Qi: substance or metaphor?
The easy answer to "What is qigong?' is to parse the Chinese. Qi (pronounced chee) means something like "vital energy" and gong (pronounced gung) means "work" or "cultivation."
Qigong is the practice of working with and understanding vital energy.
Then the questions begin: "What is qi, really? Is it substantial? Does it correspond to various frequencies of electromagnetic energy? Is it just a way of talking about experience? Is it a psychological process? A combination?" This is where it gets sticky.
What do you mean by "real"? And how do you know? Not surprisingly, the practice of qigong is a fruitful way of exploring these questions and deciding for yourself.
In China, qi takes on many nuances in many contexts. You could call it the central organizing concept of Chinese culture. Even in qigong practice, where you get closest to the experience of what "it" is, there are many shades of qi, subtle and not so subtle. It can intoxicate you. It can chill you. It can inform you. In the end, the important question is not so much "is qi real?" but "is the qi map workable?" Can you achieve reliably consistent results?
When you enter the qi world, you sense everything differently. And yet you still have your usual way of sensing things; everything is still the same. It's in that push-pull between the qi world and the so-called "real" world that you experience the emergence of movement, feeling, vision, healing, ideas . . .
What is qigong? You have to taste that for yourself.
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