Back when I was a dance student, I would go to the studio early to warm up, relax, and chat with the others who were there for the same purposes. I thought of this as the “class before the class”. These days I open our Zoom Qigong classes 15 minutes early so we can do the same.
Last Tuesday during the “class before the class”, I mentioned that I was re-reading Viktor E. Frankl’s seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning. I hadn’t read it since high school, but remembered how it offered a path to finding hope and meaning even in the midst of the most horrific circumstances imaginable. Now decades later, when many people are beginning to suffer seriously from anxiety, the book’s message continues to offer comfort and hope. Frankl explains how, although we can’t control much of what happens to us in life, we can always control how we choose to respond to it: We always have that freedom. Further, the power of our imagination, along with our connection to things that we love, gives meaning to our lives. Living with a sense of meaning is vital to our health, well-being, and even our very survival.
A bunch of you lit up when I mentioned the book. It was exciting to talk with you about the similarities between Frankl’s philosophy and what we do in Qigong. For instance, “The mind leads the Qi” is another way of saying that the way we view our circumstances has the ability to affect them. By cultivating clarity and brightness in our minds, we can then access our imagination, and eventually even find or create a solution. That’s powerful, whether struggling for survival as a prisoner of war, or dealing with the challenges of the 21 st Century. Without imagination, after all, how could we ever create change? You have to be able to first imagine that a thing can be different, in order to open the path for its transformation. This applies to politics, to art, and very strongly to our health. It’s important, even essential, to practice imagining and believing that we can heal, strengthen, and thrive.
Frankl wrote quite movingly about how the presence of love sustained him during his internment, whether it was manifested in the ways prisoners struggled to keep themselves and each other alive, or how his own thoughts of his beloved wife kept his spirit going. In Qigong, we harness the healing strength of the heartmind-- the inner wisdom and life-sustaining power of loving compassion and connection to others, to nature, to ourselves. It’s a vital energy, and why the ancients referred to the heart as the “Emperor of the body”.
