A Qi Perspective
11/12/2020
I tend to think of the body's functional "qi" as various normally-unconscious functions involving involuntary muscles and controlled mainly by the subconscious mind. For those of you that think of "qi" as being some unseen etheric "force", well, yes, that was part of the original postulate of the qi-paradigm, but the major functional and important workings in the real world are as I put it in the first sentence. It's the physical part that we can actually work with, test, discuss, reproduce, etc.
A nice example to think of, in terms of a physical qi demonstration, would be picking up a box from the floor and placing it on a table in front of us. A western descriptive visualization for most of us would be a study of the muscles and bones and joints that are used to pick up the box and move it. In reality, there are a multitude of other systems, controlled by the subconscious/unconscious mind that assist at every time increment as we pick up and move the box. Subconscious systems calculate and correct our balance, adjust the forces to point in the directions we want to go/move, and so on. It's these myriad assisting systems that are the qi, in the functional sense, and they complement our normal voluntary-muscle strength that we in the West focus so much upon.
If a person goes to the gymnasium to work out, he gets strong, muscularly, but at the same time his "qi", as we described above, gets stronger, too. In that sense, it's easy to see why we say that "everybody has qi" and also easy to see how qi relates to strength.
The Chinese and Indians (hard to say who was first, but my money is on India) figured out these involuntary systems aided in their work (mostly agrarian) and began to devise methods (like visualizations, imagery, stretching, etc.) to directly utilize and train the subconscious systems. They also tried to diagram the paths and functions of these subconsciously controlled systems and that's how the drawings of the Chinese channel systems and the Indian nadi systems arose. If the qi systems are isolated and trained, their performances and skills can be enhanced: that's how we arrive at the perspective that a person training their muscles in the gym cannot help but improve their qi, but if the qi is isolated and strengthened/conditioned, the overall strength of the muscles will improve as a side-effect, also. That is the raison d'etre of qigongs.
A pertinent saying is that "Qi by itself is weak; Qi plus muscle is very strong". If you not only train and condition your qi, but also coordinate your muscular movement in order to maximize the use of your qi, you can be very powerful. The mechanism of moving the body with the dantian actually represents an optimization of movement that considers not only muscles, bones, and joints, but also adds in the consideration of the shape and ability of the involuntary-muscle systems and what they can do within the body.
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