Hi Folks,

We have officially opened the Dragon and Tiger Qigong online course. Senior Instructor Bill Ryan will take you through the seven movements in seventy days – or ten weeks. Of course, you can go through the program at your own pace too. You can check out details and signup here:

Dragon and Tiger Qigong Online Course Launch

We are going to keep the launch open for a short time and then close it down so that Bill can take the first group through the program. Grab your spot and make the Year of the Water Dragon your best ever.

Bruce

In this video Senior Energy Arts Instructor Bill Ryan talks about the three principles of qigong and does a short demonstration of Dragon and Tiger Qigong where he explains a bit about each of the seven movements.

We will be launching the Dragon and Tiger Online Course with Bill Ryan within the next day.

Picture by Spacebom

At the end of last year,  I suggested that people forgive. Forgive others and forgive themselves. And if you know you did wrong or someone else did wrong, forget the blame and emotional energy, let go and just don’t repeat it.

For this Chinese New Year we are at a time when it really pays to look over a long period of time and start changing what we all do so that things can work out much better for the long haul.

The Year of the Water Dragon is a special type of energy that only occurs every 60 years. It interesting that this falls during 2012, the supposed end of the world or the dawning of a new global spiritual awakening depending on whom you talk to. I want to give you a few perspectives on the Year of the Water Dragon that you may find interesting.

The Water Element

The water aspect of this year brings ease and good luck to practicing everything within all Taoist water method practices. When we say water practices we are not talking about jumping in a pool or the ocean. Water tradition practices in Taoism are specifically about allowing things to happen naturally and without effort. They are more about letting go to see what is already there. The opposite to this is the fire method which is about force and pushing yourself to the edge.

In our times of increasing stress and pressure, distractions, information overload and rapid change, the Water Tradition methods are the cure. So this is a year that will naturally support these types of gentle yet powerful practices. Keep this in mind this year – if something is not flowing or you are using force ask yourself, “How can I approach this differently to make it easy or just let it go?”

Right now everywhere paralysis is taking over. More than ever find ways to take small actions, rather than just living in a dark mental soup that is the status quo for many. Think a bit less and act a bit more. You can analyze problems forever but analysis is not a solution it is only the beginning of a solution.

When you begin with small things within your power and do it, you’ll find that as the year grows and the decade grows you’ll find that you will be able to do more and more positive things. Part of this is to engage in meditation in whatever way you can so you can simply let go of what is stopping your creative potential.

Small things add up. They can change the world, especially when done collectively.

Likewise in this, in all Chinese astrological water years, the best time to enhance your creativity in personal practice is between 7 am to 9 am. If you can find the time and space in the morning this would be the best time to do your tai chi, qigong or meditation practice. If you can practice Taoist outer dissolving, as I teach in Energy Gates Qigong, this is an especially useful practice this year.

The Celestial Dragon 

So we have talked about water now lets combine that with the energy of the Dragon. Ancient China’s celestial dragon represented the Emperor in power, strength, and good fortune.  It is the ultimate auspicious symbol of success, wealth accumulation, and happiness. The dragon is known as bringing great luck to everyone but only if they applied focused effort as you would do in a personal practice.  You might ask yourself what personal practice you will put in place and what conditions will you setup for yourself so that it is inevitable that you will achieve your goals this year.

Powerful and unpredictable, you can trust the dragon’s intuitive nature that is of fearless, forward looking, great at analyzing situations and then taking action. If we remember the qualities of water you’ll want to remind yourself to move forward not through force, but by constantly watching the flow and adjusting accordingly.

When you do this, you have an opportunity to make 2012 an awesome time for creating more abundant inner knowledge and understanding in many areas of life.  This time can both be transformational for world events on a macro perspective and an important tipping point for the life of the individual, through an increase in perception.

There are lots of positive energies for growth at work.  Water dragon has enough courage to both face challenges and easily find and overcome weak points.  Water calms the dragon sufficiently so he can project his energy positively, direct it sensibly, rather than recklessly and foolishly.

Dragon years are connected to new beginnings, starting a business and finding happiness and good fortune. What do you want to start this year? What one or two things can you focus on that once achieved could change your destiny? What one practice would you train and master if you knew that you could not fail?

Aligning to Your Flow

This year is also an exceptional time to resolve old issues. Make a list of any unfinished or unresolved issues and then take action to bring them to completion. I recommend starting with the easy things first. Owe someone $50 then pay it. Need to clean out a room then do it. Caught up in a crazy relationship, then end it. Once you do this you will create space for the new. Then you can focus on building a strong, new inner foundation.

The first part of this dragon year appear to be relatively uneventful.  Best to use this time to prepare for the Spring, when the dragon influence will grow in you and you will be able to move forward with ease and grace. The early months are also an ideal time to become aware of your inner weak points then decide what actions you can take to move through them.  For if you do, in the future it will greatly show you how to be resourceful and adaptable when faced with difficult external or internal challenges.

Actions begun earlier in the year will grow into fruition the second half, with a steady flow of additions, corrections, and positive developments. I wish you the best for this year and hope to see you along the way.

Gong Hei Fat Choi,

Bruce Frantzis

P.S. As many of you know we teach a powerful qigong set called Dragon and Tiger Qigong and our launching our online course soon. The Dragon and Tiger Online Course is a 10-week training program with our highly qualified Senior Instructor Bill Ryan teaching you the seven movements in seventy days. You can watch a short intro video about it by clicking here: Benefits of Dragon and Tiger Qigong

Hi folks,

I am now on the road and already in Europe. I’ll be teaching soon and look forward to seeing everyone, especially for the Wu Style Instructor Training, something I have not done for about 10 years.

If you can’t make the whole training I invite you to come for a week or a weekend event. It will be fun and we have a great group attending.

If you are a student of Energy Arts, qigong or tai chi, you probably already realize that one of the fundamental principles is these practices are based on moving energy through the meridian lines of the body. With qigong practices like Dragon and Tiger Medical Qigong you learn to actually feel the chi or energy move through your body.

Understanding where acupuncture points and meridian lines are is also very useful for Tai Chi. In fact anything that deals with Chinese Medicine, including the internal martial arts, always has an energetic component. One of the primary components of the 16 neigong (internal energy work) is the secondary channels of the body, which includes the acupuncture channels.

I recently ran into an elder in the acupressure field, Michael Reed Gach, while I was having a drink in a local coffee shop. He has been writing and sharing knowledge for over 30 years and is the author of the best-selling book Acupressure Potent Points and also has some great acupressure charts (one of which is on the wall in the Energy Arts Inc office). You can check out his personal blog here. If you want to study acupressure points and meridians on your own, check-out Michael’s package here:

Acupressure Home Study Pack

I asked Michael to say a few words on the subject for this blog post:

Acupressure Potent Points have a high electrical conductivity at the surface of the skin, and thus conduct and channel healing energy most effectively. This is why the most potent healing energy work uses acupressure points.

The 12 Meridians of Traditional Chinese Medicine are the body’s healing energy pathways. Meridian massage therapy moves this life energy through the meridians to improve flow and balance. Acupressure and Acupuncture charts show where the meridian lines are on the body. The points are where vital energy gets blocked on the meridians, and where you can most effectively release the resulting tension, numbness, or pain. As healing energy flows through the meridians, it governs blood circulation and harmonizes all functions of the body. Studying the meridian pathways and Acupressure points for transmitting Qi healing energy is key to transformational energy work, including therapeutic touch and massage therapy.

I think it’s a great thing if any of my students simply know more about the acupuncture lines and have some familiarity with them. If you don’t, you can get away without it. But if you want to go for the upper end, it’s a very good idea to do so. When I was a qigong tui na practitioner I studied all this extensively.

Stay tuned for some more posts in the next few weeks – the next post will be on Tai Chi and the Emotions.

Everything furthers,

Bruce

Here is a nice video we put together a while ago giving an overview of the Dragon and Tiger Qigong set:

Energy Arts instructors (Bill Ryan, Kurt Miyajima, Susan Kansky) demonstrate Dragon and Tiger Qigong

Dragon and Tiger Qigong is the first of the moving practices in the Energy Arts system. Dragon and Tiger Qigong was developed 1500 years ago and was originally developed in the Shaolin Temple.

The Shaolin temple was a place where Taoism and Buddhism fused inside of China. Dragon and Tiger Qigong is known as Medical Qigong because it seeks to activate the acupuncture meridian lines in the body.  It is comprised of 7 movements and each movement activates different meridian lines in specific ways.

Of all of the hundreds of Qigong sets I looked at in China, I found Dragon and Tiger Qigong was the easiest to learn while still providing the bulk of the benefits. It is also very easy to feel Chi or Qi when you do this Qigong practice. Finally this set helps you connect the internal and external energies of your body.

Pregnant woman Martial Arts photo by dizznbonn

This blog is in response to someone asking about practicing Dragon & Tiger qigong during pregnancy.

Some pregnant women get stagnant Chi at various points during their pregnancy as a natural effect of having a child.  It’s different with some women than others.  There are many things that Dragon and Tiger can be helpful for  in terms of stagnant Chi and in actually delivering the baby.

First, the edema, the swelling, the liquidized swelling that tends to happen in many women is very often caused by a build up of stagnant Chi in the kidneys.  The flicking action within the whole of dragon and tiger which releases stagnant Chi on a large level will help this.

The flicks that are done in movements  Two, five, six and seven as well as the heart action helps to specifically circulate the Chi in the body and release stagnant Chi.  The next thing that happens is many women start finding that besides Edema that their legs and limbs start having problems.

This is very often caused by the burden of poor circulation of having a baby inside your womb.  Having to actually feed that life inside of you with your own life force.  The flicking action in Dragon and Tiger and all the flicking and piercing actions tend to push the blood of the body to it’s extremities.  The toes, the fingertips, and the head.  This tends to help the general overall circulation of the body.

The next thing is that the general ability to breathe and every way in which dragon and tiger fosters better breathing both in regular even inhale and exhales and it’s ones with different releases of breath with different pressures inside them enables a woman’s breathing capacity to remain in good shape.  Very commonly during pregnancy because of the way the baby is pushing on the diaphragm, this doesn’t happen and it is one reason why many women run out of puff when it comes time to actually push the baby out.

The fourth and last point besides everything dragon and tiger does in general, is that the explosive breaths that are happening in movement two, five, six and seven.  Especially in six and seven when you have a push out and then a very long strong push after that.  It’s very, very helpful in pushing the baby out in those moments where it just  becomes a problem to exhale; to be able to create the pressure to actually push the baby down the canal (this is helpful even for women who’ve had lamaze training).  These are some useful points.

If you’ve never done Dragon and Tiger qigong then this wont make much sense to you. If you are interested, you can learn more about it through my book and upcoming DVD.

There were many other points to mention, but for this  Blog, I believe that’s a good starting point.

One of the most important qigong sets that I teach is called Dragon and Tiger Qigong (chi gung or chi king).

The subject of Dragon and Tiger Qigong is appropriate for many reasons, but primarily because I see it having tremendous value in terms of the looming healthcare tsunami. It is one of the best qigong sets to learn to work with your etheric body and while in China I was taught it by an extraordinary woman…

There are several important benefits to this relatively easy qigong (chi gung) set, but it is known for its potency in fighting cancer in China, and all the gunk that comes with it.  You may know that Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. I imagine the numbers are mimicked in Europe and other developed countries – so this is no small matter. I have students who’ve used Dragon and Tiger Qigong to get well.

Bill Ryan, one of my senior Energy Arts instructors actively teaches Dragon and Tiger Qigong in 5 to 6-day retreats in Northhampton, Massachusetts, which are described on his website www.MovingTiger.com. He is a highly qualified instructor and has helped many people to understand benefits of these simple yet powerful practices. There are currently 129 active Dragon and Tiger Qigong Instructors and you can search the Energy Arts instructor directory here to find an instructors near you.

Now…recently, the question keeps being brought up about how exactly I came to study Dragon and Tiger Qigong and I wanted to share that story with you here.

I had been a qigong tui na doctor for many years in the 1980′s in China and after I was studying in Beijing for about a year and completely socked in with Liu Hung Chieh, I thought that it might be good for me to do some other things.

Liu’s other disciple, Bai Hua, had a friend in Beijing who I also became good friends with. This guy came from a fairly famous family in Beijing, so I told him that I’d really like to see if there was any more training I could get to finish up my training in medical qigong (chi gung).

This friend went around and around trying to find out for me. You have to realize, this was only a few years after the Cultural Revolution. So he starts looking around and I believe he also had a relative who was in the field, so he knew who was who. The one name that came up that-possibly-I could talk to was Jiang Jia Hua. There were other people, but the odds were low simply because of the political situation.

Eventually, I met with the “old lady” as my wife and I dubbed her, and I had one stroke of luck that helped the situation. Her husband, who was an engineer in a major firm in Beijing, had received his education in the States, somewhere in the Midwest. He only had great things to say about the people, so she found it somewhat amusing to meet me.

Later she saw that I could do qigong and that I wasn’t blowing smoke. Seeing that I was really skilled was one thing, but then for some reason the subject of the came up.

She said she was interested in it and then she had her mind blown because I really knew about the I Ching. She started on a line of questioning: “How come you know so much about the I Ching?” etc. I said I learned it in Taiwan and Hong Kong and when I mentioned who my teacher was, she replied, “Your teacher is…who?” Liu-in the real community-was pretty famous. He didn’t consent to teaching just anybody.

We went back and forth and although I was studying with her, she was indecisive about what to do with me because she had put away Dragon and Tiger Qigong three or four years before I met her. After her husband died, she just didn’t want to engage the masses any more.

She trained 20,000 teachers by about ‘81 or ‘82. She had been Vice President of the All-China Scientific Qigong/Chi Gung Association. Her political ties were what allowed her to run a cancer clinic and teach. Bear in mind, Mao Tse Tung was really down on qigong as one of the “Four Olds” during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1974).

She thought my level of skill was equivalent to that of her better students, but she was still on the fence as to what to do with me. This went on for a couple of weeks. Then Liu caught a flu of some sort and I happened to mention the old lady to him.

He said if I wanted to bring her over, maybe she would give him some herbal meds. Liu wouldn’t go out and see anybody because he was an absolute hermit. I got the two of them together and then, you know the way it is with a child, “Look son, go out and play while the adults have a talk.”  Basically, I was told to leave! I came back once or twice and they sent me away each time.

When I saw her the next time, she said, “If he’ll teach you, I’ll teach you.” And that was it. She then made me her formal disciple and taught me the whole bit including Dragon and Tiger Qigong. I got to work in cancer clinics even though it was very dangerous for me to be working in those clinics. At that time, it was the equivalent of a subversive act against the State.

I ended up studying Dragon and Tiger Qigong with the old lady for about a year and a half. She was a little fireball. This woman was in her late sixties, early seventies and she was a little dynamo, running all over the place and what not.

She was also one of the main students of a person called Guo Lin, who was known as one of the big qigong/chi gung cancer doctors. So, she was also teaching me on that level. Dragon and Tiger Qigong was just one piece of the puzzle. Most of what I learned was folded inside of it, which is why I wanted it to be a part of my core program even though it didn’t come from Liu’s material.

So that’s how I learned Dragon and Tiger Qigong. Now for years people have asked me to do a DVD for this set and we are in the final stages of production now…If you are interested in this DVD and have not already signuped for the prelist you may do so here:

Signup now for the launch of the new Dragon and Tiger Qigong DVD and to download two free chapters of the Dragon and Tiger Qigong Instruction Manual please click here.