QI-TISSUES AND DANTIAN: OPINION PIECE
There's a quick way to feel the actions of the "qi-tissues" of the face (as opposed to the topic of an etheric qi, which is a different topic). Close your mouth and inhale about half-way and then stop and try to pull the remainder of the breath through the skin of your cheeks. Of course, you can't really pull air in through the cheeks, but by imagining that the cheeks are like wet neoprene fabric and you're trying to pull air through them, the subconscious mind will trigger the involuntary muscles which would partake in such an action. Suck hard and you should feel the skin of the cheeks pulling inward.
If you open your mouth and attempt to suck in the skin of the cheeks in the same way, it's hard to do. Because the involuntary-muscle/fascia tissue is difficult to control with the mouth open, most breathing exercises involve keeping the mouth shut, tongue-tip on upper palate, and inhaling through the nose.
If you can feel that "pull in" done with the inhale, as described above, let's try another example using the upper sides of the arms, the front of the chest and shoulders, and the sides of the neck and head.
Stretch the arms and open hands out in front of you so that the hands are about stomach height, hands loosely open and thumbs upward. Reach out far enough to feel the slight stretch along the top of the arms, across the front of the shoulders to the neck and cheeks. Inhale through the nose again and start trying to tighten or "pull in" the tissues from the hands, along the tops of the arms, shoulders, and neck to the head/cheeks. If you look on an acupuncture doll, you'll see that this pathway is the path of the Yang channels that are used as an assist to lift/Open the arms: both the muscle-tendon channels and the qi-tissue channels follow this path.
Lift the chin slightly and adjust the height of the hands in order to maximize the amount of slight tension that you feel. If you can feel this "stretch" even somewhat assisting the effort to hold up the arms, the experiment is successful (it will take a lot of further development to increase this strength of the "qi" to the point where you can rest the weight of your arms on it).
Take things a step further and see if you can keep the slight contraction from hand, arms, shoulders, neck, etc., in place (just use your deliberation/will) while you resume lightly breathing. It takes practice and it gets stronger and more meaningful, over time. If you can accomplish this, even a little bit, you may begin to understand how the qi supplements the normal strength. Notice, also, how the "qi" tissues can be contracted, but the regular muscles are relaxed.
Below is a picture of Chen Ziqiang doing a fairly common qi demonstration of holding a weight (in this case a sand-filled basketball) out in front of him and holding the ball with his qi. Bear in mind that he will also use jin forces while doing this, but we're only discussing the qi part, at the moment. I believe Ellis Amdur has also told an anecdote about Wang Shujin also doing a version of this demonstration.
The point so far is that there are actual and manipulatable tissue connections along the lines of the channels that can be controlled by the subconscious and the will/yi/intent.
In the video snippet below I am showing, with the help of my wife, how I can relax and shift my intention so that the qi tissues of the body connect my arm to my torso so that when she attempts to twist my arm, the twist is stymied because it is connected to my torso and grounded in my right leg. This is not hard to learn to do, by the way.
These tissue connections are solid enough that in the video I can apply the power of my lower-body and dantian back through the connections to my arm and thence through my wife's arms to control her center/torso. Yet my arms stay relaxed. Moving the arms with the dantian is about controlling and manipulating the limbs using the qi-tissues, not muscle and bone. A lot of people conflate the normal muscle-and-bone mechanics of the body with learning to use the qi tissues. They are two different things. It's the qi-tissues that are of primary concern when "moving with the dantian".
Here's the video URL of my wife twisting my arm:
Here's another example of developing the qi tissues. Essentially, this Shaolin "penis gong" (which actually should tie into the scrotum, too) is just a whole-body method of training the "qi-tissues" in the same type of mechanics used for holding the arms out, above.
This "penis gong" type of exercise is, I have been told, one of the most ancient of the qi-development gongs in China.
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