Stretch Breath Movement Meditation Contemplation Integration All are interdependent aspects of the total practice of Qigong.

This program provides individual focus and practice routines designed to cultivate strength in each component while showing how each of these practices fold into one unified practice. The components of this program are unified into one practice through our awareness. We bring our awareness into our physical body allowing ourselves to experience our movements and when they surface, our feelings. Our breath is that which carries our awareness into our body. The breath in concert with our awareness disintegrates and releases energy miasmas from our body and restores homeostasis to the part of our being that was adversity affected by the miasma. Movement enhances the ability of breath awareness to penetrate the tissues, energy stream, blood flow, and cellular structure of our body. Our body also helps us to integrate into the natural world through the sense perceptions. Both through external and internal sense perceptions. The energy structures of the natural world can help to stabilize our own physical structure and will inform and help to shape our thinking mind. This process helps us to expand our awareness beyond our thinking mind. Our thoughts begins to emanate from a more unified sense perception, inclusive of the thinking mind but not exclusively controlled by it. This expansion of our sense perception is a by-product of breath awareness in movement. The practice of Qigong nurtures and develops our capacity to sustain this process. This is important because we must ultimately learn to remain in full breath awareness in every moment. Breath awareness is also a fundamental component of mediation.

Meditation helps to build confidence in our breath awareness by giving it space to exist within us, allowing us to become acquainted with this part of our intelligence and providing an opportunity for us to be guided, nurtured and cultivated from a more integrated self. Meditation also provides an opportunity for the interaction of breath awareness and thinking mind, which bears fruit in a form of contemplation. The function of meditation is not to put you into a state of peace but to allow you to become aware of your state, what ever that state may be. While in that awareness, we can apply specific techniques to identify and address miasmas within our system that are the root cause of our dysfunctional state should that be the case and techniques to identify and cultivate a path of integration and fuller states of awareness. We call it meditation because none of this process can be executed with the thinking mind. Meditation is the counterbalance of the thinking mind, allowing us to gather information and understanding from the silence. The silence is in truth a resonant electrical field of consciousness. Meditation allows our inner sense perceptions and breath awareness to penetrate deeper into the resonant field of consciousness by entraining our biological systems to perceive the subtler vibrational levels within this field. Consistent practice of meditation helps us to integrate these subtler vibrations as self. Integration is the process of balancing our function in the world with our growing sense perception and breath awareness. As we engage in this process of integration we first become aware of how our function in the world betrays what we know. At the beginning our function is being led by the thinking mind, which at this stage has derived most of its information from outside of itself. Our mind guides us to respond and to live based on information that is alien to your native intelligence. As our inner derived sense perception and breath awareness begins to feed the mind, our mind begins to sift its focus and guide us to respond and live based on information from inside of ourself. This inner guidance allows us to act and live our lives with integrity or integration. Qigong is a practice one might choose to support the cultivation of oneself through this process of integration. No doubt there are many processes derived from many different cultures and sources of esoteric knowledge.

Qigong is one of many paths. It is a path that can sustain your process and will complement any other practices you may have already adopted into your life. The richness of its complexity is rooted in its foundation as a shamanic practice and cultivation through the science of taoism, which is based on the configuration, resonance field, movement and balance of energy. The power of the practice is enhanced by its historical and cultural cross fertilization with Buddhist and Yogic practices and principles and by its association with the development of medical practices in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qigong in its current state is a contemporary practice that provides us an opportunity to awaken the parts of our self that have become disassociated from the knowledge of our being, and provides a remedy or process for integration and cultivation of deeper states of awareness and vibrant health. the person dissasociated from initially manifested in twentieth century China, referred to as "the healthy living method."