don't let them touch. don't do anything else — no breathing technique, no intention, nothing. just wait.

after twenty or thirty seconds most people report the same two things: the palms get warm, and there's a faint sense of pressure, like the air between them has thickness. now pull your hands slowly apart, a centimeter at a time. a lot of people find the thickness stretches with them, like taffy, up to some distance where it snaps.

if you ask a chinese person what qi (气) is, there's a decent chance this is what they'll show you instead of answering. it's the street version. it's also, more or less, the thing in the japanese arcade game where the fighter cups his hands, gathers something blue, and fires it at the other guy.

ask a different chinese person and you'll get: "it's just heat. everybody has it." which is the less impressive answer and, i've come to think, the closer one.

what the warmth is

the warmth is real and it is not mysterious. your skin sits around 33°C. everything at that temperature radiates infrared. normally that radiation leaves your palm and goes off into a room that is colder than you are. put a second palm in front of it and each hand is now catching what the other one throws, and both are partly shielded from the room. the pocket of air between them stops being room-temperature air. it becomes a small enclosure with two heaters in it.

the sense of pressure is likelier to be attention than air. you have receptors in that skin you almost never poll. holding still and pointing your whole nervous system at a body part you normally ignore reliably produces sensation. it produces sensation in your left ankle too, if you sit there long enough.

none of that makes the exercise fake. it makes it boring, which is different, and in this subject boring is a compliment. the question was never whether you feel something — you do, everyone does, it's repeatable on a stranger in forty seconds. the question is what you're allowed to conclude from it.

that turns out to be a question my family fought about for about fifteen years.

my grandfather had qigong

i grew up hearing that. not "practiced qigong" — had it, the way you'd say someone has a driver's license.

i had a stomachache once, small, the kind children get. he put his hand on my belly. it got warm. that is the entire memory. i don't remember it stopping hurting, i don't remember him taking his hand away, i don't remember the rest of the afternoon. i was a child and the warm hand is the whole file.

nobody else in the family believed in it. i don't mean they argued about it — i mean it was the household's running joke, the way some families have an uncle and his metal detector. and then at some point he stopped practicing, and nobody remarked on that either, and for most of my life i assumed the two facts were related: he stopped because it didn't work and he finally noticed.

that's not why he stopped.

the twenty years he started and stopped inside

on 11 march 1979 the Sichuan Daily ran a story about a twelve-year-old boy in Dazu county named Tang Yu (唐雨) who could read written characters with his ears. the paper's language was not hedged. it said: repeatedly examined, and it is indeed so.

nine days later, between 13 and 20 march, an investigation team from Sichuan Medical College ran a week of tests and concluded the opposite — the ears didn't read anything, and the effect had been produced by ordinary conjuring.

the correction did not travel the way the story did. it almost never does. what travelled instead was the idea, and then something much bigger arrived behind it: Qian Xuesen (钱学森), the man who built china's missile program and possibly the most institutionally protected scientist in the country, became the movement's most prominent advocate and pushed for an entire discipline to study it. once he was in, this was no longer a rumour about a boy in Sichuan. it was a research field with budget lines.

what followed is hard to overstate. the numbers usually cited from that period — david palmer's Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (columbia university press, 2007) is the standard account — are between 60 and 200 million practitioners and over 2,000 qigong organisations. that is not a subculture. in most chinese cities at dawn, that was simply what mornings looked like.

this is the part i didn't know, and it's the whole answer to my family's argument. when my grandfather started, he wasn't doing something eccentric. he was doing what the parks were doing, in a country where the most famous scientist alive had put his name on it.

and then it came apart. the most famous master of the era was tested at a defence research institute for sixteen years; in 1988 an investigation that included a stage illusionist watched him do the sealed-envelope trick and reported what he had actually done, which was swap the envelope for a duplicate by hand. by the mid-nineties the state had turned, and by 1999 the era was closed. those are the tears of a whole generation and not really my story to tell.

my grandfather stopped somewhere in there. the household joke had it exactly backwards: he didn't quit because his family didn't believe him. a hundred million people put it down at roughly the same time, and he was one of them.

which leaves the warm hand, which i still have and always will. and the most accurate thing i can say about it is this: a warm hand on a child's stomach, held there by somebody completely calm and completely focused on that child, is not nothing. it's just not evidence of a field. those are two different sentences and i've spent this year learning to keep them apart.

the part i can actually check

i turned forty and could not get out of my own way. no energy, nothing dramatic, just the sense of running at sixty percent all day. i went to see several daoist doctors (道医) over a few months, and then i started doing things instead of reading about them.

the first was ba bu jin gang gong (八部金刚功), an eight-section form that comes down through Zhang Zhishun (张至顺, daoist name Mi Jingzi 米晶子) — a twenty-first-generation Quanzhen Longmen daoist who lived from 1912 to 2015 and died at 104. it's free on youtube. this is the version i follow along with every morning, on our channel, tempo adjusted because in most recordings some sections run too fast and some too slow to actually learn from:

the english title on it says Eight Pieces of Brocade, which is really the name of a close cousin, ba duan jin (八段锦) — i left it because that's what people search for. either one works. i do this one because it's the blunt version; ba duan jin wants you to coordinate a breathing pattern with each movement, which is more than i can hold in my head at seven in the morning. pick whichever one you'll actually finish.

if you don't normally exercise, the first week is embarrassing how much you notice. that's not qi. what's opening in the first week is sinew and bone — jingu (筋骨) — which in an unexercised forty-year-old have a lot of slack to take up. anything would have done that. a month of brisk walking would have done that.

and then, at roughly six weeks, i hit a wall i couldn't climb with effort, which is a specific and annoying kind of wall. the instructions kept referring to bringing the qi up as the first real step. that part is xinfa (心法) — the internal method, the part that isn't the shape. i could do all eight sections correctly and had no idea what that sentence was asking me to do. it was the first time since i was a child that the word had shown up as something i was supposed to do rather than something my family argued about.

standing

then i learned zhan zhuang (站桩) — standing post — from a teacher on Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain. it's the newest thing i've added and the one i'll still be doing in ten years.

i want to describe it accurately, because everything written about it in english makes it sound harder and more mystical than it is.

you stand. you go through your body and release every bit of tension you can find. you bring your attention back inside your own skin. that is the entire preparation. there is no next instruction.

then the body starts filing reports. things twitch, ache, shake, get hot, get itchy. those are not events. those are the existing state of your body becoming audible because you finally stopped talking over it. you don't intervene, you don't correct, you don't chase them. you keep releasing. the framework says stagnation is the root — qi and blood not moving, 气血不通 — that whether a problem ends up structural or emotional, it started as something not moving and sat there long enough to become a thing with a name. so standing isn't doing anything to the body. it's removing the interference and letting circulation reach places it's been routed around for years.

what i found, in order:

gut. bad digestion my whole life. when the gut actually lets go while standing it is briefly horrible — there's no better word — and then it isn't. anyone who has relaxed a part of themselves that had forgotten how knows exactly what that feels like, and nobody who hasn't will believe the description.

shoulders and upper back. this is the one that reorganised my understanding. teachers told me for years that my shoulders were tight. massage therapists told me. i nodded and did not understand the sentence, because tight compared to what? i had no reference. then one day standing, one shoulder let go — not a stretch, a release — and i finally had the comparison. i'd been carrying them like that since roughly forever.

the one i'm keeping score on

lower belly and glutes. i have period pain. this is the part of my body that will not release — every single time i stand, that whole region is clenched. i notice it, i let go, and ninety seconds later it's back. i had no idea i was doing that. i'd been doing it all day, every day, for years.

and it has eased. that's the real report and i'm not going to soften it.

but here's why i'm telling you the number instead of the feeling: this is the only thing in my life that files a report on a fixed schedule. once a month, whether i want it or not. two cycles so far, and each one was better than the one before.

two. that's the sample size. no control, no blinding, nothing ruled out — it could be the standing, it could be the form in the mornings, it could be sleeping better, it could be two ordinary months in a row after a bad run, which happens to people. i can't separate any of that and i'm not going to pretend i can.

what i can do is keep counting. the readout comes whether i'm paying attention or not, and i've got a lot of months. ask me in a year.

i'm not a doctor. i'm someone who went to see several, kept a few habits for a few months, and is reporting what changed and what she can't yet explain. if something hurts, go get it looked at by a person with equipment.

back to the practical side of standing: fifteen minutes is the floor, two hours is the ceiling people talk about, i do thirty or forty. it does not feel like exercise, it feels good. you sweat a little and end up loose. there's a next stage — where the body stops throwing up problems and the attention itself gets steady enough to park in one place, yi shou dan tian (意守丹田), mind resting in the lower field. i'm not there. so i'm not going to write about it. what comes after that is apparently different for different people, which is a convenient thing for a tradition to say and also, i suspect, true.

one thing worth knowing: this isn't a wellness invention. Wang Xiangzhai (王芗斋, 1885–1963), who founded the martial arts Yiquan and Dachengquan, rebuilt an entire system around standing still and made it the core of the training rather than the warm-up. people who needed their method to work in a fight put standing at the centre. that's a reasonable endorsement.

the part that is actually the point

releasing and keeping the attention in — song (放松) and shou shen (守神) — are not qigong techniques. they are the base layer of every physical practice there is. yoga is that. meditation is that. so is a good golf swing and so is not throwing your back out picking up a dog.

which means it's portable, and that's the real return. walking, eating, sleeping, working — the same two moves. release what's holding for no reason. bring the attention back in. you don't need a mat, a window, twelve minutes, or a teacher on a mountain. anyone who tries it for a week knows what i'm talking about and anyone who hasn't will think this paragraph is a fortune cookie. hahahaha.

and about flying, and reading with your ears, and the rest of it: that's extra credit. maybe some people have wiring the rest of us don't — everyone's different, and if you want to find out whether you're one of the x-men, i'd be the last person to talk you out of it. but it's not the entry fee and it's not the reason to start.

the reason to start is much less impressive and much more available. attention steady enough to stay in one place, circulation good enough that you're not running at sixty percent — and what that combination produces is not enlightenment, it's the state you were in when you were nine. present, physical, not narrating, not tired for no reason. most people write that off as a thing you don't get back.

play is the best medicine there is. the more you play, the younger you are. that's the whole business i'm in, and it took me forty years and a few months of standing in front of a window to notice it was also the health advice.

and a slow master isn't slow. that's the part everyone misreads about the old men in the park moving like they're underwater. slow is what it looks like from outside. from inside it's the moment circulation and attention stop being two things, and the person doing it lights up. i've met a few. you know it when you see it.

where i actually am

i don't have a conclusion. i have a habit, and a number i'm still collecting.

i can't tell you what my grandfather was doing with his hand. i can tell you my shoulders are down, that i found out i'd been clenching my stomach since childhood, that two cycles in a row came back better than the one before, and that thirty minutes in front of an open window is the only thing i've started at forty and wanted to keep doing.

that's a much smaller claim than this subject usually makes and it's the only one i've earned so far. i'm going to keep standing. i'm going to keep counting. and if something changes i'll write it here, including if it stops working.

because the truthful version of where i am is that i'm still finding out what qi is. not deciding — finding out, by standing there. you already did the first forty seconds of that at the top of this page. what you make of it is yours, not mine.

two things on my desk belong to this piece, and i'd rather say why than pretend they wandered in.

the figures in the photo further up are the stone people, copied from the carved stone figures of bali. their page ends with a line i wrote as a joke about how little you get for twelve dollars: they already know how to stand still. i meant it about them. it has since started to feel like it was about me.

and the slow masters are the other half of the same idea — tai chi masters caught mid-form, holding a pose so you remember to move. which is the whole shape of this article, now that i look at it: one form that moves and one that doesn't, and you need both.

i hope everybody who finds this gets younger. go find your superpower. it's probably not telekinesis and it's probably better.

go play.