Category: Waysun Liao’s Chi: Discovering Your Life Energy

Although Liao devotes a lot of time talking about threats to our Chi, in the end he focuses on ways to build our Chi back up, arguing that 

Learning to strengthen and protect your Chi will help you survive the ups and downs of life and regain balance and harmony. Remember that Chi is spelled C–H–I: Center, Harmony, and Infinity.

His warning that we need to focus on personal energy instead of thinking about world affairs seems strangely appropriate right now:

Start the journey back to your true self by subduing your thinking about world affairs. Instead, pay great attention to your feeling. When you find your mind wandering outside on problems of the day, or artificial notions, stop. Instead, refocus your awareness to the sensation of your own body and the feeling of life within it. Don’t just “think” about concepts you have about your body and life energy, really “feel” the actual sensation of it, here and now. By repeating this process many times, you will finally learn to separate what is artificial and what is the real feeling of you. This will help train you not only in telling the difference between the two, but help in strengthening your mind’s ability to detach from what’s artificial and choose what is real instead.

Liao also warns that conforming to others’ expectations weakens your Chi, echoing Thoreau and Watts’ views on the importance of Individualism and Non-Conformity:

When you consistently choose to live your life and make choices based on what others will think of you, that is slavery. When those choices override your gut feelings and what is best for your health and peace of mind, that is slavery.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of Chi in quite this way.  I’ve always thought of it like a form of energy, not my essence.  

Liao explains the importance of strengthening your Chi and ways that you can do that: 

Strengthening your Chi has two components: one is to increase its quality, meaning the intensity of your Chi feeling, and the other is to increase the quantity, meaning the size or volume of your Chi (hence also the feeling of your Chi). The pure dedication of your mind can increase the intensity of your Chi and hence your ability to feel it.

Liao seems to suggest that meditation is necessary to increase the intensity of your Chi, that combining meditation, and Tai Chi makes it easier/possible to feel Chi. Some of the meditations I’ve tried that visualize energy flowing through your body do make it seem like there is Chi, or, at least, energy flowing through your body, through your hands.  

 Liao argues that by combining Tai Chi and meditation you can increase your Chi, and, ultimately, your well-being.  

Under intense meditative Tao-gong work, Chi can be refined through “flow movement” to become very pure and strong. It can also be transformed into an even higher form of energy that can serve as the fuel for spiritual development.

 Apparently “Tao-gong work” is a phrase used by Master Liao to promote his classes and books and doesn’t seem to be  used elsewhere, which makes this claim a little suspect.  However, there does seem to be some scientific evidence that practicing Taoist forms of meditation can have a positive effect.  Chat GPT concludes:  

While traditional Taoist concepts like Qi are not fully understood in Western science, many Taoist meditation practices align with proven physiological and neurological benefits. The breath control, mindfulness, and movement elements of Taoist meditation have been scientifically validated for their positive effects on mental and physical health.

Tai Chi is usually sold to Westerners as a way to gain better balance and core strength, and that’s been true to my experience after doing Tai Chi for seventeen years.  However, once I learned the form and didn’t have to think too much about what I was doing, I found that my heart rate actually dropped below my normal level while I was just sitting around.  When I took my blood pressure after Tai Chi and before starting to lift weights, it was almost invariably lower than it was while I was sitting on the couch at home watching television.  Until my recent bout with Rheumatoid Arthritis, my HRV was higher than most fifty year olds.  

I tend to ascribe my physical health mainly to the fact that I exercise a lot, at least for someone my age, but I think my meditation has done more to improve my mental health. 

When you’ve been practicing Tai Chi for 15 years you hear a lot about Chi. After all, Tai Chi means “supreme ultimate,” and one of its main goals is to increase the student’s Chi. Just hearing the same definitions repeatedly, though, doesn’t really help you to understand precisely what Chi is. In an attempt to get a better understanding of Chi, I decided to read Chi: Discovering Your Life Energy by Waysun Liao.  

I’ll have to confess that the book is probably over my head, and I question some of the ideas Liao puts forward, particularly this one:

The smarter you are, which is artificially gauged by others who have also lost their true identities, the more artificial you are, and the less natural you are. This indicates even further damage to the quality and integrity of your life energy, Chi.

I don’t know whether to take that personally or not, but it strikes me as an overgeneralization.  It is, however, consistent with his contention that (too much?) thinking makes it difficult, if not impossible, to feel your Chi. 

Practicing Tai Chi often leads you to the same conclusion. In Tai Chi there is no thinking, there is doing.  Nothing will make you lose flow quicker than thinking, either about the next element in the practice or wondering if you left the stove on when you left home.  

Of course, that’s not unique to Tai Chi; it seems to be true in most sports.  Thinking may help in practice, but nothing will make you more likely to miss a basket than thinking, “I’ve got to make this basket.”  I would even go so far as to say that the same is true in Combat, where your reactions must be automatic if you’re going to survive.  

Liao argues when a child is taught to think they begin to lose touch with their Chi: 

Learning to choose whether to act or not act on the basis of thought versus spontaneous feeling will necessarily cause the child to split herself and her mind from her original life energy. Over time, this split grows until it is permanent.

…

The price tag for this split from your life energy is very high. The day you learn to think about how to respond to an outside action, your mind activities begin to burn up your life energy. It is the beginning of the hidden assault and damage to your Chi, and the main cause of its decline. Declining and withering Chi acts like a burning candle in a gusty wind, destined to finally evaporate and vanish.

Now, I’m not sure what “spontaneous feeling” is exactly, but I can imagine situations where it could exacerbate a situation rather than solve it.  I still think Thumper’s mother’s advice (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”) is good advice in many situations (though, I’ll have to admit, I don’t always follow that advice).  

It is, however, hard to argue with Liao’s contention that overthinking can drain our Chi.

When we mistakenly overextend our mind until it exhausts itself and detaches from our life energy, it is like the rubber band that has been stretched beyond its limit. A man with weak life energy from the overextension of his mind, or a man whose mind is detached from his life energy, is like an overstretched or broken rubber band. A man whose mind has lost its natural ability to reconnect to its feeling of life energy is a man in illness, a man who has lost his true nature, a man who will decline even unto death.

Overthinking a problem can certainly make it worse rather than helping to solve it. Anybody who has meditated knows that the mind is constantly churning out thoughts that may or may not be relevant to the immediate situation. Constantly worrying about all our problems is exhausting. 

It seems to me that both of these skills are necessary to live well. Chi emphasizes being in tune with natural rhythms and bodily awareness, often advocating intuition, mindfulness, and non-resistance while thinking in the analytical Western sense often emphasizes control, logic, and structured reasoning. Rather than a strict opposition, these ideas can complement each other. Practices like meditation, qigong, and tai chi encourage a balance between thought and energy flow, showing that thinking can be integrated into a holistic system rather than being in conflict with chi. Clear, focused thinking (without excessive worry) might actually help direct chi more effectively.