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The Way of Water

Qigong, neigong, bagua and tai chi are preparatory practices for meditation. Each opens the body and clears and moves chi—your vital life-force energy—so that when you come to meditate you can control the internal workings of the body and its energy. This prevents blockages and stagnation from occurring, so your efforts are put to good use.

In the movement practices we begin with balancing the physical and energetic bodies. Meditation starts with the emotional body, seeking to create a confluence between all three bodies—physical, energetic and emotional—for more permanent and broad-ranging results.

The Water method uses the mind’s intent rather than its will to focus on your practice. The intent of the mind is focused on implementing the process rather than the will demanding a result. There is no sense of time or needing to accomplish a specific goal in a set amount of time. There is no sense of failure, only understanding that more time and more practice will yield more benefits.

Daily practice slowly prepares you to release the deeply rooted negative energies that reside within you from past injuries, shock and/or traumas. When a shift occurs, you systematically release some of the negative residue. You have now afforded yourself the opportunity to make permanent change on your path of self-discovery. Force more typically leads to a temporary enthusiasm with little long-term result because the proper foundation has not been set.

Optimise Performance

Are you a professional, executive, athlete or otherwise highly motivated individual looking for an edge? Have you been searching for strategies to break out of the herd?

Many coaches and marketers have programmes that promise results, but how do they really help you?

It’s Got to be Personal

The ancient Chinese looked at ways to achieve their goals and, after thousands of years of experimentation, discovered some pretty interesting facts that are still relevant to our lives today.

Remarkably, none of them have to do with a rigid regime asking you to follow a set protocol that promises to work for everyone. All the principles take into account that you are a unique individual—one in about 6.8 billion!

5 Principles of High Performance

1. Relax & Wake-up
Tension inhibits relaxation. Relaxed, fully concentrated attention yields refined results—whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.

Tension drains your energy and diverts it to keep the body functioning whilst in overdrive. In time, you downgrade your ability to pay attention and perform tasks optimally. When you relax, the body feels at ease and nothing stands between you and that which you wish to accomplish in your practice, work or passion.

Qigong and meditation techniques teach you how to relax your body, mind and spirit.

People are not tired and stressed in the modern age because of physical exhaustion as was the case in previous eras. Today, stress is caused by nervous exhaustion. Your nervous system is a sensory organ—picking up, interpreting and responding to the constant assault of bits and bytes of information.

After years of repeated, unrelenting stimulation, many people enter a fog and carry out routine tasks as though they’re in some sort of trance. They simply tap out and no longer feel the force of life inside of them.

Even when we sleep, we don’t necessarily fully relax and it can take hours for the body to release accumulated tension from the day. Sleep can be so healing, but you can boost that healing power by letting go of stress and tension before you hop into bed.

During the day, when you feel the drama building up, you can take a five- or ten-minute break to interrupt the stress swell. The mind can run around the world five times while you’re still putting on your shoes. Take your mind off autopilot and train yourself to live in the present moment. Simple and very effective breathing exercises can interrupt the stress cycle easily and very efficiently.

Qigong was developed four millennia ago to teach people how to feel, move and store their vital life-force energy. Among the first steps to tap into your chi is learning how to relax. Most people visibly tense and strain even when they think they’re chilled out. Once you can relax and feel your chi, you can learn how to tap into that endless reservoir of energy anytime you need it.

2. Take the Slow Road
It’s the slow road—not the road less traveled—that yields the fastest results because operating at 100% of your capacity is not sustainable. Pushing to 100% creates a glass ceiling (i.e. internal strain), preventing you from developing in the future.

People need regular periods of rest and activity. Many people don’t make time and space for integrating the experiences of their lives, which leads to trouble sleeping, emotional outbursts, diminished libido and health problems from minor aches and pains to serious diseases.

Think 70%. Safeguarding against too much or too little effort prevents injury and burnout. You not only maximize your vitality in the short-term, but also keep yourself going for the long-term by keeping a 30% reserve. Instead of being limited by a glass ceiling, your nerves release and therefore facilitate your growth to the next milestone. Before you know it you’ll overtake your initial 100% capacity.

The number one reason top athletes don’t play professional sports is because of injury. They push too hard and snap, crackle, pop! The same goes for businesspeople that consistently use force—they get desperate, greedy, overwhelmed by their emotions or burn out. A smooth steady flow will help you keep it together for the long haul and make your work, passion or sport more enjoyable for you and others.

3. Contact & Communicate with Your Body
Communication is primarily non-verbal. It’s not what you say, but what you do and how you do it. Exuding confidence, easiness, power and contentment is not the same as talking about it.

You must be grounded and calm within yourself before you can bring that energy into your communications and, eventually, your relationships. Many people don’t even really “see” the person in front of them and instead react to words and gestures as if the traumas of their past are happening all over again.

As a human being you’ll be hard-pressed to get through life without a load of bad experiences—some are really horrific and it’s no wonder people become stuck. However, more terrible than anything that could happen to you, is reliving your traumas over and over again, day after day. The fear, anger, frustration, disappointment—whatever you felt—can vibrate you for years after the fact and people can sense it. You can tell the difference between a scared animal versus one that is at ease with a glance, yes? People communicate with their bodies without a word spoken.

Meditation can help you identify what is there and help you release those negative emotions—fear, frustration, anger, sadness, greed. When you do, you will be more at ease and that will facilitate communications whether with peers, family members, coworkers or authority figures.

4. Be Here & Clear
Clarity involves wisdom—the wisdom to see things as they are without all the unnecessary mumbo jumbo. How do you become clear? Welcome to the present moment. Clarity involves training your mind to stick with the here and now.

The hurry-up mentality causes a lot of ambiguity. The mind jumps from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next and the confusion often leads to mistakes. Time is money in the modern world, and mistakes cost you time and money.

You must become capable of concentrating for sustained periods of time if you want to achieve any goal in the external world. Gapping out—your mind slipping into a memory, visual or emotional space—may only happen for a few seconds, but it’s enough to shake you or at least present vulnerability. In martial arts, it is the opponent who remains calm and aware under pressure that often wins the fight.

If you’re an athlete, you must harness the power of your mind and your emotions on the field, but it’s no different for a businessperson at the office or any social interaction. Suppressing your feelings only leaves them to fester and, eventually, you will either implode or explode.

Meditation and simple breathing techniques can be used for many purposes, but in the modern age their most practical applications are slowing down, focusing for periods of time and staying in the present moment.

5. Stabilise
If you want to be stable from deep inside yourself, you must deal with any unresolved emotions. Otherwise, they seem to crop up at the worst times and sabotage your efforts for agreeable relationships. Qigong exercises can help you release stored emotions lodged within the body.

There is a permanent state inside all of us that it absolutely stable and perfect as it is—right now and always. When you find some level of clarity, you will see that there is only one truth in the universe at all times: Change. Everything is in flux and if you can’t tap into the ever-changing tides of change, you definitely can’t figure out how to flow with those changes.

Sitting and meditating has been used in every genuine tradition since the dawn of time to help you find that stability point deep inside yourself while the world around you changes—sometimes extremely fast and other times excruciatingly slow.

Get Real
Once you can integrate the five principles, you can begin releasing everything inside of you that keeps you from experiencing the joy inherent in living. Your misconceptions, stories, excuses and identities prevent you from feeling and engaging with the force of life. Once you let go of your attachments to these falsehoods, all you will be left with is that which is true.

You naturally become more at ease and engaged with life as you begin to wake up and experience the force of life within you. You don’t have to fake strength, happiness or wear whatever mask you could conceive, but you can actually exude—from the inside out—the peace of mind, stability and happiness you have uncovered.

Isn’t happiness, stability and peace of mind what it’s all about? At the end of the day, don’t we pursue passions because they make us happy? Don’t we pursue money because it gives us the means to pursue our passions? Why would anyone care to be rich if the money could never be enjoyed or provide security?

Formulating Success
The process for creating your own personal formula for success will be completely unique unto you. Meditation for stress relief, including learning to breathe well and simple energy exercises, will help you identify blockages in your body and increase your chi flow so that later you can deal with any stuck spaces you find—whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.

In the process of trying to be successful in one external form or another, you might just become a healthy, mature individual. That is more than good enough because if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.

2010 Relaxation Meditation Courses

Relaxation Meditation: Revealing the Heart of Internal Energy Arts
Kӧln, 5-7 March

Relaxation Meditation: Become Present, Release Your Nerves & Empty Your Mind
Berlin, 12-14 March

Stop Killing Yourself for Money: 5 Strategies for Achieving Relaxation
London, 18 May

Relaxation Meditation: Become Present, Release Your Nerves & Empty Your Mind
London, 8-10 October

Relaxation Meditation: Supercharge Your Chi for Real Health Benefits
Kӧln, 15-17 October

Relaxation Meditation: Become Present, Release Your Nerves & Empty Your Mind
Stuttgart, 23-24 October