Ya know how when you have a fishbowl, and you go for a while without cleaning it, all the stuff sinks to the bottom, and you don’t really realize it’s there?  The water LOOKS clear.

The meditation I’ve been doing all my life is the meditation that stills the waters and lets all the stuff sink to the bottom, and the water looks clear.

Qigong is more like, turning on the filter and stirring the water up.

Physically, mentally spiritually.

This is completely not what I signed up for, not what I expected, and not really what I wanted.

All that old crap just get churned up and cycled through.  I hope my filter is working.

Plus, there is numbness, tingling, eye-watering and charley horses.

Somebody remind me why I’m doing this again?

Seriously.

Last time we did a meditation, I cried, and beat the crap out of my wave bag.  I did it without gloves, because I needed to HIT something, and the gloves just wouldn’t have done the job.  It chewed up my knuckles. 

Tonight, tears streamed down my face (wouldn’t call it crying, exactly), During the meditation, I found myself in a place our family calls the Big Flat Rock.  It is a dome of granet up north on my grandparents farm...in the middle of the beef cow pasture.  My grandparents used to take us out there all the time for picnics.  We would have a picnic, and then they would build a fire and we would have s'mores.  Anyway, I was on the Big Flat Rock, and I was all alone.  I was filled with intense, gripping, paralzing loneliness and as sense of loss so intense I could hardly breath.  My sinuses were closed, my lungs tight, my throat closed.  Then, one of the garter snakes that lives under the rock (there's hundreds of them) came up to me, and slithered right up into my hands.  I held it, and it looked at me.  I remember seeing how its skin shone in the sunlight that was suddenly all around us.  Things cleared.  I felt better, except I was aware of a pain in my leg.  It was unbearable, and I came out of the meditation about five minutes early.  Couldn't help it.

Then I came home and scarffed a ton of pizza and ice cream.  Weird.  Can I blame that on qigong?