Are There Really Dangers in Doing Qigong?

chi kung how to use qigong in daily life Dec 27, 2006

A young man emailed me the other day and said he wanted to study chi kung (qigong) but was worried about something a chi kung teacher told him. Apparently this teacher said that unless the guy learned chi kung properly, it could harm him, especially in a sexual way.

This young guy asked my opinion, and how he could find a good chi kung teacher so he could begin training.

First of all, I told him to give that instructor a roundhouse kick to the head. Some teachers are nuts. They believe everything they read or hear about magical or metaphysical properties of chi.

Why do we perpetuate these myths? How can a breathing exercise--a mentally and physically calming exercise--create a danger to you?

The real answer is that it can't.

Like everyone, I've heard of people who felt some strange feelings and even got ill while doing chi kung. I suspect these cases involve people who either had some physical ailment going on, or they were bringing emotional baggage into the class that triggered unpleasant feelings.

I doubt that anyone can produce any clinical evidence that chi kung can be harmful. Anecdotal evidence just doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

I've read--and I've been told--that when you do Hsing-I fist postures such as Pi Chuan, if you do them improperly it can harm the organs that the fist posture is related to--in the case of Pi Chuan, which is linked to the element metal, that would be the lungs and large intestines.

I was warned once that doing Pi Chuan wrong would mess up my lungs and large intestines.

Now look at this realistically. NONE of us do Pi Chuan properly when we're learning. So all new students should be suffering from lung and intestinal problems, right?

Ridiculous. And the more we present this type of bad science as fact, the more we damage the internal arts.

Now, it's common for the die-hards to tell me "What do you know? This stuff has been around for thousands of years."

I answer simply, "So has astrology, witchcraft, and voodoo. So has palm-reading. So have a lot of myths. And there are always people who'll believe them. People who might otherwise appear or behave intelligently."

As internal arts students and teachers, we need to be smarter than this. But I suspect there's another psychological element at play here. If a chi kung teacher tells someone, "If you don't learn properly you can be harmed," he's really saying that only he can teach chi kung properly, and that he knows the "ancient secrets" of chi kung.

There is so much ego involved in these myths, and the need to be viewed as someone with mystical knowledge and supernatural skill, that as a student, I would fire any teacher who didn't heavily qualify any statements related to these ancient, out-dated, bad science beliefs. Some internal arts teachers will tell you a bunch of hooey. Don't believe it.

Now I must be going. I have to stand and breathe in some "green chi" for a while. :))

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Are There Really Dangers in Doing Qigong?

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