Practice as Repair

Uncovering new layers in LaoHuGong all the time.

Yesterday morning, I was inclined to do some spontaneous movement, and I ended up doing the LaoHuGong sequence instead. This pattern really wants to work its way in. I’m a couple years into the practice, but it still feels like it’s teaching me the basics — meaning the immense power of it I’ve felt so far is just an introduction.

Although, one of the deepest layers of it is having received this practice from a teacher with whom my relationship is broken — surely irreparably, though not on my side. That’s unprecedented on my end, but it’s a clear and sad karmic tale on his.

No sense yet what the lesson is for me, but it does flavor the gratitude. Probably strengthens it, actually.

It gets deeper because of how far I had to roam into the jungle to find someone who had a practice like this to teach me. In truth, it was more than one person, because there were multiple capacities I needed help opening in order to realize this practice was something I needed.

That’s how far removed from me qigong was, culturally.

It was a Jewish person who introduced me to it first, but a marginal one, in a marginal place. And I didn’t find LaoHuGong until I was way up the Zen mountain.

All along, from the outset of seeking the Dharma, it has had the sense of תקון, repair, for karma of displacement and disembodiment that it is upon me to repair. Almost 20 years, this process has taken. And I’m still doing these movements clumsily, like a cub, and feeling surges of aliveness that I have never felt before.