How to Awaken Your Chi

As long as you’re alive, you’ll always have an abundance of chi from which to draw. Yoga master B.K.S Iyengar refers to chi as “your inner energy.” But if you’re chronically pooped or if your current life has you constantly bummed out, worried or stressed, it won’t seem like you have any chi at all. A number of practices can bump up your inner energy or life force. Incorporating such disciplines as meditation, deep breathing and exercise into your life will awaken your perspective regarding chi and will lead you to discover that you have enough chi all the time, no matter what happens. Your have simply to draw it forth.

Chi is also known in other traditions as qi or prana. The Sanskrit word pranayama refers to the discipline of enhancing your prana or chi through breathing techniques. The fast pace and the constantly elevated levels of stress to which North Americans have become enslaved have left a population short of breath. When you’re on high alert, you tend to breathe from your upper chest rather than from the bottoms of your lungs. The simple act of sitting quietly and slowly exhaling and inhaling deeply will awaken your chi very quickly. As you feel the stress ebb away, you will be aware of increased energy taking its place. If you want to take the discipline of conscious breathing further, find a qualified yoga or meditation teacher to guide you in its practice.

The title of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 1994 treatise on mindful meditation says it all -- “Wherever You Go, There You Are.” Escape is not an option. As the founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Kabat-Zinn is a leading voice in the movement to incorporate the practice of meditation into your everyday life to awaken your chi. Going within is where you’ll find all of your answers. For some people the notion of meditation may be frightening. They may have tried it before and instead of the blessed relief of having no thoughts, it was the opposite experience. Thoughts arose and try as they might to stave them off, the thoughts kept crowding in. Encountering dark thoughts or sides of yourself that you may prefer to ignore can seem life-draining rather than life-enhancing. But that’s where all the goodness lives, too. You can draw on your strengths to awaken your chi. Spend five quiet minutes a day to start. Practice your deep breathing and don’t try to battle enervating thoughts; just let them drift away.

The chances of awakening your reserves of chi are enhanced with the practice of daily exercise. It doesn’t matter what kind; you just need to move. Your inner energy will be given a turbo boost of support by augmenting your outer energy with exercise. Whether you’re attracted by the more gentle disciplines of yoga or tai chi or more vigorous workouts like strength building or aerobics, your chi will benefit from the effort. Movement activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which has the advantage of slowing you down. Any activity that allows you to stop and gather yourself together will hasten the process of awakening your chi.

Don’t ever believe you’re lacking in chi. It may be coated over by the layers of your life’s experiences, but chi is always available to you. As well as practicing deep breathing, meditation and exercise to awaken your chi, spend as much time outdoors in beautiful settings as you can. You are as much a part of nature as it is of you, and surrounding yourself by its physical beauty and life-enhancing properties will do you a world of good.