Today, I’d like to talk about the gap between the speed of our mind and our body.
We surely started feeling the spring in the air these days. The Sun gets higher, the wind gets warmer and warmer, yet the nature still looks just barely coming out from the winter. We will see the springiness with our eyes when the cherry blossoms are blooming, and the forest are sprouting new leaves. It takes time from the shift in the air to the change physically manifests. There are time lags between the qi and its manifestations. This time lag is universal. It applies to our health, our dreams, and our daily lives.
For example, Chinese medicine shoots to treat the disharmony in the qi dynamic that has not manifested as disease yet. It is like nature prepares spring energy before the spring shows up as the physical form.
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The qi follows our mind. If we are irritated for a long time, the irritation will manifest in some-ways in our daily life. On the other hand, if we can stay with the state of the gratitude, it will manifest to the physical form when the qi is filled. Our thoughts and actions, which both are not really tangible, form our physical reality later.
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When something big happen in our psych, the separation happens between the mind and the reality. Those times are difficult and maybe hard to keep the reality going.
For example, when I was 28 years old, I experienced the identity crisis. I felt my foundations melted down to the sand, and I lost the value of what I had been developed and cultivated. Heavy questions were hovering in my mind like Why am I here? Who am I? Do I need to constitute this reality? etc. I was just sad and barley living. I cried in the office secretly, cried in the bathroom, and held tears in the train. I didn’t know what’s going on, and it was just difficult to manage. This is an example of the change in the state of mind. A new perspective woke up in the mind, and that hit my foundations while the daily life kept going the way it used be. There was a big gap between the qi and the physical reality and created a big chaos inside. *By the way, this state requires a lot of energy, so if you get this kind of feeling, I beg you to ask help from whoever you can ask help. No reasons to go through this by yourself.
I stayed in the chaos for a while, and one day, a new thought came in. “Then, what I can do?” This was the moment that the outward and upward qi joined to the downward and inward movement. When this kind of mind joins, our actions start changing. For me, I wanted to leave my country, so I started studying English and went to some seminars to learn how to make it happen. It is still a challenging stage because the gap between the qi and physical reality are still big.
When our actions change, then the physical reality start following. In my case, I made some foreigner friends and started hanging out with them on the weekends. It took me about 6 months from the crisis (I think it’s really fast.) I remember that I felt much better at this stage. Then, two years later, I moved to the US. Qi manifested to my reality.
This is an extreme example, and it has the same gesture with the relationship of the spring qi and physical manifestation. Change takes time.
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The speed of manifestation is up to person and up to the size of the change, and what is show up depends on what we have and what the environment we are surrounded by. I guess some people who spent long time for learning one thing in their childhood know this subconsciously. I personally needed to learn it in my adulthood.
When the reality and the mind synchronizing, then now it’s about how to grow it for a long term. I don’t have much experience about it yet, and I’d love to understand it with my body sometime in the future. :)
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“The reality now is made by the past.”
Recently my friend told me about this, and it hit me well. I’ve never seen the qi and physical dynamics from this angle.
The chair that I am sitting now was purchased by past-me a few years ago. My body right now is an accumulation of what I ate, how I moved, what I thought, and what kind of environment I was in, in the past. I still feel a lot of gap between my mind and my reality. And it is ok. My past-self did her best. Mistakes and losses are also precious. We always receive a lot of new information and keep changing, so it is healthy in some degree to have the gap. I mean if we don’t have any gaps, there will be no movements. If there are no movements, there are no life. Life is movement.
If we find a gap, we can add something new to our actions. The change in the angle of the dining table may bring some change in the flow for the whole house. We may see the effect within a week or within a year. We may not be able to connect the cause and effect. But a tiny change can ripple to a bigger change.
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Knowing about the gap between the speed of the mind and the speed of the body, I think we can be gentler for ourselves. When the mind started critiquing the reality, we can choose to bring some changes.
It’s spring.
Plants and flowers are growing outwards, sending their energy upward after the long winter. Learning from those teachers, I hope we also choose the changes which bring something new and precious to our life!!
Thank you for taking your time to read it till the end.:)
With much love,
Kyoko
Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema
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