Seminars: Level 1/ Level 2

Please register by emailing

alex@zyq.ca

or calling 613-800-8000

no more then 6 students can attend.

 

Cost: 220 CAD for 10 classes

Any methods of payment available

PAYMENT

The first aim of Level 1 practice is to relax the physical body. This means releasing the main patterns of muscular tension that restrict or block energy flow. When energy flows more freely, it exerts more pressure on the next layer of blockages until they clear, and so forth.

As this process continues, you achieve the second aim: you cultivate your energy body by increasing the overall amount and intensity of energy as well as improving its ability to circulate and gather it in the lower energy center—lower dantian. In turn, more gathered qi will push through greater blockages and regenerate areas of stagnation.
When you’ve reached the relaxed state, you’ll find your body feeling more spacious, easy and your energy flowing relatively freely. Your mind may remain active, but it has lost its ability to disturb the body. This loss of embodied expression and support for the busy mind allows it to start quieting down: you’re now ready for Level 2.

 

Level 1-A, B & C Practice Benefits:

  • Increases energy and regulates our life force
  • Improves kidney/adrenal and bladder functions
  • Increase vitality, confidence, and self-esteem
  • Opens the main energy channels
  • Decreases pain
  • Leads to general physical wellness which is the foundation of total well-being, physically, energetically/emotionally and spiritually
  • Heal physical injuries from sports, dance, occupational related chronic pain and weakness
  • Helps us experience deeper levels of relaxation that lead to the next stage: stillness
  • Developing our “gut instincts” from our lower dantian (first, second and third chakras)
  • Provides us with a supply of raw energy
  • Determines the sexual disposition and appetite for men and women.  The lower dantian is associated with the reproductive function. The blockages and stagnation of this energy center are common to many modern day citizens.
  • Helps us express creativity, dance and movements especially in the pelvis and hip area
  • Works with our knees and feet, feel supported
  • Physically and energetically rooted, connected to our planet, gives us the feeling of being grounded and nurtured
  • Focusing on our relationship to Earth and Earth qualities within us such as accepting, solidity, receiving, abundance of life, transformative power
  • Creates our sense of security and general well-being, our healthy relation to the physical and material realm
  • Reduces fear, strengthens trust in self, in life, faith in higher power
  • Associated with the cerebral cortex of the brain
  • Reflects our connection with our mothers, and our feminine within
  • Helps the digestive system
  • Offers characteristic of fire – with the qualities of expansiveness, warmth, and joy
  • Especially important for those engaged in healing work of any sort, because this is where we build foundational energy for healing
  • Reduce cravings for caffeine and salt

Level 1A: Preparing the body for qi

This level lays the foundation for ongoing ZY Qigong practice. It focuses on developing internal physical and energy awareness and releasing blockage points. It addresses basics of standing (alignment and balance), qi sensitivity and handling, and how to begin opening the main energetic pathways of the body. We practice warm-up and joint-opening exercises, hand training, energetic self-massage, the four Level 1 preparatory exercises, and simple standing meditation with arms at the side.

Level 1A benchmarks

You will have successfully learned and practiced this material when you have the internal awareness and control to:

  • stand for at least a half-hour without your feet getting numb or tingly
  • make your hands pulse energetically without physically moving them
  • form a qi ball with your hands, increase its charge, and not lose the charge as you move it into your belly
  • move qi around the inside your body with your hands
  • feel the difference in your hands between pushing and pulling qi, and do either one at will

Level 1B: Activating lower dan tian

At this level, you solidify your energy foundation by continuing Level 1A practice. In addition, we apply our ability to move qi with the hands in two meditations to increase and ground our energy: cleansing and gathering (Bringing Down Heaven) and Big Tree.

Level 1B benchmarks

You will have successfully learned and practiced this material when you can:

  • stand in Big Tree comfortably for at least one hour
  • maintain an open connection from your hands through your navel to lower dan tian
  • feel the increasing charge of your lower dan tian
  • feel earth energy move up through your feet and body
  • feel heaven energy move down through your head and body

Level 1C: Building lower dan tian

This level addresses a critical phase in self-development: the methodical gathering and refining of energy. It involves longer Level 1 Big Tree meditations and more detailed training in how to move energy efficiently. We also begin refining the jing energy gathered in Big Tree into qi by pulsing the lower dantian. Finally, when the qi is strong and balanced, we practice how to circulate it through the body in the Microcosmic Orbit.
Seen as an advanced exercise only taught after two years of practice in ancient times, Microcosmic Orbit (or Small Heavenly Circle) can be a most effective exercise for healing.  This is the natural flow of qi in the body of a child in the womb and is interrupted at birth or soon afterwards. We will learn specific techniques to reconnect the life-sustaining and healing power of the microcosmic orbit as we practice to connect our gathered and balanced qi from the lower Dantian into the circulation, and opening the main spiritual gates along the way for transformation of the mind.  Much of what people practice as the microcosmic orbit today is based on “imagination” rather than real qi flow. In this workshop, we will tangibly experience the power of this exercise.

Level 1C benchmarks

You will have successfully learned and practiced this material when you can:

  • refine qi comfortably for at least two hours
  • feel your hands and lower dan tian getting hot, and getting hot faster in successive refining qi meditations
  • feel the qi begin to rise spontaneously
  • guide the circulation of the qi through the microcosmic orbit with the relaxed pulsing of the perineum

 

The first aim of Level 2 practice is to integrate and relax the energy body. This involves continued work with physical blockages, but at a more detailed level than in Level 1. Increasingly, the energy body works as a unified pattern rather than a set of more or less separate flows. As this integration develops, the energy sensations become smoother. The energy body, just as the physical body, feels more spacious and refined. There is also the realization that many of the sensations we interpret in Level 1 as energy are actually resistance to energy.
The second aim is to quiet the mind. This is a natural result of relaxing the energy body. In Level 1 we experience the physical body calming down and no longer responding to the mind’s agitation. In Level 2, the relaxation of the energy body influences the mind: the mind slows down and simply stops; its construction of space and time stops. This is the calm state, also known as the qigong state.

 

Level 2 Practice Benefits:

  • Strengthens our immune system
  • Increases personal power, boundaries
  • Improves self authority
  • Increases contentment, joy
  • Generosity
  • Gain openness, non-judgment, leading to compassion for self and others, and unconditional love
  • Emotional healing
  • Associated with the thymus gland
  • Carve yourself out of the network of conflicting desires and emotions which had previously characterized the ego
  • The qualities of air in the personality – airiness, mobility, gentleness, and lightness
  • Express our thoughts creatively, creativity, creating, manifesting in the physical world the fulfillment of one’s goals.
  • Expression, voicing thoughts, feelings, emotions, poems, invocations, rituals, speeches, and prophecies
  • Decreases cravings for sugar, refined carbohydrates

Level 2A: Integrating the energy body

At this level, we continue Level 1 training to increase our energy but with a new emphasis on improving the integrity ofthe energy body. We add Level 2 preparatory exercises, Level 2 Big Tree, and other practices to open the hips and the back of the pelvis, activate and build middle dan tian, and open and build the central channel.
 

Level 2A benchmarks

You will have successfully learned and practiced this material when:
  • the qi in your lower dan tian gets extremely hot, then shoots up and opens your central channel (this usually only happens once, maybe twice, and you know it when it happens)
  • you can move energy up and down your central channel while remaining grounded
  • you begin dissolving your body boundaries in Big Tree

Level 2B: Relaxing the energy body

With the central channel open and the energy field beginning to work as a coherent whole, we now practice how to open and close, expand and contract the boundaries of our energy body and modulate its pulsing intensity. This pulsing is also called body breathing, and we learn to use it in different ways for specific purposes. Its primary application is to relax the energy body and quiet the mind in preparation for pause state in Level 3. Training also continues for gathering energy and increasing the capacity of our central channel and other pathways.
 

Level 2B benchmarks

You will have successfully learned and practiced this material when you can:

  • meditate in Big Tree comfortably for at least two hours
  • control at a basic level the boundaries and pulsing of your energy body
  • gradually stop breathing for longer periods of time as you pulse your energy body
  • experience your mind becoming empty: the no-space, no-time calm state

Level 2C: Advanced group practice

This offers group support and guidance from a teacher in practicing all Level 1 and 2 material to prepare yourself for Level 3 and attaining pause state.

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