How to Become a Level-1 Yogi!
I said to my qigong-instructor trainee last week, "You've officially become a level one yogi!"
What is a yogi? It's a word with an ancient heritage - basically it means a practitioner of yoga, the art of Union. In my own terminology these days I tend to refer to this as integration - hence, the brand is Templestyle Integrative Arts. The name yogi was born in India and yogins were known throughout India, Tibet, Nepal, China, even into Afghanistan. My own Chinese Zen tradition (Cha'n) comes down through a Buddhist school known as "Yogachara" - the practitioners ("chara") of yoga.
Daoist cultivators have also sometimes been titled yogins by modern authors, as a way to help people understand the nature of the less-familiar arts of neigong (inner cultivation, aka "Daoist Yoga"). In an odd historical turn, some scholars feel that the earliest inner yogic techniques in the Indian tantras may have been imported from China in the first years of the common era. So the name "yogi" might fit the Daoists more than the original users knew!
In any event, what characterizes a Yogi or Yogin is that they are practitioners of "inner alchemy" they are taking hold of the mechanisms of the body and mind and learning how to come into congruence and mastery. Yogis are famous for being able to slow or raise their heart rate, change their brain waves, fast for long periods and other feats of bodymind integration.
This may sound like a far out level of mastery, but here's the context for why I told my student he's a "level one yogi." He had just told me how he went to a check up and when they checked his blood pressure it was way too high. "Hold on," he said, knowing that his anxiety around medical practitioners would skew the reading.
He proceeded to use qigong breathing to immediately drop his blood pressure down into a normal range for the second test!
This story wasn't surprising to me, as I've heard similar things all too often in my career as a qigong instructor. One of my first private students was able to use qigong to cut his reliance on blood pressure medication in half - effectively eliminating the side effects! Another of my students has used meditation to decrease problematic aspects of a heart arrhythmia.
These students have experienced the promise of qigong and inner alchemy. They aren't performing circus feats, but they have found that we have much more influence over our bodies than we usually believe we do.
This weekend we'll be finishing up a course on Daoist Sexual Energy Yoga, and the same principles hold true in that unique setting, we use breathing, muscle contraction, and the mind to alter our physiological responses. We move our bodily response from something habitual to something conscious.
The most profound application of yogic mastery, though, has to be in relation to our emotional life. What are our emotions but thoughts affecting our physiology?
When one attains basic facility with the art of inner alchemy, they are able to free themselves from habits of emotional reactivity, as well as release self-judgment for our uncomfortable emotions.
This becomes possible because we learn that our feelings are just movements of life-force set in motion by our mind.
If we have the capacity to stand back from our thoughts and stories, like meditative practice instills in us, we often find out that we can choose how we mobilize our life-energies. We can withdraw our attention from uncomfortable stories because we realize they are optional.
These two inner capacities: 1. the ability to stand back and see the emptiness of our stories, and 2. the ability to influence our physiology by making the unconscious conscious, are the skills of a level one yogi!
There are plenty of advanced skills to cultivate beyond this, but can you imagine what a beautiful world it would be if everyone had access to just level one?!?
How many of us would be free from unnecessary stress - the kind that is self-inflicted? How many of us might learn to calm asthma attacks, re-route the blood flow before a migraine starts, settle our anxiety through breathwork, and thus save ourselves time and money, and save ourselves from unnecessary pain?
What might it mean for our relationships if we learned to read the signs of our own bodies - when we were getting too heated up, when our survival circuitry was triggered, when we were too hungry or under-resourced to relate well?
I imagine a world of yogins who are so mindful and in loving relationship with their bodies that they know when to step back and take care of themselves and thus can treat each other with love as well.
We, of course, can't control every aspect of our life and health - integrative arts are not meant to make you into a better control freak! What we can do is learn where we have influence, and then how to skillfully take advantage of that influence!
This is my mission at Templestyle. It's the reason I've begun offering Qigong Instructor trainings designed to be accessible to a wide audience. It's why I've put together the Empathy Dojo curriculum, and built it into our Level 2 Qigong Instructor course.
All my course offerings are what they are because I envision what a beautiful world this will be when we've all attained the status of Level 1 Yogi!
The goal is not far away, it's not limited to certain types of fitness, or the mystically minded. Understanding the potentials of our bodies and minds is all of our inheritance. It simply takes access, dedication and deliberate effort!
