CompleteMartialArts.com - Master Lam's Walking Chi Kung
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $11.21
Your Save: $ 3.74 ( 25% )
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Manufacturer: Gaia
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.7148
EAN: 9781856752350
ISBN: 1856752356
Label: Gaia
Manufacturer: Gaia
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: 2006-05-10
Publisher: Gaia
Studio: Gaia
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Editorial Reviews:
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People who must sit or stand long hours at work can now thank the Buddhist monks who centuries ago faced the same problems in their enforced periods of meditation, and developed Chi Kung, a powerful program of energy cultivation to heal distracted minds and tired bodies. Internationally known instructor Master Lam introduces a special form of Chi Kung that focuses on movement and walking. Each move is shown in a stop-action photo with a caption and lets you stay in place until you feel the tension disappear. Breathing, stretching, and mental relaxation come together in a natural way that harmonizes the six directional forces of up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. Your legs and knees, the first part of your body to age, receive special life-lengthening exercises.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Find a good teacher
Comment: No instruction book can teach the
basics properly.
If it does, no one will believe the teaching.
Yes I have an instruction book, given by my teacher.
Find a teacher.
Standing still is the 1st lesson, and teachers of the
prior generation will not teach you a second lesson until
maybe 12 months later.
For some of those in the military, who had to stand watch
and not move, may pass this first lesson after 1 month.
Walking is one of the basics.
Find a teacher. A book cannot teach.
Preferably, a teacher over 60 years old and not fluent in English.
You should be able to find one in a park nearby, between 4am and 7am.
Yes, some get up early to avoid people. Good luck.
The masters usually get up before sunrise and exercise in a quiet area.
The masters are too embarrassed to call themselves masters.
The masters don't want to invite trouble.
The masters are too busy to teach. You have to beg for a long time
to be accepted.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Unique Chi Kung Manual
Comment: This book is quite different in subject than all of Master Lam's other books that have focused on introducing students in the West to the various aspects of standing qigong practices. You will be pleased to note however that he still has a teacher's command of images and verbal explanations of processes that are postural and internal (difficult to convey with words). In this text as you can see from the example on the cover, he uses stop action multi-image pictures to convey the techniques in walking qigong. Through this methodology he does what I think is the best that any teacher could possibly hope for when teaching a dynamic movement qigong technique through the vehicle of a book.
Even teaching stationary standing postures without having face-to-face contact is difficult, throw in movement and the task is daunting. The most challenging task in these exercises is that the posture and internal alignment is quite precise. It can take hours of internal monitoring and the experienced hand of a teacher to get these positions correct when just standing. These walking exercises are moving sequences of postures and while you can stand in some of the individual postures to get the inner feel of them, only the moving sequence contains their unique qigong. Master Lam gives sufficient internal imagery, points to notice and explanations of the target energy that you can actually become your own teacher. You memorize the sequence, automate the movements, repeat with awareness, and constantly adjust until all of the corners of the movement are smoothed out.
I feel that this text has a number of overlapping audiences. First and largest, Master Lam points out that the Chinese think that you are as old as your legs! They view them as the true barometer of your health and I can tell you from my personal experience that my great grand teacher in Hong Kong who has played taiji push hands for 60 years, has the legs of a twenty year old at 94! He argues, and Western heart science supports this, that regular contraction of the leg muscles, pumps the blood, supports, strengthens and when needed assits the heart. So if you want to age more gracefully, try this practice. Young qigong practitioners of standing qigong may think that standing still is boring, so try walking qigong. Finally, I was especially interested in this book looking for instructions for moving meditation. Except the walking practice taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, which is an moving awareness there is little about how a more active form of moving meditation would be done. In this book I found what could make a curricula of a moving qigong meditation, closed enough to be focused while open enough to be engaged. I would recommend anyone getting this book also try one of Master Lam's other book for the mental imagery that goes with these exercises, The Way of Power is the text that I think would compliment this text best.
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