Let your partner be your Qigong Master

The idea of being a "Qigong Master" has been on my mind a lot lately.

This is partially because I hold a certificate that says I AM a qigong master :)

As I expand my practice into serving more and more people with energetic therapies, I've been feeling deeper into the question of what exactly a Qigong Master DOES.  What is it that earns you this title of "Master"?  What is the best way to put that role and those skills into play?

The main thing that has come to me, during a few recent healing arts sessions, is that the role of a Qigong master is to be able to feel into the places that the recipient of healing is not even aware of him or herself, and to have a wider perspective on the nature of illness, life events, or emotions and their meaning.

What struck me the instant after this insight arose is that this is exactly the type of partner that I want to be... and also the type of partner I'd like to have.

I'm going to assume in this blog that readers are not merely interested in an intimate partnership that meets a certain selection of their needs in a fairly consistent way, but rather have an intuition that relationship could be something more.

I hear a lot of people speaking to the ideals that an intimate partner could somehow raise you up to the next level in your spiritual growth, that they could take you farther than you could go yourself.  And yet, I don't hear a lot of people raving about their success in this department.... and I don't think there's anything wrong with them or their partners - rather, it seems there are some very specific principles and skills that it would take to create this kind of relationship and have it succeed.  People are intuiting a very high level of relationship, something rare, and something which requires cultivation.

In considering what many of us want in relationship, it seemed that the metaphor of the role of the qigong master was a valid one.  We want someone who can sense inside of us what we are really needing and going through, we want someone who can guide us when we need it the most, who can be a stable presence during the storms we encounter in life.  In some cases this may be a wishful fantasy of a partner who could "read your mind" in order to give you what you want more consistently, but I think there is something deeper here.  You are not looking for a beloved who uses this ability just to coddle you and keep you from getting uncomfortable, you are looking for someone who can open you more than you've opened before - who can find the areas of your heart and life that are stuck, and begin to release them.

The missing element that we often don't notice, though, is trust.  It is one thing to want someone to be able to see into your heart and know you better than you know yourself, but when it comes down to it - that's a little disconcerting.  We have grown used to knowing who we are and that can be very hard to give up.  Perhaps this is why the "ego" in Sanskrit is called the "Ahamkara" which literally means the "i maker".  We love to make up this sense of "I" over and over.  It seems very secure to know who we are.

If we consider it, though, how accurate are we?  The ancient yogis and Buddhist masters would say that we are placing our trust in a fiction.  We think that we are some kind of fixed self that will never change or fall apart - but then reality comes along again and again and gives us a rude awakening.  Every year many of us will think that we can reach certain goals, only to be "disappointed in ourselves" when we don't.  If the "I" was the way we thought it was, we wouldn't have to be disappointed - we would have assessed our abilities correctly.  If the "I" was the way we thought, we could also get the mind to do what we ask it to.  We would not ever be "of two minds" about things because we would be a real, singular, "self".  The fact is that "I" does not exist in the way I seem to.  If we trust the vested interests of our egos to run our lives, we are doomed to stay stuck in the same patterns we have always circled in - even if you don't think that is suffering, it is at the very least boring.

To break loose from these patterns, we need a Guide.  We need someone with an outside perspective.  We can't just pick ANY guide though, we need a qualified one.  Many of us already know what happens when you pick an unqualified guide - we found out by listening to our friends' advice in high school, or by blindly following our parent's religion, or the religion of our consumer culture.  We cannot just trust and hope for the best.  The idea of calling someone a "master" doesn't mean that you get to surrender your critical thinking abilities completely - this idea has gotten many disciples into trouble with their "gurus".

When choosing someone to perform medical qigong or other healing modalities, we first want to check their references - did they go to school?  Do they have a valid lineage?  Have they had much clinical experience?  What is their teacher's reputation?  We might also want to see if their personality is a "fit".  Do we like the way they communicate?  Do their perspectives and insights seem to resonate?  Are they operating under a similar worldview to our own.  If these preliminary qualities match up, we may be able to give them a bit of our trust and open to them enough to receive a good treatment.

This too is a testing process.  Does the treatment work in the way they claim it will?  Do the intuitions they receive during the therapy match our own inner sense of things?  Do we find that over the long-term our health, mind, and life are improving?  If we can answer yes to these questions then it might be time to invest a significant amount of trust in a healer or guide.

How many of us do this with a partner?  I know that for myself and many people I know, the desire to have someone in our lives to share experiences with is so deep that we often fail to consider whether a potential mate has the skill-set, maturity, or experience to help take us where we want to go spiritually.  Is it any wonder, then, that we fail to develop the ability to surrender to them?  Should it surprise us that they "let us down"?  Do we have any choice but to remain closed to them?  Perhaps the fact that they fail to rise to the challenge of guiding us to greater openness and presence is  the natural result of our continued closure toward them, because we are uncertain that they can guide us masterfully?

If you find a candidate, you must test them, but then once you've tested them, you have to realize that their ability to be a "master" depends on you empowering them to be so.  In the Buddhist tradition it is said that if you devote yourself to a Teacher and they actually are not an enlightened being, it doesn't matter, because the energy of your devotion will call all enlightened qualities through them.  I think this speaks to the power we have in shaping the capacities of our partner.  The energy of trust is itself magical.  If you want a more trustable partner, you can start by finding places where you can practice trusting them.

It is likely that you chose them for a reason.  You chose them on some level because they can highlight the exact places where you need to grow.  Sometimes this is just through being a mirror to your subconscious blocks, but other times it is through direct instruction.  If empowered, your partner can come to know your heart better than you know your own.  They can come to see the blind spots that you will never be able to see.  And isn't this perhaps why we crave communion?  Could this be why so many of us have an intuition that partnership could be the path that leads us to greater growth and wholeness than we've ever felt before?

Can we become courageous enough to take the big leap of letting another lead our hearts?  Could we empower a loved one to show us what we have the potential to be?  This, I think is the promise of partnership, the promise of mastery.