Cultivate Intuition with Qigong

What is intuition? Why would you want to cultivate it? There’s a story about it.

One day a man saw Mulla Nasreddin crawling around under a streetlamp. He walked over and asked him, “Mulla Nasreddin, what are you doing?” He said, “I’m looking for my house key – I seem to have lost it.” The man decided to help him, so he started crawling around, too. After a while, neither of them could find anything, so the man looked up and asked, “Are you sure you lost your key around here?” Mulla Nasreddin answered, “Of course not! I lost it in my house.” The man stood up. “Then why are you looking over here?” “Well,” said Mulla Nasreddin, “This is where the light is.”

Intuition is about knowing. What is knowing?

When most of us talk about knowing, we mean something that comes from knowledge – from words we’ve heard or read, or even from the experience of our senses.

It’s like reading a book on carving wood. Someone who knows how to carve wood has composed written characters, which symbolize spoken words; those words symbolize things or ideas or concepts. You look at all that with your eyes, and by sensory magic, your eyes convert the ink into characters into words into concepts and – in a sense – you get the knowledge the author was trying to give you. Now you can apply the knowledge to carve wood yourself.

If you really think about it, knowing by knowledge is second-hand. It's mediated. Words are mediators. Thoughts are mediators. And on a deeper level, even senses are mediators.

There's your hand and its sense of touch, and there's the thing that you want to touch – say, a tree. To experience an aspect of the being of that tree, you place a hand on it; from its skin to yours, something is transmitted that your senses receive and your nervous system interprets as information. So, a kind of knowing is passing between the hand and the tree, only... with a lot of things in between. But the question is – is there a way to know without a mediator? Without a word or an idea? Without senses? Without anything in between?

Then, there’s the question – when we know, or when we have knowledge, what is it about? Is it about the world – people, plants, and animals, buildings, towns, and the things in them – or about ourselves – our inner world of thoughts, memories, sensations, and the emotional landscapes that hold and house them? Maybe you’ve never thought about that. There are two basic orientations of awareness with respect to life – outward, into the world, and inward, into ourselves. Most of us are turned outward, into the world.

So when we say we know something, we're usually talking about knowing something that we've either heard or read, and we're usually talking about knowing something in the outer world, by means of the outer world.

Yet most of us have also heard of something called intuition, and many of us have experienced it. But unlike the usual kind of knowing -- outer, second-hand, mediated, -- intuition is a direct inner knowing without reference to knowledge we already have. It's a flash of lightning in the inner night-sky, a sudden sourceless illumination that gives the shapeless form and makes the hidden visible.

That's what the Mulla Nasreddin story was about.

The house is our inner world, the street is the outer world. We've lost the house-key, our connection to our inner knowing, in the house itself; but because we spend our whole lives outside on the street, in the world, coming and going, and because it seems like that's where all the light is... that's where we think to look for the key. Does that make any sense? Not if you've seen the light in your own house.

So, then the question becomes, if there's a way to turn the house-light on, if there's a way to know, immediately, inwardly, perfectly, without reference to knowledge we already have... how do we cultivate this way of knowing, so that it's no longer like a lone lightning-flash in a dark night sky, but like a brilliant sun that always shines?

Did you ever consider that Spring Forest Qiqong can help you to cultivate that kind of intuition? Did you know that if you're practicing the simple Level 1 or Five Element Healing Movements, you're already cultivating your intuition -- or did you think they were just about healing the body?

It might be useful to know that Qigong is deeply rooted in ancient Taoist tradition.

Chuang Tzu was a Taoist master. He said, "The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing."

Lao Tzu was another Taoist master. He said, "Without stepping out the door, know the world. Without looking out the window, see the Tao of Heaven. The farther one comes out, the less one knows."

They were saying this over two thousand years ago! And what were they saying? Inside you is everything you need for knowing everything that can be known.

And what do we say before practicing Spring Forest Qigong -- whether meditation, movements, or healing? I am in the universe, the universe is in my body, the universe and I combine together.

What that means is, the information of the entire universe is in your body, and the information of your body permeates the entire universe. And if that's the case -- why are you crawling on a dirty sidewalk under a flickering streetlamp, looking for something you think you lost... when it's right at home where you left it?

In a way, intuition works like the reflectiveness of a mirror. You can put anything in front of a mirror, and effortlessly, perfectly, by its very nature it reflects the reality of what stands before it. You put a book in front of a mirror, and the mirror suddenly reflects the book. You put a plant in front of the mirror, and the mirror suddenly reflects the plant. It can do this with anything and everything, without exception.

It's not that the mirror has seen books and plants before, and that's how it's reflecting them so clearly. It's not that the dresser or the bed told the mirror about plants, then the mirror memorized what the dresser told it about them just in case, if a plant ever stood in front of it, it would know what to make of it. No. All the mirror does is stay clean and clear! Then, whatever comes before it is reflected in it. And when nothing is in front of the mirror, it’s simply empty. That's all!

In another way, intuition works like the resonance of mutually attuned strings. Do you know about that? When the strings of two musical instruments are tuned in the same way, you can play a note on the string of one instrument and the same note will sound on the same string of the other instrument -- without your ever touching it! The only thing is to make sure the instruments are in tune with each other.

Understanding these analogies, you can begin to understand what might be necessary to cultivate intuition.

If a "perfect" mind works as a mirror to reflect the reality of what passes before it, and if a clean mirror reflects best, what is dust on the mirror of the mind, and what cleans it?

If we are one with the universe, and can access any information from any part of it simply by attuning ourselves to the universe like one stringed instrument to another... what puts us out of tune? What puts us in tune?

This is the value of Spring Forest Qigong as a tool for cultivating intuition.

At the simplest level, an unhealthy body -- with organs failing, joints in pain, muscles aching -- leads to an unstill psyche -- emotions raging out of balance, thoughts racing and looping. This pain and chaos is like a film of dust over the mirror of one's awareness. Simple practices like the Five Element Healing Movements strengthen the body, help the organs to balance and heal, calm the emotions, and calm the mind. This is like wiping the dust off the mirror; in this peace, and from this alone, suddenly there is space and clarity enough to reflect more than just one's own chaos.

And with a healthy, balanced body and a still, quiet mind, one can begin to meditate more and more deeply -- even with simple meditations like Small Universe. As the mind becomes more and more focused, more and more quiet, suddenly one finds oneself simultaneously relaxed and taut, still like a well-tuned string waiting to be vibrated by an invisible hand.

Body quiet, mind quiet, awareness drawn inward, patient and receptive, you become ripe like a black night for lightning-flashes of intuition. Sitting in that black night long enough, you may even see lighting give way to the sun's rise…

And that's just the beginning! But now that you have the key... why don't you go inside and see for yourself?