When we are learning something new in our qigong class and then practise it at home it’s often a good idea to separate our practice into two aspects.
The first aspect we could consider our ‘learning practice’. Here we use our time to go through what we’ve learnt, taking time to remember the movements as best as we can at that time and generally revising what we covered in the lesson. This tends to be a bit more ‘head focused’ and usually we end up thinking a bit more than we’d like.
The second aspect would involve using our time to practice what we’ve learnt without thinking about it too much. We can let go of the need to “get it right” and can stop worrying about whether we’ve remembered the sequence correctly or not. We practice the routine and just relax into it and enjoy it, knowing that if we “make a mistake” we can improve on that the next time, but at this time we are going to practice how we can and enjoy it.
In a sense we can view the first aspect as “checking out” our practice – seeing what we can remember, spending some time learning it.
The second aspect can be seen as “checking in” with our practice. We practise with the aim of checking in with how it feels to do the practice, allowing our breath and movements to combine, and see how that feels, what is happening as we do the movements, how does it feel, how is our energy feeling.
Learning the movements are a necessary part, but the real benefit comes from checking in and feeling into our bodies in a natural, easy way without thinking too much.
