The upper arms are a very interesting area in the IP training context. By upper arms I mean the body zone from shoulder to elbow. It may surprise you that I call attention to that area, as it’s definitely a backwater from the pov of normal Qi Gong.
In general we humans are very handsy. We focus a lot on our hands. For example any Qi Gong or energy healing class or seminar program has everybody focusing on their hands right away. In the first ten minutes of all such classes, they’ll have you doing the ‘feel the energy ball’ (the air between your palms) thing. True, it’s very easy to sense the edges of the body’s energy shell at the palms as you gently bring them into near proximity facing one another. But then the programs quickly shifts to a vanilla breathing-and-stretching class, skating past any further direct exploration of the actual internal power experience. They do that because to go much further in the direction of direct IP experience would require a depth of knowledge (from the teacher) and disciplined long term practice (from the students) which few these days can muster.
That’s all fine as far as it goes. But much is lost in the shuffle. To go deeper into the pure Internal Power (IP) aspects, you need something that is physically fairly simple (to avoid distraction toward physical calesthenics) and that really pushes you to combine mind and body intimately. The essential IP experience first stirs to life in that mind/body crucible.
My book Bare Metal Minimality attempts to kick start you with the simplest, least physically taxing, least mentally demanding (in terms of learnability of the dynamics) and least time-consuming bite-size training drills.
As you persist with any or all of those drills, or, to be fair, any other drills that are equally good on all those dimensions from any other source, you’ll actually feel the power - first in your hands, then in your forearms - BEFORE you experience it in your upper arms. You’ll probably also experience the Power in other disjointed body areas as well, such as soles of feet, spine, possibly even dantian, before experiencing it in your upper arms.
This may seem counterintuitive, even impossible. After all, the neijing is said to be a circulating, connected power stream, often hypothesized to originate in the dantian (lower abodomen). How could it get from there to your hands without transiting your upper arms? In fact yes, it is a connected stream. But - most people are too tense and insensitive in their upper arms to feel much of anything. The upper arms are functioning as a bottleneck. Enough gets through to give your palms and fingers a bit of tingling warmth, but only 5% of what’s possible.
I’ve already written on here about forearm centrality in a recent post, headlined as below:
That’s something you can starting working with right away. Beyond that, at some point you’ll want to check your progress. One marker of great advancement is beginning to directly experience the ‘packing flow’ of IP into and through your upper arms. I use the term ‘packing flow’ very deliberately. It seems like a contradiction at first: if it’s ‘packing’ how can it also be a ‘flow’? I understand the weirdness of that, yet that’s how it is. Your upper arms will swell as the IP fills them statically, and at the same time, you’ll experience a torrential flow of the IP through your upper arms down into your forearms and hands, like never before.
This opening to optimal pack/flow is hard to cultivate directly. It happens by itself after you’ve done enough of the BMM (book) drills, in addition to working on any of the Two-Stroke Tai Chi drills I’ve been introducing recently. But there are ways you can check on your progress and even possibly expedite it. That’s what I’ll cover below.
