Touch Not-Touching

I recently attended a class with Mingtong Gu - a wonderful teacher and practitioner of Zhening (Wisdom Healing) Qigong, and founder of the Chi Healing Center. The experience was a rich and delightful one, with much now for me to digest in the coming weeks and months, as I put into practice some of what Master Gu introduced.

One practice I found particularly powerful was the practice of what Mingtong called "touch not-touching." The way he suggested that we explore this rather paradoxical instruction was to bring the tips of the fingers of one hand in very light contact with the tips of the corresponding fingers of the other hand, with the palms quite open - and then hold this spherical configuration a couple inches in front of our lower dantian. The idea is to touch the tips of the fingers so lightly that we're not actually sure if they're touching or not-touching. The effect is to awaken a connection at a more subtle energetic level. Give it a try, if you'd like, and let me know what happens!

In the context of this class, we learned a very simple form - a series of physical movements with visualizations. One sign of becoming more advanced in the practice, said Mingtong, is the capacity to take longer and longer to complete this series of movements. We were moving through the sequence in 5-10 minutes. More advanced practitioners slow the movements down to a point where it takes 45 minutes, an hour, or even two hours to complete. At this point there arises the opportunity to explore, in a very immediate way, what might be called movement no-movement - and to notice the deeply healing and rejuvenating effects of this rather inside-out approach to "accomplishment."