Reishi and Chi Gong Practice

By Brandon Daemon

In this article I am going to speak about how reishi mushroom has really improved and deepened my qigong practice.

Now if you don't know what qigong is, it means energy work or energy cultivation, and it's a Chinese art that is sort of, a touch like yoga if you are acquainted with that, but it is mostly delicate, refined movements coordinated with the breath, coordinated with the mind, that then moves energy and the blood better thru the body which then improves health and improves just the entire body system from the bottom up.

So qigong is the method of working with and moving the energy in the body, and it requires a while to develop a sensitiveness to the energy in the body because it's completely subtle, and we have to calm our nervous system and improve our health and improve our blood flow and our joint circulation all of these things. And then we start to feel it, and we start to notice it more deeply.

So how reishi has helped me is because it is such a good shen tonic, it is such a good chi tonic, that just about taking it puts you into a meditative, just about qigong mental condition. And the things begin to come more naturally. Actually , plenty of folk believe that, people like Lao Tzu and a lot of the other Taoist sages, and even plenty of the originators of the selfdefense skills, were taking reishi. So taking reishi is really just using that consciousness and, in my judgment, when I think of the archetype of the master or the archetype of where I want to be when it comes to qigong and martial arts and just practicing and working with the body, definitely herbs are often a gigantic part of that. It is a thing we kind of left out, however it is kind of coming back, because in America, we have super-foods and these sorts of things. Which is nothing new, because in Asian nations, they have always had these class of super-foods and tonic herbs that they incorporated and utilized in their diet, incorporated and used on a constant basis.

When I practice, when I do qigong or meditate, I always do my best to take reishi previously, because I know I'm going to be calmer, I am going to be more relaxed, I'm going to feel more grounded and more in my body, and I feel strain kind of liquefying away, which then is going to make the practice much easier and so much more effective and let me progress much faster. Because reishi can open your right brain, more of your intuitive side, which will allow you to have flashes of insight where you are saying, "Oh, I was moving like this but now I really should be moving like this," or "I was moving my hand this way nonetheless it should be that way," etcetra. You just start to see things and make connections and actually, in brief, just increase your intelligence.

When you do that, everything else improves, whether that's a yoga practice, a qigong practice, tai chi practice, meditation practice everything improves because your intelligence, your wisdom, your intellect, your consciousness is improving, and you are getting better chi flow or you are improving blood flow, your liver is shaping up, your lungs are getting better, your senses are improving. All these things come in and lead up and manifest and come to completion in your practice. You are able to be more calm, more relaxed, more peaceful, more grounded, more in the instant, which is basically the final result of the practice that is trying hard to get you to. It's trying hard to get you to a state of consciousness and a condition of mind, not just always taking you thru a bunch of motions and all these things, but get you to a point, get you to a viewpoint, get you to a condition of consciousness, so if you can already move your consciousness closer to that, do you not think that the body movements will flow out of that much more easily? Naturally they can.