Zen Mindfulness - Sei Ki HeartTouch - Tai Chi Qi Gong

This practice has come out of the Shinto tradition, although I have adapted it with my own style as a British person and have no interest in religious aspects which some people in Japan may hold.

My interest is the effect it has had over the years in releasing first myself and now my students from extreme states of emotional distress. My personal background involves aspects of trauma and what I call 'spiritual psychosis'. (I took anti-psychotics for 8 months in 2001 but came off and managed my inner balance by myself from then on.)

It means, occasionally my emotional field can get jammed up with anxiety and frustration, perhaps rage which needs to be release in a healthy way.

Meditative / Mindfulness practices help me to 'hold it together' and shift things, but in my experience use of the voice in practices like this work much better. I usually use a combination, starting with this work and also a practice called Katsugen (I call it Yawning Yoga) which I'll share in another video. And then I move onto mindfulness work.

This voice work practice clears emotions from the body-mind and re-enegises the Hara / abdominal power centre which leaves you feeling quiet inside, present, centred and grounded. The thinking mind shuts down and you find yourself just in the here and now. There is a strong meditative effect, but it is not trance like. It brings you down into your body. You get your power back in a healthy way and this is what most people recovering from traumatic situations and extreme stress need. (i.e. people often labeled mentally ill)

I present this practice in my workshops for people with a mental health diagnosis but it is applicable for anyone finding life 'challenging'.

I hope you find it useful. less...

Strong emotional release and movement can come with this work as we progress but we are not seeking it. We need to be more familiar with ourselves and the practice before going there.

What we are aiming at here is a gentle practice. A quiet titration of emotion in which we release a little of the trauma inside with the stimulation of the vagus nerve, a few stretches or yawns and then back to the meditative sitting to calm everything down.

Thank you for your wisdom in taking care of yourselves!

As with any practice I share, anyone following this, does so with their own responsibility for themselves.

This is a healthy natural process, but for some people anything that brings you to a state of relaxation and connection to oneself will bring up emotions which you then have to face. If you follow the instructions here and start small, you should be able to create a smooth, gentle path for yourself. If there is a need to talk to a therapist though about what may come up, please do so. less...

In this case, I am sharing the practices standing up, as it is often easier for people to learn them in this form, but also they tend to produce a natural qi gong like response from the body as you allow the waves of energy coming up to move you until the ripples settle.

When you do this in Seiza, Japanese kneeling, it often produces stronger reactions which I don't necessarily want for my students at the beginning.

Kishi Sensei never taught this standing up in my experience.

The core of this work is still the breath, so it is worth practicing with the Sitting Yawning Yoga practices before approaching this video. The opening exercises magnify the hara opening, bringing up stronger responses.

As with the Sitting Yawning Yoga, after each 'hara stimulation', dropping a pebble into your pond, you allow the body's natural responses to come up, yawns, stretches, shaking, burps, coughs, emotional releases.

And then when all is quiet you can drop another pebble to release more deeply.

The most important thing in this practice is to relax about what comes up response wise. If you are afraid and tighten up or hold it back, it creates an unpleasant tension and leaves you stagnated which isn't healthy. Its a bit like holding back a sneeze.

I noticed with a few students who were quite head based, possibly psychologist trained, that they went into a fear state doing this work which produces an uncomfortable result. There is no need for this, but if you are not ready to surrender the ego's control and let go, you may not be ready to do this practice. It requires a leap of faith like jumping off a bridge and trusting your bungie rope will hold. I was afraid the first time, but was even more afraid of staying the way I was...

When I hear about people with aggressive voices inside, I want to offer this work, as I'm sure it will discharge the emotion from the system and ease the inner relationships but what is likely to come out will not be 'tidy' to use my language and facilitators need to be prepared for this. I lost my voice after two of my early retreats working with Katsugen.

A safety note - For some people and I was one of them, there can be so much energy stuck inside needing to get out, that it can come as a real volcano of 'demonic rage'. Harmless in my case, but impressive and scary for myself and those around. This is amazing to go through if you have been holding it in for decades like I did, but you need good support around you to keep it safe.

My view is that if you have a lot going on inside, you should work with the sitting yawning yoga practice for longer, quietly titrating the emotion before approaching these practices that take you deeper.

Ideally when you do go ahead, you will do it in a group, with experienced people present for the first few times.

Thank you for your wisdom in taking care of yourselves!

As with any practice I share, anyone following this, does so with their own responsibility for themselves.

This is a healthy natural process, but for some people anything that brings you to a state of relaxation and connection to oneself will bring up emotions which you then have to face.

If there is a need to talk to a therapist though about what may come up, please do so. less...

Katsugen is both familiar and strange to us.

The familiar part is what we do naturally all the time: the morning stretches, yawning reflexes, burping, little shakes, sighs even vomiting and diarhoea.

The strange part is because it comes from our subconscious and we are not used to seeing human beings lower their 'public face' and reveal their 'private face' without feeling self-conscious which would interfere and make it contrived and ugly. It is not a performance and is normally considered extremely private so there are very few examples available on the internet.

Katsugen Undo as a practice evolved with Haruchika Noguchi in the 1960's although spontaneous Hara practices existed in other forms before this in Japan.

In my experience it has the capacity to free us from deep distortions in our body and mind which may be causing us physical or mental health issues.

Katsugen sessions of my own, that looked pretty mad or even 'demonic', freed me from inner prisons which were at risk of erupting in unhealthy or harmful ways. In other circumstances these expressions might have been identified as signs of psychiatric illness. Whatever it looks like, this is not a pathological process but a demonstration of the amazing wisdom of the body to heal even extreme distortions of the human mind in addition to organic issues.

It is a way out of suffering and can evolve as a spontaneous Zen path as well as a natural healing process. For me, it works well alongside my Zen sitting and HeartTouch work.

As with all of the practices I share it isn't directly a therapeutic practice, but it helps us move towards a more natural state, and the side-effect indirect consequences of this may be to free us from our pain and sickness.

I see it as a meeting in which the conscious mind, goes empty and softens its tight grip to allow the usually subconscious 'Hara mind' to take over and guide expression from the body. The consequence from doing this is that there is some release of old stagnant patterns from the body and it evolves to a new more fresh order, which may well feel much better than before!

In the longer term there is also a change as the two 'minds' get more familiar with each other and this frees us from some of the psycho-somatic tension of being human.

There is a re-balancing of who we are, with the Hara Self gaining more role in our lives (which we may or may not want).

I have also been exploring the TRE Trauma work recently and though I found what was coming out for me quite similiar in terms of the involuntary shaking, I didn't find it energised me in the same way as the Spontaneous Hara work. It didn't take me into the 'Big Me', Zen like state which I am used to with Katsugen Undo.

In fact I noticed I felt tired afterwards, and sometimes in need of connection practices or emotional work to recover from the mild dissociations that occurred. I only had the opportunity for 5 sessions but this is what I experienced with my history of 'non-ordinary state life'. What it did do though was bring my nervous system to a lower level of 'charge' which is what it is designed to do and this felt amazing, reducing the stress memory.

So somehow even though these practices take us to similar kinds of activity, there is something fundamentally different about them. TRE tires the fight/flight muscles lightly to trigger activation of the body's chemical reset process to recover from a freeze state i.e. trauma.

Katsugen Undo energises the Hara using open throat breathing and then this is magnified by the 'hara opening' exercises from Akinobu Kishi as here or Noguchi (see later videos) which are stronger still. This extra vitality in the Hara causes the body to 'clean the house' on a physical and emotional level, so we also get a recovery from the freeze trauma state but the consciousness state you do this in feels different.

It is common to need to lie down after a Katsugen session, while it settles and keeps working inside, but usually I feel great after this, totally alive and present. Real Samurai empowerment stuff... less...

My intention here is to facilitate arriving at a relaxed sitting practice, in which you can just sit and do nothing naturally. In my experience this is not easy, and I noticed while doing the Qi Yoga series once that I would have been content to just stop and sit there.

An easy way into Zen, but also a good preparation for the HeartTouch practice.

The postures look similar to those in yoga, but the focus is closer to Qi Gong, as we aim to place our attention on the areas of the body in contact with the floor and 'sink' our weight through them as in Tai Chi. This brings energy into the body from the resonance that develops with the ground from the contact places and the ensuing 'peng' or inflating balloon of vitality, helps the body to open more fully from the inside. less...