Waking Energy 7 Timeless Practices Designed to Reboot Your Body and Unleash Your Potential

9
the power of love: inner smile and cosmic healing
sounds
I’ll never forget the moment Master Chia started his lecture at his Asheville workshop in 2007.
“What’s the main focus of life in the West?” he asked. “It’s work. People are always being told to
‘focus their minds on their jobs, on their performance.’ Why not shift perspective? What would
happen if we were all to turn that focus inside and actually concentrate on sending that energy into our
bodies first? We’re so concerned with building our actual bank accounts that we deplete our body’s
‘health’ bank account. Then what happens? We’re forced to spend the money we have worked so hard
to earn to restore our health.” He went on to say that we suffer from the ravaging effects of stress—
indigestion, heart disease, back pain, to name just a few examples of inner imbalance—that all result
because we move too fast and our focus is everywhere instead of where it should be: inside first.
He continued, “If you were a child with disharmony in the household, with your parents fighting,
would you want to stay or would you want to run away and seek more peaceful pastures?” In Eastern
philosophies, the “spirit” in your body is like the child. When you don’t look after your inner
household and there is disharmony, when you are at odds with yourself, scattering your focus,
spreading yourself too thin, the spirit likes to wander; the child runs away to seek a calmer, more
peaceful place to live and takes the energy with her.
“How do we get the spirit to stay with us and grow inner virtue?” he asked. “How do we ‘grow
the love’ we can cultivate for ourselves? By quieting and focusing our minds on the place where love
begins—in our hearts. We need to acknowledge our negative emotions, no matter how unpleasant, and
then make the decision to ‘delete’ them, just like on a computer.”
Very matter-of-factly, he said we needed to take that energy, which has been left to its own
devices, and brazenly mount a “takeover.” Master Chia’s lectures were consistently peppered with
military allusions because so much of qigong history is centered around preparing soldiers for battle;
for example, the liver is said to be the “general of the army.” He said that we needed to take control
again, reroute the energy, transform it and distribute it to all our organs, so that they would work like
a team, a united front to ward off disease and increase our immunity. “You have to organize and train
your army!” he exclaimed. We had to engage in practices that fortified our immune defense, and in