Walking qi gong

Depends on what you mean by “walking qigong”.

If you mean just walking–as in Zen–then you can do this without much instruction. Just walk. Keep your breath and attention in your lower dantian. When your mind wanders off, bring your attention back to your breath in your lower dantian. That’s it.

If you mean that you are doing some other physical movements while walking, then certainly things like the Five Animals, Tai Chi, and Bagua all qualify as “walking qigong”.

If you mean something intermediate to these extremes, I teach a form of “walking” in the Tai Chi 1-2 class that is separate from the forms, called “bow walking”. It’s basically a way to walk in a straight line, but to do so in a way where you are rooted to the ground throughout. It can be a form of walking meditation. If you are interested in this, I warmly invite you to my Tai Chi 1-2 class this summer where you would learn this as well as the Tai Chi 1 and 2 forms.

Tai Chi Qigong 1-2 course

Best,
Steven

All of what I mentioned–from Five Animals on one end, to simple walking meditation on the other–can be done in nature while hiking. I’ve done all of these.

Unless you are meaning that you want something where your lower body is relatively free to be on its own while you move your arms coordinated with your breath. To be honest, most qigong associated with walking isn’t done this way, because the one of the main purposes of connecting qigong with walking is to connect your body’s movements to your connection to the ground. In other words, strengthening your level of contact with the surface of the earth and to be fully conscious of this connection is the main purpose. That’s actually one of the main purposes of Tai Chi . . . to be able to meditate while walking but to do so in a way where you are rooted and stable so your ground connection is strengthened.

If, however, you are simply walking, but doing so while moving arms connected to the breath, then in actuality you are doing the opposite: your attention becomes scattered . . . more focused on the feeling of your breath driving qi and less about any kind of awareness of the ground . . . in some sense, a person would probably have less awareness than simply walking without any qigong whatsoever. It feels good until you trip over a rock or something, because when you are walking, your attention should be focused on the walking, not spaced-out on some other activity. It forms “distracted walking”, not unlike talking/texting on a cell phone while driving is “distracted driving”. Consequently, I would dis-advise such qigong, despite how good it might feel.

In the five-elements, walking highly stimulates the liver system. So if you are interested in doing some kind of arm/breath qigong while walking (and consequently diminishing your consciousness toward the actual walking part), one might ask the question: are there some internal emotional issues surrounding anger that you are trying to avoid? I would encourage you to explore this. Anger–and buried emotional issues surrounding anger–have a tendency to activate and express when stimulating the liver through walking of any kind.

But the short answer to your question is that outside of what I mentioned in my previous post, I would dis-advise variations that are not focused on strengthening contact and awareness with the ground, as such variations form an unconscious escape to the actual walking . . . both physically dangerous and a likely avoidance tactic toward anger issues.

S

A few of the movements this guy does are slow, semi-rooted, movements not unlike what we do in the Five Animals. These are sort of fine. But the other ones where he is walking around at casually at some normal pace in a posture or some other meditation . . . they suffer from the problems I mentioned earlier. Do at your own risk.