I practice every morning, every day since I was 17. I usually start by rolling around on the ground a little bit, I’ve done some Feldenkrais work, and I love how gentle that is for my body, to get my body moving and to really just start to feel aligned and centered. And then I move into qigong practice. So qigong is an ancient Shamanic practice and it’s connected to nature. For me, it feels like a very natural extension of the natural world, and I’m imagining that the original practitioners of that, that that’s where that came from, is a sensing a feeling of the energies of nature and movements that embody that experience and nature is at the center of it. The five elements in Chinese medicine or Asian medicine, water, wood, fire earth, and metal. These all have different psychospiritual expressions, they’re like archetypes, and we see them reflected back to us in the seasons in the plant world and the animal world, in behaviors, in stages of life and qigong touches on these different qualities and harmonizes them.

I speak about my work as a way to come into wholeness, as a path to wholeness. We are all inherently whole, and then we have experiences that fracture us. They become overlays onto this wholeness that’s still there. Parts of us become hidden, parts of us become unknown to ourselves, parts of us become feel damaged or traumatized. So wholeness is about stitching all those pieces back together again.

This form has been the center of my qigong practice almost every day for years. It’s fortifying for me when I’m feeling unsure or unclear, it’s calming. It reminds me of all the expressions of who I am and what I’m here to do as a woman on the planet. The particular role, the feminine, is here to play well. The yin is the feminine principle, as opposed to the yang, the other polarity, the masculine principle, but the yin is the subtle, the internal, the intuitive, the dark, the mysterious, the non-linear, the shape shifter or the shapeless. This is the energy, this is the principle of getting really quiet and going deep and going in, and then being attuned on a whole different level of sensitivity, and then knowing what to do next from that place because of a sensitivity to the field in which we talk about the energetic field or what’s happening in the moment or being sensitive to just how the energy is moving in a particular instance.

And of course we live in a world that’s become dominated by the yang energy or as my former teacher would say, the false young, a masculine active, constantly needing to take action, regardless of whether the information has been gathered, regardless of whether we’re in touch with something really deep inside of us. And the reality is that the yang needs to come from a place where it is always rooted in the yin. The yin is where everything begins and the yin is where everything returns. So if you think about the feminine, this is the life giving principle, this is birth, this is where birth comes from.

I feel that I’ve been recruited to help bring the yin back into our awareness and actually to even bring new and deeper understandings of the yin and I’m finding out what this is myself, day to day in my own life, what it means to actually keep calling myself back to the yin. As a woman in our culture, there’s so many different forms of oppression and snuffing out and being abused or ignored or devalued for these more subtle arts of the yin. I’m experiencing the yin as this intelligent presence at a level that I haven’t experienced before. And just as I’ve been describing, just that it is so much more powerful and intelligent and available and yet so sublimated, so pushed underground, pushed out of our consciousness culturally.

Then there’s the dark feminine, the deep, the underground Kali Persephone, the goddesses that go to the underworld and then emerge with the gifts of the shadow. The body, our bodies, is the gateway, it’s the finely tuned instrument. We’re designed for attunement to these different energies. Like an instrument, we actually have to cultivate and care for this body. It is naturally endowed with it, but of course we can override it with our lifestyle or with our personality or with our belief system or just how we abuse our body, the choices we make with our bodies. The reality is that we all are born with this perfection in terms of this instrument, and we can connect with that at any time.