ENSURING LASTING BENEFITS OF CHI KUNG PRACTICE
Turning Heads of 18 Lohan Hands
Question
What do we do after our 18 Lohan practice to ensure the healing benefits stay with us?
David
Answer
Practice the 18 Lohan Hands or any genuine chi kung exercise correctly everyday, and the healing and other wonderful benefits will stay with us.
Each practice session should take about 10 to 15 minutes. One practice session a day is quite sufficient, but if you like you may practice two sessions a day, once in the morning and once in the evening or at night. It is not necessary to practice more sessions a day, and not necessary to practice more than 15 minutes a session. But it is important that the practice is regular and consistent.
Different types of chi kung need different length of time for practice. For other people most types of chi kung need about an hour per practice session. For our chi kung, just about 10 to 15 minutes a session is enough. In fact, it is not advisable for new students to practice too long as this may lead to over-training.
Our chi kung is very powerful. Our students get more benefits practicing just 15 minutes a day for six months than most other students practice an hour a day for three years. Other people may not be happy hearing this statement, but it is true.
If you just do this, i.e. practice the 18 Lohan Hands correctly about 10 to 15 minutes a day everyday, not only the healing benefits of the 18 Lohan Hands will stay with you but also you will enjoy good health, vitality and longevity.
But first of all, what do we mean by practicing correctly? We mean that by performing one or more of the 18 Lohan Hands, you can generate an energy flow. The energy flow is the most important. It is the energy flow, not the exercise itself, that overcomes all pain and illness, and brings good health, vitality and longevity.
To help you to practice the 18 Lohan Hands or any chi kung in our school correctly, i.e. to generate an energy flow from the chi kung exercise you perform, just follow the following three golden rules:
- Don't worry.
- Don't Intellectualize.
- Enjoy your practice.
These three golden rules will answer most, if not all, technical questions you may have concerning your practice, like which exercise should you choose to practice, should you breath into your chest or your abdomen, can you drink coffee after your practice. Just don’t worry about the questions, don’t intellectualize what the correct answers should be, and enjoy your practice which should result in an energy flow.
Because today many people are sick or stressful, they find it hard to believe that chi kung can overcome any health problems, including so-called incurable diseases. From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, all sickness and pain is caused by energy blockage.
In modern language, energy blockage here means that the energy that works all the systems that maintain your life is blocked from doing its work. For example, when viruses get into your body, energy in your body will naturally clear away the harmful viruses. When negative emotions are locked in your body, energy in your body will naturally flush out the negative emotions.
You don’t have to do anything special or know how they work. They are natural processes. But if the energy is blocked from working these life-maintaining processes, sickness or pain will result. When the blockage is cleared, the life-maintaining processes resume their functions, and illness is overcome as a matter of course. Practicing chi kung to generate an energy flow daily is an excellent way to clear energy blockage.
Practicing chi kung not only overcomes illness but also contributes to good health, vitality and longevity. After having overcome illness, if you continue to practice chi kung daily, you maintain a harmonious energy flow, which means that all your life-maintaining processes function smoothly. This results in good health, which is different from merely overcoming illness.
As you continue to practice chi kung daily, your energy flow is not only harmonious but also vigorous. A vigorous energy flow gives you vitality. As you further continue to practice chi kung daily, you accumulate more energy than you need to maintain good health and vitality. The excess energy is stored at your dan tian, creating a reservoir that enables your energy to flow for a long time. This means you have longevity.
Overcoming illness, maintaining good health, and contributing to vitality and longevity are the logical results of practicing chi kung correctly. In other words, if you practice chi kung correctly every day, you will naturally overcome illness, maintain good health, and enjoy vitality and longevity.
But in real life, a lot of people who practice chi kung, like the 18 Lohan Hands, do not have these wonderful benefits. The most important reason is that they do not practice chi kung correctly, and they are unaware of this fact. They do not generate an energy flow. Strictly speaking, they do not practice genuine chi kung; they practice chi kung patterns as gentle physical exercise. More than 80% of chi kung practitioners all over the world today make this serious mistake.
But even amongst those who practice chi kung correctly, i.e. they generate an energy flow by performing their chi kung patterns, a small proportion may still not overcome their illness. This is because of one or more of the following reasons:
- They do not practice everyday. They may practice everyday for a short time, like two weeks, then stop practicing or only practice of and on.
- The chi kung they practice is of a low level, and the energy flow is not strong enough to clear their energy blockage.
- They are still exposed to the disease-causing agents which are potent. Although their energy flow has cleared some blockage, their disease-causing agents are creating new blockage.
- Their illness has gone beyond a threshold for recovery.
It is inspiring to note that while not every patient can be cured, due to one or more of the reasons above, there is no such a thing as an incurable disease in the chi kung paradigm.
As the 18 Lohan Hands practiced in our school generate a lot of energy flow, all you need to do to ensure the healing benefits stay with you as well as to enjoy other wonderful benefits of chi kung, is to practice one or more of the 18 Lohan Hands correctly everyday.
You should not worry even when you realized you have made some mistakes due to carelessness or forgetfulness because without you having to do anything extra, your chi flow will erase the harm your mistakes may cause
The questions and answers are reproduced from the thread 18 Lohan Hands: 10 Questions to Grandmaster Wong in the Shaolin Wahnam Discussion Forum.
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