Walker

Shaking to improve immunity, prevent colds and flus, expel wind-cold pathogenic qi, strengthen protective qi

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29 minutes ago, Walker said:
Because the coronavirus epidemic that originated in Wuhan continues to spread, I wish to share a simple immunity-promoting technique with members and visitors here. 
 
Coincidentally, I learned this incredibly simple and easy method from a student of Andrew Nugent Head while visiting Hubei province, the origin of the current coronavirus epidemic, in 2016. Andrew Nugent Head learned it from Dr. Xie Peiqi (解佩啓), a master of Yin style baguazhang. The Yin bagua practitioners were in close contact with Forbidden City doctors during the late Qing dynasty, and a great many wonderful medical and health promoting techniques were absorbed into their teachings. This is one of them, and it is something that apparently Dr. Xie would make some new baguazhang students do for an hour a day before training anything else. Andrew Nugent Head said he sometimes used to do it for two hours a day. The fellow who taught it to me practiced it while living in a very polluted Chinese city with bitterly cold winters. He and his wife did this method for an hour each morning and neither of them caught a single cold in two years.
 
After learning this method 3.5 years ago I have not gotten a single cold or fallen ill in any other way. I do not think you need to do it an hour every day to get results, and in fact I almost never do it any more. After doing it for 20-40 minutes a day most days of the week for about two to three months, I could feel that my body had reaped the effects of this method, and I was able to feel that I no longer needed do it with regularity. I now only occasionally use it if I feel that I have been affected by pernicious wind-cold qi and need to, in the words of Chinese medicine, "clear the exterior." I would estimate I have done it only three of four times in the last year.
 
Here is how to do it:
 
1. Stand with approximately feet shoulder width apart in a stance that you find comfortable. Relax your body. Your knees should be straight but relaxed. This is not a horse stance, going low will not help.
 
2. "As though" there were a ping-pong ball inside of your belly button bouncing constantly up and down at a fast pace and guiding the shaking of the rest of your body at its pace, shake your whole body. I say "as though" because this is not a visualization; the ping-pong ball image is just a suggestion to the body. Do not think of this as "filling the dantian with qi" or anything like that; do not strive to imagine a clear image of a ball. It's just a feeling. You can also think of shaking a big sack of rice to get the grains to settle. The most important thing is relaxing and letting yourself get a chance to know what feels right.
 
3. If you wish and your environment permits, after you have done this for 20 or more minutes, you can let out a few loud "ha" sounds emanating from your lower abdomen. Three to five is of these sufficient; do not do more than that.
 
4. Close practice as you please. Best to stand in stillness for some time after you stop moving, until your body feels settled and normal. Then go about your day.
 
Important notes:
 
-If you have time, I recommend doing this 30-40 minutes per day when you begin learning. This will give you enough time to get accustomed to the method and get the desired result. What is the desired effect? After about 20 or 30 or 40 minutes you will clearly feel your whole body has become relatively "open and unobstructed" (通). This is an unmistakable sensation. For me it feels like a shock wave that emanates from my lower abdomen region and then hits the entire surface of my body at once; making the "ha" sound with your belly after 20 minutes can help to trigger such a reaction, but the sound is not necessary. When you shake unto the point of "open and unobstructed" you will feel subtly blissful and get a sense of "that's good, I'm finished now." Important: For the purposes of strengthening the immune system against external pathogenic wind-cold qi (and "breaking" pathogenic qi if you have already succumbed to a small amount of it but are not yet sick with a cold or worse), it is crucial that the wave of "opening" reaches the exterior of the body. This will happen naturally, though, and you must not try to force or guide it.
 
-Your shaking frequency can and will naturally adjust as you practice. That's great, let it happen. It's vigor and up-down range may also naturally change, also great. However: do not sway left and right. Do not wobble or roll your head. Your body and head should basically stay upright, and your posture should be pretty straight. There should be no twisting or spontaneous movements except for small, subtle ones. This is not zifagong and if you trigger zifagong you will get different results. 
 
-If parts of your body feel sore during the shaking, try to let them naturally "connect" to the origin of the shaking in your lower abdomen. Feel the connection and observe it. Do not force anything. 
 
-Always keep your feet entirely flat on the floor. No jumping, tiptoes, no spontaneous qigong. You need to keep rooted.
 
-Again, try to do 30 to 40 minutes the first many times until you are totally clear about what the "open and unobstructed" feeling entails. Once you understand this feeling, you can just stop when you get that, which might only take you 15 or 20 minutes.
 
-This method is especially good to do if you feel you were exposed to wind-cold and you have the sort of feeling that you get right before you succumb to a flu or cold. If you use this method at this moment, you have a high chance of preventing the onset of a full-blown cold. Unfortunately, if you already have a full-blown cold, I have no idea whether or not this method will help at all (again, I haven't gotten one cold since learning this).
 
-Going overboard past the feeling of "open and unobstructed" resulted in dry stool for me. No need to do this to excess. I think I saw a video where Andrew Nugent Head said that old men in the parks in Beijing in his day would do this until they got "that feeling" and then they'd stop and as, "ah, great,  'open and unobstructed,'" and then start training other things.
 
-Never do this method right before lying down to sleep or rest. Only do it when you will remain upright and reasonably active afterwards. This is because doing this method stirs up a lot of "gunk" in the body, which then needs to naturally mobilize to the places the body will put it to help it leave the body (remember, for example, that lymph fluid only moves if your body moves, and cartilage only gets nourished and cleaned by intercellular fluid if you move). My friend said he once ignored this warning and did this for an hour one morning before deciding to go back to bed. He got back up an hour later feeling awful. 
 
-A very influential qigong master in China in the 80s and 90s included this method in his foundation practices required for all beginners. His idea about why it is so useful is very interesting, so I'll share it here. He pointed out that if you put iron filings on a flat surface and then cause that surface to vibrate at a steady rate, the iron filings will spontaneously organize into regulated patterns. He theorized that the various qi, electrical, and magnetic fields of the human body react in a similar way to shaking/vibrating. In other words, doing this practice takes a chaotic, disturbed "pattern" of qi and then "reorganizes" it. This, he postulated, makes it much easier for the body's natural defenses to operate, and has the effect of strengthening the factors that taken together are what Chinese medicine calls "defensive qi" (衛氣/weiqi). Given that I have not succumbed to wind-cold in several years and this method protected my friends in a very polluted and densely populated city in the same way, I think there is a lot of wisdom in this statement, even if it is just a hypothesis. 
 
If anybody has any practical questions please let me know and I will try to answer. Best if you try it a few times and then ask questions if any arise. Let us avoid theoretical and speculative discussion if possible, in order to keep this thread simple and accessible for people hoping to improve their immune systems. 
 
祝 身體健康

 

This is gold, buddy! Thank you so much for sharing this! Quite similar to an exercise I do in one variation from Baduanjin, but helpful and distinct nonetheless! 

 

Suggestion so that more people see this thread (and they should): rename it to something like "Shaking technique for good health/Shaking technique to help against nCov" or something like either of those. 

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Very cool.  Similar to Osho's Kundalini Meditation...as well as all the numerous other shaking gongs.

On a very basic physical level, this helps circulate your lymph to aid your immune system.  But obviously it does a lot more energetically, too!

Edited by gendao

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11 minutes ago, gendao said:

 

They have nothing in common. Osho's is like a cathartic dance were you subconscious takes over much like Zifgong. Did you read Walker's point here ?

 

55 minutes ago, Walker said:

There should be no twisting or spontaneous movements except for small, subtle ones. This is not zifagong and if you trigger zifagong you will get different results. 

 

In contrast, Osho's "bouncing" looks like a dance in a mad-house.

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On 2/19/2020 at 11:53 AM, gendao said:

Similar to Osho's Kundalini Meditation...as well as all the numerous other shaking gongs.

 

Yes, this actually should look like the simple shaking in that video, but not the later "stage 2" where the people start moving.

 

I did not listen to the audio in that video but let me stress that this is not a kundalini practice, nor is is neigong or qigong. It is just shaking. If all of the instructions I posted are followed--especially keeping the feet flat on the ground and staying in an upright posture with little swaying--then it will not trigger spontaneous qigong (zifagong), kundalini, or anything else remotely esoteric. The instructions are simple in order to keep the result simple. Changing the mental focus or the nature of the movements may change the results, at which point we are talking about a different practice altogether. 

 

On 2/19/2020 at 11:53 AM, gendao said:

On a very basic physical level, this helps circulate your lymph to aid your immune system.  But obviously it does a lot more energetically, too!

 

Yes, helping to circulate lymphatic fluid is quite likely a big reason this practice can be so beneficial to the immune system. As I said above that is also a reason it should not be practiced right before lying down. 

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Thanks Walker!  Saves me buying one of those expensive rebounders.  

 

This sounds very much like a warm-up I used to do in tai chi class.  Robert Peng also uses it as a warm-up for Yi Jin Jing.  I´ve done something similar as well when I received some Zapchen coaching only they called it "jiggling."  Didn´t know it was specifically for the immune system, though.  Very cool.

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14 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

Thanks Walker!  Saves me buying one of those expensive rebounders.  

 

This sounds very much like a warm-up I used to do in tai chi class.  Robert Peng also uses it as a warm-up for Yi Jin Jing.  I´ve done something similar as well when I received some Zapchen coaching only they called it "jiggling."  Didn´t know it was specifically for the immune system, though.  Very cool.

 

Happy to share!

 

You make an important point--this exercise or something very like it shows up in lots of different traditions. But time is a factor in getting the results I described. Some teachers might teach it as a small part of a warm up , and while I'm sure that's good, it won't bring about the effects I described in the first post.

 

To get the immune-boosting effects it's time consuming in the beginning, but once it has taken effect, it seems not to be necessary to do the practice with any regularity. 

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@Walker

 

You mentioned that it expels pathogenic cold.  Does it also work for excess heat?  If you know something similarly effective and simple for heat, and feel like sharing, I´d be interested.

Edited by liminal_luke

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Please PM the symptoms you have in mind to me, I'll think if I know of anything relevant to the specifics. 

 

Your question contains an issue I should address for everybody--this method will help expel what TCM calls external pernicious wind-cold, but it won't help turn a chronically cold constitution warm. In other words, it does not build yang qi, even though it does somehow improve the functioning of the defensive qi (衛氣/weiqi) semi-permanently.

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Great stuff, thanks for posting this walker.

I began naturally doing this when I was into regular IMA training.

Never did it for more than 15-20 minutes.

I'll definitely try it for longer and see the effects.

Thanks again

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@Walker thanks for this timely and thoughtful share, very considerate of you.

 

The practice brings great benefits to immunity by facilitating the movement of lymph which has no pump and relies on your movement to get around the body. Like everything in life the more circulation, the more vitality. The TCM aspects you outlined were all news to me as I came to this same understanding but from a totally different approach. All roads lead to.. as they say.

 

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I busted out the rebounder the other day from where it was gathering dust and did some 10 minute sessions. This works in a similar way due to the circulation of lymph. Despite the reputed immunity benefits on the second day I caught a pretty heavy flu bug. Wondering if this circulation of lymph can trigger a 'healing crisis' early on as viruses laying dormant in the body are woken up?

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Thanks for this technique ! Can you help me ? I dont know how I should shake, I tried to headbang but it just didnt feel right...

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

I'm shaking 24/7.

 

Cassandra's qigong.  

 

I noticed your conoravirus thread disappeared.  (Or am I just missing it somewhere?) Cassandra´s role is not an easy one and I figured perhaps you were taking a well-deserved break.

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On 2/21/2020 at 7:40 PM, steve said:

I'll definitely try it for longer and see the effects.

Thanks again

 

You're welcome--please keep us posted if you end up trying this for a few weeks and notice (or don't notice) any changes.

 

On 2/25/2020 at 1:06 AM, Vajra Fist said:

I busted out the rebounder the other day from where it was gathering dust and did some 10 minute sessions. This works in a similar way due to the circulation of lymph. Despite the reputed immunity benefits on the second day I caught a pretty heavy flu bug. Wondering if this circulation of lymph can trigger a 'healing crisis' early on as viruses laying dormant in the body are woken up?

 

I really don't know, but I am sure there are differences between following the directions of this movement and using a rebounder. I have never used a rebounder but I can say that the primary "movement of qi" that the shaking exercise here operates through is "scattering" (from 散/san; the other movements of qi include rising, & falling, opening & closing, exiting & entering, while scattering is paired with gathering; link).

 

Scattering with this shaking method has, evidently, been great for my immune system and some friends' as well. But as with all things in life there can be too much of a good thing; too much scattering may lead to a temporary exhaustion of your "right[ening] qi." Also, if you get too sweaty and your pores are all open after you shake, that will create a new opportunity for pathogenic wind-cold qi to enter.

 

So, in sum, with the method I described here please remember:

 

1: No need to do too much.

2: Beware shaking unto the point of being very sweaty and tired. If you get sweaty and tired, immediately towel dry after practice and take extra special care to avoid exposure to cold wind/drafts and make sure to dress warmly.

 

On 2/25/2020 at 1:54 AM, ralis said:

Johns Hopkins map of the nCov. Be well informed!

 

Ralis! You, of all people, going off topic!?!? Tut-tut :D

 

On 2/25/2020 at 2:19 AM, Scholar said:

Thanks for this technique ! Can you help me ? I dont know how I should shake, I tried to headbang but it just didnt feel right...

 

Haha, you are welcome. Did you actually need advice?

 

On 2/25/2020 at 3:47 AM, Taomeow said:

I'm shaking 24/7.

 

Cassandra's qigong.  

 

Hmm. I may have to contradict myself here and ask if what you need isn't... a cold draught?

 

7-x-10-Metal-Sign-1968-Guinness.jpg

Edited by Walker
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On 2/20/2020 at 9:46 PM, Walker said:

I did not listen to the audio in that video but let me stress that this is not a kundalini practice, nor is is neigong or qigong.

 

I don't know if you are referring to the Osho method or to what you described, but what you describe is an important part of my Tien Shan chi kung/nei kung.  There are several other ways of shaking that are part of Tien Shan and not Osho, like shaking your hands in a way that shakes your body.

 

Quote

Yes, helping to circulate lymphatic fluid is quite likely a big reason this practice can be so beneficial to the immune system. As I said above that is also a reason it should not be practiced right before lying down. 

 

One of the main things it does, and why it strengthens the immune system, is that it generates a lot of chi.  There is also a kind of shaking that can be done lying down in bed before going to sleep, which is great.  This method is not in my chi kung, I learned it from a Japanese doctor.  Peter Ragnar, who calls himself a Taoist wizard, said that if you go to sleep with a chi buzz that it increase prenatal chi, and there are the lying down shaking methods that I found that will give you a big chi buzz, so I do those in bed before going to sleep.  The lying down shaking method is like moving your body like a fish swimming, but pretty fast.  This can be accomplished with what are called chi machines, but you can do it yourself without a machine.

Edited by Starjumper
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16 minutes ago, Walker said:

 

 

 

Ralis! You, of all people, going off topic!?!? Tut-tut :D

 

 

 

 

COVID-19 is apropos to this conversation given that it was mentioned previously on this site and it is important for all to keep abreast of this potential pandemic. Also no amount of shaking will prevent a virulent infection such as this virus! Stop the condescending remarks as if your opinion is absolute!

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14 minutes ago, Starjumper said:

 This can be accomplished with what are called chi machines, but you can do it yourself without a machine.

 

This is a demo and explanation of a chi machine.  A lot of them sound like old washing machines that are about to break but some good ones are pretty quiet.  In any case, it won't work on a bed mattress and you don't need one to move in the proper way, you can use your own muscles.

 

 

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It seems to me that most here are anti vaccination? Shaking as opposed to vaccines? Most vaccines have a very high efficacy rate and if enough persons are vaccinated, herd immunity will protect the population.

 

Small Pox is a virus and is no longer a threat due to vaccines, not shaking!

Edited by ralis

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29 minutes ago, Walker said:

Hmm. I may have to contradict myself here and ask if what you need isn't... a cold draught?

 

7-x-10-Metal-Sign-1968-Guinness.jpg

 

When did cold anything ever help one stop shaking?..

 

On a different note, I just got a text from one of teacher Wang's senior instructors with his (Wang Liping's) article dedicated to specific practices for fighting off infections and expediting convalescence toward full recovery (which is an important, and mostly overlooked by today's medicine, part of the whole cycle of overcoming an illness).  Not posting it here yet because, for one thing I got it translated into Russian (don't have the Chinese version) and currently have no time to translate it into Ehglish (it's fairly long), and for another, didn't have the time to read it in depth myself yet, just skimmed.  I'll try to see what Google Translate can do with it if there's interest (and help it along a bit if it talks nonsense -- though I am often at a loss translating the Cyrillic version of taoist terms into Pinyin myself).  I think it is a more spiritual/alchemical, less physiological version of the relevant parts of the Yellow Emperor's Classic, but, like I said, I just had a chance to take a very quick look so far.       

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7 minutes ago, ralis said:

It seems to me that most here are anti vaccination? Shaking as opposed to vaccines? Most vaccines have a very high efficacy rate and if enough persons are vaccinated, herd immunity will protect the population.

 

Small Pox is a virus and is no longer a threat due to vaccines, not shaking!


I don’t see any anti-vaccine stance here, but shaking as a practice for vitality. Good vitality means robust health making one stronger against ailments, but doesn’t say the virus is eliminated. It’s like making your body a harder target for the virus, but even as I do my own qi practice, I still get immunizations (except flu shots).

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36 minutes ago, ralis said:

COVID-19 is apropos to this conversation given that it was mentioned previously on this site and it is important for all to keep abreast of this potential pandemic. Also no amount of shaking will prevent a virulent infection such as this virus! Stop the condescending remarks as if your opinion is absolute!

 

Huh?? I would have thought using a smiley face and a ridiculous term like "tut-tut" would have made it clear I was joshing you.

 

That said, in case it is not clear:

 

I in no way believe that this method is guaranteed to prevent the contraction of any specific infection. I am merely sharing this method because of personal experience and anecdotal experience of close, trusted friends which indicates that it has a remarkable immune boosting effect. I have no absolute opinions about what it can or will do for others who use it. Nor should anybody interpret the point of this post to be a comment on the pros and cons of vaccinations, or the offering of an "alternative" to vaccines. Sheesh. 

 

Jokes aside, Ralis, if you wish to talk about vaccinations, smallpox, or anything unrelated to this shaking technique may I please suggest starting a new thread so that this one may remain focused on the technicalities of this method ? Thank you. 

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24 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

When did cold anything ever help one stop shaking?..

 

Well, get cold enough and you'll stop moving forever! :unsure:

 

24 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

On a different note, I just got a text from one of teacher Wang's senior instructors with his (Wang Liping's) article dedicated to specific practices for fighting off infections and expediting convalescence toward full recovery (which is an important, and mostly overlooked by today's medicine, part of the whole cycle of overcoming an illness).  Not posting it here yet because, for one thing I got it translated into Russian (don't have the Chinese version) and currently have no time to translate it into Ehglish (it's fairly long), and for another, didn't have the time to read it in depth myself yet, just skimmed.  I'll try to see what Google Translate can do with it if there's interest (and help it along a bit if it talks nonsense -- though I am often at a loss translating the Cyrillic version of taoist terms into Pinyin myself).  I think it is a more spiritual/alchemical, less physiological version of the relevant parts of the Yellow Emperor's Classic, but, like I said, I just had a chance to take a very quick look so far.       

 

I'm sure there are important nuggets in that document. This shaking method can never be more than just a small contribution to vitality and immunity... As the part of your quote I put in bold reminds us, building a strong constitution and fully recovering from an illness is a big question involving lots of factors.

 

For this reason (not at directing this at any particular person) I have to emphasize that the shaking method is not a panacea nor a replacement for medical treatment. That disclaimer aside, the people I know who've used it as I described report powerful effects. 

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