Ten Ways To Guarantee Failure With Qigong

In no particular order I’d like to present the top 10 ways to fail with your Qigong exercises:

1. Practice Qigong Form Only Forget that this exercise is a composite of Qigong form, energy/breathing and Mind. Just focus on the bit you can see, Qigong form and ignore the rest. Yes you will look like you are doing Qigong, and hardly anybody will be able to tell the difference.

2. Learn Only From Books & Qigong DVD’s Don’t bother making the effort to find the best teacher of this that you can, don’t waste your time, effort and money traveling to learn from them. Forget the sacrifice of spending time away from your family and friends to learn directly from them.

Why bother when you can pick up a book from the store, or watch a DVD and teach yourself?

3. Don’t Follow Instructions If you do have a real live breathing teacher, the quickest way to guarantee failure is to not follow their instructions. If they tell you to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth and you’re not cool with that – forget about it. Do it your way.

I mean come on, let’s face it, you’re actually doing the teacher a favor by turning up every week, why should you bother following their instructions? The teachers a fool anyway, otherwise they’d know that they could get better results by thinking about their angels, wearing the right crystal, whilst humming the right frequency, tensing, stretching their muscles and visualizing the love of the Buddha’s – whilst practicing Qigong.

Seriously, haven’t they read the book?

4. Have No Idea Why You’re Practicing the exercise If you can’t tell me in a sentence or two what benefits you specifically want from your practice in the next 6 months and in the 12 months or so after that – congratulations. You are well on the way to failing with it. Keep it up.

5. Be Tense Hey, it’s a stressful world we seem to inhabit. If you really want to fail fast with your exercises then make sure you do them when you are physically, emotionally, mentally and Spiritually tense. Qi finds it really difficult to flow harmoniously when you’re tense – so the tenser you are, the more likely you are to fail with it.

6. Make Sure Your Practice Is Haphazard. Don’t feel like practicing once or twice a day – every day. Excellent you have what it takes to fail with Qigong. Practice only when you can be bothered, take a few days off when ever you feel like it and just see how quickly you don’t get any beneficial results from your practice.

7. Give Up Now Hey, come on, you’ve been practicing for a few weeks and nothing’s happened yet? You can’t set fire to cotton wool just by looking at it? You mean you haven’t overcome that illness you’ve had for the last decade? You don’t wake up in a morning feeling ready to jump out of bed – kick ass and take names?

Clearly Qigong doesn’t work and you should give up now. I mean it’s been a few weeks already.

8. Be Addicted to ‘New’ Forget about practicing and practicing and practicing the two or three qigong exercises you know. Forget about developing the core skills by practicing, practicing, practicing. No, it’s far more fun and enjoyable to learn new forms, learn new stuff.

A really good way to fail with it is to never scratch the surface of it by constantly moving on to a new form, school or style.

9. Keep Thinking All the Time Similar to #5 – but significantly different if you think about it enough, from enough different angles. Forget about enjoying your Qigong and analyze every single movement of this exercise you agonized over choosing, every single sensation. Approach it as if you were going into a lab and put everything under the microscope of your mind.

To really speed this one up, don’t just keep thinking about what you’re doing whilst practicing it, drag in unfinished business from the day as well. Forget about relaxing and enjoying your practice. Chew on tomorrow’s meeting instead and what you’re doing. This way you can multi-task whilst doing your practice.

If you can keep this up for the full 15 minutes of your practice, you are well on the way to falling with this.

10. Distractions Nothing says failure like practicing in a really rubbish place. Ideally you’ll choose somewhere noisy, dirty, and busy and if you want to fail super fast – you could add dangerous to the list as well.

If you want to fail with the exercise forget about practicing in a place of nature, far from the madding crowd with fresh circulating air. That’s for people who want to succeed with Qigong!

Conclusion If however you wish to succeed with it and your practice of exercises then simply ignore the 10 suggestions above and do the opposite.

Marcus Santer is an author and worldwide authority on Shaolin Qigong. Visit his Qigong Exercises blog for 170+ articles like this and for your free Qigong Exercises.