Getting Old!

Life, Our Universe, Layer upon Layer of information, but is it relevant to you!?

It’s the old story, If you are thirsty, should you start digging the Well now?
No, you should have started weeks ago when there was water, planning for the future..

Life is so Multi-layered.

Qigong is a starting point. So often our bodies deteriorate over a long period of time, we don’t notice the decline. We start feeling older..by which time, it’s already becoming late!

We become progressively more upset with the world around us, as it stops conforming with what we believe to be right. We get angrier or more depressed as time slides by, we slip into depression, dementia or permanent bad tempers, again too late to save ourselves..

We collect bad habits in our diet too.. Sweets as a child, become biscuits and cake as an adult, portion control goes out the window, before we know it obesity and Heart attacks loom, all to late!

What’s to be done!?

Think of a milking stool – three legs hold it up.

Mental Hygiene, Physical Exercise, and a Clean Diet. The Three Pillars of my therapy.

It’s NEVER to late to start! Every effort you put in now, will add longevity.

I often hear people say, “God, I don’t want to live to be that old!” – It’s a very powerful thought. Your mind and body both hear that and understand that you want to limit the clock!
Be careful of what you wish for. You are in control of this amazing Chemical Factory, we call our body.
If you tell it you don’t want to live to one hundred years old, it’ll oblige, one way or another!

The picture we have of growing old is not a good one.

My lovely maternal Grandmother lived to be 100 years old.
She was uncomplaining, optimistic, kind and happy throughout.
She rarely complained (except as she slide into her last few years “this Hotel is the worst I’ve ever stayed in, the Staff keep stealing my night-time whiskey!” – Dementia can be cruel and funny..

Her arthritis slowed her down a bit, she used to habitually massage her sore hands on a cold Scottish day, and try to straighten her stooped back – “I must stand up better”
For her, and I suspect that she’d had a tough life, it was about marching onwards without complaint, in a stately way.

We just assume that it’ll all be miserable.
I have the pleasure to know and work with amazing students who are still practicing qigong in their eighties (and I’m hoping into their nineties as we all age together, like fine wines!)
It was lovely to noticing how one student who must be twenty or twenty five years my senior has a “Bow-body” bend which is much superior to mine! I want to grow up to be like her!

My point obviously is that old age shouldn’t be about being knackered.
We all know an old person who’s lived an amazing life.

Amazing Death

One of my clients passed away in his late eighties.
His family had demanded that I attend him twice a week, and help cure him.
We used to do a few exercises, chat a lot and I’d give him a treatment.
As I was trying to rev him up one day, he said to me, “You have to accept that my time has come, and that I’m happily dying..”
I was rather taken aback by that. I asked him if he’d like me to stop coming to visit, to which he replied “NO! This is the most fun I have in the week, I love our conversations, and I always feel much better after you’ve been!”
One day I received the call I’d been dreading. He’d passed, the day after I saw him last.
Sad on the face of it, however I discovered that after my session, he’d phoned all his friends and told them to meet him in the pub that evening. He’d arranged a fiddler to play some music, and had danced and drank late into the night.
He’d hugged and said goodbye to everybody then gone home to bed.
The next morning he passed peacefully.
At his funeral his family thanked me for all the life I’d given him! What a great way to go I thought..

Change your Life

There’s this idea that we have to work until we are sixty five, and then the machine will spit you out the other end, a used up husk, with a few broken years ahead of you.
More and more people are eschewing this path, and making their living, doing things that they love.
It’s important I think to follow your truth, but that’s not enough.
You have to lay the foundations for a healthy old age too.
I started in earnest at thirty.
Many of my clients have started in the fifties and sixties. (some in their eighties..)
Some have saved themselves from seriously dangerous chronic health issues, some, just simple changes that have meant the world to them.
(getting your knees or back working again might sound like a small thing, but it can change a life..)

Qigong

My remedy for the body is Qigong.
If we examine the “Layers” I was talking about earlier, then this is the Physical layer, on the face of it.
We can feel our bodies, we can see the musculature, it’s all pretty real.
In Chinese medicine, there’s another “Layer” this is the “Qi Layer” – it’s the underlying energy that moves the body.
We often hear Science tell us about Mitochondria and Energy in our muscles and cells. We hear that it’s possible to detect small amounts of light, electricity, magnetism and even something akin to nuclear power in our chemistry.
All of these things are “Qi” – this doesn’t actually do “Qi” any justice, it’s much more than that, but it’s a fair starting point!

The Emotions

The next layer “Up” would be the Emotional self.
A Thought generates an electro pulse from the brain, that triggers a flush of chemical through the body – this is an emotion. Somebody says something embarrassing to you, and you blush.
The emotion causes blood to rise to your skin.
We are “Bags” filled with emotions! All day, every day, we experience these gusts of chemicals blowing through or bodies.
Most scientists will tell us that we only really “hear” five percent of the thoughts in our heads, and that the ninety five we don’t hear can also have dramatic effects on the chemical make up of the body.
Are you in charge of that process, or do the old patterns and stories you have built through childhood into adulthood still rule your chemical processes..
(I’ll never be good enough for my boss / wife etc… give’s way to toxic streams of chemicals quietly damaging your body, day after day.)

Mental Hygiene

I prescribe Mental Hygiene.
For my “One to One” Clients, I often send them resources such as the La Qi healing Meditation (We also use this in my free self-healing classes on a Wednesday morning and on Youtube after…)
My other favourites are a Compassion Meditation and Ho’oponopono
The latter is a Hawaiian forgiveness tool.
It’s amazingly powerful. One client kindly shared a story that she hadn’t spoken to one of her children for months; I recommended Ho’oponopono to her and she said she would do her first session that evening. She called me amazed, the next day, to say that she’d practiced for a little while then her child had called her out of the blue!

When we feel down, or that things have become too difficult with our family and friends, there’s nothing to be done about it. We have to realise that we can’t manipulate or change other people. (maybe that’s what caused the problem in the first place!)
The only thing we can change is ourselves. Using these tools, we are able to change how we feel about ourselves and thus, like a pebble in a pond, things start to change around us.

Diet

We have built so many unhealthy patterns that the Diet story is one that can plague us all, sometimes all of our lives.
I take a simple approach, as I’m not a qualified dietitian.
For me, I do a Gallbladder and Liver Cleanse (book on my Resources Page of my website) a few times a year, and I drink Green Drinks every day (details available Here..)
I supplement my diet with Vitamin C and D in high dosage and a multivitamin.

It’s about giving your Body and Mind every chance to be it’s best.
The Physical (Diet and Exercise) layer help us to build and store our Qi.
The Emotional and Mental work helps us to take the weight off our “ego selves”

There are still more layers as we “move up”
We have gone through the physical, into Qi through energy and emotions and finally into the more ethereal mental realms.
The broader idea for this layer would be “Consciousness”

Consciousness

Science seems to place this consciousness as being guided by our physical bodies. (double slit experiment etc..) It demonstrates that our consciousness can bring about changes in the world around us.
It was Ramesh Balsekar who put it so beautifully for me.
He says – you are all surrounded by all these electrical devices, phones, computers, kettles and  lights. We can’t see Electricity and it’s exceptionally difficult to understand, yet it’s common to all of these devices. Consciousness is the same for all of us. This unified energy operates in and through us. We understand little of it, but should realise it’s existence, and try to research and understand it none-the-less.

I have spent the last thirty years doing exactly this. One of the first “Spiritual” things I ever did was to have the OM symbol tattooed on my arm. I was so drawn to it.
It’s one of the oldest symbols in the world. It contains the path for humanity encoded in this one shape! (the first figure, like an oddly shaped “Three” represents the three states of mankind “Sleeping, Dreaming and awakening” there’s a veil drawn between this symbol and a simple dot.
The Dot represents God, All-there-is, The Creator or more simply Consciousness.
When put all together, we find that the wise men from thousands of years ago were showing us the path, “move from crashing through life in a mindless rush, to find your Trueself”

Don’t overdo it!

I don’t think ten hours of Qigong every day will do it, I certainly don’t think that putting yourself back to sleep with ten hours of meditation every day will do it either!
A simple Qigong workout, and (for me) a standing Meditation session each day is enough, along with eating well, to put me in a good frame for a happy healthy life.
I think the revelation of Enlightenment is something that finds you, not something you can force.
Put yourself on the right road, live a happy healthy life, and if you are supposed to become enlightened, then you will.
At worst, you’ll become still, cantered, healthy and happy. You’ll live a long joyous life.
I’m not sure what more you’d want?
Tend to every layer of life, not just the look of it.

If you want help finding the path, I’m your signpost, I can help you find the start of the way All my love,

Jeremy