What "Internal" Exercise Can Do for You

Internal exercise is much different than what most Westerners think of when they talk about going to the gym or getting in shape.  

Internal exercises are different because they've been designed with the whole person in mind, because they reintegrate mind and body and because they are sustainable - in other words, they lead to long-term health and, unlike some forms of exercise, they're not prepared to sacrifice that for the sake of short-term gains.  

                            Hatha Yoga


What's the opposite? Have you ever seen someone running on a treadmill and watching TV at the same time, with their body doing one thing and their mind another?  There you have it - a recipe for limited results, where you're treating your physical life and your emotional / spiritual life as unrelated.  

                                          Tai Chi



What are the classic internal exercise forms available to you today?  Chinese Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Bagua Zhang, Xing Yi Chuan, and Indian Hatha Yoga are all viable options if they're taught properly.  Granted, Bagua and Xing Yi are the least common; however I thought we should list them in case you come across them!  

                            Bagua's circle walking exercise

The Short List of What Internal Exercise Can Do for You

1. Helps Your Heart: improves your aerobic conditioning, oxygen uptake and endurance, while lowering resting heart rate.
   
   
2. Improves Your Flexibility: May not seem that way at first, but you'll become much more physically flexible doing internal exercises like Qi Gong, Tai Chi or Hatha Yoga.  This will reduce your stress, release trapped tensions and help you become more flexible emotionally.
   
   
3. Banishes Your Worries: Chronic worry and anxiety can increase your cortisol levels, which unfortunately correlate with elevated blood pressure, depression, weight gain and increased insulin resistance.
    
   
4. Improves Muscle Tone: Contrary to popular belief, these exercises build muscle like crazy.  This superior muscle tone helps protect you from injury, back pain and even arthritis.  Moreover, these exercises target deep core muscle groups vital to many aspects of your health and promote the flow of blood, oxygen and energy (qi or prana) throughout your system.
   
   
5. Takes Off the Pounds: Internal exercises burn far more calories than most people think and, even better, as a practitioner you're more likely to improve your nutrition.  This will help you drop even more weight, if that's your goal, or at least arrive at your optimum weight sooner.
   
   
6. Lubricates Your Joints:  To keep your joints healthy, internal exercises take them through their complete range of motion.  This bathes the joints in nutrients they might not otherwise get, keeping them healthy, pliable and resistant to injury.
   
   
7. Balances Your Blood Sugar:  Internal exercises promote better sugar metabolic function, improve cholesterol balance and decrease risk of diabetes and its related complications, such as kidney failure, heart attack, blindness and limb amputation.
   
   
8. Kicks in the "Relaxation Response":  That's an expression coined by Dr. Herbert Benson.  Internal exercise brings your breath, movement and mental attention together, calming you automatically and shifting your nervous system over to the restorative parasympathetic circuit.
    
   
9. Builds Those Bones:  Because they favor weight-bearing exercise, internal systems tend to build up bone density and stave off osteoporosis.  Moreover, some systems have special methods for keeping the bone marrow healthy and the bones resilient.
   
   
10. Improves Balance and Coordination: This is a function of mind-body integration and translates into fewer injuries and accidents as well as enhanced mobility. 
    
    
11. Circulates Your Blood Better: Vitality is partly dependent on efficient blood circulation.  Internal exercises wring the venous blood out of your nooks 'n crannies, reduce the workload on your heart and also thin your blood naturally, reducing the likelihood of clot-induced heart attacks or strokes.
    
    
12. Builds Mind-Body Awareness: As you practice, you become more and more sensitive to how you use your body - your balance, weight distribution, the places you habitually hold tension and the psychological resistances you've built to life that translate into physical manifestations of stress.  And once you're aware of these things, you can change them consciously!
    
    
13. Immunizes and Detoxes You:  Internal exercise postures move your lymph fluid quite efficiently, boosting your immune system, destroying pathogens (including cancer cells) and promoting a natural detoxification of internal organs in general and the lower digestive tract in particular.  This release of toxins and improved immune system functioning provides a solid basis for long-term health and longevity.
    
    
14. Deepens Your Sleep: By circulating blood, energy and oxygen more efficiently, reducing your stress and inducing a never-before experienced level of control over your own organism, how could you help but sleep better?
    
    
15. Instills Happiness "Software" in Your Mind: If your practice goes beyond just doing the routine to "get some exercise", you're in for a treat.  Internal exercise systems are holistic tools for cultivating mind-body harmony and happiness at levels you've probably not felt before.  And these systems often have or are connected with meditative systems that can revolutionize your life (in fact, that's what they've been designed to do).
    
    
16. Ramps Up Your Relationships: As you become calmer, more flexible and more connected with the core of your own being, other people will more often crave connection with you.  Internal exercise helps you become more compassionate, more approachable and more balanced - secrets you can share with your loved ones and anyone else who will listen.
    
    
17. Spiritualizes Your Romance: Internal systems are indeed holistic - they have or are connected with repositories of expertise on conjugal relations that can show you how to deepen your emotional connection with your spouse, master your sexuality and spiritualize sexual union. 

Needless to say, there's lots more!  Of course, none of these benefits come without regular and consistent practice.  The deeper benefits only come if you make the effort to build your lifestyle on these practices and the principles that underlie them.  

If you'd like to learn more about one form of internal exercise, Chinese Qi Gong, and its origins in the world's most successful tradition for cultivating health and longevity, just go here.

 ~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

The Documentary "Openings" and How to "Open" Your Own Heart and Mind

You can read the text below OR listen to this post on audio here:

Last week I spent a couple of days in beautiful Denver, Colorado, filming my segments in the upcoming docudrama "Openings" (You can watch the trailer here).

The producers spent hours before the actual filming going through the "brutal" creative process of "teasing" out of me what they considered the golden nuggets they wanted to capture on digital celluloid.  One of our discussions revolved around the whole question of how we human beings can become open enough to experience a significant shift in our lives....

The Space of Freedom

As a human being, you're only free to the extent that you can free yourself from your previous programming.  And the only place you can do that is in the "space" between stimulus and response.  The only way to become a truly free and therefore truly functional and happy person is to expand that space.

For example, if you have no psychological "distance" between the two, your responses will be distressingly predictable and egocentric - someone insults you and you retaliate, someone compliments you and it goes to your head, etc.  At this level, you're basically a lower animal, fleeing pain, seeking pleasure and incapable of amassing enough personal integrity to follow higher principles when the going gets tough.

So, needless to say, you'll never experience personal growth of any kind without expanding the distance between stimulus and response.   

The 3 Keys to Expanding the Space

The good news is there are only three things you need to do in order to cultivate and build up true internal freedom.

The first is simply that you need to make a decision to do so - you have to decide you want to grow beyond your own programming, free yourself from the emotional chains imposed on you by other people, their emotions, ideologies and delusions.  And, while a simple decision on your part won't achieve deep transformation on its own, it's a step that everyone of us must take.

The second step is that we have to be willing to humble ourselves.  When some jerk cuts us off in traffic, we have the opportunity to stifle that string of four-letter words, for example.  And that takes guts.

The third step is simply to practice over and over again.  Good thing life presents us with unending opportunities to do just that!

If you look at the three keys carefully, you'll notice that all of them have one thing in common - they contradict your ego.  So opening yourself to a larger universe takes a decision to work against your ego, as well as determination and work.  

The Magical Results

As you expand the distance between stimulus and response, you'll find that you become more open to and accepting of other people.  Your responses to life's situations become more flexible, appropriate and successful.  Your old programming no longer determines your words or actions.  And, perhaps for the first time, you sense a real change in your world as you let go of old baggage.  

This means your capacity to be aware of, to accept and to deal with your own emotional content will expand.  So, naturally, your compassion for and empathy with other people will go way up.  After all, if I can't feel my own heart, I sure can't feel yours.  And all deep human communication is, in reality, a heart to heart connection between us. 

This means the quality of your relationships will improve and, in fact, the quantity likely will as well, since people will be increasingly drawn to you.  Another way to say this is that your interpersonal skills will improve even though, paradoxically, these aren't "skills" or "techniques" that can be taught at all.

Besides all this, your overall level of psychological and physical resistance to life's challenges (which I discussed in a previous post) will drop, thereby reducing your stress levels and improving your health.  

And, by the way, don't ever think that you can grow spiritually if you haven't grown emotionally first.  That's a common delusion in our culture and is plain wrong.

That then is what it means to open your heart and your mind, to expand your consciousness and acquire true inner freedom and spontaneous happiness.   Sound good to you?  Then you're probably asking yourself how you can do this even faster and more effectively...

Accelerating the Process

If your body is significantly uptight and inflexible, if you're storing emotional tensions throughout your body's energy system and muscular structure, then any attempts you make to become more open psychologically will likely hit the wall pretty fast.  So yes...

...to open yourself emotionally, you have to open yourself physically as well.  The most effective way to do this is to use some form of what I call "internal exercise", such as Qi Gong, Tai Chi or Hatha Yoga, for example.  


The great emotional benefit of these exercises is that they put your mental attention inside your body and help you process emotions and traumas locked in your bodily tissues in a gentle and natural way.  For instance, you cannot possibly do Hatha Yoga's sun salutation properly and stay in a bad mood, nor can you do Qi Gong's organ meditation and feel like a victim.  Not going to happen! 


As every teacher of any of these three methods knows from experience, the more physcially flexible you become, the more emotionally calm you become.  


So if you would like to become more open to divine guidance (one of the main themes of Openings), enjoy far better relationships and improve your health on every level, then just start doing what's outlined here and enjoy the process!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger