How to Achieve Life Balance with Qi: Advice from Robert Peng

1440: How can we feel our qi?

Robert: We use all of our senses to work with qi, but when we are deep in meditation or when we're doing a qigong healing or practicing qigong, the senses can cross. When I was training, at first I was really confused and my master would tell me to listen to this force or to try and eat that color. He would use language to cross the senses to make my awareness of the energy more holistic. Now when I'm synchronized with a patient, I can feel other people's energy. I may have goose bumps, I may have tingling in my fingers. With some diseases, I feel like my hands are in cold water. With years of practice, you can learn what these things resonate with and then how to follow your intuition, to follow the qi and bring it into balance.

1440: Do you have to be able to sense which qi is which to work with the energy?

Robert: If you're practicing on your own, it's not necessary to have such a colorful experience! In a qigong practice, we're looking for balance in our energy centers, or dantians. We have an energy center in our head that is for wisdom, one in our chest that is the center of loving, and one in our lower torso for vitality. We also have the central meridian, which goes from the top of the head to the perineum and crosses through all three dantians. I call these the four golden wheels—wisdom, love, vitality, and harmony. When you have the energy flowing well, then you are very balanced. The problem is, sometimes they are not harmonized. You can work to harmonize them by cultivating and nourishing your qi.

1440: Can you talk about the concept of effortless effort, or wu wei, and how this can be applied in our daily life?

Robert: Wu means no and wei means action. It's like in breathing—we have breathing in and breathing out, but the more meaningful part is during the pauses between the inhale and the exhale. That pause is wu wei. When you watch the pause between your actions or your efforts, when that space is big, you have more freedom, more ways of adjusting. Here's how my master had me understand it. Qigong is a way of cultivating qi. When you do the exercises, you move the qi ball here and try to channel it there. I was a very diligent student, but he kept saying I need to practice more, like 24 hours a day. I said, "What do you mean?! How can I do this for 24 hours?" And he said, "Don't ask." So he's asking me to do something I didn't know how to do and not letting me ask questions about it.
Finally he said, ‘I know you are working hard cultivating your qi, but you should also nourish your qi. You should allow your qi to work for you. Qi has better intelligence.'
How do you do that? Wu wei.

1440: Do you have a particular exercise for nourishing your qi?

Robert: To nourish your qi, just keep in mind your lower dantian. If you're relaxing, just open up all the pores of your body, like before you go to sleep. We look solid, but we are full of holes, so open up your pores and allow the universal qi to soak in. Then that qi is nourishing you.

1440: What are some of the most valuable lessons you learned from your qigong master?

Robert: He had no ego. He was unpretentious. When I met him, he was in a most difficult time. All his life he had been in a monastery, and then the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. A few years later, he was driven out of the monastery because religion was banned. He worked in my hometown as a boiler room attendant, a very demanding job with not very good pay. He lived in the boiler room where it was so hot in the summer he had to sleep outside with a mosquito net. He had a million reasons to be angry, to be resentful, but he wasn't. He just seemed like a nice boiler room attendant. We didn't know he had this legendary healing power and that he was an amazing martial artist. He just appeared to be nobody and one who served. He was pleasant and he had no ego. I find that if you want to hold something internally that says, "I am somebody," that is very tiring for me. He would say, "It doesn't matter, you just serve the people." Even when he was back in the monastery as a senior monk again to reconstruct the temple, he was still very mild tempered and talked to people without commanding them. He didn't talk much, but when he did he was convincing and people listened. The power wasn't loud and shouting, it was about being sincere.