The Phenomenology of Qi

This had been on my mind anyway, and Ebonmuse gave me the perfect excuse to expound on it. The problem with telling people that there is no such thing as qi, is that many people have experienced a sensation that they interpret as qi. Ebonmuse even has a physiological explanation for one of these sensations: The Ideomotor Effect. Beautiful stuff, particularly as something like this very effect is taken advantage of in push-hands. From Wikipedia: "The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action."

Mark once asked Kayo Robertson how to follow someone who wasn't moving. Following in push-hands means, essentially, responding to another person's movements, and simply staying with those movements (without tensing up). Kayo responded, "You think you're not moving?" Kayo placed one hand on the center of Mark's chest and told him to try and not move. There were still small movements that Kayo could follow and use to push Mark out. Wikipedia describes reflexive movements, but I think unconscious or unintentional would be a better descriptor in this example.

Ebonmuse also suggests that most of the other reported effects of qi flow are due to suggestibility in the practitioner. There are some instances where I strongly suspect that is the case; look for Henry Wang's push-hands videos on You-Tube, for example. There are some problems, however.

My first experience with qi was before I had any idea there was such a notion. I was riding on a bus, either in junior high or high school. My feet kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter, as if there were a coal burning roughly in the center of the bottom of each foot. I looked around, wondering if something was wrong, but no one else seemed to notice. With great effort, I managed to pull my feet up off the floor, and the sensation decreased noticeably. Years later, I had a similar sensation during a qigong exercise, and suddenly I knew what it was I'd felt on that bus. Even stranger, the place where I'd felt the hot coal has a name: the bubbling well. Certainly, my latter experiences could have an element of suggestibility to them, but that begs the question of why I felt heat in a location that is believed to be a center for qi flow before ever hearing of qi flow or that there was an energy center in that location.

Another problem with the pure suggestibility hypothesis is that beginning taiji students often spontaneously report feeling heat in their hands. Usually I don't even mention qi unless students express interest in it, or mention such sensations. I'm not claiming that the only explanation is a metaphysical energy source; I am claiming that the sensations are real and a result of the taiji practice. What the practice does to result in those sensations, I can't say, at least not in physical terms. It's simpler, and more useful, just to call it qi-flow.

Why? Because it feels like an energy flow. Mentally, it can be manipulated as if it were an energy flow, at least in one's own body. If it's not an energy flow, then it's probably an artifact of the way the brain processes information coming in from the body. That's not going to help people figure out what to do with those sensations, however. And they are useful sensations in the context of taiji. They tell practitioners when the body is lined up correctly, and treating the sensations as actual energy flows tends to give people exactly the right impression for adjusting their own postures. Most of the time. Every so often I locate a different flow that turns out not to be the one we're aiming for in the taiji form, and then Don and I argue about it, and he nearly always turns out to be right.

As for where the maps of the meridians and such came from, I would bet solid money that they came from practitioners of the martial arts and meditation, noting where these "energy" concentrations felt like they were located, and whether they felt any flows between them. One more personal anecdote: in our morning warm-ups, we rub the centers of the right palm around the center of the left foot 36 times, and then switch to left palm on right foot. I was told this was supposed to be good for the kidneys. After a few weeks of practice, I could feel a sensation, almost like an electrical current, running from the center of my palm, up the arm, over the shoulder, and down to the middle of the back, where it seemed to collect. I had to look up where the kidneys were, and it turned out that they were exactly where the energy felt like it was collecting. It took several years before I got a similar flow running up from the center of the foot to the opposite kidney, and I still don't always get that one: it seems to depend on getting the presumed energy centers in the feet and hands precisely lined up.

Do I think there's actual electricity flowing from my limbs into my kidneys? Possibly. Then again, it may just be another artifact of the way the brain processes sensation. What I know is that I experienced that in the absence of any expectation of feeling such a flow, and before I knew for certain where my own kidneys were located. So I'm inclined to be dismissive of anyone who just dismisses the meridians as hokey nonsense with no physiological correlates. There is something to them, even if it's not a literal energy flow.

For the record, I would like it if qi turned out to be energy in the sense that the term is used in physics. That would just be cool. However, I don't think I'll be convinced of that until/unless I manage to physically affect some inanimate object without physically touching it. And, yes, periodically I do try. I suspect that if I ever did succeed, my first thought would be to wonder if I was having a psychotic break-down.