Qi Breathers: Soft Gaze

Transcript

today's qi breather is going to be on the soft gaze when we're practicing qigong our ideal state is a blank mind a state where we're not thinking my master master li her favorite rule in class was always relax stay informed and no thinking so how do we achieve this state of no thinking well at the beginning is going to be very difficult because our minds are just designed to leap from one thought to another so one of the techniques that we use is the soft gaze in order to help us remove some of the distractions from our minds now for most of us our vision is our number one sense it's our strongest sense it's the one that commands the most of our attention and because of that it's the sense that tends to distract our minds the most if we see something move by it'll naturally draw our attention so a lot of people when they do some sort of meditation or qigong they will close their eyes as a means of removing this large distraction from their senses now when you close your eyes though your tendency is to internalize so when i close my eyes i start to look within and i start to listen to myself to my mind and to my spirit and this is very useful in many practices and is a very good practice if you want to be alone and start being in tune with yourself however in qigong this is not always the ideal state what we want to achieve is that blank state of mind so what we do instead is practice a soft gaze which is blurring your vision or doubling your vision so if you think of a magic eye one of those magic eye puzzles 3d puzzles when you relax your eyes you'll get a double vision or in most cases when you relax your eyes your vision will go blurry and what this allows us to do is remove a lot of that sensory input from our eyes without closing our eyes and turning inwards so we're still staying in the present and just blanking our minds out rather than gazing inward all right so try that out just relax your eyeballs so that everything goes blurry and just start that nice belly breathing and whenever you're doing your yoga or your meditation or your chi gong try this out and you'll start to get much more in tune with your energetic system you