r/qigong

Hey everyone — 4th-gen TCM practitioner here. I've been doing the Twelve Section Brocade (十二段锦) since I was a kid learning from my family, and I keep noticing the same thing with beginners:

They gravitate toward the "cool" movements and skip the boring-looking ones. But those quiet exercises are where the real foundation gets built.

1. Teeth clicking (叩齿)

Lightly click your upper and lower teeth together 36 times. Sounds pointless, but in TCM theory the teeth are connected to the kidney meridian. It's about anchoring your energy before you even start moving. I do this every morning before anything else.

2. Belly rubbing (揉腹)

Circular massage around the navel — 36 times clockwise, 24 times counterclockwise. This is the single most important self-massage in Chinese wellness practice. It directly stimulates digestion and calms the nervous system. If you only do ONE thing from seated qigong, make it this.

3. Heaven drum (鸣天鼓)

Cover your ears with your palms, fingers on the back of your head, then snap your index fingers off your middle fingers to tap the back of your skull 24 times. Sounds weird, but it's remarkably effective for mental clarity and relieving that foggy-headed feeling.

The full set has 12 sections — all seated, all gentle, designed so anyone can do them regardless of age or fitness level. I actually wrote a beginner-friendly guide that walks through each one step by step with photos, if anyone's interested.

Happy to answer questions about any of these — been teaching this stuff for a long time.

I watched a reel about qigong, and so I tried copying some basic movements. I noticed that it helps to loosen up some tight joints and muscles.

Would you recommend some basic moves as I start this journey?

You can follow every strategy perfectly and still get zero results. Why? Your attitude is creating the wrong frequency. Fix the vibration first, then the technique works.

How would one increase qi output and or the amount of qi available, via meditation?

I really need some guidance because I am completely lost and overwhelmed. I’ve been dealing with a chronic health condition that keeps me stuck at home most of the time, barely able to go out, and it has prevented me from living a normal life for years.

I want to use Qigong to genuinely improve my health, release deep physical tension, and clear my energy centers/blockages. However, every time I look into it, I find a massive amount of different styles, lineages, and complex systems (like Yuan Gong, Shaolin Wahnam, medical Qigong, etc.), and I have no idea where to start or what actually works for deep, long-term healing.

which style, approach, or foundational method would you actually recommend to start with? What should I focus on first?

I've seen Ren Xue's page with Yuan Qigong, but I don't know if there are any students here who can share their experiences. Also, I don't know if I need to reach the final level to achieve healing...

Any advice or honest recommendations would mean the world to me. Thank you so much.

(Also, if you happen to know of any good, reliable courses, teachers, or resources available in Spanish, that would be an amazing help for me).

When I was 15 I found a book about Huna healing and started experimenting with it. One of the things I learned was very simple: breathe, gather energy from the environment, bring the awareness/energy into the belly, then work with it from there.

Years later I encountered Chinese systems and recognized something familiar. Different terminology, different cultural framework, much more developed maps, but this idea of cultivation rather than only thinking about energy felt similar to me.

I later saw versions of the same general principle in Indian practices and Reiki too. I don't mean they are all “the same system.” They clearly are not. Their philosophies, methods and goals can be very different.

What interests me is the experiential layer underneath the labels.

At some point you stop only reading words like qi, prana, mana, energy, lower dantian etc and you ask: what can I actually feel? Does attention change sensation? Does breathing change it? Can I become more sensitive without imagining what I think I am supposed to feel?

For me that last question became more important with time.

Belief is easy. Sensation is more interesting because it gives you something to observe directly, even if different traditions explain the sensation differently.

I'm curious how experienced qigong practitioners think about similar-looking energy practices from other traditions. Do you see a genuine common experiential core there, or do the different frameworks produce fundamentally different practices even when the language sounds similar?

Hola a todos. Tengo 46 años y no soy practicante de Qigong, pero hace como tres años me interesé en las prácticas de retención de semen y la alquimia taoísta.

En ese periodo, mientras tenía sexo con mi pareja de ese momento, intenté aplicar estas prácticas por primera vez. En el momento del orgasmo, contraí con fuerza mi esfínter con la intención de evitar la eyaculación y, al mismo tiempo, dirigir la energía del orgasmo hacia arriba, hacia los centros de energía más altos.

No sé si lo hice bien. De hecho, en ese momento apenas sentí placer.

Poco después empecé a sentirme muy raro. Durante los dos o tres días siguientes tuve una sensación desagradable en el pecho, como si hubiera algo ahí que no podía identificar o que era difícil de describir—algo que interpreté como una especie de alteración o sensación energética.

En esas noches también tuve sueños muy extraños y me costaba dormir.

Lo más raro de toda la experiencia es que mi pareja me dijo que ella estaba sintiendo prácticamente lo mismo.

Después de tres días, empecé a hacer algunas meditaciones con la intención de transmutar la energía. No sé si eso tuvo que ver con lo que pasó, pero lo extraño es que los dos dejamos de sentir esa sensación el mismo día, aunque para entonces ya no estábamos juntos.

Lo que más me intriga, y no sé si podría estar relacionado con esta experiencia, es que mi sexualidad parece haber cambiado desde ese momento.

Desde entonces, no he vuelto a experimentar el mismo nivel de placer durante el sexo. También he notado una disminución del deseo sexual, y se me ha hecho más difícil sentir ese “chispazo” que antes tenía cuando estaba con una mujer.

Hasta el día de hoy, todavía me pregunto qué pudo haber pasado.

¿Puede haber alguna explicación desde la perspectiva de la energía sexual o el Qi/Chi? ¿Podría estar relacionado con la dificultad que ahora tengo para sentir esa conexión sexual, y hay alguna forma en la que pudiera revertirlo o mejorarlo?

I feel a sensation like ants crawling inside my body.

I’m completely new to Qi and after reading about it on a forum I was wondering how I would be able to do multiple practices in the same day without messing up?

David Palmer’s Qigong Fever (Columbia University Press, 2007) (complete with its red cover and yellow star) is the English-language reference on the history of qigong under the People’s Republic. It is the citation.

When a journalist needs to contextualise Falungong, when a scholar needs an authority on Chinese body practices in the twentieth century, is the book. It is not fringe.

It is canonical. And its core argument — that qigong was invented by Party cadres in 1949, that they extracted body cultivation techniques from their natural home in religion, that the techniques were then secularised and standardised, and that the religious essence inevitably burst back out in the form of qigong fever, grandmasters, somatic science, and finally Falungong in 1999 — this argument has become the standard account.

The problem is not the archival work. Palmer’s research is meticulous: names, dates, organisations, policy shifts, the institutional history from the Tangshan sanatorium through the Zhongnanhai demonstration. The problem is the frame. And the frame is a Protestant missionary