After 30 years of practicing Acupuncture, I would like to share some insights about ‘stuck Qi.’
Qi Stagnation can cause poor circulation or is due to poor circulation. The Circulatory function of Qi is the most important for your health, because it is the easiest to assess. The more Qi stagnation develops, the more pain, fatigue, and depression can occur. For both patients and clinicians, the urgency is to find out why.
For example, Liver Qi Stagnation affects the movement of your blood, bile, enzymatic transformation (a function of Qi), and every nutrient getting where it needs to go. If your Liver Qi is stuck, your emotional adaptability can also become disoriented. This directs everyone’s focus to the Liver (of TCM) but may distract us from a whole-body stagnation that is waiting for something essential to change.
Qi needs to move, but Qi cannot move alone.
There is another aspect of Qi that brings up images of someone glowing in the dark, or radiating some kind of energy, or spiritual light. Which all animals do, in a way. The question, for both Qi skeptics and Qi enthusiasts, can a person’s Qi become more radiant?
Today, I would like to prove that both are true. Qi needs to function as circulation and as a warming and activating ‘glow’. It turns out, this kind of measurable radiance can be cultivated in the most common-sense way imaginable.
But your Qi is waiting for something…
Recently, I have been teaching a Shaolin practice called Yi Jin Jing – or the Muscle Tendon Change. This practice focuses on the transformation of many aspects of your contractile tissue system. This tissue transformation process enhances the circulation of your Qi, blood, and the fluids (called Jin Ye) that make up 60% of your body.
This kind of Qi Gong develops a physical and very embodied capacity called Myofascial Tensegrity.
Tensegrity
Tensegrity describes a near perfect and dynamic balance of structure, integrity, and systemic elastic tone. In a structure or human body with tensegrity, no component adapts to internal and external interactions in isolation. Your skeleton floats in a myofascial web rather than being stacked mechanically like blocks.
Your near infinitely interconnected fascial tissue system transmits every force across all of your joints, through myofascial ‘meridians’. Over weeks and months, as you develop new skills, or as you age, or as you tell your body to hibernate, you are gradually remodeling your collagen architecture. Possibly towards adaptability, tensegrity, circulation, and innate potential; and possibly towards a state called Sensory Motor Amnesia. (I will come back to that shortly)
An essential component of reawakening your hibernating Qi is to re-awaken, regenerate, and lengthen your entire inner network of tissue connections towards tensegrity. This process has always needed moving exactly the way you would after waking up, stimulating growth and repair, humbly going through the weeks it takes to wake up from a hibernation.
Pandiculation
Pandiculation is the voluntary or involuntary cat-like stretch that is accompanied by contracting muscles, while reaching, twisting, gyrating, and often some extended jaw stretching (and Soul opening) while yawning. The function of pandiculation is to reset your nervous system, increase circulation, and relieve muscle tension by engaging the sensori-motor (feel and move) brain to wake up the body.
Pandiculation also:
- reawakens the connection between your brain and muscles, balance, and coordination.
- releases chronic tension by contracting and then relaxing muscles, changing your body’s memory of itself.
- helps re-align posture and increases your life affirming range of motion.
- Lubricates your joints, muscles, and membranes, and breaks up abnormal cross-links in the fascia, reducing rigidity and enhancing mobility. (extended sitting or lying turns your body into a ball of inner ‘Velcro’)
- restores a somatic confidence and a connective tissue ‘playground’ for personal development and emotional regulation.
For context – Qi Gong, Yoga, Tai Chi, and the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing all focus on different qualities of pandiculation.
As your pandiculation and tensegrity practice improves, many things will begin to happen. Every tissue system gradually regenerates, every aspect of circulation improves, and the fluid and gel matrix that lives within the sponge like spaces (interstitial membranes) everywhere in your body, can finally reconnect your entire tissue, energy, and sensation systems.
We have all heard that the body is 60% water (or more). That is sort of true, but it would be more accurate to say that you are 60% bone broth. In general, this fluid is called Ground Substance.
Ground Substance is an amorphous, gelatinous, and transparent component of your extracellular matrix (ECM), that lives in your connective tissues and fills the space between cells and the microfibers that hold you together.
This fluid is another element of what your Qi is waiting for – and needs.
Ground Substance is made of:
- Water and Solutes – The high-water content acts as a reservoir for nutrients, ions, and waste products travelling between blood vessels and cells. As ‘icky’ as that may become, improving this chemical bone broth is potentially the most potent movement you could make. (pardon the pun)
- Glycoproteins (Adhesion Proteins): Proteins such as fibronectin and laminin act as “glue,” attaching the ground substance to cells (via integrins) and other microfilaments.
- Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) – are long, polysaccharides that are highly negatively charged, which attracts large amounts of water (making your fluid gel matrix up to 90% water). The most important GAG is called hyaluronic acid (crucial for skin moisture and lubrication), chondroitin sulfate, dermatan sulfate, and heparan sulfate.
- Proteoglycans – are formed by GAGs bound to a core protein, these bottle-brush-like structures interact with each other and water to give the matrix its viscous, hydrated gel structure.
A Liquid Crystal Battery and Antenna
This complex ionic and highly charged fluid and gel system is capable of storing and releasing elastic strain energy, transforming mechanical stress into bioelectric signals. The more precise and consistent the ionic charge, the more efficiently information is shared through your body, and the more efficient your countless trillions of mitochondria are.
Who knew that you were full of ‘bone broth’ that works as a battery, a bioelectrical internet, and an antenna. I will write a separate article on this subject. Learning to become an antenna has its perks.
For any of that to improve or be enhanced, all of your tissue systems need abundant vitality and resources (Qi and Jing). All of your tissues need stimulation and challenges to grow.
If you are ready to commit to that, you are getting close to what your Qi is waiting for.
Tissues are Systems
Traditional Chinese medicine identifies five primary tissue systems. When you evaluate someone’s health (or your own), it is wise to begin with all aspects of circulation. How is their/your Qi?
Next you should evaluate their (or your) tissue systems. This will show you the availability or atrophy of Jing/Essence.
One of the resources Qi is waiting for is some available Jing – or Mojo – or an available and unformed tissue potential.
I invite you to try an experiential practice
As you read about each tissue, imagine building your body, like a 3D puzzle from the inside out. I invite you to visualize healthy Qi, or Golden Light, to purify and nurture each of your tissues – in order, from your bones outward.
Your Kidneys store Essence (Jing) and govern growth, reproduction, and longevity. Their tissue is the bones, teeth, and marrow.
Your Liver governs the tissue system called Jīn 筋 (Sinews/Membranes), which flourish and manifest as your nails. Liver Qi is expressed through pliable and toned tissue, or as stiff, uptight, and resentful tissue (and people).
Your Heart is expressed as the tissue that makes up your entire Vascular System (Mài 脉), which includes thousands of kilometers of arteries, veins, organ networks, capillaries, and micro-vasculature.
Your Spleen’s tissue extension is your muscles, fat, lymph, and the 60% of you that is Ground Substance (Jin Ye). Referred to as the ‘Flesh Body’ (Ròu).
I love that Ground Substance is related to your Earth Element.
Your Lungs govern Qi, respiration, your immune system, and your energetic boundaries. The tissue extension of your Lungs expresses its vitality through your skin and hair.
Your Marrow (a Sixth Tissue) is not one of the classic Five Tissues, but given that Marrow is an extension of your Jing, it can help us understand the shared resources needed for abundant Qi and a long life.
In the practice of Inner Cultivation (like the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing), when your Five Tissues are ‘full to filling,’ and your Jing is still, clear, and abundant, your Marrow can act as a resource. Now, if you practice the old way, you have the potential to purify and increase your Jing, Spinal Fluids and ‘regenerate’ your Brain.
Building your tissue systems is building Your Jing/Essence
Modern fitness culture is obsessed with muscle. Muscle is responsive, it grows relatively quickly, looks good in the mirror, and confirms that what you’re doing is working. Building muscle is the easiest way lose fat. As important as muscle tone matters, balance is unique for us all. Many people do not want to or cannot build muscle mass.
The process of getting stronger, in any way that you can, is one of the final pieces your Qi is waiting for. You need to build momentum together.
There is another way to get stronger
The classical Chinese term for the body’s connective tissue matrix is Jin 筋, which includes your tendons, ligaments, fascia, membranes, and the deep elastic webbing that holds the entire tissue structure of your body together. Modern fascial research confirms what the classics and ancient practitioners understood through trial and error. Your connective tissue, the support system for everything including your muscles, is the real strength of the body.
The practices that benefit your connective tissue the most include sustained, gentle, cyclical loading. Extensive and slow pandiculation, and tensegrity challenges that improve the density of fascia and collagen in in as many joints, in as many directions as possible.
It takes months to years, not weeks, so a regular practice is the only way to guide the transformation effectively. Systems of embodied spiritual practice like Qi Gong, Yoga (if it has spirals and gyration), and especially the Shaolin Yi Jin Jing practice I mentioned, are so effective because they focus on improving all of Qi’s natural functions – through the interaction of fascial filaments and the potency (bioelectric charge) of your liquid crystal gel body.
After some time refining your tissues and Qi circulation, your ‘Gel Body’ can store and release energy as light. We do, in fact, become more radiant with practice.
Tissue Transformation takes Time
The first two months – The primary changes are neurological. Your nervous system begins recalibrating its baseline tension levels. Most people feel less stiffness in the morning, better circulation, and the lifting of some brain fog.
Months three through six – Your connective tissue and collagen network restoration begins in earnest. The collagen fibres of your fascia and tendons begin to re-orient along lines of functional stress.
The first year – Most practitioners report a qualitative shift in embodied experience. A sense that the body is coordinated from the inside rather than managed from the outside. The experience is difficult to describe, and yet unmistakable when it arrives. It is a different quality of animalistic aliveness, potency, and playfulness.
Qi Doesn’t move alone
Qi does not exist alone. It needs a terrain to interact with, and it needs a substance like blood or body fluids to draw on for Qi to fully express its functions. Qi is anchored in the blood and nourished by your fluids. If Qi leaves the blood, then the Shen/Spirit floats and internal wind has more room to move.
Said in a modern way, asking your Qi/circulation to improve without improving your tissue ‘bodies’ will leave you agitated, tired, restless, and gradually sinking into helplessness.
Your Ground Substance, the great enhancer or limiter of Qi circulation, requires regular pandiculation movements and hydration to maintain its viscosity and volume. It has to get everywhere for your Qi to experience the everywhere of you.
Becoming one with yourself, and the world, may have a clear first step
Modern Aging is close to Hibernation
If you are reading this in midlife, with the unique exhaustion of someone who has tried all of the fad quick fixes, I understand your fatigue, frustration, and instinctual impatience. Your body has been yelling at you for years.
Waiting to see what happens with your health is the worst choice each of us ever makes. If any of these conditions last for long enough (about 3 months) your evolutionary physiology say ‘hibernate’. Metabolic rate, and number of mitochondria per cell plummet to conserve energy.
The connective tissues that feel tight and unreliable are not dead, they are dehydrated, under nourished, and disconnected from the embodied dynamic necessary for aliveness – and staying alive if you are an animal.
I have playfully brought you here to say exactly what your Qi is waiting for. In order to describe that ‘something’, we need to look at an example.
After 40 years of age, almost every tissue and hormone begins to decline. From growth hormones, collagen density, to your vascular elasticity, your Jing will atrophy at the rate of your overall health.
If sitting is the new smoking, there needs to be a why. There are many, but I have two favorite examples.
If your Ground Substance cannot get to your fingers and toes, your fingers and toes cannot communicate and connect with you the way they need to. If your inner fluids become stagnant in the sponge-like spaces in your belly and chest, it can become septic (infected/toxic).
The classics of TCM describe an ‘invisible’ organ that mobilizes these fluids. The quote goes something like, ‘We know that it is there, but cannot see it.’ That organ was discovered in 2018. It is becoming apparent that septic fluids are the greatest risk for the spreading (metastasizing) of cancer.
If you explore whole body tensegrity through pandiculation (and advanced Qi Gong), you have rescued your alone and lonely Qi, and helped it reach every cell in your body.
Sorry to those who believe you can tell your Qi to heal your body without the anchoring and necessary tissues (blood, fluids, and gels) that nourish Qi’s functions. The 2500 year old texts on the previous millennia of experience are not at all vague about this. Modern fad Qi Gong makes up new rules and ideas every single day.
Somatic Hibernation (Sensory Motor Amnesia).
My second favorite example of what your Qi needs and may be waiting for you to heal, is called Sensory Motor Amnesia. Big words can be fun and often leave little room for ‘fad thinking’.
Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) describes a condition in which your brain loses conscious awareness and voluntary control of specific muscles due to habituated, chronic contraction or flaccidity. It is not a muscular problem, but a neurological one. Your nervous system has ‘forgotten’ how to fully sense and release those muscles. Over time, every adaptive pattern (good posture or couch potato) becomes fixed in your motor cortex as your new baseline. The gradual imbalances of tension and collapse, create chronic tension, poor circulation, loss of dynamic embodied communication, stagnant fluids, that are ‘below the radar’ of the person experiencing it.
Because your brain no longer receives accurate sensory feedback from your muscles, tendons, nerves, and inner antenna, conventional stretching, acupuncture, and massage can only offer temporary relief.
Your stubborn motor cortex simply re-imposes the habituated pattern.
Highly organized, effective, and efficient pandiculation is the only known way to re-awaken your Somato-sensory-motor loop. Like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon, you have to gradually update the proprioceptive information going back to the cortex.
In essence, SMA is a disease of learned forgetting, and its resolution requires active neurological re-education rather than passive intervention.
What your Qi has been waiting for
What your Qi needs to move and connect every cell again is whole body myofascial tensegrity, which asks for optimal structure, tissue enhancement, complete and efficient circulation, and the bio-electric capacity (qi) of your fluids and gels.
The nervous system that has mapped you into chronic holding patterns can be remapped. The capacity for the deep, structural, embodied change you have been looking for is instinctual – it just takes regular practice.
If you do not restore and maintain Qi and substance flow, your Qi and tissue systems are skilled at hibernation too.
I do not recommend hibernation as a physical, emotional, or metabolic baseline.
I hear that dancing has always been the best medicine – just stretch like a cat every chance you get!
Author
Dr. Michael Smith (TCM) offers training in Shaolin Nei Gong (Yi Jin Jing) grounded in the Gu Ru Zhang lineage. Michael also teaches Daoist Nei Gong and Traditional Chinese medicine. He has trained in martial arts for 48 years and has been a clinician for 30 years. Learn from a clear, proven, and progressive system designed for real bodies at every stage of life.
