I was reading a Taiji article the other day and the author was basically saying that a practice must return a physically tangible result otherwise it is not worth doing.

He then went on to imply that some of the more esoteric practices of Qigong and Taijiquan are not based in reality and therefore have no value to the student. An example of this would be any inner alchemy practice where the process is completely internal and the result is subjective rather than objective.

I found that perspective interesting and worthy of discussion.

It is true that any external practice can and should be measured upon the results it brings to the individual student. After all if you practice Taiji specifically because you wanted to increase your balance or short range striking power and after a prescribed amount of time neither your balance nor power had improved, then one should definitely review his practice.

On the flip side, internal work is different and I often refer to a saying “If something does not exist within your consciousness, then it does not exist… to you”.

Now I’ll ask all of you readers from the USA, Canada, Russia, China, Malaysia, Egypt, etc. a question.

Can anyone out there tell me a legitimate reason why the “Conception vessel” (Ren channel) is called the conception vessel?

Please take a moment and email me your answers.

I’m intentionally leading this conversation somewhere and I’ll discuss the reasoning and answers in the next post. I’m sure you’ll find the results interesting!

Peace
Rod