No splay, no play: 500 days of a 5000 year old practice.
On March 20th 2020 I started a qigong class in my garden. You can see the origin of that class in this video (scroll down the page a little) and you can see the one year celebration here.
As of 12th August I’ve now done 500 days of qigong. I’ve probably missed 20 days in total due to work or holidays, and I think once due to illness. I’ve taught up a mountain, on the beach, in cheap hotel rooms, but mainly in my garden. I say taught, its a light-touch. Light on structure, light on technique, heavy on the community. I know a lot of the people join for the chat and community. So much chat that I can’t read it all. And I know that a lot of people join to listen-in. Like a dime store/pound shop version of BBC Radio 4.
But I know that everyone moves a little at the very least. I know this because they tell me. Because some of them tell me they’ve not renewed their gym membership, that they can now squat for the first time ever, that their back pain has gone and not come back, that they get up in the morning pain-free, that they feel worse on the days that they don’t do it, that it saved them.
Clearly these weekly (at one point daily) messages move me. They also add a little pressure. Pressure to show up most days, pressure not to stop, pressure to add new routines and classes. This is nice pressure in as much as it validates what I do and why I do it. I started to do this stuff because I needed to move, I needed space to think and I needed a stage. It’s been an extraordinary journey for me too. I’m a qigong teacher. I teach what I know and what I have learned of this amazing practice. I have no lived experience of Taoism or Chinese Medicine but I know it works and I have an enthusiasm to share.
I wanted to think deeply about what I have learnt from this process. Here are a few lessons:
1 Movement is life. I say it a lot: if you stop moving you start dying. Just a little. This is harsh, I know that. But to move is to live. It is very easy to create a smaller and smaller life for ourselves and I see that exacerbated by moving less, by being able to move less. Keeping moving means you’re keeping going. Quality of life depends of quality of movement.
2 Breathing is everything. If you want to calm down, slow your breathing. If you want to feel enlivened, increase your breath pace. Breathing brings you to the here and now.
3 A team works. I don’t do breath work, but I have mates that do. I invited one to add breathing into my sessions. It grew. So did he. Without the support of my family, allowing me to take time, none of this would have happened.
4 The sounds of the garden are beautiful. Sometimes when I’m standing there, in a short meditation at the end of the sessions and I listen to garden I am truly in awe of nature. Awe is an over-used word. I see and feel it most when I am in nature. The summer or winter. Cold or warm. Unless its teeming it down I do qigong outside, mainly barefoot.
5 Ritual is magic. Having a morning ritual is a great way to start the day. Is a great way to create pattern and pace. And a great way to get me up in the morning. When I have a day off, I miss it.
6 Teaching means I need to learn. When I started I knew about three flows. All learnt from Lee Holden and Mimi Kuo Deemer. I got bored of me. So I needed to stay fresh, I needed to learn more. So I did. I learnt, I grew, as the group did. We all grow together.
7 The chat is enough. The typed chat is s stream of connection and sharing. I can’t read it all, in fact I can’t read much of it. There’s a lot of it and I’m getting old so I struggle to see it. But I know it is there and I know some people are there just for the chat. And that’s cool. I know some people use it as a way of feeling connected to others. My morning rambles and chit-chat reflect what I see on my morning walks, what I’ve heard on the radio, the goings on in the world. It’s a eulogy of sorts, or rather a stream of consciousness download of my mind.
8 Stoicism still has legs. Each morning I finish with the daily reading from Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s Daily Stoic. The insights, the train of thought this prompts, inspire deeper thinking and a resilience of mind that was missing, at least in my life.
9 Community lifts you higher. I’ve had a number of down moments during this time. Days when I really didn’t want to walk down the garden and press “Go Live”. On those days I’m not doing it for me. But of course I am. I always feel better after a session. After I move. After I breathe. After I chat. After I read the messages from the community. (It’s called the qigang. My daughter Daisy named it in the first weeks. It stuck). We meet. In real life as well now. We have formed a book group, an ideas group, a men’s group, a women’s group, a running group. We are having a mini-festival of sorts in October and there are a myriad of connections and sub groups that have grown from it. I think that’s what I’m proudest of.
There are other things, of course. Business connections, friendships, care. Plus the movement and the practice of course. I’ve gone deeper into that. I’m a teacher now. After 500 lessons how could I not be. Ive gone deeper into understanding me and why I need to move, breathe and commune.
So I’ve just done 500 days. Sometimes I carry the group, sometimes it carries me. But the world is changing again and the problem comes when the world changes and you don’t. So it’s time to change. Time to drop down a gear with it. I won’t stop. I will do a class at the weekend and one or two in the week depending on work schedules. I’ll post the week’s class dates and times on instagram ahead of time (@theqigang) and there are hundreds of old classes on the grid and another couple of hundred on my other account (@markshayler) if you have the patience to scroll back that far.
I want to thank the people that join me each morning, that move with me, that move me.
If there’s no splay, there’s no play (feet, mind and heart).
Mark is a sustainability and innovation consultant (30 years), helps people find their voice and a presenting style, and teaches qigong.
