Qigong Explorations, Aug. 11-Sept. 29

Description

Over this new seven-week series, we will deepen our practitioner skills, moving more fluidly through familiar practices such as Shaking, Opening and Stretching, Scooping Qi, Playing with Qi, and Connecting with Heaven and Earth. Our stillness practices will develop new capacities for attention, inviting us to relax narrow, effortful focus and experience awareness as a spacious, inclusive field. By noticing the space within and around the body, we allow tension in the dantians to soften without forcing anything to change. Over time, we learn to move freely between focused attention and open awareness, responding to life with greater presence, flexibility, and choice. Through this practice: • Widening attention can soften the feeling that you must continually monitor, analyze, or control experience. • Thoughts and emotions can be felt as events arising within awareness rather than as the whole of reality, creating more room to choose your response. • The body may begin to be experienced not as separate parts, but as one connected field. • Moving readily between focused and panoramic awareness can support problem-solving, creativity, and the ability to see a larger context. • Presence deepens as sounds, sensations, emotions, and surroundings are included without any one element dominating the whole of our experience. Our movements create the inner conditions for awakening awareness, making attention training embodied, practical, and deeply restorative. Through awareness, we can unwind our conditioning and restore the natural functioning of the dantians. Qigong Explorations meets every Tuesday in seven-week series. Together, we explore Qigong and transformational themes through movement, breathwork, visualization, and stillness. There will be no class on August 18 during this series.