Activated Qi Meditations

Meditation, like physical exercise, is a tool that helps keep those 11 million actions happening.  There’s no magic to it.  As we shall see, meditation is an activity that activates parts of our body’s systems that evolved to maintain a healthy internal balance.

Like physical exercise, Activated Qi Meditations are practical techniques designed to aid that well-oiled machine that is our body to keep on going despite what may be thrown at it.

Meditation is a process.  You don’t have to change your way of life, it’s a tool that supports your way of life.

A simple point but an important one to remember.  It supports whatever it is we do.

There are many meditative ways and techniques that people have found and use, to support, strengthen and develop what they do.  They are varied, valid and relevant.

Whichever way we chose to benefit ourselves denying how our body evolved to operate and the things it needs as a result only leads to problems. Especially if we think we have the ability to deny our evolutionary needs.

We have to accept that when it comes to the evolutionary setup of the human body we are just like one of many relay-baton runners.  It doesn’t matter whether we want to harmonise with evolution or not it will continue at its pace and will be doing so long after we are gone.  Hopefully!

The scientific words used in the pages of this website are included because they are the words used by the scientists involved to explain what they are discovering about how we as humans operate.

It isn’t absolutely necessary for us to remember them all but it is important to be

aware of the insights that these dedicated people are establishing and how they refer to us and our everyday lives.

This information is not meant to be absorbed in one or two great gulps, over time with tea and biscuits to hand is a better way.

Activated Qi Meditations focus on and combine,

• what the Ancient Chinese Tradition established through practice over thousands of years,
• with the discoveries and understanding developed by scientists from across the World since I began meditating 50 years ago.

Together these approaches have delved deep and are creating a picture, a growing understanding of how the human body works best.

It won’t stop there.  Over the next twenty years there are going to be tremendous advances in these understandings and how they can be practically applied to help each of us in our everyday life.

Thanks to people like those mentioned in these webpages the potential advancements are both reassuring and exciting. If we are really determined to help ourselves, developing our abilities to meditate creates a strong foundation from which we grow and benefit.

It’s important to approach meditation in the same way as you would learning anything new.  You can’t learn a new language in a couple of weeks nor a musical instrument.  It’s the same when taking up meditation.  It will take time for you and your body to adjust. 

To gain the benefits that meditation brings a person needs to be,

• determined
• focused
• patient and,
• courageous

We need these qualities if we are to overcome the body’s natural internal resistance to change. 

By building our understanding through knowledge and experience of how our body operates, such as those inbuilt resistant-to-change systems, we are acquiring the tools to better look after ourselves.

Luckily, the more we meditate the stronger those tools become and the more we strengthen those natural inbuilt abilities that we all have. 

It is important to realise it takes time to build the foundation because the changes that meditation stimulates are happening at the microscopic, molecular level.  Those changes need to grow until they reach a level where we are able to consciously feel the consequences.

While the C-system takes more energy to function and processes information more slowly. It governs higher order thinking, consciously reflecting on things; it challenges and corrects the X-system.

Our neo-cortex taking more energy to operate compared with our energy efficient, brain stem and limbic system means it takes more effort to think about and do something new (like meditating maybe) than react out of instinct or habit.

When we understand this is the sort of thing going on inside us we can relate with greater clarity to how we react to the world.  We can then counter those behaviours that weaken us and reinforce those that strengthen and benefit us.

He continues, ‘Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.

To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new, the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.’^3.

As this site is not about the health and well-being of puppies and kittens but people, we’ll focus on, setting out the, research and understanding of both ancient and modern that gives us insight into how we operate and how to use that to our benefit.

Understanding things such as these is why Socrates described, 

When I was a primary school teacher it was understood that the children I taught had a concentration span of around 40 minutes and that generally as a child/person matured the longer their attention span became.

In response to the modern world by 2016, it is commonly held that university students’ attention span on average was between 10 to 15 minutes.^4.

Research carried out by MIT found that the ideal length for an instructional video is less than six minutes long.^5.

Apparently I have 10 seconds max in which to grab your attention for you to stay on this site.  That’s just long to run the 100 metres!

So, thanking you for staying on this long because you’re already a couple of minutes reading time in.

Obviously, if I was to include cats or fast cars that time would go way up doubling and doubling again.  I don’t know what type of cars the people whose research I include drive and unfortunately none of them look like cats.

I imagine if you are still reading you are more interested in how meditation benefits your health and well-being.  So let’s get on.  This website is a combination of the knowledge gained from either the long-held experience of the Ancient practices or from the growing evidence provided by various scientific fields.

The meditation practices are all based within these two and have been trialled on those who have been coming to the Activated Qi Meditation classes for the past 20 plus years.  If it gets a ‘yea’ from them it’s in!

I hope you too gain as we have done.