What's That Tingling Sensation? Qi!

--from The Healing Promise of Qi by Roger Jahnke, O.M.D.

Through your practice you will learn to feel the Qi within your own body. It is a sensation that is unique to each person. Here are a few of the sensations that are typical:

• tingling in the hands, feet, cheeks
• feeling fluffy internally like clouds moving inside
• a sense of flowing or circulating
• feeling radiant or luminescent
• feeling that the surface of the body is porous
• spreading warmth in either the limbs or torso
• the feeling of being tipsy on wine
• energy moving in the belly
• release of tension in shoulders or neck
• decrease of pain
• sensation of a magnetic field between the hands
• sensation of heat coming from the hands as they pass over the face or body parts
• the urge to cry or the release of tears
• a sense of reconnecting with a lost part of oneself
• a sense of the transcendental or spiritual
• a feeling of coming home
• a feeling of ecstacy or bliss

There is no correct way to experience the Qi sensation. If you are fully awake and attentive in the experience you will probably ask, "What is that sensation?" Most of us have these experiences bu then fail to take the time to investigate them.

Kwan Yin's Quatrain #8 | Living the Tao

Living the Tao

In the forest, the pines and cypresses grow straight up

And neither rain nor wind, snow or frost can harm them--

One day to come you'll see what it all was for...

And these will be the pillars of the temple of community.

-From KUANYIN Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion By Martin Palmer and Jay Ramsay with Man-Ho-Kwok

10 Tips for Winter Health

Staying Healthy With the Seasons is a very popular, easy to understand, health guide by Dr. Elson M Haas. This book is recommended reading for Body Balance Academy students seeking natural ways to harmonize with the seasons for life-long health.

Here is the short list of ten tips for winter health. Click the link for more details about each one of the ten listed here:

1. Take time for reflection.
2. Reduce stress.
3. Get quality sleep.
4. Increase the relaxation in your life. Learn some relaxation exercises or practice yoga, Tai chi, Qigong, or Pilates exercises. These gentle practices can be done almost anywhere, regardless of the weather. (Congratulations, Body Balance students! You are way ahead on this one!-Shih Fu Catherine)
5. Nourish yourself.
6. Be sure you’re getting enough Essential Nutrients.
7. Avoid over-indulgence.
8. Have fun. Laugh.
9. Make time for love.
10. Nourish others.

Karen Armstrong on Compassion (Shu)

In this long book review from the Brain Pickings newsletter, author Karen Armstrong traces the evolution of compassion across religions, cultures and time. Her own life story is as fascinating as her study. Reviewer Maria Popova writes that 

“Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

Later in the review she writes, "In fact, the first person to formulate the Golden Rule predated the founding figures of Christianity and Islam by five centuries and a millennium, respectively — when asked which of his teachings his disciples should practice most tenaciously, “all day and every day,” the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE) pointed to the concept of shu, commonly translated as “consideration,” which he explained as striving “never to do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” Armstrong clarifies:

A better translation of shu is “likening to oneself”; people should not put themselves in a special, privileged category but relate their own experience to that of others “all day and every day.” Confucius called this ideal ren, a word that originally meant “noble” or “worthy” but that by his time simply meant “human.” Some scholars have argued that its root meaning was “softness,” “pliability.” But Confucius always refused to define ren, because, he said, it did not adequately correspond to any of the familiar categories of his day. It could be understood only by somebody who practiced it perfectly and was inconceivable to anybody who did not. A person who behaved with ren “all day and every day” would become a junzi, a “mature human being.”

Read more.