Deng Ming-Dao – Taoist Energy Practices of Huashan Qigong for Radiant Living 2022

As your 7-week journey begins, Ming-Dao will share the philosophy behind the first two Huashan Qigong postures…

Posture 1: Restoring Spring will serve as the foundation for all the postures to come. It aids the absorption of fresh energy, expels toxins, regulates the organs, stimulates circulation of qi and blood, and builds vitality.

This posture uses body movements to facilitate your lungs’ processes, invites you to rapidly shake your body to loosen tight muscles, aids breathing, and helps dispel blockages to further enhance relaxation.

Posture 2: Vital Energy improves the health of sexual organs and sets your energy in motion. The hand movements drive the energy upward, then combine with the air you’re breathing to form Qi.

The next step is to move that Qi to benefit your entire being — resulting in better sexual health and a feeling of great wellbeing that moves renewed energy to every part of your body and mind.

In this session, you’ll discover Qigong postures to:

• Build up your kidneys’ functioning and sexual health
• Increase mobility, improve your range of motion, and strengthen your legs
• Harness your body’s essence (jing) as the foundation for all other energy transformation
• Increase elasticity in the muscles through building smooth movements
• Address back pain and stiff hips

Posture 3: The Eight Trigrams, is the foundation of the Yijing (Book of Changes), the ancient, classic Chinese divination text.

In this exercise, your hands move in shapes based on the yin-yang symbol.

As Ming-Dao will explain, yin and yang aren’t just concepts, they’re a template for movement.

You’ll use the yin yang symbol itself to guide your movements, coordinating the movements of your legs, body, and arms.

You’ll use the circle to rise higher and lower in height, moving energy from below to above and back again. You’ll shift where you stand, improving strength, mobility, and balance.

Ming-Dao will show you how to circulate energy, achieve grace and coordination, and incorporate the full idea of yin and yang into your life.

In this session, you’ll explore The Eight Trigrams so you can:

• Treat and prevent insomnia, depression, dizziness, and headaches
• Enhance alertness and coordination as you move your head
• Coordinate circling your arms and turning your waist to promote joint mobility and circulation
• Aid digestion

Ming-Dao will share the first exercises in this course that are inspired by the power of animals — Posture 4: The Peng Bird and Posture 5: The Turtle.

As you’ll discover, Posture 4 coordinates your hands with the rest of your body as you turn at the waist and connect your left and right sides.

Its twisting movements are aimed directly at the lower abdomen — the source of our energy, according to the Taoists. This posture holds the promise of enhanced vitality, more energy, and a feeling of stability.

Especially if you spend lots of time sitting, it’s important to activate the waist, hips, glutes, and legs. Posture 5 provides an excellent way to gain flexibility in the waist and low back while helping to improve stability.

The circling of the arms extends energy and aids breathing. The benefit of this posture is whole-body coordination, better circulation, easier breathing, and a sturdier stance.

The two new postures you’ll explore this week are designed to:

• Promote and gather kidney energy
• Relieve tension in the low back and improve your balance
• Move from the waist to improve your fluid movements in the arms and shoulders
• Strengthen blood vessels to the brain
• Make your muscles stronger and more pliable as you work your core
• Move your arms with intention to expand your upper back and rib cage, and improve energy flow
• Experience neck movements to relieve tension and energize the nervous system

You’ll practice Posture 6: The Smiling Dragon, a fun and easy posture that encourages you to coil and twist like a dragon. By twisting, you massage your organs, alternately compressing and stretching them.

You’ll move your entire body as a single unit, maximizing flexibility as you renew your ties with nature.

As you stand on tiptoe and reach upward, you’ll stretch your entire body and boost your nervous system — resulting in better balance, livelier movement, and feelings of happiness.

As you explore Posture 7: The Swimming Frog, you’ll also stand on tiptoe to improve balance as you stretch your neck — to relieve shoulder tension and headaches, and counter stress.

Adapting the swimming motion of the frog is inspired by the myth of the Golden Toad, a popular feng shui charm for prosperity. The hand movements facilitate breathing and encourage greater volume of airflow. This posture fosters protection from falls, relief from stress, and greater vitality.

In this session, you’ll discover two new postures to:

• Maximize flexibility and renew your ties with nature
• Embrace whole-body movement, massaging your internal organs to improve digestion and metabolism
• Incorporate smiling into your practice so you can feel more cheerful and optimistic
• Improve the health of your legs as you boost circulation in the upper body
• Stretch your neck to help with dizziness, stiffness, tremors in the hands, insomnia, and forgetfulness

Together, the words heaven and earth create a poetic term for the entire universe.

According to the Yijing, heaven is the initiating force, and earth is the nurturing force.

Posture 8: Heaven Circles & Earth Circles, is about achieving integration within yourself and with the cosmos.

Ming-Dao will share how you can recycle your own energy — and how your metabolism is the transformation of your body substances, along with nutrition and air, into your own internal energy… your personal Qi.

As you practice the circular movements of Posture 8: Heaven Circles & Earth Circles, Ming-Dao will guide you to reflect on what heaven and earth bring you. As you reach up into the skies, you’ll spread out over the earth — to achieve better waist flexibility and a calm and efficient flow of energy within your body.

As Ming-Dao will explain, all of Taoism is about seeking truth in nature. If you can see yourself as part of heaven and earth, you can achieve harmony.

In this session, you’ll experience how the Heaven Circles & Earth Circles posture:

• Aids waist and joint flexibility
• Relieves stiffness in your back and hips
• Promotes better circulation and breathing
• Helps the heart and kidneys function more effectively
• Harmonizes the energy in the Triple Warmer (chest, abdomen, and lower abdomen)
• Alleviates dizziness and postural issues
• Helps you feel more limber in the morning and restores circulation after sitting or working in a static position

This week’s exercise, Posture 9, is called Ren Rings — after the triangular foot pattern that looks like the Chinese character ren, 人, which means person.

Chinese martial artists put great emphasis on leg strength. If one is strong, then walking, lifting, and a pain-free life are easy.

The Ren Rings posture focuses on specific acupuncture points in the body and requires you to move in five different directions. The complexity of this posture helps you focus on the flow of energy through the acupuncture meridian…

It can improve mobility and sharpen your mind, as you keep track of the directions in which you turn.

With Ming-Dao as your guide, you’ll move plenty of Qi through your body while driving the energy deep into your leg muscles — distributing Qi through your entire body.

In this session, you’ll explore how the Ren Rings posture:

• Increases vitality, strengthens the legs, and teaches pivoting of stance
• Helps waist and back flexibility, encourages shoulder mobility, aids the working of the lungs and heart, and stimulates nervous system
• Moves energy, tonifies sexual energy, and improves the endocrine system
• Relieves digestive discomfort and bloating