approximating: general #585

Health. Nei-kung methods are usually looked at and also practiced as methods to support one’s physical health and to gain or regain emotional equilibrium. But with Nei-kung and Qigong practitioners, health support is often seen within a rather narrow framework of individual health.

[Also see “Yangsheng – nourishing life 養生”: https://tao-moves.com/2020/12/05/yangsheng-nourishing-life-%e9%a4%8a%e7%94%9f/%5D

Health, however, has so many facets. There is also—and not just metaphorically—the health of organizations, of political systems, of ecosystems, … We are parts of larger systems, and on every level the structures and patterns of systems can be healthier or less healthy. There are also so many contributing contextual factors to health—individual, social, environmental, …

I mentioned the endless interlocking of contexts and realities in recent posts which is also expressed in chapter 54 of the Tao Te Ching related to governance. In chapter 54, individual cultivation is mentioned as the foundational part of the cascading extension of social interactions—from the smallest societal units to the largest one.

Physical practices can be trivialized, fragmented, and isolated activities centered around scalability for commercial purposes like in fitness studios. But physical practices can also be profound as you can find with traditional Chinese Taoist or Buddhist practices, for instance. They can clearly provide conceptual inspiration for our modern educational systems. Our educational systems are simply out of balance—also on a structural level.

For manifold reasons, the kinds of physical education we have in our modern societies are trivial and not at all designed for (truly) helping with the complex problems we are facing as societies. They are neither helpful in stabilizing democratic structures nor do they provide any extended horizon for dealing with the complexities of life. But physical education can do precisely that. When you work on your bodymind structure, for instance, in a Tao Te Ching oriented Nei-kung method, you can discover and work with interlocked structures and patterns also effective on larger societal levels. …

As physical beings it makes sense for a physical education to prepare us for the networking and interlocking patterns structuring life. We could gain tremendously as societies by learning from profound physical education traditions of peoples and cultures around the world, because they aim at materializing complex healthy patterns and learn by experiencing that materialization.