Live Life

A qigong instructor once said, “You can’t DO qigong”. True. One does not do qigong, they live it. One could easily insert the word “life” in place of qigong.

To do life sounds like one has their ego at the steering wheel driving the show of life. How might one LIVE life instead? How does one live with a pet, a plant, the sunlight, the rain? In symbiosis! With heart! In a dance of equality and allowing.

You can live life like a pendulum, swinging from one extreme to the other, a victim this moment, a control freak the next. Yet allowing relieves the nervous system of always needing to be on top of one’s game. Allowing opens one up to the still, small moments in the day where the pause button of routine and time come to a standstill. In complete awareness of the breath, one can experience the internal sensations, thoughts, and feelings rising and falling like ocean tides, and it’s so much easier to move the body a little more gracefully, to step more softly on the Earth, with no expectation.

Dropping in – I love that term. Dropping in to the body on a tender quest to feel… where is the body tight and achy? Where is it loose and relaxed. Feel your inside world.

Then, feel the outside world. Peering out the window or door into a gray, windy, rainy day, just listen …. the soft woosh of a passing wind, allowing your body to echo the sway of the trees. Observe without judgment the body language of passerbyers. Feel the height, mood, and speed of the clouds sailing overhead.

Now, use your powerful imagination and merge the two … your inside world and outside world. They are one flowing stream of life, blending and creating seamlessly into one another every millisecond of the day and night.

Now that’s living life.