One thing that’s come out of the qigong practice over the last couple of weeks is that I’ve rediscovered my ankles.
Now, you may rightly say: “Look mate, they’re just where they always were. They’re in the same place you left them, viz. between your shins and your feet. You can be fairly sure they didn’t go anywhere, on account of your feet not having fallen off”. These are wise words and true. However: the mind directs the qi, as the classics tell us, and my mind hasn’t been near my ankles for rather a long time – in fact, it had forgotten about them. As a result, they became very stiff and inflexible.
The good news is, that I am now aware of them, and starting to relax them, so that my full weight flows through them and into my feet. This isn’t particularly easy, what with the tendons being very stiff and all that, but it’s happening – and, in consequence, my feet are hurting more than a little as they take my weight for the first time in a while.
“But”, you say, “if your weight wasn’t going through your ankles, into your feet and thence the ground, where was it going?”. The answer, my perceptive friend, is that it was being carried by my knees. “Now hang on”, you say, “does not Bruce Frantzis Kumar, in his most excellent book Opening the Energy Gates of the Body, repeatedly point out that The Knees Are Not For Load-Bearing, and that any violation of this rule will lead to the knees in question ceasing to perform their intended function?”. Alas this is true! Sadly, my knees have already endured a decade or so of carrying heavy packs through steep mountains, not to mention a car crash or two, and so weren’t exactly in pristine condition anyway. Bugger. I hope these qigong exercises are good for Revitalising Knackered Knees…
Updated:
Good timing – this just appeared on Icanhazcheezburger:
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